I’ve been wanting to attach a 5.25 inch floppy drive to my Mac for a very long time. I have many disks that need to be saved. Including some disks people have sent me. I have been using an ISA Catweasel on an old PC I have (a Pentium 90). But now I can finally recycle that monster. Last week I ordered and recieved my brand new Catweasel MK4!

Here is a picture of the card inside the Mac:

Since there is no room in my Mac for a 5.25 inch floppy drive I run the cable thru an unused card slot and have the drive units resting on top of my Mac:

Currently I’ve ported Tim Mann’s cw2dmk software suite to Mac OS X. It required a driver to be written. Since I am still using a PPC Mac, I had to add some endian detection to Tim’s code.

I plan on extending the driver to allow the use of the MK4′s joystick and keyboard/mouse port. And also ad an interface for the SID chips. Maybe I’ll finally understand why the SID is so popular.

The ink on my hands.
Take cyan and magenta,
sky blue does not make.

Last weekend my brother and his wife went on a trip out-of-town. He asked me if I could watch Sophie while they were gone. Since I have not had much time getting to know my niece I jumped at the chance.
My wife was also going out of town that weekend, taking my younger daughter, Megan. My older daughter, Bethany, would be gone most of Saturday at a church event. So it was going to be just me watching my two year old niece.
It has been a long time since I’ve watched a child this young all by myself. It turned out to be a lot of fun. Sophie really liked the pets we have here. Three cats and a dog. You can imagine how much the cats liked being hugged by a two year old. But the dog actually enjoyed all the attention. Sometime she hugged a little too hard, but Sophie was very receptive to suggestions to ease up a little.
Twenty-four hours later my brother and his wife came to pick up their daughter and the Lindner household became just a bit quieter.

I have two users on my Mac, myself and my wife. One of the things that really bothered me with iPhoto is sharing photos between users. Depending who dumped the camera, that person would get that roll. Some photos are under my user, some photos are under her user.

With every new iPhoto release I would hope Apple would address this issue. Well, it turned out they addressed it a long time ago. iPhoto has the option of sharing your library using Bonjour discovery. I always associated this feature with sharing photo albums between two machines. But with fast user switching, you can have one iPhoto sharing its albums between users.

Just turn on photo share under one user and the other user will see every shared photo. It’s fantastic.

Scott Adams Dilbert. Not cool enough. *grin*

Never forget.

There is debate in congress on how to implement network neutrality without keeping companies from innovating. But how would one construct these regulations?

I really fear a law that gives the government control of how people can set up and interconnect networks of computers.

I think the solution to these problems is is simple. Prohibit network operators from introducing artificial scarcity into their networks. Is this too vague to become a regulation? Personally, I like the idea of vague regulations. It gives the laywers something to do.

Since Apple Corps, Ltd did not ask for an injunction against Apple’s name change, I can only assume that Apple and Apple have come to an agreement.

Apple’s trademarks lawyers are pretty smart. If they can convince a judge that the operating system OS-9 is in a different market than the operating system OS/9 then they should have no problem with Cisco. Still, it is amazing how Apple feels it can push around other companies.

Hmm. Maybe Apple and Apple don’t have an agreement? Maybe Steve is playing the same game with Apple Corps as Cisco? I call this the “If we can’t use it, then no on can” attack.

Here it is: the last day of the last month of 2006. Just to keep a promise to write once a month in this journal I decided to write something.

I want to thank Olivier Galibert and R. Belmont for SDLMESS. You guys got me back working on MESS again. I had forgotten how much fun it was.

I just posted a small update to the PCB PDF files. Thank you Christian for pointing out the errors to me. I forgot to connect IC6′s pin 1 and pin 2 together. I also forgot the trace between R5 and R6.