Yes, good old ebay comes to the rescue when trying to find a classic
mac to ‘refit’ with new parts. Even today, searching for ‘mac classic’
on ebay UK turns up some likely targets.

A few short days later and I was picking up a lovely Mac SE for under a tenner – whoo!

Yes, it even still worked – after a fashion; I didn’t actually have any
software for it… or a mouse, or keyboard, but then it doesn’t matter
as sadly it’s all going to get ripped out! (ha ha haaaaaa)

So, now to sort out what’s going to go in it… [continued tomorrow!]

So, almost all the computers at home (well my home anyway) are macs. Lovely, shiny macs… ahhh!

Except for one. It’s not bad, it’s a little mini-itx PC that’s low
power and very low noise. Before ‘converting’ to macs I was obsessed
with trying to make the humble PC be more quiet and fit into the home
environment better – nasty, noisy beige boxes don’t really fit at home
I think!

Basically I was a bit ahead of the whole ‘media centre PC’
curve (yes,
early adopter as usual) and this was bought as a bit of an experiment,
also to be a little jukebox of both audio and video things. (and yes,
this was before the mac mini, which is what I’d go for now)

So, that was fun, it didn’t really ever work very well, especially as
I’d unwisely decided to go for maximum geek points and try to make it
work using gentoo
linux. Nice idea in theory. In practice – very flakey, much things
breaking all the time. In short, far too much like hard work for a home
computer (I’m of the mind that after fighting with the damn things all
day at work, I want things to just work
at home.) The poor little thing was left somewhat unloved and forgotten
under the TV, not really ever used and quite folorn. (awww)

However – after fully mac-ing up and remembering this wonderful mod
in which a little mini-itx PC board was stuffed into an old Mac
Classic, I thought… “hmmm… sounds like a good idea!”

But to be honest, I didn’t want to have a mouse and keyboard
attached. I still want to use it as a jukebox of some kind. So, a touch
screen would be useful – but I can’t do that with the built-in old 9
inch black & white screen. After a bit of searching on the web I
found the perfect thing – an 8″ touch screen designed for fitting in
the back seats of cars. Perfect!

Now all I needed to do was find the poor, unsuspecting mac to stuff my left-over PC bits into… ebay to the rescue!

[the story continues in the next episode, tomorrow!]

It’s quite literally true for some of the guys I work with:

(I think that’s about 15 but to be honest I lost count after a while)