the jorbot

it’s no secret that i dabble in all sorts of technology, gadgetry, art, design, music and the sorts. it’s also not a secret that flashes of inspiration happen in an instant. it can be a song or imagery that triggers it. in this case, it was more of a challenge that got the juices flowing.

a couple of days ago joe got a dell mini 9. it’s pretty quaint and somewhat useful. i say somewhat because it uses windows. since my primary computer (pc) has been broken for a good 8 months, i’ve been using my laptop (mac) as the everyday machine. i’ve gotten very used to what apple has to offer in terms of user interface and the total package. so much so that when i do use a windows machine, everything feels unintuitive.

there have been a bajillion flame wars regarding mac vs. pc. i’m not going to bother to evanglize “either/or” but i will say this: since most programs have a mac equivalant, i have no need to go back into windows unless the place i work uses it. ironically where i work, they use linux. go figure.

anyways, joe got the dell mini and we played with it and realized it wasn’t fun. it was just win xp on a really small screen. if he had gotten the ubuntu (linux) version, maybe things would have been different. i had read earlier this year that people have successfully installed mac osx on their dell9’s without any hardware modification. so we discussed it and decided to give it a go.

the problem was, the newer dell9’s were a pain to convert due to some hardware and bios changes. heh. sounds like a challenge! long story short. thanks to patience, previous coding know-how and blind luck, there’s another insanely small mac floating around in the world.