Things which do not mix well (or at all): PowerPC edition

[DouglasCarroll]

Without opening another thread, one thing which can mix well:

Your quad-core G5 or 2.7GHz dual-processor G5 with a broken/faulty liquid cooling system… and putting the machine outside during the Great North American Cold Snap of 2022, routing long cords from inside to make it run nice and cool on just crisp, dry air alone.

Better get those video encodes and compiles queued up and ready! 🥶

EDIT: When I posted this reply earlier, the local air temperature was a toasty +4.1°C (39.4°F for you yanks). The current local temperature is now a mild -13.1°C (or +8.4°F for y’all metric-haters). Sure, maybe not as impressive as the plummeting thermometers in other parts of this storm’s reach, but cold enough to send your petulant quad-core G5 outside to go do some actual work. If you’re really up for a challenge, duct the exhaust back into your home, which miiiiight just be warm enough to match room temperature!

For folks not in North America, look at this absolute unit:

View attachment 2132261

….or leave it inside to warm up your house!

 

[DouglasCarroll]

Not that the Pacific Northwest was spared last day: glazed ice on every surface in Seattle, I’m told, was legendary by its brutality. Then again, Seattle and Vancouver got hit with two major storms in one week — the earlier one being the one affecting the eastern half of the continent over the last couple of days. (Where I am now, it’s just cold af, but there’s no longer the serious wind or snowfall.)




Ha, not quite. It was, however, one of those rare cyclones beasts which’ll be bookmarked for generations of meteorologists to review and study — right up there in the same league as 2008, 1996, 1993, 1989, and 1983 — bur especially so 2008, 1989, and 1983, given how all of those happened at exactly the same time as this one.




Except for G5s with chronic cooling issues! All of you fitting that bill, OUTSIDE NOW!




That’s a heart breaker. If I didn’t know any better, a solder on the main board cracked, or else the board itself suffered a tiny crack created after impact with the ground.

I live in Seattle….last week ice was BRUTAL. I went outside and it looked like the entire world was encased in 1/4” of clear glass. Massively slick. I had to put on TIRE CHAINS to drive anywhere.

I then flew to Fairbanks Alaska the next day and was able to easily drive there 55mph on -20 degree frozen roads.

Seattle ice was %100 worse than frozen Alaska.

☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️

 

[originaldotexe]

I still use several CRTs in my cave of antique computing devices (NeXT, Sun, SGI, Apple). Since I'm not in there most of the time I lay sections of bubble wrap atop the keyboards to get dust from accumulating in amongst the keys. Earlier this week, unfortunately, one of those sections slid down atop the rear portion of my SGI display (a rebadged Sony), causing the display to overheat. The image now occupies perhaps 1/3 of the center of the CRT and is very shaky. Sigh. Have to see if there are some old techs around town who can take a look at it....
I fortunately have a couple of spare CRTs around (I put together my set of UNIX workstations twenty years ago so, yeah...) so I can still see run my SGI Indigos, a beige G3 and NeXT TurboColor NeXTstation and an Apple Cube (though I could send the output for that to an Apple ADC LCD display that normally is hooked to a G4 MDD). But losing that nice big Sony CRT would be sad...

i am still a newb at repairing crt's but i am learning. i have fixed some arcing and other minor issues like bad focus on my own so far. it is fun to learn if you are interested in crt's! just be careful to not electrocute yourself on 30kV