When I inherited my PowerBook G3 Lombard, the battery I inherited yielded less than 1 hour of battery life. I didn’t mind this, because it still allowed me to be somewhat mobile and untethered from power. It didn’t take long, however, for the battery to fail entirely, leaving me with absolutely no battery life. Well, after running across instructions recently for how to replace the cells inside the PowerBook battery pack myself, I decided to try it. I ordered 9 18650 Lithium Ion cells from batteryspace.com and walked through the instructions. It was a bit tedious, and I had to be careful, but it was fairly straightforward and now I have a battery that gives me nearly 5 hours of battery life on my overclocked (466Mhz) Lombard! I’m very excited about this as I intend to install this in my Jeep as some sort of voice-controlled car computer.

I recently picked up a Macintosh Server G3 from eBay for less than $20. It came equipped with 64MB of RAM and a 233Mhz CPU. I quickly replaced the 64MB with 512MB and began working on overclocking the meager CPU. I tried 300Mhz, but it just wasn’t stable, so I stuck with 266Mhz, which has been rock solid under OS 9, OS X and Darwin. I installed a 20GB HD and installed Darwin 8.0.1 along with Mac OS 9.1. And the reason I picked the Mac Server G3 was because it has a real physical serial port which I can use to serial console to my server and use Open Firmware to boot into Darwin or Mac OS 9. My intention is to set it up as pure Darwin server running directory services for my Mac clients at home. I may have to wait for OpenDarwin 8.2.1 for that, however.