A Bulletin Board from the backside of the internet

Seeing as I'm apparently going through some old derelict Apple-phase, I figured I would start a thread to document my pointless shenanigans.
This all really stems from me always having been curious about Apple hardware and software, and always liked the industrial design of the machines from about 2003-2010. But I never had the funds to throw at it when it was current hardware. So now is a good time to hop on that train, because the Core2Duo-era machines are currently very cheap and undesirable.
Plus all this a strangely refreshing change from all the Linux poking and terminal stabbing I otherwise do. This is intriguing and different.

I've had a Power Mac G5 for many years, and got my first one in 2012. The PowerPC systems are really neat I think, since it's an old strange architecture that for some reason feels more fun than "just another Intel" platform. They only go so far though, and are getting expensive, making them a bad choice for cheap fun tinkering.

A little infrastructure
Having been a fan of the Xserve series for the longest time, I naturally picked up a C2D-based Mac Mini (lol), chucked an SSD into that and installed OS 10.6 Server, and put it in top of an Iomega external HDD made to fit the computer footprint. This one runs as a NAS, webserver, VPN, Open Directory, calendar, wiki, email server etc. This as a platform to tinker around with the various services of the old server forks of the OS 10 operating system and its integration with the client side.
A side note on the Mini server. Apple did sell a Mac Mini Server, that was simply a regular Mini with an extra hard drive in place of the optical drive, and another case without the disc slot. These flopped pretty hard and are quite uncommon. I call my abomination Xserve Mini, because fun.
I was also given an old Time Capsule to use as backup and wifi access point for the portables and two Airplay audio receivers. This one had a bad power supply, so I modded it and threw in an SSD at the same time. Ye olde laptops
In terms of laptops I have two, (focusing on functional ones here) which I wasn't even meant to have. They were purchased as complete damage control when my OCC plans fell apart and I needed something to replace the sad Powerbook G4 with.
First up is an A1181 Macbook 13" from 2008. This is one of the white plastic models, which cleaned up surprisingly well with some effort! It was anything but white when I got it. Somehow the original battery is in good condition as well, giving it about 4 hours of runtime. Second up is an A1226 Macbook Pro 15" from 2007. This one was such a basketcase when I got it. The casing being smashed and bent, screws missing, the battery missing cells (wtf?) and it having a firmware lock which prevented me from installing anything on it. Luckily all those issues were sorted eventually, except for the smashed corners anyways. It too gets about 4 hours runtime on battery. Since it's kind of large, heavy and burns your legs because it's all metal, it has been put to desk duty with an external monitor, and just yesterday got its vertical desk stand. It has been my primary desktop computer solution for the past weeks. And I just recently won what was described as "iMac late 2000s" for real cheap on an auction. I have no clue what model or year it is, but it looks to possibly be from 2010. I've never dealt with a flatscreen iMac before, so it will be an interesting thing to poke and prod at. It'll be picked up on monday. So, more to come.

Gorgeous setups!

Thanks!
I picked up the cheap and mystery iMac today. It turned out to be a mid-2011 model, not late 2000s. It's a 21.5" variant with some 2.5GHz i5, 4GB RAM and a 500GB mechanical hard drive. I did what any unreasonable person would do and threw an SSD into it, shoved 24GB of RAM in, because I had it, and the darn thing has no less than four SO-DIMM memory slots, taking regular DDR3 laptop RAM. Since this computer turned out to be too new to be retro-fun, I instead decided to go the route of updating it as far as possible (the official route without shenanigans)
Modern-ish Macs have a pretty neat online recovery solution, that, when you boot the computer without an OS, and with network attached, it automatically snorts down the OS installer of the version the computer originally shipped with. In the case of this one, that turned out to be 10.7. I then set out to start updating the OS, which I quickly found out you have to do in (some) steps. After downloading three different High Sierra update installers, only to have the OS complain about the archive files being broken, I did some more research and found out I needed to hop over version 10.11 El Capitan first. I eventually found a page from Apple with a list of download links for all the versions I needed. It's important to note that upgrades need to be done with the base versions, such as 10.11, and not 10.11.x.
Chugging through 10.11, I could finally kick off the installer for 10.13 High Sierra. Exciting pictures, I know.
I then installed the 10.13.6 patch, and ended up here, with a fully working 13 year old iMac. Woo-fucking-hoo. Not sure what I'm going to use it for, but I'm sure it'll be useful somehow. Since Mac OS is pretty lightweight, it's still a very snappy and fast feeling experience. For 300sek, or about $30 I'm certainly not going to complain.

Dude what a beautiful setup!!

Cheers! The old iMac found its way to what was my primary computer desk, where I hadn't even booted up the computer in over a month, since I have been tinkering only eith old, more fun computers. It feels like that wallpaper has become a staple of Headcrash computing lately. lol.

Right, so I stumbled across a cheap Macbook Air from mid-2011. The same time frame as the iMac, so it seemed like a good fit. It's a 13" i5 model with 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD, so a base model. I would have preferred an 11" model, but for roughly $60 I am not going to complain about it.

It was listed as coming with a "sleeve", which turned out to be a hard plastic protective case around it. Ugly as sin, but it probably saved the machine from dents and smashed corners, which it has none of. It was pretty filghty over all, with a bunch of dust and grime in the keyboard, ports etc. It did clean up quite well with some effort though. I couldn't get all the dust out of the keyboard, so I am tempted to take it all apart and clean it properly, if it's not a massive job. I have yet to look into that. It did come preinstalled with macOS High Sierra, which is the latest it can run natively, and what I am using on the iMac. It was a clean install done properly, putting me directly into the OOBE setup. For funsies I decided to try the "Import your shit from another Mac or Time Machine Backup" solution rather than setting everything up manually. This took a couple of hours over wifi, which probably wasn't ideal, but it got there in the end!
It's kind of uncanny to use the laptop separate from the iMac, while it's being identical in every way on the display. But I figured as it'll be a portable extension of the desktop, I might as well put the whole software pile on there with files and all.

I'll call it good enough for now, and it really did clean up alright. Other than the key edges having some dirt on them, it's really not bad for a 13 year old machine. All that's left now is to test how the battery is feeling. It's advertised as lasting for 7 hours on paper, so I'll see. --

As a side note, I got a little desk lamp for the.... desk? because it looked flat, boring and it's starting to get dark in the evenings.

After starting as a bit of a joke, because it's what I totally would have done in 2007-2012-ish has seemingly turned into a staple of my Apple shenanigans at this point. So if you feel like being me, building knockoff setups of mine, or just for the lulz, here is the Avril Lavigne wallpaper for download.
It's quite hard to find it in the 1920x1200 resolution. It's somewhat common in lower resolutions for some reason.
(right-click and save it to get the full resolution)

It's funny how using an OS built for the period of the machine just works fine; even modern DE's won't run nicely on old hardware I find. How unnecessarily spoilt we have become.

I was having a bit of a chuckle at the wallpaper; thats the sort of thing I would do

Love the computers and the setup!

On tip, if you press alt+cmd+R at boot, the mac boots into the recovery for the latest OS that's supported and not for the original that it came with.

What software are you running on these machines? I mean the programs that you regularly use, not just the OS.

Huh, looks like I forgot to reply!
Good tip about the boot command sequence. I didn't know you you could go straight to the latest version. That's much more convenient than version-hopping to the latest one.

On the software front I'm using the following
Firefox 115.14.0esr
Limechat
TextMate
VLC
iTunes
LibreOffice
FileZilla
iTerm
Apple Mail
Mumble
Minecraft

And the various Apple integrated stuff that syncs with iCloud still, since it works between my phone and the old slow iPad I've got.

There is also a small upgrade on the desk (And to my back) I went to IKEA today and bought a monitor/computer stand to get the display a bit further up.