Recycled Computing

When Bad Things Happen to Overly Impulsive People

- 2011.02.23

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Short link: http://bit.ly/gzquyC

It all started with my old iSub speaker. I bought one to use with my G3 computer back in the day. Part sculpture, part subwoofer, it proudly boosted my low end until I rebuilt a 12" PowerBook G4 laptop.

iSub

Progress has its pitfalls, as I soon discovered. The iSub would not appear in the Sound pane of the G4's Leopard install.

Of course, someone had a hack online that restored the iSub to Leopard's operating system. I opened up Terminal, ran the hack, and that's when the problems started.

I shoulda known better.

I had to plug the iSub in before I turned on the PowerBook, and while the audio was fine sometimes, it started to break up at random intervals. I'm going to blame my general foolishness for not figuring out what was up.

iSub I first thought that I might have a bad sound card in the PowerBook. Then I thought that perhaps the stereo mini plug out was shorting out.

Then I found a Logitech Speaker Lapdesk N550 on sale. It's just what it sounds like - sort of like a cooling stand with built-in stereo speakers. It also has a stereo audio connection through USB.

Still thinking that perhaps my audio difficulties were due to a short in the analog audio output, I reasoned that maybe this would clear up the problem.

Logitech Speaker Lapdesk N550 After I unwrapped the Lapdesk, I discovered that I had another problem. My PowerBook would not recognize it in the Sounds preference pane. Strangely it did appear (and work) for my Pismo G3 and my son's MacBook.

After some heavy thinking on my part, I reasoned that it was due to the hack I did to get the iSub working.

How to fix this problem? Well, if I actually knew what I was doing, I could delete the hack through the Terminal window. Since I don't, I reinstalled Leopard.

"It's good to reinstall your operating system every once and awhile," I kept saying.

The reinstall went fine, and I was able to use my Time Machine external disk to bring all my extra applications and data up to where they were before I did the reinstall.

Here's where things slowed down. I had to do a whole bunch of software updates, I had to do a whole new Time Machine backup, and Disk Utility took forever to run. But at the end of a couple days, my PowerBook G4 can use the Logitech Speaker Lapdesk N550 - and the iSub is going home to be reunited with an iMac G3.

From now on, I'm going to be awful careful about what I do in Terminal.

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