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Reload page in style: light

When I got back from Dorsai Thing a few weeks back, I saw a kernel panic on my iMac, so I tried rebooting it. Upon rebooting it, the screen stayed black and no sounds came from the speakers, nor did the Caps Lock light turn on on the keyboard when I pressed the key. So I took the machine out of service and made a note to open it up at some point.

I finally got around to opening up the machine today, and I found what the problem was:

It's quite clear that at least 3 of the capacitors blew out. I'm not clear how this happened, I know that excessive heat can do it but the fans on the system work just fine and there was no excess buildup of dust when I removed the back cover. And I could understand one capacitor failing, but 3 at once? That just doesn't make any sense to me.

Oh well, the machine was old, and served me well for the nearly 6 years that I had it. I'll just stick with my newer machines for now.

Folks might have heard that Steam is finally available for the Mac and that, for a limited time, Portal is available as a free download. Naturally, I made the most of it, and downloaded Portal on Friday evening, beating it just last night. :-)

Downloading Portal was interesting, I had no idea that the game was on the order of 3 Gigs in size. It was a great way to test out my current Internet connection, which performed pretty well, as this graph shows:

As for playing the game itself, someone asked me how Steam and Portal were on the Mac, out of concern that there might just be some emulation going on. This does not seem to be the case, judging by my CPU usage (gameplay began right after the download):

I'd say that my Mac Mini held its own just fine. :-)

I'll probably be on Steam on occasion. If anyone wants to friend me there, feel free. My Steam ID is DmuthAtHome.