Once upon a time, I put a tiny Windows machine inside an Apple III’s case. See this page for details.

At long last, I’ve hacked open a few mice and made a matching one-button mouse with the innards of a Logitech optical USB mouse. Sure, it can only left-click, but that’s part of the charm!

By the way, I switched the Logitech mouse to a blue diode in 2002 just to see if I could. It wasn’t part of the project this time. Yes, the accuracy suffers a little. This is part of why I chose to cannibalize it for the Compy III project.

We have an undergrad intern at my company this summer working on some illustrations for one of our projects. She’s using Illustrator CS3 with an older USB Wacom Intuos tablet (ours) on a MacBook (hers). She installed the driver from Wacom’s website, and for the most part the tablet worked fine. However, when she tried to create a pressure-sensitive Caligraphic Brush, she found all the pressure-related options grayed out in the configuration dialog.

A quick review of Google results revealed a collection of useless leads. Forums tended to have people ask the question, only to have it go unsolved. I’m bothering to blog about this in the hope that someone else will find it, and my solution will work for them.

In the Wacom Pref Pane in System Preferences, it lists all installed tablets at the top of the page. Below that, it lists available “Tools” for the selected tablet. I noticed that our intern’s driver had two of the same 6×8 Intuos installed, and while one of them had a pen listed in Tools, the other only listed the function buttons. We hit the [ - ] button to remove the penless tablet, leaving only the copy with the pen. After a restart, Illustrator recognized the pen’s presence, and the grayed out options were restored.

If you’re having this problem and that doesn’t help, good luck in your search for an answer. Expect to find a lot of “reinstall the driver/Illustrator.”

The president of my company leaves for Tortola (in the British Virgin Islands) for 5 months every year. In order to enable his continued participation in our meetings, I decided to put together an iChat Appliance (we’re all-mac in the office) for the conference room.

I began with a graphite Power Mac with a 533 MHz cpu, since we had 3 unused and laying around. I harvested more SDRAM (for a total of 1 GB) and an Airport card from other machines and added them to the 533 with the best graphics card (tied to the Motherboard). This machine now lives in the corner of the conference room on a shelf held up by old beige macs. A FireWire iSight is mounted above the office’s projection screen and is aimed at the conference room table. Under Panther, this worked perfectly, but I couldn’t share documents or take advantage of any of Leopard’s other new features. So I installed Leopard!

…which requires an 867 or higher cpu! Curses…

Happily, I found a post on MacRumors detailing how to modify the installation image, lowering the required MHz. Instead of burning it to a DVD-DL, I used Disk Utility to “restore” the sparseimage to a partition on a Firewire drive. I then booted the Graphite system from this drive, and installation went perfectly. I booted the system, fired up iChat AV and prepared to test the system. Instead of the usual Video preview in iChat AV’s setup, I saw a blank grey window stating:

“This computer does not support video conferencing.”

Nevermind the fact that while running 10.3 I could video conference perfectly. 10.5 and its new version of iChat didn’t believe I had the power. Apparently this happened to other people with real supported systems, so I found a thread and was lead to Apple’s official solution and poof, I can video conference again!

The downside is that now that it’s finished and working, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m a government official in V for Vendetta, being stared down on by the power-hungry Supreme Chancellor. A Supreme Chancellor in a floral print shirt.

I guess I’m just in tune with the electromagnetic forces around me. Maybe I’m due for membership in the Brotherhood of the Twisted Pair. We’re having trouble with our DSL in the office, and the AT&T tech said that it was flickering on and off every 30 seconds from the moment I left the office yesterday until I got here this morning and rebooted the server. Not the modem. The server. The modem isn’t supposed to care what the server is doing, but there you have it. The modem missed me. We’ve replaced it now, so I get to watch it and decide if the modem was really the problem of if there’s something wrong with the brand new Mac Pro server. I’ve made myself a necklace of dsl filters and cat3 couplers. I’m in tune with the unnatural world.

My new Comcast internet connection has been tremendously frustrating so far, but now everything is working and I am happily posting from my own wireless.

The initial problem is that you have to activate your Comcast service with a PC (and not a Mac or anything else) connected directly to your modem. This registers the MAC address of your modem with Comcast. It also registers the address of the PC, meaning that any other device hooked up to the modem is refused a connection. My Airport Extreme, sadly, wasn’t terribly extreme with no internet connection.

I researched my problem online for a while, growing increasingly frustrated when it seemed I would have to buy a new router to satisfy my new ISP Overlord. The solution I saw repeated was using the router to spoof the MAC address of the original PC. While this is a fine and respectably geeky way to solve the problem, I’d rather not buy a new router.

It turns out I had neglected a chief rule of tech support: Restart the thing. Another site I found declared that the PC’s MAC address is only registered in the Cable Modem, not at Comcast. A hard reset of the modem opens it up to latch on to a new device, in this case my Airport Extreme. Everything is working nicely now, and I didn’t even have to deal with customer service!