After recently resurrecting my PowerBook G3 Lombard, I decided to take the opportunity to try out the recently release Tiger Preview from WWDC. The OS installed just fine and is quite usable on the old hardware. The only thing I noticed right off was that any files I added to the system had some strange garbage outlining their icons in the finder. You can see it in this screenshot:

I am pretty impressed with Tiger so far. I know the strange graphics artifacts are probably just due to the fact that this prerelease software was never really intended to be installed on such old hardware. I really want to play with Xcode 2.0 preview, but I’m afraid the 400Mhz G3 just doesn’t cut it. Also, there is no way I can play with the new graphics APIs Apple has included with Tiger. But so far, so good. I’m enjoying casually exploring some of the new features of the OS and plan to put up some more of my impressions as time allows.

I just migrated my blog from bblog to wordpress. I really like my new blogging engine and plan to stick with it. (migration is kind of a pain). I also moved the blog to the root of the site as my website has become more blog-centric in recent months. I don’t yet have the best system worked out for incorporating my static pages into the site design, but site navigation is still provided from the blog. I’m still tweaking the CSS for the site, but am comfortable enough with the design to go live with it.

More about the migration: I wrote a script that migrated my blog from bblog to wordpress. It wasn’t too difficult; it just took a little time. I am providing it here for the convenience of any other switchers. The script is not perfect and there will be some data lost in migration due to the different db schemas, but take it for what its worth.

I believe the new engine and new appearance really add value to my site, and I hope I can perhaps become a greater part of the blogging community out there.

I’ve had some more time to use the preview of Safari 2.0 that shipped with the Tiger WWDC preview, and I wanted to share my impressions of it. So far, I am really enjoying the new Safari. Of course, the biggest new feature is the built-in RSS aggregator. It really is nice. As I have come to expect from Apple, the interface is intuitive and provides quick navigation of RSS feeds. Another neat RSS feature is this:

When you connect to a site that lists its RSS feed in a link “alternate” tag, this [RSS] graphic is displayed in the address bar. Clicking it will bring up the feed in Safari’s RSS reader interface (pictured below).

Anyway, I like the new RSS features of Safari.

Actually, I found two of them. I have been working with one of my old Macs lately — my IIsi. I connected my US Robotics 28.8kbps external modem to see if it still worked and fired up Z-Term 1.0.1. I was able to dial into another machine connected internally on my company’s PBX. That was great, but I yearned for the experience I had growing up, connecting to many BBSs with my 2400 bps modem. I knew I wasn’t likely to find one, but Googling for Nashville area BBSs revealed two local numbers. I tried them both out and got a CARRIER both times. One didn’t amount to much, but the other one was a discussion board that looked like it had some fairly recent activity. Anyway, it was a thrill to take a brief stroll down memory lane and sigh at the loss of a culture.

In playing with my Mac IIsi recently, I have had to experiment with web browsers. There are obviously few options available for such old machines, but I’ve found three that each have their place — iCab, WannaBe, and MacLynx. WannaBe and MacLynx are both text-only based browsers, while iCab is still an actively maintained full-fledged web browser. My IIsi has 16MB of RAM and a 40MB HD, barely enough disk space to be useful. iCab does a reasonable job rendering websites, but it is exscrutiatingly slow. WannaBe is MUCH faster. It is my favorite of the three in terms of the pleasure derived from using it. However, WannaBe is missing many important features and the external plugins are cumbersome. MacLynx is quicker than iCab, slower than WannaBe, but is really a more complete browser than WannaBe. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out how to make it work with sites using gzip encoding (like mine). It seems that MacLynx isn’t able to create the gzip file or decompress it properly or something. Perhaps I’ll write more about it later if it turns out to be interesting. Anyway, I just thought I’d share my thoughts on browsers for such old Macs.

I overclocked my PowerBook G3 Lombard from 400Mhz to 466Mhz today. I am posting this using it. I have had absolutely no stability issues whatsoever. Heat doesn’t seem to be particularly worse, either. I have tried to push the machine, too. I played GLQuake and Quake 3 under OS 9 for more than an hour this evening. Aside from the machine just not being able to play Quake 3 well, I had no problems. I think I can tell a slight improvement in performance. I’d love to attempt a higher overclocking, and I am tempted, but I am very satisfied with the success of my procedure this afternoon. I like stability. :) All the same, I would like to see what this machine is truly capable of. Oh well, perhaps someday I’ll attempt a 400Mhz to 500Mhz overclocking by upping the FSB to 83Mhz. That should provide a noticeable improvement.

While I was very satisfied with my successful PowerBook overclocking, I was left with the nagging thought that this G3 could handle higher speeds. :) So, I decided to try the 83Mhz FSB. I knew this would likely give the greatest increase in performance, with the greatest risk of instability. I started by resetting the multiplier to 6, while altering the resistors responsible for the FSB. It would not POST. No lovely Apple chime. The screen remained black, though the machine was clearly on. I tried removing one of the dimms and making sure the cpu module and memory were both seated properly. Still nothing. I figured it was time to try for 500Mhz by using a multiplier of 7.5 with the original FSB of 66Mhz. I reconfigured my resistors, reinstalled the cpu module, and powered my Lombard up while crossing my fingers. It booted right up into OS X (10.4 Tiger preview). So far so good. It read “500Mhz PowerPC G3 Processor” under “About this computer”. Excellent! Now, I knew OS 9 was a bit more finicky, so I decided to reboot into 9 to test stability. It booted up into 9 just fine, but Apple System Profiler crashed. GLQuake crashed. I tried rebooting, but the system just wasn’t stable. I think the CPU was getting too hot. I decided 466 was my magic number. I reset the resistors and my stability was restored. I’m currently making this post using Mozilla 1.3.1 under OS 9 on this machine right now. At least I satisfied my curiosity (without ruining my CPU) and hopefully provided some useful stability information for anyone attempting this in the future. :)