April 29, 2008

A few months back I made a post regarding my SGI 1600SW flatscreen display. It had been sitting mostly dormant as part of my SGI O2 setup for years, so I decided to get it working with my P4-based Shuttle running Ubuntu and XP. I dropped in the GFX-1600SW board I spoke of in that earlier post and everything came together as I'd hoped. Good times.

Not long after, I had cause to clear off some desk space for a new arrival in the Byte Cellar (that's another story - stay tuned!), so I moved the Shuttle setup to my main workspace, right next to my Mac Pro. The 1600SW fit nicely and I grabbed a tiny Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2 to go with it. A slick setup. I came to realize, however, that it just sat there sad and dark most of the time, since the Shuttle doesn't see that much use. And then it dawned on me...

All I needed was a second graphics card to put this screen to use as a third display for my Mac Pro. I even had a two-way DVI KVM lying around unused, so the Mac and Shuttle could share the display. How geekily wonderful! A trip to eBay and a few days later I was sliding a GeForce 7300 GT into slot 1 on the Mac Pro. I wired it all up and -- shazaam! My desk now looks like something out of The Matrix.

I grabbed some video (above) of the three headed beast going crazy with a little wrap-around iTunes visualization goodness. I definitely opened a can of badass on my Mac Pro with this little exercise. Good times.

April 16, 2008

Readers will recall that one of my favorite projects of late was putting my beloved Apple //c to daily use as a text terminal to Mac OS X running an IRC client, by way of a null modem serial link. (In fact, you could say I became carried away with the notion.) A recent project I've stumbled upon makes my setup look rather dull by comparison.

Joshua Bell, who works for Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, has posted a video demonstrating an application he has written that streams live video from the Windows desktop to the Apple IIc via null modem serial link. It's full color video (well, all six colors of the Apple II high res screenmode) and it's surprisingly smooth.

Unexpectedly, no software need be loaded on the Apple //c to get the video up and running. It's simply a matter of telling the //c to accept input from the modem port ("IN#2"), keying a couple of modem port config commands, and kicking off the app on the Windows side. It dumps a small assembly language program to the //c which accepts the incoming video data through the modem port and starts it running. And that's it - voila!

Bell's demonstration features Second Life running full-screen streamed to the //c. It's an impressive effort. Where's the Mac OS X version of this clever application?!

April 10, 2008

Apple II lovers take note: a2RetroSystems is selling a limited run of the $89 Uthernet ethernet board for the Apple ][+, IIe, and IIgs. As of this posting there are 16 available. I ordered mine this morning.

Rest assured that I'll make a nice, juicy post covering my install and initial experiences with the Uthernet board shortly after it arrives. Don't let this opportunity slip you by!

[ UPDATE: As of 8 a.m. (EDT) this morning (April 11), there are only 3 cards left... ]