Dec
13
Recently I was given an old G4 tower in return for some assistance to a fellow tech. The model is the G4 Digital Audio with a 733Mhz CPU.
Now, free things are not to be sneezed at, but this one probably should have been. The original video card, a GeForce2MX 32MB with ADC & VGA had been swapped out for a RagePro 128 16MB VGA only, the internal AirPort antennas had been ripped out, the motherboard had 3 tracks scratched right through by a ham-fisted operator removing the hex nuts under the CPU card and it was missing the Heatsink and Fan & Shroud.
Owing to the generosity of friends, I managed to get a Heatsink, Fan & Shroud from ebay. A old iBook Indigo display housing relinquished it’s Airport Antennas, and a few hours work with a Jeweler’s Loupe, prototyping wire, soldering iron and a multimeter, repaired the broken tracks and all was well again.
I’d also found a local eBay seller and picked up a 17″ CRT with ADC for $1.40, but without the original video card, I was stumped.
Looking through eBay it was clear that a reasonable video card with ADC was going to set me back a pretty penny. Most come from the US with a frightful freight charge or from the UK but were pushing AUD$100 landed cost or more.
Then, after keeping an eye on ADC video cards on eBay, I came across a card for USD$10 and USD$6 freight to Australia. Nobody had bid on it yet but the description indicated that it was an NVidia of a model P74.
So I decided to try and collate as much information as I could to find out exactly what this card was and which G4 towers it suited. After many hours pouring over Google, I discovered that it was the top of the range option sold with the QuickSilver 2002 with 64MB of VRAM. This would give me Quartz Extreme support. SOLD!
So, the point of this post is to attach the chart I made which shows (as best as I could determine) all the various information required to identify certain cards. Here it is (click for larger image):
Hopefully, this may help somebody else. Oh, and the card? It arrived and is quite happily working. Who says you can’t get a bargain on eBay? Here is what System Profiler makes of it.
Nov
11
What Happened?
Posted at: 4:26 pm and filed under Uncategorized
It’ll soon be twelve months since I’ve posted something new here. There have been a number of personal projects that I’ve wanted to post about, but have usually balked at the time it will take to type them all up.
For those with a thirst for project photos (without detailed explanations) I’ve decided to post a page of “Project Pics“.
If any really grab you, make a comment below asking about a particular pictured project, and I’ll see what I can do. No guarantees here!
Jan
6
I’ve recently discovered the joys of Squid’s Store URL Rewriting. A very powerful tool to work around sites that love to store the same content on different servers meaning that although Squid gets the same content, it treats it as different because the URL differs from the content already fetched.
Some of the great offenders are GoogleMaps, YouTube, eBay, MSN Videos and some Yahoo content.
There are many discussions on Squid-Users about this (especially YouTube), and a lot of the information and examples have been extremely helpful. However, I wanted to share my experience with GoogleMaps and YouTube with others that might be having trouble getting it to work.
The bulk of this has been posted to a set of static page and is quite a long read. I’ve detailed what I discovered about the URLs involved, redirect problems and higher quality work-arounds.
Click here to go to the Store Rewriting Index page.
Jan
6
I can now report that I’ve found a reliable work-around to the export stalls that I reported earlier.
A more recent post to Elgato’s forum suggested removing markers from the video within the “Edit” panel. The poster was marking sections not required and then exporting without compacting. Apparently, this still skips the marked portions. I always “compact” after creating my marked sections, but the markers remain despite effectively marking nothing.
So I poked out my tongue, stood facing into the wind on a full moon and “removed markers” on all the compacted videos. I then setup numerous videos to export in the same manner described before using DivX. Hey presto! No more export stalls at the completion of the first of two passes!
Since then, by following this, I can do anything with the computer whilst exporting and nothing I do will cause an export stall.
The only thing I can think of here is that the export somehow chokes on the marker because of an incomplete set of “Groups of Frames”. In any case, I no longer have to worry about how long it will take to get each video converted to DivX as I can rest assured that I won’t need to restart the export ten times before it’s successful.
Nov
6
I’ve been using an old build of Squid for quite some time now. It’s a binary from SquidMan 1.8 which uses 2.5Stable13. It runs with very little CPU usage (under 1%) on my iMac G3 700Mhz. On average, this saves me about 20% of download usage every month.
I haven’t tweaked it very much since setting it up but a few days ago, I looked into changing the on disk cache replacement policy from the standard LRU to heap LFUDA. This is when I discovered that the heap LFUDA policy needs to be configured at build time.
Since the iMac is running MacOS 10.3.9 I couldn’t install the latest version of SquidMan 2 (Squid 2.6Stable16) which I assume would also not be built with this option. I could have extracted the binary from the installer, but I felt that I’d rather go to the latest stable build of Squid. I decided to build it from source so I looked at what was currently available at Squid-Cache.org.
The latest build is actually version 3.0Stable10, but after looking at the documentation I decided to stay on version 2. The latest stable build is then 2.7Stable5.
After using the auto configure and installing, everything seemed fine (and a little snappier) but after a while, the iMac froze completely. I couldn’t even connect to other services running on it’s IP address. Rebooting into single user mode and doing FSCK revealed minor errors in temp files and with those cleaned up, it was happy to run again.
Over the next 24 hours this freezing process repeated itself over and over. There was nothing in any of the logs to reveal what was going on. However, I did notice two things. Firstly, the startup showed that Maximum File Descriptors had gone from 1024 to 256 and that a new process was being spawned called kqueue.
Building from source again, I noticed that autoconfigure was detecting the maximum file descriptors of 1024 and indeed this was set in /include/autoconf.h as such. Even using the option “–with-maxfd=1024″ at build time still yielded 256. Confused, I looked again at the changes documentation to find that the maximum file descriptors now seems to be hard coded to 256 but is configurable at runtime using “max_filedescriptor N” in squid.conf.
I added the line to my squid.conf and at the next freeze was still able to connect to the iMac even though the proxy was slow to respond. I discovered the squid process had run away to about 75% CPU usage.
Horrified, I started to look through various build configure options and also at the new spawned process called kqueue. This was an external method of purging the on disk cache which overrides squid’s own internal method. I decided to turn off all these at build time using –disable-kqueue, –disable-poll and –disable-epoll.
So, I ended up with this string of configure options:
–disable-carp –enable-removal-policies=heap,lru –enable-delay-pools –disable-wccp –disable-wccpv2 –disable-hostname-checks –enable-cache-digests –disable-poll –disable-kqueue –disable-epoll
So far, after using these build options squid is humming along quite nicely with no freezes or CPU usage spikes. Fingers crossed.
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