Happy Lunar Landing Day!

Yes, it was in 1969, on this date, that a manned spacecraft from Earth first touched down on our closest celestial neighbour, The Moon. The first thing to touch The Moon was the contact sensor on the Lunar Module's leg...both of which were made in Canada! So Canadians should celebrate this date as well! 

If you remember, I finally got a soldering iron, and did my first soldering this century...and it was...ugly. After checking it to make sure it didn't have a bridged connection or anything, I put it aside, since I didn't have anything to test it on. Today, I did some excavation of my room, and pulled out an old HP Pentium 4 system that has been taking up space under my desk. I had already decided to scrap it, and had pulled just about everything of use out of it, but it would still work, and thus was a nice test-bed for my repaired video card.  I plugged it in...and it worked!!!!  The first success of the day! I tested out some other video cards I had, and they all worked as well. Then I pulled the machine out, and put it into the hall way so that I can get a collection of stuff to take to a recycling place.

My second success, well, not really a success, but simply a moral booster, I got a call from my friend Heidi. And, as usual, we chatted for something like a couple of hours. Much to the annoyance of Duncan, since I had taken over the kitchen for the call, as my room has such horrible reception, that if I move the wrong way, it disconnects the call!

My next success for the day was to find the half-height nVidia video card I had, and put that into the small form factor Lenovo system I have. It's an Intel Core2 Duo system, and I might even be able to upgrade the CPU in it, since it uses DDR3 RAM, and thus has a fairly modern chipset in it.  It was my experiential hackintosh system, and it had horrible video update speed with the built-in Intel HD video...but with the upgraded card, it flew! I was able to play 1080p video on it, no problem! It has Mac OS X Sierra on it, so it's fairly current. Once I have a good backup of the Hard drive and it's configuration, I will allow it to do some updates...scary stuff kids! But, it would be nice to have a contemporary Mac up and running! I do have an old iMac, but it's in pieces, and it's an old Core2 Duo, with DDR2 memory. :-(

Now that I know that the video card I fixed will not blow up, or blow up the system  I plugged it into, I can set up a more powerful system to start scanning my dad's slides.

So, tomorrow (later today?), I am going to see about getting the new power connector soldered on to the Apple 30" Cinema display, and then see if I have an amazing display, or something I can sell for parts.