Technologists Notes

Week before last I was given a 2002 vintage 700 MHz G4 iMac, one of the ones with the LCD on an arm above a half sphere dome (“pedestal”) system unit. It has 640M of RAM, so I expect it will be useful running (Panther or) Tiger. The hardware doesn’t meet the specs for “Leopard”. Besides, I don’t own a copy of Leopard (10.5), but do own copies of Jaguar/Panther/Tiger (OS X 10.2/3/4, respectively).

The iMac came with Jaguar on it. It had been unused for a while and no one knew the passwords. So it was time to learn about the esoteric Apple boot options and keyboard commands.

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3+ weeks ago my give one get one XO arrived. I’ve been trying to grok it and show it off. This is a summary of observations, ponderings  and usage.

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When Jerry Barnett & I were contemplating forming the band that became the 1970 Hub City Movers, Jerry was also wanting to build a self-tuning guitar. As a drummer, he was sick of waiting for all of us guitarists to get in tune.

I’ve heard of other attempts since then, but it looks like the first successful realization is available from Gibson. Mechanically, it “sounds” much like what Jerry had in mind in 1969.

Update April 11, 2008: Gibson’s second robo-guitar gets pimped out.