Over the years I’ve played a lot of MMOs, and with a couple of notable exceptions such as World of Warcraft, they’ve all become inoperable relics in my game collection. For example, I was looking for something to write about and decided on a random grab from the dead MMO shelf…
And so I present 2007’s “Tabula Rasa”.
If you’re above a certain age, you probably recognize the name attached to this title; Richard Garriott of Ultima fame… AKA “Lord British” himself.
And here’s the back of the box which talks about some of the game’s features:
Now, while I found Tabula Rasa to be engaging and fun – one might even say I liked it – it was the swirl of events, rumors, and stories surrounding the game, Richard Garriott, and NCSoft that were probably more entertaining.
See, Richard Garriott had teamed up with NCSoft to make the game, and somewhere in the middle of development he fucked off to space for a while which wasn’t super helpful. Then NCSoft concocted some story about him leaving the company to tank the game so they wouldn’t have to pay him, which only partially worked… The game did tank, but Lord British sued the crap out of NCSoft for this and won like $30 million in settlement.
Either way the game only ran for like a year before being boarded up and eventually bulldozed to make way for other NCSoft titles.
I think I got my money’s worth out of it though. The box was like $50, and I paid for 8-9 months of the game before it became a ghost town. But during that time I probably sunk a couple hundred hours into the game.
Speaking of boxes, this was late 2007 – back when we still bought games in boxes off of store shelves… Which is something I really miss.
Game stores were a cool place to get your games, because they tended to be full of other gamers and you could be among your people for a bit. That and the physical boxes usually contained a bunch of goodies that went with the game – like maps, books, pins, etc, etc.
Here’s what came in the basic box for Tabula Rasa – along with the receipt from the now long-gone neighborhood Game Stop just because I left it in the box:
The booklet in the lower right is about a half an inch thick and contains lots of artwork, lore, tricks and tips for game mechanics, and other useful items for the game.
So, that was the rise and fall of Tabula Rasa. It was only around for like a year, but it was fun and turned out to be an interesting footnote in gaming history.
There’s a couple of fairly up-scale apartment complexes right near my office; you know the type – one is “modern” and looks like hundreds of various colored cubes stuck together, and the other has stores on the ground level and three floors of apartments above them.
I drive past one of these two every morning on my way in, depending on which way I go. And for the last couple of weeks, without fail, there has been a repossession truck hauling off someone’s car at 6am as I pass the place.
I’ve been driving past these two apartment complexes nearly every day since they were built, and this is the first time I’ve noticed this sort of activity.
I have to guess it’s economic factors making this so prevalent. The same economy that is apparently “perfectly fine” or “on fire” depending on who you talk to. I’m not an economist and tend to get worn out just balancing my own checkbook, so all I can go on is my own observations – and those observations make me think things are pretty screwed up right now.
For example, I like to occasionally stop at the Carl’s Junior on the way into the office and get one of their breakfast burritos and a large drink. Three years ago this ran me about six bucks – this morning it was a few pennies short of ten bucks – and the burrito itself is about three quarters the size it used to be… I thought I was imagining this, but they recently reduced the size of the paper bag they put the food in as well and it became obvious.
And this is pretty much the way it is with everything… My grocery bill has remained steady at about $100 a week for the last few years, but I’m also living on a lot of cheap TV dinners, canned soup, and Raman. Keeping the tank full on the car costs about $40 a week on average and I don’t really go anywhere but the the office. And all of my monthly bills have gone up 10-20 percent for ‘reasons’.
If I wasn’t making 6-figures and splitting my housing costs with a roommate I’m not sure I could make ends meet in this economy. Though I’m certain a good portion of that is living in Denver… I need to get out of this town.
Back on July 4th, 2022, I put in a request for my OMPF (Official Military Personnel File), and today it showed up in my email from the National Archives. So it only took about 16 months… Not bad really!
But, now I have specific dates for all of the various things I did while I was enlisted – so now I get to go and update some entries to be a bit more specific.
The levels of security involved to get this PDF was pretty impressive. I guess I should squirrel it away somewhere when I get home from the office.
My CFO came in this morning stating the big sliding front doors to the building wouldn’t close.
I just had them serviced, so I doubted it was anything major and told him I’d take a look before he called the door company and spent money on a service call… And upon taking a look I noticed something funny with the beam break sensors…
So a quick trip back upstairs to get a screwdriver led to an even quicker debugging session…
And after dumping out the mummified moths and reassembling – everything is good as new.
It’s the little things.
And here’s a bonus picture of a snowy Colorado morning from the roof of my office building looking towards downtown Denver.
Listening to "Blinded By The Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band
I spent several hours at “Urgent Care” last evening for a bad bout of food poisoning, probably caused by a King Soopers salad… I try to eat healthy, but apparently the healthy food these days will try to kill you as well.
Kaiser’s Urgent Care is anything but urgent, as I spent two and a half hours sitting in a waiting room with a 104-degree temperature and feeling like I was freezing to death. The shakes were the worst part, and I’m still sore.
By the time they actually got around to me my temperature was down to 100.4, so they did a cursory check and sent me on my way. And the fee for this was a mere $50.
Fortunately, my roommate has a somewhat open prescription for amoxicillin being a kidney transplant recipient and therefore living on immunosuppressants. So, I’m self-medicating with Gatorade, the BRAT (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast) regimen to get my insides straightened out, taking 500mg of amoxicillin every 12 hours, and trying to get some rest.
My HR director at work has been using the same HP Envy 700-527c desktop since the company purchased them ten years ago, and earlier this week the drive started showing symptoms of failure… So, I had him back up his data – just in case – and started the process of replacing his machine.
The Envy 700-527c uses a 4th gen Haswell i5, so pretty much anything would be an upgrade. But, just to show how fast technology has evolved, I found a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7060 over at Microcenter for $230…
Said Optiplex has an 8th gen i7-8700 in it, 32 gigs of ram, 4TB of storage (1TB SSD + 3TB 3.5″ HD) and Win10 Pro. Win10 Pro is probably a hundred bucks of the $230 all by itself…
Anyway, I send my CFO (who has returned from abroad) over to Microcenter to get the Dell, and when he gets back, I collect the HR director’s machine, pull the HD, and install it in place of the 3TB 3.5″ in order to clone it to the SSD.
So far so good – with one exception – the new Dell only supports display port for monitors, and everything at work is older than that. In fact, my HR director is still using an old DVI-based 27″ LCD I sold to the company back in 2010 or so… But I can fix this being as I have a huge collection of old video cards and most of them do DVI.
So, I stick an old Nvidia GT-430 into the Dell because it can’t support additional PCIe power, hook up a test monitor, and power it on…
Nada. The machine powers up, but no display.
I figure this is caused by a UEFI configuration where it’s been told to use the integrated GPU in the CPU and ignore an external GPU, so I scour the building looking for a monitor that will do display port – finding one in our spinoff’s disused office space. (They get all of the cool new stuff while I build complex systems out of popsicle sticks and paper clips – such is life)
Okay, new(er) monitor hooked up and I get into the UEFI – and the GPU selection is set for “automatic”: so that’s not it.
Then I remember that if a UEFI machine is set for “Secure Boot” it will generally refuse to see any cards that aren’t also UEFI-based. The GT-340, being from 2010, has no concept of UEFI and uses older VBIOS mechanism to instantiate itself on boot…
Easy fix. Turn off secure boot, turn on legacy card support, and presto – DVI video. And a half an hour later I have the old drive cloned to the new SSD, the system booting off the cloned image, and all of the Win10 drivers installed for the new chipset and other new hardware.
Even with the 2010 video card in it, the new Coffee Lake-based Dell runs circles around the Haswell-based HP, as one would expect.
Now to replace the other 4-5 Haswell-based HPs still hanging out in the office with much more performative $230 Dells.
Apple has apparently caught wind that I’m using other systems and decided that I’m a heretic, because starting this morning nothing has worked right.
My roommate likes to use iMessage to send me his part of the utilities and to pay off the loans I’ve given him, and as of this morning iMessage says my account isn’t eligible for Apple Cash payments. Following this Apple Music, which I have a year’s worth of subscription in the queue, stopped working in Windows and Android – insisting that I need to log back in, but then refuses to let me log back in.
And being as these are the last things I was actually using Apple for, I’ve decided to completely move on.
I’ll keep the account, just because I’ve had an Apple account since Apple accounts were a thing, even though all I get at my “.mac” address is spam. And I’ll keep the credit card open as it doesn’t cost anything to do so, but without an iPhone the card is pretty much useless.
For payments we used Zelle this morning, which seems to work just as well and has the added advantage of going straight into my bank accounts versus the Apple debit card. And for Apple Music I’ve decided to give Spotify a whirl and paid for a year of that. It was cheaper than Apple Music, but hopefully just as good.
So, it’s been a few days with Windows now, and I’m adjusting well, I think.
I know I make it sound worse than it really is. I mean, I manage Windows-based servers and Windows-based users pretty much every day, so it’s not like I’m coming into this blind. And I’ve been using Windows on and off since Windows was a thing, so – yeah.
Sure, Windows 11 is kind of a hot mess when it comes to anything approaching a cohesive operating system; the backup facility for example is located in the still very Windows 7 control panel that no one is supposed to see anymore, and even says “Windows 7” right in the title…
And it still takes Windows Backup a month of Sundays to do a backup, but at least it’s still there I guess, so that’s a win of sorts.
Apparently, there is a new backup utility in the works where Microsoft is attempting to ape the functionality of Apple’s Time Machine – but in typical Microsoft fashion it’s half-assed and only supports OneDrive and only works with Microsoft Store applications that have been installed on the machine.
And that pretty much sums up the whole “Windows 11 Experience”: half-assed. Which is still better than Windows 8, which was whole-assed – but I digress.
Really what Window’s problem is, is it’s written by a thousand different teams of blind people all trying to describe an elephant. Every single aspect of Windows feels incoherent and tacked on, because it is.
But, even with that, I think I’ll stick with Windows for a bit – mostly because of the functionality of DirectX 11/12 for the various games I like to play. Which makes me wonder how much of Window’s install-base can be attributed to that line of thinking; “Windows sucks, but I want to play [insert game here] so – whatever.”
With the move to Windows, I’ve also had to exfiltrate all of my data from Apple’s walled garden, which was more complicated that it needed to be because he who controls the data controls the subscriptions, and no one wants to lose that subscription money.
Initially I was just going to run the Windows iCloud agent much like I do on the Mac, because iCloud contains a copy of damn near every aspect of my life – but it was somewhat buggy and more than a bit clunky. So, I started looking into what it would take to just move everything to some Windows equivalent.
Apple Notes required a third-party utility and some patience. And I needed another one to export all of my photos. For all of the general data I had squirreled away in iCloud Drive it was a simple matter of telling the iCloud agent to keep a copy of everything local, and once it was done just turning off the agent and moving everything into the correct folders.
Once this was done, I attempted to sync my iPhone with Windows, which hasn’t been possible until recently. But the new phone-to-windows utility with the ability to do iPhones is yet another beta-at-best mess, and while it did connect, the functionality is extremely basic.
And this got me thinking…
My cellphone is an iPhone “SE”, the cheap iPhone, and I’ve had it for a while now. It’s okay and does what I need it to do, but the main reason I have it is because I use a lot of Macs and I have an Apple Watch, and the phone works seamlessly with those as you would imagine.
But now I’m using a Windows gaming PC… So maybe I should switch over to some cheap Android phone as that works better with Windows.
Fortunately, at work we do a lot of “Mobile Testing”, which is software QA for smartphones. And the best way to do this is to sit a trained software QA tester down with the selection of physical phones and the software, and have at it… So, I dug around in inventory and found a somewhat recent Android phone that had never been used in testing and borrowed it for a while to see if I can coexist with it.
The phone itself is an LG V60 from back in 2020 that was purchased used and was locked to T-Mobile. But without a T-Mobile sim / account the phone was essentially useless as it constantly stopped whatever it was doing to attempt to activate – so no one ever used it.
For me this was an easy fix; just put the phone into developer mode, load up the Android tools on my Mac at work, and do a little brain surgery… Which they can’t do for testing as it invalidates the device – but I’m testing for me and not a client…
And about 30 minutes later the phone was working with the Ting sim out of my SE… And this started the day of Android OS updates. I guess Android OS updates need to be done patch by patch, in order, and the phone was on an early Android 10 version, and I was taking it to Android 13. And once the phone was on Android 13, I went in and removed / disabled all of the Google / LG / T-Mobile spyware.
Once I got past the “What were they thinking!?” of Android, I kinda like it. Granted I’ve totally removed the creature comforts of the phone like the various app stores and whatnot – so when I want to install something it requires an effort similar to command line Linux. But I can live with that.
After this, I got the phone syncing with Windows, which is pretty slick. And then I got Android Auto working in the car, which is also pretty slick. But this left my Apple Watch out in the cold because the watch really can’t function without an iPhone…
So, I dug though my storage bins and pulled out my old circa 2016 Samsung Gear S3 watch, charged it overnight, and am currently going through the update cycle on it as well.
And with that my Apple watch has been set aside for the time being, and my iPhone SE is just being used to manage my Apple credit card and handle my roommate paying his half of the rent over iMessage.
All in all, it’s been entertaining to switch platforms again, and everything is going pretty well on that front. 🙂
I got a bit fed up with the complexities of my Hackintosh this morning, specifically the flaky network kexts I’m using to make an unsupported NIC and WIFI work – and after a quick trip to Microcenter for a few parts I set about installing Windows 11.
My rig as it appears now:
Windows 11 is, well … Windows 11. Everything you’ve heard is true – both good and bad.
I spent a good portion of the day disabling the operating system’s incredible desire to send everything you click on, look at, open, install, or type to Microsoft. Then another couple of hours were spent turning Edge back into a web-browser versus an advertising engine with rudimentary search functionality, and Outlook into a usable email application versus EmailOS.
Seriously. Everything in Windows is massively bloated, overcomplicated, and stuffed with features and pop-up tie-ins that I seriously doubt anyone asked for or needs.
But, after a solid five or six hours, I got the OS and assorted useful applications into a state where they are worth my time.
I even got all of my Apple specific things running, like iCloud cloud storage synchronization, my keychain linked up with Edge, Apple Music, and even my iPhone is connected to Windows and offers iMessage and calling from the desktop.
The final bit was getting the mouse wheel in Windows 11 to scroll the other way – like a Mac… I’ve been using Macs for so long that the default scroll direction in Windows irks me. And while there is no real facility in Windows to invert the mouse wheel scroll, this is only a minor setback.
By firing up PowerShell in admin mode, the following is possible:
$mode = Read-host "How do you like your mouse scroll (0 or 1)?"; Get-PnpDevice -Class Mouse -PresentOnly -Status OK | ForEach-Object { "$($_.Name): $($_.DeviceID)"; Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\$($_.DeviceID)\Device Parameters" -Name FlipFlopWheel -Value $mode; "+--- Value of FlipFlopWheel is set to " + (Get-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\$($_.DeviceID)\Device Parameters").FlipFlopWheel + "`n" }
0 is Windows default, 1 is Mac default.
This changes the registry to invert the mouse wheel, so now I’m less irked. 🙂
There are a few things I’m having to change though, like I’m dropping iMessage in favor of Discord. But in exchange I’m getting to play games like “Starfield” as soon as I finish Baldur’s Gate 3.
Speaking of which, things like Second Life and BG3 run 3-4x faster under Windows than macOS on the same hardware, just because Windows supports things other than Metal.
Now to enjoy a nice quiet weekend of video games. 😀
Last week my boss / CFO / landlord had to take off to Taiwan for a while to deal with family issues, and since then things have been pretty complicated at work and I’ve been running around putting out fires.
I’ve already written about the Microsoft debacle – and I got that worked out in a couple of days.
But while I was working on that the hosting company we use for the company website decided that now is a good time to phase out PHP 7 in favor of PHP 8 – which is totally legit, I just wish it wasn’t ‘right now’…
Anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem but our website is … contentious. See, when my sales team contracted out the design for the company website, the provider of said design took a $60 ThemeForest template, slapped in some stock photos, charged the marketing department $6000, and ran off giggling. And due to this I don’t have any of the ‘source’ for the website and have to reverse-engineer whatever needs to be fixed or adjusted every time it comes up.
The site’s template was developed on PHP 5.4 back in 2015, and I updated it all in 2018 for PHP 7.2 – which was a week of hell. And now we’re in 2023 and it was time to drag the thing kicking and screaming into PHP 8.
It took another week, but I was successful.
The roadblock currently is the COO wanting to have some testers test my work before I move the thing from staging to production, but continually spacing out that he wants this – so I’m on hot-standby to move the codebase around and the clock is ticking on the forced PHP upgrade…
Then on Saturday I get a voicemail from the alarm company regarding the alarm going off at the building… So off I go to get there and figure out what the hell is going on – which is perfect timing for the daily multi-car accident on Parker Road, so it takes me 45 minutes to drive 4 miles…
I get to the office and discover that it was a maintenance guy setting off the alarm because new tenants were moving into an office space on the second floor and no one got them keys. So I reset the alarm system and the new tenants catch me to ask if I can lock out the elevator for their movers a 2pm on Sunday.
I say “Sure” and make plans to be back at the office to use the elevator keys I’m not supposed to have.
Sunday rolls around, and then 2pm rolls around, and no tenant and no movers… She texts me to say the movers aren’t there yet and they don’t know when they will arrive. So I put the elevator into lockout and put a post-it above the buttons with instructions on how to get it to move, and bail.
Monday I get to the office early to fix the elevator so that the nurses on the second floor don’t panic when the elevator doesn’t arrive on the ground floor when they press the button. Monday is also when I’ve scheduled the door company to come out and to the maintenance on the big sliding glass door on the front of the building.
The maintenance guy arrives, does “stuff”, and leaves. Then at 17:30 when the building locks down it’s discovered that the front door will no longer open without an arcane sequence of events involving the door open switch that never worked and the motion sensor / mag-lock unit timing out after it sees you.
No one tells me this until Tuesday evening though, so I drive back to the office and try to figure out what the hell is wrong with the doors… And leave another post-it, on the door this time, explaining the timing required to get the doors open after 5pm.
And on top of this it’s fall in Colorado, so we went from weeks of high-80’s to high-60’s in one day – which was Saturday – and the building HVAC has never worked quite right and needs a lot of manual intervention… So since Monday I’ve been babysitting the Trane controls to try and keep the building comfortable.
Tomorrow I need to manually relight the boiler and get the heating system running as it took the building 5 hours to go from 68 to 72 today, and anything under 68 makes the aforementioned nurses cranky.
In my last post I mentioned that Microsoft was in something of a panic and gave me an inordinately short period of time to ‘fix’ my end of my AD-to-Azure connection at work… Well, I figured out why:
In short, Microsoft got caught with their pants down, China basically has the keys to the O365 kingdom, and that means Microsoft has to redo pretty much everything related to Azure…
This apparently includes renaming the thing to “Entra ID” a few weeks back – probably marketing’s attempt to get ahead of the debacle and tainted image of Azure.
All of the parts I ordered came in this afternoon, so I took the XPS apart again and upgraded pretty much everything in it…
It’s now got the fans out of an Alienware Aurora r-series computer in it, which required a PWM fan splitter, because there’s only one fan header on the motherboard for Dell reasons. I got a nice Silverstone splitter at Microcenter for $7 and set up the top fan to report the tach. The front fan doesn’t report its tach and just gets the PWM signal the motherboard is sending to the top fan… But it works.
I installed the i9-9900kf and the CPU cooler out of a Precision workstation, which is a snug fit but I got it in there.
Then there’s the new modular 850 watt Corsair PSU which has three cables plugged into it; motherboard, supplemental CPU power, and PCIe for the video card… I stripped out the various SATA cabling and the 3.5″ drive cages just to unclutter things a bit in there.
I also got the Aorus Wifi / Bluetooth card working and am using my Apple AirPods Max as I type…
This all took about two hours, including the round trip to Microcenter. And just as I got the machine up and running I got a bunch of emails from Microsoft regarding the AD-to-Azure (Entra ID) system I use to bridge internal and cloud credentials – and how everything was going to stop working on the 1st if I didn’t upgrade my AD server to at least Server 2019…
Yep, four days notice… Thanks Microsoft.
So the remainder of my evening was figuring out how to divorce my local AD from Azure… The way I look at it, having to manage two sets of credentials is less of an ask than a quarter million bucks to update my entire infrastructure.
Anyway, my AD is still 2008r2 because it still works and I haven’t found a reason to spend a small fortune on M$ licensing fees – again. But this added a lot of complexity to the divorce proceedings because Microsoft moves the goalposts every 5 minutes… So I had to engineer a way to get 2008r2 PowerShell to talk to today’s version of Microsoft’s repositories so that I could install the modules needed to talk to today’s version of Azure and both turn off sync and enable web-management of the O365 accounts.
It looked like this:
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
(This enables PowerShell 5.1 on 2008r2 to speak TLS 1.2...)
Install-Module -Name PowerShellGet -Force
(Install the thing that lets you install things...)
Install-Module -Name Az -Scope CurrentUser -Repository PSGallery -force
(Basically update everything...)
Install-Module MSOnline
(The piece I actually needed...)
Install_module AzureAD
(The piece I needed to make the piece I needed work...)
Import-Module AzureAD
(Import AzureConnect's configuration so we know what instances to talk to at Microsoft)
Connect-MsolService
(Everything is 2FA now, so this brings up the MS 2FA login page to acquire a token)
Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled -EnableDirSync $false
(And finally we get to the divorce proceedings...)
And with that taken care of I’ll get a whole hour to play some Baldur’s Gate 3 before I need to hit the rack so I can get up and do it all again tomorrow…
I spent the last couple of weeks fiddling around with OpenCore, and overall I’m pretty pleased.
This all started because I found this old, disused Dell XPS PC at work and then decided to see if I could get MacOS to load on it… Because why not?
It took a few days to figure out the ins and outs of OpenCore; it’s kind of complicated being as it can add / remove / modify / fake everything from the CPU and chipset to every peripheral on the motherboard in order to fool an operating system into thinking it’s running on some other kind of hardware.
But, once I had it figured out is was a pretty simple matter of building custom SSDTs (Secondary System Description Tables) from the DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table) residing in the motherboards ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface)… Which is about as complex as it sounds. But luckily I’ve been dinking with computer hardware since, well, the personal computer came to be – and nothing has really changed since the 80’s save that it’s all smaller and faster.
Oh, and they keep inventing new words for old things, so there’s always the day or two of syntax update I need to do to figure out what the new lingo is…
Following the manufacture of custom hardware descriptors it was a rather simple task to acquire linux kernel extensions and drivers for a few components from GitHub, and then modifying those sources to suit my macOS / Mach kernel needs so I could inject them into the OS at runtime…
It looks easy on paper, but my desk is covered in uEFI tables, IO translation information, address space assumptions, and reams of notes on the thousands of parameters that that glue it all together at boot.
But I should probably skip all of the boring deep-nerd stuff because this is more of a journal than an technical blog…
I got macOS to boot on the XPS Wednesday morning on an older version of OpenCore and macOS Mojave – because Mojave was the last “easy” OS to modify and runs both 32bit and 64 bit code. Everything after Mojave is “hard mode” due to various bits of Apple security, obfuscation, and proprietary hardware – but by Thursday afternoon I had finished my fully customized boot-loader for macOS Monterey on the 0.9.5 build of OpenCore.
Core i7-8700 on a Z370 motherboard and using my old RX 580 videocard.
I figure my boot loader will also run Ventura (macOS 13) being as there isn’t a lot of change under the hood; it’s mostly application space and UI – but I kinda dislike Ventura. Apple is slowly turning everyone’s desktop/laptop into an iPhone, and that irks me.
Anyway, with this mischief managed I decided to keep the XPS and take it home with me just to see what it could do in the longer term. And upon getting the XPS home I swapped the RX580 with the RX6600XT I had in the MacPro 5,1 – which quickly sent me back to the old days of computing…
See, back in the 80’s computers came with IO diagrams, pinout descriptions, and often complete schematics – because if you wanted to add something to the computer you were expected to figure it out. There were no standards really because we were still inventing everything everyone takes for granted these days.
And then the 90’s rolled around and while we finally standardized on a peripheral bus, PCI, you were still more often than not left on your own to configure the card for your system via IRQ jumpers and then compile (or write from whole cloth) your own drivers.
Back in the present day, when I swapped out the video card nothing worked – because while the 6600 is a PCIe card from AMD, just like the 580, it’s a different chipset with different frame-buffer needs which means different configuration requirements and a different driver…
Apple natively supports the 6600, but not on this hardware – so I needed a couple of hours to get the two talking to each other…
The above “About This Mac” claims the machine is a 2019 iMac because I’m faking the SMBIOS information from an iMac19,1. This is because the 2019 iMac used the same Intel “coffee lake” CPU and Intel 300-series north/south chipset as the XPS, so any macOS version that supports that iMac includes the drivers for this hardware.
The reason for this is pretty basic: Apple is a hardware company that also makes an OS, so the OS only contains drivers and config data for their hardware and makes it possible for Apple to support just that hardware really well, so things “just work”… This is the opposite of Microsoft, who is a software company and wants to support as much hardware as possible – so Windows tends to support anything that computes in some basic, generalized fashion. Which is why you really need to install manufacturer’s drivers instead of the generic Windows drivers whenever possible.
Anyway, faking this SMBIOS information also meant I needed to forge a system serial number, which involves forging a matching board serial and SmUUID. Luckily someone wrote a tool that can generate this data pretty easily, so it was a pretty simple issue in the scope of things.
And with that I have a working “hackintosh”.
There are a few more things I need to update in the XPS for daily use… The first was the SSD.
The XPS had a 500 gig Western Digital “blue” m.2 SSD stuck into it from the previous IT guy, and I used that for all of my testing and configuration… The problem is the WD Blue is an old 6gig SATA interface on an m.2 bus, and is therefore cheap and slow.
So slow that when macOS’ “Spotlight” kicked off to index the drive (and all of my email), the system basically became unresponsive.
I initially thought the SMC faking I was doing was preventing macOS from controlling the Dell system fans, and due to this everything was throttling – and I went down that rabbit hole for a few hours before figuring out that the culprit was that $20 SSD.
One quick trip to Microcenter later to get a 2tb WD “black” NVME drive (on sale for $150!) and a couple of hours of building a new installer with my EFI changes so that I could swap the drive and get to a restore partition to restore from TimeMachine. The machine is back up and running well on the new drive.
The WD “black” was kinda essential because Apple only natively supports like two third-party SSD controllers, and one of them happens to be Western Digital’s 750-series. So while I could put a Samsung SSD in the machine, I’d be modifying yet more drivers to make it work correctly…
The next update for the XPS will be an i9-9900KF CPU (K for unlocked, F meaning it has no iGPU) – the fastest thing that the 300-series chipset will run. One of these was a mere $250 from Amazon and will be here in a week.
And because I’m moving the XPS to a newer, faster – and hotter – CPU, a heatsink upgrade was in order… The problem is the XPS is a really nice looking machine from the outside, but it’s a mess inside. The power supply sits over the processor on this swing-out arm (see first picture), so the heatsink options are really limited as they need to be low-profile to fit under the PSU. And the case has has one fan; a 92mm in the top that sits over the CPU and tries valiantly to exhaust all of the heat – and mostly works okay until you really push the machine.
The fix for this came by way of figuring out the XPS is the same chassis as the Alienware Aurora r-series or the Precision 3600-series workstation wrapped in different plastic. So I can swap out the basic aluminum puck CPU cooler with the Precision’s blower style rig that works much better:
Precision 3600-series CPU cooling
And I can also add the 120mm top and front fans out of the Alienware to the XPS.
Aurora r-series case fans
So $100 later and I have all three fans coming in Wednesday.
The last update is the aforementioned power supply. The XPS, being a ‘business desktop’ has a paltry 460watt PSU in it. This is enough to run the 65watt CPU and the 6600 video card, but just barely. The i9 is a 95watt unit, and I want some PSU overhead, so I bought a Corsair RM850x for $150.
There’s one more thing I’ll be doing, and that’s adding this old Gigabyte Aorus wifi/bluetooth card to the system.
The onboard wifi/bluetooth the XPS came with is totally incompatible with macOS, so I removed the tiny card that was in there in order to replace it with something better… That something better is the Aorus card, which is based on an Intel AX210 chipset and something I can get working via some massaged linux drivers.
The problem is most PCIe wifi/bluetooth cards require a USB connection to make the bluetooth work, and the XPS has no internal USB headers for Dell reasons… So one more trip to Amazon for a USB-A to male USB Dupont header to fix this oversight…
Said cable will also be here Wednesday, and I’ll get the wifi and bluetooth working as well.
And that’s what I’ve been up to over the last week or two in my spare time…
The hackintosh is working well enough that I’m typing this entry on it right now, and later I’ll attempt to get Baldur’s Gate III to run on it. 🙂
I bought the car on August 10th, 2022 – 404 days ago – so I’m up to about 10 miles a day on average.
The up-tick in miles is probably due to the trips to Castlerock every other weekend to have breakfast with a friend and then hit up Sam’s Club for supplies. I was also going into the office five days a week for the last couple of months, which is 40 miles a week.
I’m back to every other day again as of last week, mostly because gas is pushing $5 a gallon again and that’s a lot of money just to physically watch lights blink that I can watch blink on a screen at home.
Listening to "Neo-Tokyo (Dance With The Dead Remix)" by Scandroid
Occasionally I’ll be doing something here in the bright and shiny future, and suddenly realize everything is incredibly overcomplicated in the name of technology…
For example, this morning I was pulling my laundry out of the washer and tossing it into the dryer, and then navigating the bazillion settings the dryer has to get to “Speed Dry” where I set the dryer for medium heat and 40 minutes.
Back in ’88 I bought my first washer and dryer set, which was basically the same thing my mom had from the 70’s but in white instead of ‘avocado’. The washer was a tub that filled with water and then beat the crap out of your clothing for however long you set the mechanical timer for. And it had three settings; gentle, wash, and heavy duty – which all corresponded to various gears in the belt-drive transmission located under the tub.
About 99.99% of the time you would set the machine for “wash” and about 40 minutes on the timer.
The dryer was similar; three settings which enabled various numbers of cal-rods for heat and a mechanical timer. And like the washer, it was “medium” heat (because “high” would light things on fire) and about 40 minutes on the timer.
The washer / dryer set I have now is a pretty fancy LG set with touch screens and computers and like a hundred various settings you can chose which result in various songs it plays when starting and stopping… But after three years of using them I’ve settled on “wash” for about 40 minutes, and “medium” for about 40 minutes.
The difference is how much effort it takes to get to those basic settings now, because there are a couple hundred ‘features’ that I never use to get through before I can just ‘wash’ or ‘dry’… I’m guessing nobody uses most of the settings, but they look good on the sales poster at Best Buy. 🙂
Ever get the feeling there is some sort of diabolical Wizard of Oz chuckling quietly to himself as he says “watch this!” and presses a button to make your day much worse than it has to be?
I’m pretty certain this is how it works – and when I find the guy pushing my buttons there is gonna be such a reckoning. 🙂
There are patterns to this button pressing though, you just have to watch for them and make note when they occur so you can avoid them and thumb your nose at your personal tormenter on occasion… And yesterday I discovered a new pattern.
See, my daily driver is a collector’s item – the literal last of the big Detroit V8 sedans – so I’m extremely careful with what the weather looks like when I leave the garage, what traffic looks like where I’m going, and where I park when I get there.
And thanks to this level of caution I’ve only been narrowly caught in some of Colorado’s routine hail once…
What happened was that my roommate needed a ride to pick up his truck from the dealership where he had some work done. The weather looked bad, but he was insistent – and on the way back from dropping him off it started hailing… I managed to duck into a gas station just as it started and sloooowly filled my tank until the storm passed.
So one near miss with the hail… Well, that was until yesterday…
Yesterday afternoon my roommate once again needed a ride because his truck was out of commission… He needed to swap out the tensioner pulley he’d purchased earlier in the day for one that actually fit his truck, and I’m more than happy to help out – even if it did look a bit like rain. But the weather app on my phone said everything was fine – so off we went to Parker.
And here’s what happened halfway between Centennial and Parker…
I turned off the car to wait it out, and that’s when the video stops – it got a bit worse before it let up, and some of the hail got to pingpong ball size…
Right as I ducked into the parking spot is also about the time the severe weather alert appeared on my phone… It’s called a forecast guys, not an after the factcast…
Anyway, I once again got lucky and found a spot to hide out from the worst of it, but this time I managed to pick up a few very minor dents… I can fix those though, easy enough – but the hail happened exactly as if someone pressed a button. It went from windows down and enjoying the drive to Hail-Apocalypse in seconds.
And back to those patterns I mentioned: the pattern here seems to be that if my roommate’s truck is out of commission for any reason and he needs a ride to deal with it – say no. 😀
Not only is the box really small, but when you open it you realize you just spent $3 for a literal handful of crackers.
I’d have to say a full dollar of the purchase price is in the packaging; a full cardboard box and plastic bag for what amounts to a vending machine portion can’t be cheap to produce.
Luckily the crackers are pretty amazing; no complaints there. I just find it funny that the already smaller than normal box is about twice the size of the contents.
Like the t-shirt says: “That’s what I do: I fix stuff and I know things”…
My time in the USN was on a submarine, and on a submarine you’re expected to be able to do everything and fix anything – so while I was a Radioman managing top secret comms, I studied and trained on everything from nuclear and diesel AC/DC power plant operation to the various electrical, hydraulic, and refrigeration systems used onboard.
Accordingly I’m fairly well versed in a plethora of technical ‘things’ and get called upon at work to do all manner of stuff. Take this morning for example:
When I arrived at work at 0615 I commenced unlocking everything and turning on the lights – and noticed the server room was louder than usual. Upon opening the door I instantly figured out why; it was about a hundred degrees in there and all of the fans in the servers were screaming.
A quick analysis pointed out a high head pressure situation with the one working CRAC (Computer Room AC), which had shut it down about an hour before I got there.
High head pressure is a ‘condenser-end’ issue where, for some reason, the freon isn’t changing states from gas to liquid appropriately anymore. This is typically caused by it being really cold outside, the condenser coils being dirty, or the fan has stopped working. Most AC systems will detect this and turn off the compressor to keep it from being damaged.
Anyway, once I had the backup portable AC units running and things cooled down enough I wasn’t worried about immediate hardware failures, I ran up to the roof to take a look… And sure enough, the condenser fan had seized.
I have two of these and both units are a bit over 30 years old, so this is kinda expected… The backup unit’s compressor failed two years ago, but with the transition to “the cloud” I’ve only got a dozen or so systems running local now so I just tagged out the backup and carried on with the primary.
I fiddle with the fan a bit and get it to go again, definitely a bad bearing.
Mmmm – the sound of failure
It sounds horrible and I really need to replace it, so time to call my HVAC company…
So I head back down to the office and call the HVAC guys who don’t seem to be too happy to answer the phone and tell me that even for an emergency the best they can do is get someone out Thursday.
By Thursday I may lose a quarter million in hardware if the portable units die (as they tend to do as soon as you rely on them 24/7).
So the obvious solution is to on-the-fly disassemble the backup unit’s rooftop condenser, scavenge the fan and associated controls out of it, and transplant them into the primary unit’s condenser… I can do that, no problem!
The backup unit’s condenser fan removed from the condenser unit. It’s sitting next to the south RTU – one of the two train-car sized AC units for the building
Given the rusted nature of every nut and bolt in the thing, the fact I got the old one apart in about 15 minutes is pretty impressive – and I don’t even need a tetanus shot after the fact!
I decided to wait for my roommate to arrive before shutting down the limping primary because the two of use would be much faster. So an hour later my roommate arrived and helped me disassemble the primary unit, get the failed fan out of it, and transplant the backup fan into it.
So the whole surgical process of remove / replace / rewire only took ten minutes and didn’t overheat the servers again…
All rewired nice and pretty
After the surgery everything was tested and worked better than ever, and being as no one was in the office (it’s the day before a holiday, so everyone is taking today off to make it a 4-day weekend) we decided to close up shop and go get lunch.
Which is right about the time the HVAC company decided to show up to fix things. 😀
I decided to get out of the house for a bit and get some fast food for lunch / dinner, and the place of choice was Taco Bell… Mostly because I happen to like Taco Bell and it’s always been a cheap place to eat when I’m suffering from terminal belt tightening.
The good news is they’ve brought back the “volcano” menu items, which is always nice to see. “Volcano” stuff is the same as other menu things like “Doritos locos tacos” and “beefy 5-layer burritos”, but with some added spicy cheese sauce. And I happen to like spicy stuff.
The bad news is two tacos for lunch, a burrito for dinner, and a soda cost as much as going to an actual sit down and get waited on Mexican restaurant…
At least the diablo sauce is still free
For comparison, here’s the menu from 2020:
If we add $0.10 to each of the food items for a tablespoon of spicy cheese sauce, today’s $12.36 before tax trip to Taco Bell, back in 2020, would have been $8.36 before tax (two $1.99 tacos, a $2.39 burrito, and a $1.99 drink)… Which is a roughly 33% percent increase in just 3 years.
And that’s not considering the tax increases between 2020 and 2023.
So, yeah. Looks like I won’t be going to Taco Bell again any time soon… I can go to a nice local place like Three Margaritas for that price.
