Catweasel and newer Macintoshes

I am currently using my Catweasel MK4 in my PowerMac G4 computer. The card is not compatible with the PowerMac G5 computers. The G5 does not provide the 5 volt power and signaling the card requires. It turns out the previous statement isn’t true. There are three types of PowerMac G5s: PCI, PCI-X and PCI Express. I just tested a Catweasel MK4 card in a PowerMac G5 PCI-X machine and the floppy I/O functions worked just fine. I did not test the SIDs or the keyboard/joystick functions.

The Catweasel MK4 is not a PCI Express card. So it work work in late model PowerMac G5s or any Mac Pro.

Catweasel in my Mac

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:

Catweasel Card
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:

Floppy on 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.

Sophie’s Visit

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.

iPhoto sharing

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.