Saturday, September 30, 2006

Aluminum Foiled Again!

Well, their going to blow up the Frieze building. And you know what? I really don't care. What I do care about is the fact that Property Disposition, the liquidators of old University equipment was on the scene selling everything that wasn't actually bolted to the building (and a few things that were).
There were hatracks, reel-to-reel tap recorders, hundreds of shelves and sofas and even a quad-set of plastic chairs in a row. You know, the kind you see at subway stations or something.
There was also a very handsome looking Apple Studio Display. Now, my keen fan-boy eye immediately pegged it for not a recent model (2001), but it is a nice looking display none the less.
So, after four separate visits (once to case the joint, another to buy new sofas, another to move new sofas, etc.) I caved and bought it. Only $10! True, it has a teasing "DEAD MONITOR? - BOTTOM IS DARKER THAN TOP" sticker on it, I feel like it's at least worth investigating.
HOWEVER!
After I brought it home, I was puzzled at my inability to connect it to me PowerBook. A few searches on the internet and a browse through MacTracker sussed out the problem: Around 2000 or so, Apple introduced the ADC cable. The idea was that this sucker could power small USB devices, the monitor and carry all of the video data to the monitor itself! Ingenious! But, like many of Apple's proprietary hardware standards, this fell by the way-side and the universal DVI standard was eventually adopted.
The PowerBook that I run, naturally, has no ADC jack. And because of the unique configurations of the ADC cords, a $100 adapter ($50 on eBay) would be necessary to render it useful for me.

So what am I going to do?
Well, if someone can get me a cut-rate solution, I'd be willing to pay. However, I think it's much more likely that I'll take this sucker down to the Garg office and set up one of our G4 Towers as a dual-monitor station. It'd actually be useful there - provided that it's even usable!

Am I upset? No. The thing cost less than most meals in Ann Arbor (dorm food: $8 per meal). But I was very, very close to achieving true dorkdom by duel monitoring!

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