Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Despite being tired enough to spill oil on my favourite shoes, I had trouble getting to sleep (and staying asleep) last night. This afternoon I got bad news regarding some missing equipment. But there was some niftiness in between.

madbodger gave me a computer at Balticon. He knew that my rather underpowered Mac wasn't working, and he had a surplus one. So last night / this morning I went searching for the itty bitty Mac monitor I knew was in the house somewhere, and set up the computer. It's a little faster than the old one, and it's running a later version of the operating system (MacOS 9.1 instead of 8.something). It being a Mac, well, gee, I turned it on, waited forever for it to boot, selected the TCP/IP control panel, stuck in three relevant addresses (name server, gateway, and the machine's own address), and *poof* it was all set up. *shrug* Downloaded a copy of Nifty Telnet, logged into the file server and turned on the Apple file service daemons (it did take me a little while to remember there are two of them needed), and *poof* there's my home directory on the Mac desktop. Tossed a CD of medieval music (New York's Ensemble for Early Music, Istanpitta II, if you're curious (or if you're not curious)), and, as expected, music came out. Pointed a browser at LiveJournal. Basically had the completely expected "drop it into place and it works" experience.

The stylus/puck tablet is going to be really nice once I get used to it. Being able to change the way I use my hand for the pointing device, and having pointing devices on both sides of the keyboard ... these are good things.

But then there's the added nifty part, as if getting a useable hand-me-down computer with bonus I/O gizmos weren't pleasant enough. (I'm perpetually short on computer power, running almost entirely on hand-me-downs. So it's always nice to get another box as fast as or faster than the nearest equivalent in the house, to expand my resources.) While plugging things in, I noticed these phono ("RCA") jacks on the back. I'm used to little mini-phone (1/8") jacks, and especially on Macs I'm used to that funky extra-long microphone jack. I've found it a little frustrating to get sound from line-level sources into a Mac in the past. So seeing the phono jacks was a pleasant surprise. I ran a cable over from one of the not-quite-working VCRs sitting in this bedroom (the tuners work but neither one will play or record -- they were given to me as "I don't know whether this works but if it does you're welcome to it" items), and sure enough, I got television sounds out of the computer's speaker (once I told the Sound control panel to use those inputs). Easy. Nice. Gonna come in handy for some recording I want to do (pretty sure it's going to be easier on the Mac than on my very underpowered Win95 machine). But there was an extra connector. A yellow phono jack...

Okay, what's the yellow jack? Red is right, white is left, yellow has an indistinct, kind of jaggy icon stamped into the plastic next to it. Looks almost sort of like a video camera if I squint at it and let my mind wander. Could it be? Nah ...

Okay, I plugged the composite-video output of the VCR into the yellow jack, and went hunting on the hard disk for an app that sounded like it might display/capture video. Found one. And all of a sudden there was the Channel 45 morning news in a corner of my screen.

WHEEEEEEEEEEE!

Gee, all of a sudden I've got all these ideas for projects that I need this computer for, that I hadn't been thinking of before I discovered the little yellow jack.

It is good to have friends.

Now I need to go install Solaris on one of the Suns downstairs, which I meant to do about a week and a half ago. And go to a hardware store for parts to build a bracket to hold the video camera my brother gave me several months ago (neither of my tripods is really up to supporting that much weight).