Right Hand sabre just about complete...

It's beautiful. It fits my hand. It hangs better on my belt. It's great.

Here are the pix!



Gotta give 'nuff respect to Ryan at Random Sabers. He made this possible.



I think I might try to greeble the control box a little, but the approach I used last time won't work. Control box is way too small for a SO-DIMM. I'm thinking ICs clipped off of a non-working circuit board.



This is sort of a before-and-after pic.



Now you can see the reason why people were talking about "wookiee sabres" with regard to v1.0, and how these are just more in scale with me. The drain-pipe sabres would be just fine for a taller person with bigger hands. These are more like it for me.

Of course, I'll be recording the build of the left handed sabre.

Naked sabres! Naked sabres!!! (SFW)

Yes, these pix are safe for work. Now you see what I will be working with with regard to the new Hardware Store Jedi hardware lightsabre tutorial. I'm redoing it because of a few things I was dissatisfied with in the original project.



The old and new sabres, for scale. Note how big and klunky the first version of the sabres turned out. The next version should be a lot more elegant.



The greebling job will be quite similar to the original, except there will be only 5 of the aircraft part nurnies at the top, and there will be no faucet handle pommel. Otherwise I will be attempting to get as close as possible to the look and feel of the original in a more streamlined version.



Look how graceful they are! The pics don't do the blades justice...they are translucent iMac Indigo blue. Sweet. Thanks, Random Sabers!!!

Totally delighted with my new (to me) Mac...

I now have a fairly capable Mac to work with. An iMac is not usually what you would consider a "power user's" computer, but there you go. It's got a 500MHz IBM PPC G3 proc and now has 768MB of RAM now that the DIMM arrived.

There are some definite quirks about this machine. The specs are actually consistent with an iMac released in Europe, although it came with a plain-Jane slot loading CD-ROM as opposed to a CD-RW like the original spec says. Apple makes educational-only machines from time to time, and they are usually bare-bones affairs.

Now that the upgrades have been done, however, it is a more capable machine. It will get external storage upgrades which will make it even more capable: a DVD-/+RW/RAM drive and an external 120GB hard drive.

This should hold me until I get a MacIntel. I'm hoping to get one as a grad gift in 2007.

Update: here's my desktop. I don't know why I get such perverse pleasure in decorating my desktop but I do.