Low End Mac Reader Specials

TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com

Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

Thelma, Louise, Lombard, and Europe's Most Famous Chicken Webcam

- 2005.11.02

My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your submission to Dan Knight .

Not only am I a frequent visitor of Low End Mac, above all we share the same love for Macs (old and new). I would like to share the following story with you.

How it all begun is a long story and can be read on my site (link below), but suddenly 1,500,000 American newspaper readers were aware of the fact that I had bought two chickens, Thelma & Louise.

It started with my personal interest in animal cams, and it ended up with the fact that I was forced to set up my own chicken webcam. I was dreaming of a wireless network camera to bridge the distance from the hen house to the router in our house, but my budget was rather tight. So I looked in my garage, where two old Lombards were laying around, both broken if I recalled correctly.

Indeed, neither of them were alive, but putting the hard drive from one Lombard in the other one gave me a spinning sound, and suddenly the old Mac OS 9 welcome screen was laughing at me.

Would OS X work on this baby with a 6 GB hard drive and 128 MB RAM? I installed 10.2 and - go, tell it to the mountains - it worked (not blazing fast, but stable). Next I took an old Orinoco wireless card and the Lombard was surfing with my wireless ADSL modem with the help of WirelessDriver.

chicken webcam Last but not least: Would the Orinoco card bridge the 30+ meters from inside the hen house to the modem, hidden behind concrete on the first floor of the house? It does it flawlessly. Thanks to another oldie webcam application, every 30 seconds Oculus takes an image from a Logitech 4000 camera and sends it through FTP to Thelma and Louise's website.

The rest is history.

Since Europe is under the threat of the bird flu, Thelma & Louise became the symbol of the fight against the forced quarantine and massacre of domestic birds. Newspapers, radio, and television are all bringing Thelma & Louise into the picture, and thousands of visitors are watching these funky chicks daily.

But for me, as a Mac lover since 1986, it's above all a proof that old Mac equipment does have a second life.

Kind regards,
Koen Bogaert
9000 Gent - Belgium

Link: Thelma & Louise
Link: WirelessDriver

Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.

Recent My Turn articles

Using Low End Macs for Internet Radio, 08.18. When the local public radio station moved classical music to HD radio, it was time to find another way to listen. An old iMac with iTunes solved the problem.
'That's Not a Computer', 07.30. Salvaging a broken PowerBook by turning it into a desktop computer.
Upgrading a Digital Audio G4 to work better in Leopard, 06.02. In its original configuration, the dual 533 MHz Power Mac G4 was slow with Mac OS X 10.5, but add the right upgrades, and it runs Leopard quite nicely.
My 4 favorite PowerBooks, 05.28. The PowerBook 150 has a big screen for a vintage PowerBook, the 165c has color, the 100 is diminutive, and Lombard has USB and a great keyboard.
More in the My Turn index.

Links for the Day

Mac of the Day: Lisa, Jan. 1983 - The ancestor of the Macintosh had a mouse, a graphical interface, and a $10,000 price tag.
Group of the Day: Unsupported OS X is for those using OS X on unsupported hardware.
March 22 in LEM history: 00: Macs and digital video - 01: My Performa - Fun at CompUSA75 Mac Advantages - 02: Don't try this at home - History of portable computing - 04: Prolong battery life - 05: Symantec's ravings spread FUD about OS X security - 06: Picking a Power Mac G4 - France and the end of DRM
Support Low End Mac

Recent Deals

Best 13" MacBook & MacBook Pro Deals, 03.22. Used 1.83 GHz, $570; 2.0, $599; 2.4 GHz, $889; refurb 2.26, $849; new, $900 after rebate; Pro, $1,119 a/r, 2.53, $1,399 a/r.
Best Power Mac G5 Deals, 03.22. 1.8 GHz single, $399; dual, $445; 2.0, $609; 2.5, $724; 2.7, $799; 2.3 GHz dual-core, $669; 2.5 GHz Quad, $799.
Best AirPort Deals, 03.22. Refurb AirPort Express, $79; new, $95; refurb dual-band AirPort Extreme Hub, $129; new simultaneous dual-band, $168.
Best Intel iMac Deals, 03.17. Used 17" from $600; 20" from $750; 24" from $825; refurb 21.5" nVidia, $999; new, $1,099; refurb Radeon, $1,299; new, $1,399; refurb 27" 3.06, $1,499; more.
Best G5 iMac Deals, 03.17. 17" 2.0 GHz, $380; 1.9 GHz iSight, $479 shipped; 20" 1.8 GHz, $509 shipped; 2.1 GHz iSight, $549 shipped.
Best Time Capsule Deals, 03.17. Close-out 500 GB, $140; new 1 TB, $279; used 2 TB simultaneous dual-band, $400; new, $455. Shipping included.
Best iPad Deals, 03.16. 16 GB iPad, $499; 32 GB, $599; 64 GB, $699; 16 GB with 3G, $629; 32 GB 3G, $729; 64 GB 3G, $829. Free ground shipping.
More deals in our archive.

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2010 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.