Rats Nest

So, my house has a lovely little crawl space underneath it, and it doesn't really do anything except stink.  No longer.  We just installed ethernet cables in the crawlspace, which means no more cables lying across the ground.

I said that we should use wall plates, my dad insisted on just drilling holes in the ground.  Psssh.

C-Cube Revision A

The C-Cube is now C-Cube Revision A. It has a floppy drive now. Bringin' it into the 20th Centrury.Top's a Samsung CD-RW drive, then a Sony DVD-RW drive and then a random floppy drive I picked up at RE-PC.

Higher Power

So, it turns out that my laptop has an aversion to .zip files. After trying for over two hours to transfer the .zip file to my hard drive, I gave up. It's only a 180 mb file, it should not take two hours to transfer. Fortunately, I could appeal to a higher power. My beautiful desktop computer, aka the C-Cube (named after the pirate fairy computer in Artemis Fowl). I was able to unzip the file in about two minutes, and then burn them to a CD. The new files were about 190 megs, and took exactly three minutes to transfer to my laptop.


The end result: I now have a truncated, slightly out of date, British version of Wikipedia stashed neatly on my laptop's hard drive, just in case I need it. It's really quite lovely, and more convenient than running downstairs to one of our internet ready computers. Only gripe about Pocket Wikipedia: you can only search one keyword at a time.

Installing Pocket Wikipedia

This morning, in an attempt to make my internet-less laptop a little bit more useful, I decided to install Pocket Wikipedia on it.  This comes in the form of a 180 MB .zip file.  I burned it to a CD, and I am now in the process of transfering this file to my hard drive.  

It has been at this point for almost two hours.  

Hover!

So, further in my quest to make my Thinkpad usable, I was reading about Windows 98 on Wikipedia, and I discovered Hover.  Hover is a game that was built in to older versions of Windows, but can be downloaded and works on any windows machine.  It's a fun little game that takes barely any processing power; my 166 mHz Thinkpad runs it perfectly.

Shrouded in Mystery: The Thinkpad 380D Bios

I was trying to install a PCMCIA Wireless Internet card on my laptop, and got the idea that maybe entering BIOS would help.  I tried most of the ordinary keys, but none of them worked.  Finally, I found that you had to hold the F1 key while the laptop was off and then turn it on.  So bothersome.

As for the wireless card?  I don't reccomend it for anything before Windows XP.