Saturday, September 25, 2010

Crimson Ghosts/ Diemonsterdie Split




The opening track of this split, The Crimson Ghosts doing "The Body Bag" is pretty awesome. It's got a rockin' chorus (can you see it/ can you see it/ something's moving in the body bag/ can you see it/ can you see it/ whatever is inside don't ever let it out!). The song has a real industrial edge to it, but not in a bad way. It's just an influence of industrial, not a full on industrial song. The next track, "October Slowly Dying" is a diemonsterdie cover, and it's about as good as a DMD cover can get. I'm not really a DMD fan, I've never really seen the attraction to the band. As far as "whoa-ohh" horror punk, they're not "bad", but I've heard my fill of "whoa-ohh". I guess it goes without saying, then, that the next side of the split, the DMD side, isn't all that appealing to me. "She Looks Like You" is the aforementioned "whoa-ohh" standard, heard it all before horror punk song, while the next track, "Death From Above" is a Crimson Ghosts cover. "Death From Above" is one of my favorite Ghosts' songs, so anyone covering it can't really do it justice. And DMD can't.

Nim Vind - The Stillness Illness Review



Classic, weird Nim Vind at his finest! I'm a big fan of this band, they've always been the most "different" of all the horror punk bands, save for maybe the Bloodsucking Zombies from Outer Space. When Nim Vind released "Fashion of Fear", a lot of my favorite songs from the Mr. Underhill (same band; different name) days didn't make it on the record. This rarely happens, but all of the song's that I wanted to hear redone made it onto this record! "21st Century Teenage" and "Killing Saturday Night" are classics, while songs like "Hadron Collider", "Jacknife" and "Shangro Nitra" have awesome choruses, which I always thought was the appeal to Nim Vind's music. One weird thing, however, is the inclusion of "The Radio-active Man", which was on the last record as "Interviews With The Icon". It's cool what they did with the song, but I don't think that they added enough to the song to warrant redoing it. Other than that, this is a solid album from a horror punk band that dare's to sing about something other than brains.

Buy here!

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Repowering the Powerbook: Chapter 2

Well, we've got some success!

I purchased the Torx screwdriver that I needed, and I also purchased an AC adapter to give this baby some juice.

During the period where I was waiting to receive the AC adapter in the mail, I spoke to Hollywood. I asked him how a computer could get so destroyed.

"I was working in Reason, and I got frustrated, so I punched the screen."

"Sir, don't lie to me. This is no one-punch job."

"Okay, maybe I hit it more than once."

"The CD drive looks like it was pried open with a crowbar! The antenna is severed! Did this thing take a trip through the air?"

"Well... it may have."

Haha. All the more fun for me, right?

I plugged the AC adapter in tonight, and to my surprise, I was greeted by that classic Mac sound.

I was also greeted by this:



I can line-out via DVI to my desktop monitor, but it only functions as a second screen. It's gonna take some work getting this bad boy to use the DVI-out by default, haha.

Next stop? Purchasing a new screen and wireless antenna, and doing something about the pried-apart bottom cover.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Repowering the Powerbook: Chapter 1

If anyone reading this blog didn't know, I am a film maker. The way my film company, C1C2 Productions, writes our movies involves one main writer and an editor, which is me. He writes the first drafts, and then these are sent to me and the editing begins. This worked splendidly for our first two films, because our head writer was at college at had a private place to write. Our third film, Recoil, however, found him living at home, and his computer located in the central area of the house, which meant no privacy or quiet place for him to think.

To accomplish this, we rounded up every old, spare computer we each had, and tried to Frankenstein and working PC that he could use in his bedroom. When we were rounding up computers to use, our head writer, who will herein be referred to as Hollywood, brought out a destroyed, non-functioning Powerbook G4.

"Can you use this for anything?" Hollywood said.



I then went on to explain the mac vs PC file system differences, and the self-imposed hardware monopoly that Apple places on their hardware. Suffice to say, there wasn't much that I could use this laptop for, at least for our purposes. I took it anyway, in the hope that someday I would work with it enough to be able to recover the data that is stored on the hard drive. If I could do this, the machine would be mine.

Now is that time.

Upon first inspection, the future looks pretty grim for this machine. There are Torx screws missing, and the body is separating from itself,



Their are parts hanging out of the side,



and the screen is in such bad shape, I doubt it will even work.



So why bother?

3 reasons.

1. Mac machines are very expensive. I've been in the market for a macbook pro for a while, but seeing as how I'm a poor college student, the future looks pretty bleak on this. I figure I can play around with this machine once it's working to have a OS X based system that I can use to learn the ropes and have a better laptop that the one I'm currently running (rickety Acer Travelmate barely running Windows 7).

2. Data recovery. Hollywood is now strugging to become an audio engineer in LA, and a lot of his undergrad recording sessions are saved on this machine. Having these could help him get a job.

3. Challenge! I'm pretty good with computer repair, and I'd love to see what lengths it would take to fix this! Plus, I think it would be pretty neat to have a Mac machine running a Linux distro when all is said and done.

I'll be periodically updating this blog with the different milestones I reach in working on this. So far I've just purchased a power adapter off of ebay, which is kinda important when seeing what works and what doesn't on a computer. Once it arrives, I'll venture into the guts of this machine. Luckily, this is the Titanium DVI model, so I can DVI-Out on bootup in case the screen is totally blasted.