Dead Ink Vinyl

I just purchased a second Tivo Series2 and am happy to report that it is possible to perform the initial Guided Setup without a phone line!

My configuration:

Tivo unit’s service number: starts with 540

USB to Ethernet adapter: NetGear FA120

I have SpeakEasy VoIP for my phone service. Since I use VoIP, computer modems will not work for me. This could have presented a major hurdle since Tivo’s site is adamant that the first connection must be performed by phone. However, Tivo’s customer service site has this excellent advice for repeating the Guided Setup using an Internet connection.

First I setup the Tivo’s cabling to the cable box, television, home network, and power. Then I proceeded through the initial Guided Setup. When I got to the “Welcome!” screen (“You are about to begin Guided Setup…”), I picked up on Step 3 of the instructions from Tivo’s Customer Service site. The short of it is to go into Dialing Options > Set Dial Prefix and enter the value ,#401 (comma-pound-four-zero-one). Then proceed normally and when the Tivo attempts to connect, it will use the Internet instead of the phone line (which I never bothered to plug in anyway).

I am writing this entry from my newly upgraded PowerBook with a 7200rpm 100GB hard disk. I have pictures to prove the tale — I’ll post them later. The PowerBook works like a charm. I love it so far. The computer certainly boots faster than ever and launches multiple applications simultaneously faster than ever. I haven’t put the PB through its paces yet, though.

Anyway, I want to thank the team at PB FixIt — they did a great job with their walk through. Their instructions were dead-on for disassembling my laptop.

I would add just three small items to those who may follow in my footsteps. The first item sounds pretty brain-dead, but is easy enough to forget as a PowerBook owner: shutdown the laptop before starting. This is worth mentioning because as a Mac user I’ve grown so comfortable with the Sleep mode that I think “sleep = off”. The other thing I would note is on page 6: the orange cables are disconnected from the motherboard by pulling straight up. I didn’t enjoy having to guess at something like that with a very expensive motherboard at stake. Finally, the guide needs to mention that when you’re attaching the upper case (keyboard, trackpad, et al) you want to make sure the trackpad ribbon (from page 3) is properly positioned through its slot or you won’t be able to reach it when it’s time to plug it back in.

And you need to plug in the “trackpad ribbon”. It turns out that the “trackpad ribbon” isn’t just for the trackpad. It’s for everything on the upper case that needs to talk with the motherboard: keyboard, trackpad, and power button. I happened to have missed this step and my PowerBook was a brick when I was done assembling it. A brick. A paperweight. It didn’t work. It didn’t start. It didn’t do anything. I pressed the power button and… nothing. Not a whir, a light, nor a chirp. Absolute nothing. It is a very eerie sensation, followed by a little bit of panic. I did figure out pretty quickly that I’d skipped a step in my rush to enjoy my new system, and then discovered that I had to go all the way back to pulling off the upper case to fix my oversight. I hope I’ve saved you that trouble. Now you know what to look for first if your PowerBook won’t start after a hard drive replacement or upgrade.

I dropped the old 80GB disk into a MacAlly 2.5″ Firewire enclosure. The enclosure really impresses me. I also own standard size enclosure from MacAlly and I think very highly of both products. The 2.5″ is a really solid piece of work. I read some reviews that bad-mouthed it because it doesn’t come with a DC power adapter, which is needed when running from USB. However, the drive does come with a second USB cable that plugs into the DC power port, so you just need to plug that into a powered USB port to pull the necessary power to run the drive. (Since USB sucks, it doesn’t bother to provide enough power on its own.) Of course, if you simply use the Firewire connector, all the necessary power is pulled from that and you don’t need to fool with any of this USB nonsense.

I booted from a different Firewire drive that had an old image of my main disk, then used SuperDuper! to clone the old 80GB drive onto the new 100GB drive and rebooted. (I’m aware of CCC, but I find SuperDuper! sufficiently superior to CCC that I’m willing to pay for the utility.)

With my new, static IP addresses, I’ve started kicking around the possibility of running a public server. I don’t know for what exactly I’d run the server. Possibilties include running Subversion, an OpenLaszlo project gallery, an Echo2 project gallery, or a Confluence knowledgebase for the Echo community. Since I don’t need to run a server — I just want a server — I don’t want to spend a lot of money. In fact, I want to spend as little money as possible.

I donated all of my old computer equipment to a local school system last year, so a new server means new kit. Thinking of a Linux server, I looked up Dell‘s offerings, since I get an employee discount with them. It would be $420 + shipping for the lowest-end box they offer. That’s close enough to the price of a Mac mini (with my employee discount) that I seriously contemplated that angle. Still, the $400+ price range is more than I want to invest in this project at this time.

Then I recalled that the Linksys NSLU2 can be hacked to upgrade its Linux kernel and services. I want to keep my current NSLU2 as a file server for my home network, so I would need a new NSLU2 ($80) and a small, external USB2 hard drive ($80). That’s more in line with my price range. Looking over the NSLU2-Linux sites, it certainly runs Web servers serving static content just fine. But does it run Java?

The NSLU2 runs on an Intel IXP425 Xscale CPU. I was unaware of any Java runtimes for the processor until I came across Kaffe. This is not the first time I’ve heard of Kaffe, but it is the first time I’ve seriously considered it. This thread indicates that the newest versions (1.1.4) should build on NSLU2-Linux. Kaffe’s compatability reports indicate that it should be suitable for server-side applications. Intrigued, I dug further and found some hope that Tomcat will run on Kaffe with minimal tweaking.

So I’ll sleep on it a while and revisit the idea of setting up a Servlet server on an NSLU2 “soon”.