A few months ago I found another PC in the garbage.  Much like Trash Server, this one was (mostly) functional.  But unlike trash server, I didn’t really have a use for it.   This beige mini tower sports a 733MHz Pentium III CPU, a couple smallish hard drives, and a dead CD drive.  After sitting in the corner for a few months, the new trash PC has a use.

What are we looking at?  This is a 733MHz battery charger.  While it may not be the most efficient, it was certainly the least expensive (free) option.  Why did I do it?  I have an older dual-beam bike headlamp that has a 110V/60Hz-only charger (Australian AC power is 220V/50Hz).  To charge the headlamp batteries I could either buy a new charger or buy a step-down transformer to use the current charger.  Either option would have cost more than the headlamp.

After poking around the garage, I found my automotive 12V to 110V power inverter.  This would work fine as-is, but the headlamp battery charges overnight, and I don’t have many all-night road trips planned.  Obviously I needed a 12V power source other than a Subaru, and this is where the PC comes in.  The PIII, with it’s ATX power supply, makes a great 12V power source and a convenient flat surface on which to charge the battery.

Not much is going on here, so I’ll share some minor and likely boring updates.  I haven’t mentioned any computer issues, projects or upgrades recently.  So, here is one:  I swapped the 2.5″ 500GB 5400RPM hard drive in the newest of the Mac Minis for a 2.5″ 500GB 7200RPM drive.  In an equally interesting news, I used that 5400RPM drive to upgrade the TV Mac Mini from an internal 100GB plus external 250GB to a single internal 500GB.

While waiting for my 380GB disk image to transfer to the new drive via a painfully slow SATA to USB adapter, I made some unexciting changes to the Gunnar.  After reading about cloth grip tape and the interesting ways in which it can be applied, I changed the chainstay protector.  Don’t follow?

The Gunnar did have the standard inner tube chain stay wrap.  However, the Gunnar doesn’t see much trail use these days, so the inner tube was overkill.  I would just leave the chainstay bare, but it is pretty beat up.  What to do?  Start with two colors of vinyl electrical tape and a lot of patience.  Electrical tape isn’t the easiest to work with as it stretches, folds and sticks to everything (it is tape, after all). After several attempts, this was the result:

While not pictured, the grey and black electrical tape matches the grey and black Gunnar logos.  Oh, and this technique also works with inner tubes.  Inner tubes are easier to work with, protect the frame better, and will probably soon end up on the Eriksen:

I couldn’t resist. I saw that shiny Apple store in one of those new Microsoft commercials and had to get another Mac.

I chose a the base model Mac Mini, and added some upgrades. These new Mac Minis are a departure from the previous generations in that the base model is identical to the more expensive models with the exception of easily upgradable components: the hard drive and the memory. This was nice considering the last Mini I purchased topped $1000 and this one came in under $550 (okay, $1 under $550). The most compelling feature for me is the dual monitor support, closely followed by the 4GB RAM capacity and inclusion of Firewire 800.

What you’re looking at above is the new Mini about five minutes after taking it out of the box. With practice the cases aren’t too hard to open, and once open they are easy to work on. This Mini received the 500GB 2.5″ SATA drive out of the old 1.66GHz Core Duo Mini and 4GB of Crucial DDR3/1066 memory for $55 from Newegg. A comparison of my now three Mac Minis:

I’m only going to keep two of them, so I’ll have to decided between a trusty PPC G4 or the faster, more feature-laden Intel…