I'll never forget being intrigued by the first Mac I ever saw.

I spent my childhood tinkering with Commodore 64's, Amstrad CPC 464's and the occasional Amiga. I was first introduced to IBM compatibles in 1986 and they consumed my life for the next two years. Then in 1988 my family moved to a small town in country New South Wales, Australia, where I was upset to find there were no IBM clones at my new school! Instead there were these tiny computers labelled "Macintosh Plus". I was surprised to see that every one of these computers had a mouse—previously the presence of a mouse had been a novelty for me. I curiously switched it on and played with the mouse while the screen displayed a flashing question mark on top of a disk. An older kid gave me a disk, it was a little 3.5" disk not like the larger 5.25" 'floppy' disks I was used to (I think it was System 3). It booted and within the next two minutes I was convinced that this was the coolest thing I had ever seen. After that moment, if anybody ever asked me about Macs, I'd say,

Nowadays there's not a great deal of difference between the various platforms, not enough at least to make a noise about like the Mac in the eighties.

The multi-platform Mini vMac emulates a Mac Plus with the use of a ROM that you extract from your old Mac Plus using a program called CopyRoms. Once the ROM has been extracted the resulting file must be named "vMac.ROM" and placed into the same directory as the Mini vMac program. Disks are then inserted into the emulated Mac Plus by dragging-and-dropping disk image files onto the Mini vMac icon or application window (of course the emulated machine won't boot unless the disk image contains an installed system).

It really is incredible how well the emulator works. A nice touch is how the mouse cursor moves seamlessly in and out of the emulator. You'll need to use [Ctrl][M] to magnify the display, and [Ctrl][F] to enter what's called "full screen" in order to trap the mouse cursor when playing games. My only criticism is that compared to my old Macintosh the emulator seems to have a little too much power.

There's no longer the need to save pocket money in order to buy expensive floppies; an archive called Blanks contains a number of blank disk images of varying sizes that are of course infinitely reproducible. (The floppy drive of the Mac Plus is not emulated allowing disk images of arbitrary sizes to be used, subject only to file system constraints.)

The best operating system for the Mac Plus is System 6 and luckily Apple has released this OS as freeware. Boot the emulator using the first of two disks called Z-6.0.8-System Startup. Next drag an appropriately sized blank disk image onto the Mini vMac window and begin the system installation. If needed mount the second System 6 disk image called Z-6.0.8-System_Additions and copy any of the needed extras.

I was lucky enough that I was able to clone the external 40 MB hard drive from my old Mac using my SCSI equipped Powerbook. The resulting disk image works perfectly with Mini vMac. Using this image with the emulator feels just like I'm using my old computer.

There are two applications available to get files in and out of the emulated environment. To export a file, run ExportFl from within the emulator, then press [Cmd][O] and select the file. A save-file dialogue box will then appear in the host operating system. To import a file, run ImportFl from within the emulator, and then drag a file onto the Mini vMac icon or application window. A save-file dialogue box will then appear in the emulated environment. It is important to realise that resource forks are not preserved in either direction. The file type and creator codes can be corrected within the emulator by using ResEdit and selecting "Get Info" from the "File" menu. Within Mac OS X the same is achieved by using the Finder and selecting "Get Info" from the "File" menu and adjusting the option "Open with".

If you have lost software due to the failure of an aged floppy disk you'll most likely be able to replace it at the Macintosh Garden. This site is dedicated to preserving software titles that have been abandoned by their rights holders.

Note that you'll need a stripped down system disk in order play most games (such as Beyond Dark Castle). Using a typical System 6 install will cause many games to fail at launch, giving an error message about a large OS occupying memory. I always booted my old Mac from a floppy when playing games, and from the hard drive when doing anything else—I use the emulator in the same way.

Lastly, for those who are fussy about the icons that appear in Mac OS X there are some high resolution icons for Mini vMac and its associated files available on the Mini vMac website.

 

I recently had an intermittent problem where my PC would fail to power-up. The only signs of activity were the spinning of the PSU fan and a solid HDD activity LED.

Since the PSU fan was spinning I assumed it was the motherboard at fault. Replacing a motherboard is a slippery slope that usually ends in the expensive trinity of replacing the RAM and CPU as well as the motherboard. Wishing for anything else to be at fault, I searched the Web for people experiencing the same problem.

Nearly everyone was blaming the power supply.

The power supply is the butler of PC murder—always seen as the most likely suspect, but rarely at fault. I even knew a guy who blamed his power supply for a problem that was ultimately caused by his firewall!

I didn't think the PSU guilty until I read a post by a guy who went through three motherboards before finding out it was the power supply. It is much easier and cheaper to replace the PSU, so I decided to try replacing it first.

Well what do you know? The butler did do it! The computer has been working fine ever since.

The PSU I replaced was the most expensive one I've ever bought—with fancy cabling, heatpipes and PFC. It was also the most short-lived at 18 months of age. Which goes to show that there isn't always a correlation between cost and reliability.

If your photos fail to appear in SkyDrive it's because you've done the right thing and disabled third-party cookies. As pointed out by the user jobo on Neowin, the photos come from livefilestore.com. However there's no need to enable third-party cookies as jobo suggests in order to fix the problem. Instead livefilestore.com can be simply added to your browser's list of cookie exceptions. For Firefox this list is found within the preferences under the Privacy tab and then the button Exceptions...

If "Human" icons are selected, likely in the case of someone upgrading, the NetworkManager Applet will have an ugly black icon representing an ethernet connection. Note that the new 9.10 theme is called "Humanity" which uses a much nicer and smaller connection icon. To use the latter in the place of the former:

Canonical have taken all of the fun out of gdmsetup, reducing it to just two options. All other customisation aside, I can't stand the "Face Browser" at the login screen. At least there's still a way to get rid if that:

The gnome-settings-daemon doesn't appear to be at all tested with remote logins. Currently there's another new bug, in a long line of bugs, that causes the daemon to crash when using the desktop remotely. This has been fixed, but the fix is currently sitting in the "proposed" queue. The solution in the meantime is to disable the xrandr plugin by running gconf-editor and unchecking the following:

It appears that Firefox 3.5 doesn't respect the font rendering set by the user in their system wide settings. I was really annoyed by this, and as a result managed to gather together the following information. This problem will only annoy those people who have selected settings that differ from those already set in the file respected by Firefox. This file is "/~.fonts.conf". My copy of this file had four settings within it: rgba, hinting, hintstyle and antialias. The settings hinting and antialias are boolean, whilst the other two have the following options:

My file was set to: rgba none, hinting true, hintstyle hintfull and antialias true.

Within my gnome font rendering settings I select the standard "LCD" setting. This equates to: rgba rgb, hinting true, hintstyle hintslight and antialias true.

The contents of /~.fonts.conf then becomes: