Slept late again this morning, didn't matter too much though, because I finished off the breakfast cereal yesterday, and didn't take my backpack with me yesterday, so I couldn't buy anymore last night, so there was nothing for breakfast.

I was about to take off about 8.30am, I noticed a parcel next to my bike, I think it's the SparcStation IPC I bought off eBay a few days ago.

I dragged it inside, and opened it up, yep, SparcStation, Sun mounse, and keyboard.

Wow, I haven't even paid for this yet. I sent an email chasing up the payment details yesterday, haven't heard anything back from them yet.

D'oh, the F10 key cap is missing off the keyboard, oh well.

I left it, no time for playing with it now.

The eBay auction is here.

I took off, and headed for work.

There was a speed trap on the freeway, but aimed forward, so there was no worries with slowing down for that, then a few kilometres up the road, a truck had a tyre blowout, so I had to navigate through all the bits of steel belted radial all over the road.

As I got towards work, and was waiting at the traffic lights, I was daydreaming a bit, so I didn't notice the lights turn green for a couple of seconds, I just started to take off, and some idiot with a Uhaul trailer on his car came blasting into the intersection from the right, running a red light.

If I'd been watching the lights, and taken off as soon as they turn green, I don't want to know what would have happened.

After that, the road was covered in some sort of pebbles or gravel or something, like a landscaping truck had been losing his load all along the road, but it covered the whole road.

I had to be careful to stay in the wheel tracks that had been cleared by cars driving through it all. It went for about 5 kilometres, god knows how much of it there was.

The rest of the trip was unremarkable.

I emailed a guy on the tivo mailing list about buying one of his spares a couple of months ago, but they were all gone by the time I got around to emailing him. Turns out he sent me an email about them weeks ago, but I missed it.

I emailed him to find out if he still had any, and he did have a couple, so I worked to buy one off him.

I wandered up to the bank to pay for it, the CollectingWealth Bank doesn't allow you to put a comment on a deposit, only a number, so I quickly though to put "710", the best I could spell "TIVO" with numbers :-)

I couldn't think of how to do the V with numbers, I even looked up leet speak documentation, and apparently ">" is sometimes used as a v, but it's not really a number.

I mentioned it to the guy I'm buying the tivo off, he suggested using a carat symbol (^) as a v, but I really doubt my chances of explaining a carat symbol to a bank teller, and again, it's not really a number.

It dawned on me on the way home.. 5. V being the Roman numeral for 5 :-)

I mucked around with the SparcStation a bit when I got home.

I went to plug the serial terminal into it, but found it has the two 8 pin mini din serial ports on it, instead of the single 25 pin combined serial port like the LX. I don't have any way to plug anything into the serial ports on this.

I grabbed the 13W3 adapter from my LX, that allows using a vga monitor on a sun, and plugged in one of my 17" monitors, since it has a better hope of supporting the weird Sun frame buffer resolution (fixed frequency, 1152x900, at 66Hz), than any of the other crappy monitors I have hanging around.

I tried booting it up, no video output. Hmm. The unit has the onboard B/W framebuffer, and also has an sbus framebuffer card. I was trying to use the card, so I tried using the onboard framebuffer, still no picture.

I plugged in the other 17" monitor, but it was the same.

Hmm, now I don't know if both monitors can't support the Sun resolution (quite probably not), or if there's something wrong with the Sparc. I'll have to get some parts and make up a serial adapter.

I saw a Sun monitor on eBay for $100, (shipping up to $65 though), perhaps I should just grab that, then I can run it properly.