Back on the 5th I quietly celebrated twenty years of this journal.
I started this ongoing chronicle of my so called life on August 5th 2003 over on LiveJournal, and I had planned to post something about in on the day – but things were busy with running all over Denver to pick up the MacPro and whatnot.
Oddly enough, I set up this domain in August of ’99 – so the domain has been running for 24 years now as well… I should plan some sort of 25th year anniversary thing for next year.
In other news I’ve finished moving into the 2012 Mac Pro, which as of this afternoon is acting as my daily driver in preparation for selling my M2 Max MacBook Pro.
It was a bit weird to disconnect everything from my laptop, unplug the power adapter, and set it all aside…
The 2012 is still running on a single 6-core Xeon, but that should be fixed some time next week once the new tray arrives and I get a chance to fully populate it with two top-end 6-core Xeons and 128gigs of ram… The ram will come from my big box o’ server ram that a friend sent me, because all of the servers at his datacenter that have been replaced used the same DDR3 ECC as the 2012 – so the memory upgrade will be free…
But everything else has been updated; macOS Monterey, OWC 1TB Accelsior 1M2 M.2 PCIe card, USB 3.1 / USB-C PCIe card, and an 8gig Radeon RX 580 video card.
The RX 580 is also temporary… I got a really good deal on it – $80 with cables! – but I have a Radeon RX 6600 XT on the way as well.
I have been pleasantly surprised at how well this machine runs. It’s an 11 year old computer I got for free with an $80 six year old video card in it and about $100 in new parts – and it does day-to-day stuff pretty much on-par with my $4000 M2 Max MacBook Pro.
It’s a bit slower in 3D things, like I’m doing good right now to pull 15fps in busy areas of SecondLife where the M2 Max will do 25fps – but the new card, which is about 2x faster in pretty much everything, should fix that.
The ‘secret sauce’ to getting this machine on-par with a $6000 2019 Mac Pro boiled down to massaging the system’s firmware a bit, creating a custom EFI boot loader, and once the new video card gets here, fixing a bug in its firmware… Once I took care of those few things, macOS Monterey – which is last year’s OS – runs just fine on it.
Like I mentioned in the previous post; it’s not that these fancy new Apple operating systems can’t run on this machine – it’s that Apple really doesn’t want them to.
Listening to "Inhale" by New Arcades