Assemblies

In which stuff is alternately broken, assembled, and reassembled, and I get to keep the bits that break off.

Folk wanting an updated version of Yaki should head over to Github right now, since I’ve finally balled up together a number of files I had spread across 3 or 4 machines and, thanks to the magic of git, pushed and pulled this and that during the morning until it was all mostly working and worthy of pushing to a public repository.

Emphasis on mostly working, mind you. It’s (feature-wise) at least a month ahead of this site, but that only means it’ll be more fun to try out (ahem).

Murphy’s Law struck mercilessly on my birthday, and as a result I’ve been repeatedly assembling and disassembling my (home) office Mac mini over the past few days - at first because it refused to boot, then because I blamed it on a bum DIMM and finally (after some finagling with connectors and judicious cleaning) because I seem to have found an edge case where it will simply refuse to boot when there are too many hard disks hanging off its USB ports.

To make a long story short, after taking it to and fro my desk for repeated disassemblies and re-testing, I finally figured out that it would boot if I unplugged my (encrypted) Western Digital Time Machine disk while it was doing so - and only that one, which is rather odd and worth investigating reporting as a bug once I have the time.

Somewhere in the middle of this rigmarole I took an amusing detour and popped open its predecessor - a now elderly Intel mini that did a brief stint as a NAS before I realized the (by then already ancient, and amazingly still working) G4 would do it just as fast and with less power.

I intended to try swapping parts (a fruitless endeavor, given Apple’s penchant for constant juggling of components and entire architectural blocks across product releases) and, after much dithering, decided to reinstall it from scratch an hour ago - only to find that its Superdrive has gone to the great frisbee dome in the sky.

Ah well. Time to read a book or something, I guess - that’s enough for today.