I have known since years that the day had to come, but it was hard anyhow:

My beloved iMac G5 (rev. 1) had to be taken down, in order to move to his new home, the waldobjekt. During the last few years, it always served well the kuehlschrank-website (it’s down now, of course!), provided a home for my emails (people are still calling me crazy for setting up the MX for my primary mail domain into a dyndns), archived our webcam pictures, connected my home to the world wide web (and even further), and had not suffered a single crash. Only one time, somebody tripped over the power extension lead, which unfortunately had an integrated switch. That was 635 days ago. The machine wasn’t connected to a UPS, always had a decent load, braved dozens of unsuccesfull hacking attempts, received approx. 1 spam email attempt every 10 seconds (that are multi million attempts in total, each one logged into the ever-growing /var/log/mail), and ran a linux version highly experimental on this hardware (the first one to offer “windfarm” support). Every now and then, a loud “wheeeeeww” reminded us that the (otherwise pretty silent) router was still routing. Other than that, it just worked. No harddrive failure, no fan failure, not a single kernel oops. I believe this is the iMac with the longest uptime ever, so far. (Though this is a wild guess - but who else would be stupid enough use an iMac as something not standing on a desktop?)

This machine is also related to my Xbox 360 hacking, since it was a wonderful PowerPC code executor. I’ve just mmap()‘ed the code in question and executed it, which often saved me from reverse-engineering complex functions like decompressors. I’ve just used the original code.

I’m not completely sure about the new tasks for this machine. Maybe I’ll use it as a workstation, or I will replace the current Xbox running the waldobjekt-webcams with it. We’ll see.