Wesley's Tool-Box

There have been some network issues in the last few days. The major culprit turned out to be the 100Mbps Ethernet hub I've been using for more than five years (NEXT-8305SH). It doesn't "switch" the network connection over the ports properly anymore.

That has now been replaced with a ipTIME H5005 Gigabit Ethernet hub. I don't think the internet connection is that fast yet, but it's better to futureproof things. However, I've been noticing that the connection to the server is lost after some idling time after the new hub has been put into place. I'm not sure what's causing this and am trying to find out now.

Today marks the return of The Toon-Box, the comic that ran for four years from August 23, 2005 to July 29, 2009 and went into hiatus for more than four years since. With Comic Life software that made the comic possible available on iOS for some time, all it needed was motivation to resurrect the comic.

So yes, now the comic is fully created on my iPhone, and uploaded to the server. No need work on my Mac, since the photos are already on the iPhone anyway. Enjoy!

Wesley's Tool-Box was offline for a 53 days since February 2, 2013, when the iMac (Early 2008) that ran the website since May 2008 broke down.

Replacement system was sought, and a souped-up Mac mini (Late 2012) was chosen to pick up the task. Unfortunately, there had been a few issues - recovering the files and database from the iMac didn't go as smoothly as planned; Mac mini didn't get along with certain brand of SSD; family stuff.

All that's behind now. Enjoy the site once again - thank you for your patience.

One week I leave the server let roam free, it goes down in 8 hours. Heh...
Sorry for all those of you who tried to access the website this week. I've gotten it running again now.

I have relieved the old G4 Mac mini of its Tool-Box.info web server functions for the final time on 7PM, July 10, 2008, as all my websites have finished transitioning to iMac. The Mac mini faithfully served as the server for Tool-Box.info for 1100 days - just over 3 years.

Come to think of it, I don't think I have ever owned a system lasting that long fully intact in my 20 years of computing life. Emphasis on 'owned', since some systems that I gave away to other people have lasted longer. The things I keep around rarely last over a year. One big exception was this Altec Lansing speaker set that I kept around for 9 years until iMac's internal speakers made it unnecessary. Anyway, the Mac mini was originally bought to be modified into a portable system. But in hindsight, I'm glad I didn't butcher it as a part of my ongoing experiment with small form factor computers. I might have moved back to Windows world after tinkering with it for a couple of months if that happened.

Instead, the system served me well as a solid desktop Mac platform - it took me a while to get accustomed to the Mac way of things, but once I cleared the entry barrier, I found more interesting things to do with it, especially because OS X is a UNIX. Using a Mac became part of my life and Mac mini was no longer just some compact computer to toy around with - it became my primary system. It became my web server.

It had an excellent run throughout all these times, and I hope it will find new purposes (or perhaps a new owner) eventually, since it's working fine just as ever.