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9 November 2005

[Mirror door 'windtunnel' G4] Yup, I finally did it. Good bye Windows 98, hello Mac OS X. The power of UNIX plus the delicious interface of Apple. Very, very nice.

Then I tried to plug my microphone in. Oops, the microphone jack isn't; it is a line-in jack. Apparently this was a failed attempt to avoid a lawsuit from the Beatles. According to activity in the newsgroups, I'm not the first to fall into this trap. Oddly all the discussions about this issue revolve around which $100 gadget is required, whereas a similar problem on a PC would have many people providing schematics. Interesting cultural difference.

No problem, I'll just design my own microphone driver and amplifier. After a couple of prototypes I had a working system. Not that I can use it to talk to most of my friends, since Google Talk doesn't support the Mac yet. But maybe some day.

In the mean time I thought I'd publish my circuit for the benefit of other Macusers. Oh, that's a problem, ORCAD and Electronic Workbench don't run on a Mac. Looks like I'm back to ASCII art schematics until I find a new package that's affordable.

Well at least I can take some photographs of the circuit. Unfortunately I can't get the photos off my camera since the drivers explode with "Error #17537" as they are unstuffed. So much for "It just works."

The Mac is better at 95% of things than a PC, but that remaining 5% is a real problem. A cheap Windows 2000 box is arriving on Friday.

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