Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

This time it is for real. Sunday, on the floor of UbuntuBelowZero, the Power Adapter of my aging 5 year old PowerBook died, after being flacky lately. Off course, since this is the older model, nobody has it at the conference to replace, so I'm without a laptop at all. The paradox is that it happen close to home....

Replacement is between USD60 and USD80 either used, new or third party.

The only good news is that I should be getting one in the mail as a friend of mine found one under its bed. Not sure if it works, so fingers crossed.

I plugged the power supply to a machine at the office and it worked. I even had almost perfect +5V and +12V. I must have done something wrong. I plugged it back to my computer, and here we go. There is still a bad smell coming from the fan exhaust. We'll see.

But I have no sound card as I pulled it out.

My desktop machine just died. I switched it off to see what was that soundcard lspci didn't find, to discover that it was an ISA card. Off course when I wanted to switch the PC back on it didn't work. Given that there was a bad smell coming from the back of the machine out of the power supply exhaust, I bet this is it...

So back to working almost exclusively on the PowerBook G3/400 unless I do MacOS X stuff which I should be doing as AbiWord Mac still needs fixing. I still have the old PowerPC desktop, but it is not with a PowerPC 604 240MHz with 128MB of RAM and headless that I'd be doing anything productive (running Debian sarge).

Maybe in addition to that power supply should I get a replacement for the dead CD-ROM, a Fast Ethernet adapter (it only has 10 base-T) and a sound card. An USB 2.0 controller wouldn't be a bad idea either as USB 1.1 is very slow to empty my 1GB compact flash off the camera. But I would also require an USB 2.0 card reader.... Let's stick to the power supply.

Hardware sucks. Off to bed.