Benjamin Ellis

First, a disclaimer: Don’t do this unless you feel confident and safe to do so :). This will void the warauntee on your G4, big style, but hey… It’s so old I doubt anyone would repair it anyway, right?

With that said, making an old Apple G4 quieter is a fairly simple job. There are three fans that need replacing, two 60mm fans in the power supply, and one 120mm fan that cools the CPU. Some would argue that the two smaller fans make the bulk of the noise, but my G4 is in an audio environment, so I wasn’t taking any chances. Besides, the bearing on the 120mm fan was wearing out and emitting that telling grind of death noise.

The best on-line piece on dealing with the G4 noise is on xlr8yourmac. Normally I get components for quieting machines from QuietPC, but because of the special fan sizes this time I went to FrozenCPU (an insanely large collection of PC bits and pieces, but a carbon foot print fail, since my fans went: China -> US -> UK). It turns out you can actually get a full kit here, but not so cheap. 

I ordered a SilenX 120×120x38mm - 18dBA - 90CFM iXtrema Pro Fan and two Cooljag Everflow 60mm x 25mm Fans with grommets. Just enough to hush the mac, although potentially not enough airflow for a fully loaded system. You can laugh at my exploits in these Qiks:

Part I - wind noise:

Part Ib - going in:

Part II - getting it out:

Part III, the result:

No, not breaking into them! Automating them and reducing the power that they use…

Current Cost Meter

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I spent Saturday at Social Media Camp London, and a mighty fine day it was too. A remarkable number of the folks there were SMC first-timers, with just a handful of the old guard. Good to have new blood into the game!

I haven’t see a complete round up of the talks (there were a lot!). The venue (Wallspace, St. Pancras) was absolutely stunning, the food delightful and Vero’s organization seamless.
I’ll write up my presentation on FOAF and Dunbar’s number (’6 degrees of seperation now 3′) and get it up on slideshare (to join this lot) just as soon as I’ve caught my breath. In the mean time there’s a nice mention here  (thanks @edent!). Read the rest of this entry »