Nerd Alert

OK, if you aren't incredibly geeky this may come across as way over the top. You have been warned.

So I have been trading like a madman on Craigslist, getting rid of some older hardware and doo-dads and picking up some neat new things to play with. One my happiest trades was an old G4 mac setup that I traded to a guy for a Core 2 Duo Dell. He wanted to try the mac and he had this extra computer laying around that he didn't need anymore. So, we traded, and I promptly brought it home and set it up. The first thing I did was wipe Vista off of it and install Leopard. Heh, this was cool in a very ironic sort of way because I had checked out the specs of the machine online and it turns out it is a great candidate for a 'hackintosh'. So I got drivers loaded and everything set up and it runs pretty nicely as a mac. Technically, this makes me a 'software pirate' (as if it was THIS that made me a software pirate) and I am doing a nice little write up for my ethics class about why I don't think there is anything wrong with doing what I did here. Anyways, so I have also been futzing around with Windows 7, which is quite a nice refinement over Vista (and very Mac-y), and decided to do something interesting. I threw another hard drive in there and installed Windows 7 on it. Now I have Leopard installed on a 300 gig drive and W7 installed on a 400 gig drive and I can toggle between them at boot time to switch from Mac to Windows. Pretty snazzy. Why would I do this? Well, it was fun. Also, I have been 'employed' (and I say that loosely considering what they are paying me) by Claremont to do a lot of their video processing for our remote campus. I have a nice iMac and a Macbook Pro (another CL trade) but frankly I need some more muscle to really crunch video. Plus, we just got a hi def camcorder and it does suck up some serious resources playing around with video on there. My imac is getting cluttered up with scripts and video/audio files as I throw around media for the school and what not, so now I have a machine that I can boot up into Leopard when I need to do video work, load it down with jobs, and have my iMac free to do other creative things. Plus, I have a nice little windows box to play around with when I want to do windows-y things.

I hope you found that as interesting as I did! Woo hoo!

Posted in: computers,hobbies,interests,macs,school