I just got through a move to my new place of residence, so the G5 is currently disconnected, lying in bits and pieces in the basement. When I get it set back up, I’ll work on some juicy material for you.
What’s on tap?
Before Christmas, I am aiming to do a little walkthrough of some remote connection options for your G5. For example, how do you setup screen sharing, your own VNC server, telnet, etc? I’ll probably do them in bits and pieces though, rather than one big messy article.
If you are still on the fence about the potential of an SSD for your Power Mac G5 (or older computer), today is Black Friday, which means there are bound to be solid deals on solid state drives out there.
In fact, yesterday, I noticed the good people at OWC had a 100GB Intel 710 SSD for $29.00. That’s a great price for anyone on the fence about upgrading their older Mac. Unfortunately, the deal is sold out now, but you can also get a 300GB drive for $79, which is a very nice deal too. Go get it. Intel drives are always pretty good, usually built for enterprise which means they are made to endure in lots of configurations. And they are SATA II, which means they will work fine in our Power Mac G5s.
I am not affiliated with OWC in anyway, nor do I shill for them lightly. I have purchased RAM and other upgrades over the years from them and have never been disappointed. They are a great company that still offer some good hardware and resources for our older Macs, so today might be a good day to stock up on another upgrade or two.
If you notice any other good deals floating around, let me know.
Christian dropped me an email a couple of weeks back, expressing his appreciation for this site and the introduction of his new website, Power to the Mac.
Excellent work, Christian.
We always can use more voices in the G5 world, sharing ins and outs, spreading software wisdom, and helping us get the most out of our beautiful (if aging) machines.
By the way, to keep up with most G5 related sites, I do typically use viva PowerPC’s excellent “world” blog section which captures the RSS feeds of several sites. A great way to save time and see what others are writing about.
One of our awesome readers, Adam, sent me an intriguing question that I get frequently: how much should I spend on a Power Mac G5?
I’m curious to know what some of you think. For those of you with G5s, what has been your budget to maximize your G5 with upgrades and fixes? For those of you looking to purchase one, how much are you willing to spend? Is there a limit?
I feel pretty content with my Power Mac at the moment, and in fact, over the last few weeks, it hasn’t been in much use with work life and family life keeping me on my toes. Counting the SSD (which was the last and largest bit of money spent on it), I feel like I have likely maximized performance too. More RAM would just be tossing money in a dark pit.
But what about you? I’d love to see your comments below.
Hot on the heels of the scintillating version 1.0.2, SimpleMarkPPC continues its glorious march into usability with version 1.0.3.
Here’s what’s new in this useful update:
Added a visual marker in the title bar to indicate when the document has not been saved.
Added a visual reminder of how to escape full screen mode.
Printing is now enabled, although it only prints the raw MarkDown text without formatting.
Because printing is enabled, there is now a way to export to PDF, but again, it only exports the raw text.
I slowed down the autosave feature which still occasionally interferes with typing.
Export to glorious Open Document text format
Removed some old code and stuff.
Limitations on Printing
Right now, printing is a pretty limited thing. I haven’t figured out how to print the html rendered text yet, although I imagine there is a way. Part of the limitation is that the actual MarkDown text gets formatted after running through multimarkdown. Likewise, I can’t render a PDF that way because multimarkdown doesn’t seem to support that option either. I’ll keep exploring options, but just beware, using Real Basic to code apps is an exercise in joy and frustration. Joy, because it’s easy to get started and mock something up, and frustration, because there are lots of stubborn limitations that you have to deal to make things work.
Versioning
Just a note about versioning: I’m not really following any specific guideline with versioning. Right now, I’m sticking with incrementing the sub numbers, typically reserved for bug fixes. Since I still consider the software in a sort of alpha stage (meaning a bit untested), features may be added randomly at any time.
