RIHAHN.COM

Category: Modern Computing

  • Change of plan

    A couple of years ago I early-adopted a cloud-based computing platform called “Shadow“.

    Shadow is interesting because it’s not really a cloud-based gaming platform, it just pretends to be one really well… It’s more aimed at creating dedicated remote-access high-performance computing platforms. Think of it like a modern, low-latency terminal services / RDP setup for people using 3d modelers and video production pipelines.

    This has two main effects for the end-user; there is no pre-installed library of games so you’re free to install literally anything you want, and because of this it’s a little bit more involved to do some gaming than something like Geforce Now.

    Unfortunately the first iteration of Shadow didn’t fare well financially and when they filed for bankruptcy I bailed. But the company was purchased and they’re trying again – so I signed back up.

    What this means for me is I now have access to a server in Utah with a quarter of an AMD Epyc 7543P CPU (8 cores), 28 gigs of ram, 512G of server-class storage, a dedicated RTX A4500 video card, and a gigabit network connection…

    Of course the first thing I did was load the Secondlife client “Firestorm” on it to see how it would handle virtual world graphical sludge…

    Around 100fps at 4K ultra-settings pretty much everywhere with 4 avatars. It’ll hold well over 50fps at those settings with ~40 avatars around in really hard to render places as well, so running vsync at 30Hz to my huge OLED screen is totally doable. And if I turn off shadows it’ll jump back up to 80-90fps in those situations letting me bump up the monitor to 60Hz.

    And while it’s doing this, it’s in a datacenter using someone else’s power and cooling.

    There is a cost for this, of course, and it’s about $50 a month ($40 a month if you pay in 6-month chunks) – which is about what my old Windows workstation with similar specs cost in electricity per month… So for me it works out.

    Now, this sort of thing only really works for the kinds of games I enjoy; things that aren’t horribly twitchy like turn-based RPGs, simulations, or Secondlife. Something like a competitive shooter where 144fps and sub-10ms peripheral response time is the difference between life and death isn’t a good use case for Shadow.

    Don’t get me wrong though, on the desktop and in something like Secondlife you don’t even notice you’re on a remote system. Average desktop granularity is 28-30ms on a system sitting right in front of you, and Shadow on my networks at home and work seems to average about 35-38ms.

    Anyway, with a couple of days of testing from the Mac Pro 5,1, my i3 Macbook Air, my M2 Max laptop, and even my iPhone (yes there’s a smartphone client for Shadow), I decided to change things up computer-wise.

    Going forward I’ll be using the 2013 trashcan at home and will move the 2012 Mac Pro to the office.

    The reason for this is basically utility costs… The 2013 Mac Pro uses far less wattage and therefore makes far less heat than the 2012 Mac Pro does. The 2013 is also much, much quieter than the 2012 because the 2012 needs nine fans to compensate for all the heat.

    I’d initially decided on using the 2012 cheese grater at home because I could upgrade the GPU in it for gaming, but with Shadow this is no longer a point of contention. At work I can leverage commercial power and cooling in a three story building full of computers, so the 2012’s thirst for electricity and air-conditioning isn’t a big deal here.

    There’s also the fact that while the 2012 will run MacOS Monterey with some fiddling, it isn’t without some hassles and loss of features. The 2013 natively supports Monterey so all of the OS features just work… Which is a ‘nice to have’ on a personal system you’re using every day.

    I guess can also skip my yearly tithe to Parallels being as I have ready access to a Windows machine with Shadow… So no need for a virtual Windows instance on every computer I use, and another savings.

    Listening to "Fallout" by Mantus

  • Update

    It’s been about a week now of using a 2011 computer in 2023, and things are still going well. The only real noticeable difference between decades is that the Mac Pro takes a second or two longer to open an application – and some of the fancy “AI” things in Photoshop take 10 seconds or so to process.

    The only real “game” I play is Secondlife (SL for short), and the 2012 Mac Pro does okay with that as well. Though I also own the new Baldur’s Gate III game, but it won’t be out for Mac until the 6th… But I expect the Mac Pro will do okay with that as well.

    As for Secondlife, it is, well, old – so it’s not exactly a speed demon even on pinnacle hardware. The client that is used to connect to the service is generally single-threaded and therefore mostly CPU-bound. And in SL the entire visible world can be changed on a whim, with user generated content, and this makes for a decidedly unoptimized render pipeline. This means that even on things like my old Windows workstation (Xeon 6312U / Nvidia 3090) I would generally get 20-30 FPS at “ultra” settings, in a 4K window, in busy areas with lots of people in them.

    The Mac Pro gets 20-30 FPS in the same areas with the same number of people, but with slightly reduced graphics settings and a 1440p window size – which isn’t bad for what it is.

    You may have noticed that I mentioned ‘fancy AI things in Photoshop’ up above; yes – I paid for another year of Creative Cloud.

    Fortunately, I’ve already made that money back… See, I sell some stuff I make on the Secondlife marketplace and I also completed some custom texture work for a couple of folks. And this netted enough to cover another year of Adobe Mafia protection.

    Basically I work to afford the tools I use to to do work to afford the tools… But with the cost covered I was able to spend a few days working on some stuff for myself, which was fun.

    Other than that, everything is mostly okay – or at least as okay as is possible here in 2023. Everything is crazy expensive so I don’t really leave the house save to get supplies, which means my car isn’t getting very many miles put on it and all of my entertainment is on the computer… I have managed to catch a few new(er) movies though, and the other day I binge-watched the entire second season of “Strange New Worlds” which wasn’t bad.

    Listening to "Lightbeams" by MJ Cook

  • And scene…

    It’s been quite the journey to get to this point; sketchy mining cards, shipping complications, undocumented third-party utilities, and a distinct lack of modern-ish Windows hardware at my disposal.

    That latter kept me at the office until 8pm last night as I tried valiantly to reflash the new RX 6600 XT with random scraps of PC hardware running Windows 8.1. But I kept getting a GDI32.dll error with the open sorcery VBIOS write tool and eventually had to stop for the night.

    Bright and early this morning I started the update process to Win10, assuming that would probably fix it, and got to deal with the usual spate of Windows-isms… Like this one:

    Yes, that really is a Razer “driver” attempting to install while Win10 is still installing…

    But, after a half dozen restarts to do yet more updates that totaled about an hour of downtime, I was finally able to flash the new RX 6600 XT for use in the 2012 Mac Pro.

    About an hour after this FedEx dropped off the new CPU tray in the gravel next to my garage, so I came home, unboxed the tray, loaded CPUs and ram, and shoved everything into the 2012 Mac Pro…

    The installation of the CPU tray and video card were literally the least effort part of this whole ordeal – and the Mac Pro fired right up with the new hardware.

    And with that I’m free to sell off my MacBook Pro M2 Max…

    To be honest? I’m not sure I’ll miss the laptop. The 11 year old machine I’m daily driving now is actually more powerful where the rubber meets the road; mostly because I don’t use any of the handful of apps tailored to use the fancy bits of Apple Silicon.

    Apple Silicon does definitely win when it comes to power efficiency though, and I expect the Mac Pro will wind up costing me a few bucks each month in electricity… But I think it’ll be worth it.

    Listening to "Rabbit Hole Chasing You (2023 Live)" by morgan willis

  • Life in the crypto-mines

    The RX 6600 XT I ordered off of Amazon for the 2012 Mac Pro arrived last night, and a few minutes later I had it installed in the PC I prepped for video card flashing… I use an older Intel Desktop Board for this because of the amount of info it gives when messing with hardware…

    That’s an old HD 6970 I was testing…

    The board has two sets of firmware in case you mangle one while fiddling, has power and reset right on the board because it’s test hardware, shows the boot process on the green 7-segments next to the ram, and the row of green LEDs at the bottom show the status of major components (the one in the middle shows the status of the video card), and most importantly it has an LED skull with blinking eyes for hard drive read/write!

    Anyway, the machine wouldn’t boot with the RX 6600 XT in the system. Everything halted with post code EB which is where the system looks for video BIOS / firmware on the bus – and it found nothing.

    This usually means the card has been reflashed with mining firmware, which doesn’t require video output so it’s disabled. In fact anything not associated with compute is usually disabled for crypto mining.

    Crypto mining essentially turns electricity and video cards into imaginary money, so getting a used mining card is generally more miss than hit as it’s been run harder than it was designed to, 24 / 7, until it either had a problem or was replaced with something faster.

    Now, while I could most likely fix this card by flashing the original firmware back onto it, the fact that the seller clearly didn’t even test it before slapping it into a used static bag and chucking it into a box didn’t leave me with much confidence.

    So I just requested a refund, put the card back in the used static bag and the box, and headed over to the local UPS store to send it back… The UPS Store closes at 19:00, and while I got there at 18:34 they were already closed for the day, unfortunately.

    So I’ll send it back after work today.

    And I ordered another RX 6600 XT from Amazon. A brand new, never been used one… Of course it was a hundred bucks more than the used mining card – but at least it will work.

    Hopefully.

    Nothing is guaranteed with Amazon… I’ll probably get some cheap Chinese knockoff card. :/

    Listening to "Taste Like Venom" by GUNSHIP

  • 20 years…

    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…

    About seven pounds of 8 and 16 gig DDR3 ECC sticks…

    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

  • Crowfall

    Back in March of 2015 I heard that an MMO I really liked back in the old days of the early 2000’s – Shadowbane – was having a bit of a renaissance… The guys who originally built it were kickstarting a spiritual successor to the game that would be called Crowfall.

    I thought this was a capital idea as I love goal-based PvP and I’ve always liked odd MMO races – so I backed the thing at a pretty high level.

    How high of a level?

    The game took five years to produce, and while they did fulfill all of the stuff they promised like the really cool physical copy of the game I eventually received…

    The hard-backed art book (which is phenomenal)…

    And even a one-shot comic and bunch of miniatures for the various races…

    … the game itself, which was a cross between a gathering / crafting / survival game and a hardcore squad-based PvP game, wasn’t a commercial success.

    I enjoyed it, but that doesn’t count for much when you need a critical mass of players to pay the people running the game.

    Eventually the game was sold to another developer in 2021, and in November of 2022 the game was shut down.

    Such is the way of the games industry; the games that try new things are super risky and have a high chance of failure, but those games have to happen to move the industry forward… If the try and fail didn’t happen, all we would have is 40 versions of “Madden”…

    Oh, wait…

    Listening to "How to Disappear" by The Bad Dreamers

  • Hand Crafted Bits

    The site took a dive yesterday; completely fubar’d.

    So today I sftp’d my backup of the old wp-content directory into a totally new GoDaddy server instance, which then required hand-jamming the mysql backup into a parallel reality complete with new host locations, logins, and passwords for everything.

    It took about three hours, and I’m pretty sure it’s all back up and running now.

    It’s interesting that I’ve been around long enough that on the fly analysis of database architecture and rattling off strings of SQL to do in-place key changes and whatnot is no big deal, but I’ve also been around long enough that I’m definitely getting too old for this stuff. 🙂

    Listening to "We Are the Wild Ones" by NINA

  • Spam

    I hate spam.

    I mean, I really really hate spam…

    And due to this I spend a borderline insane amount of time creating filters, building heuristic systems, and blocking entire countries to keep my personal email junk-free. Which is great if you own your own mail server, but harder if you use mail services offered by other companies…

    For example, I’ve had Apple’s email service since early 2000 – when Apple released iTools. And because of this I have an @mac.com email address (and me.com and icloud.com) I keep around for historical reasons. But Apple isn’t as on the ball as I am with regard to spam, so I periodically have to find inventive ways to stem the tide when some 20+ year old email list gets put back into service.

    First I have to point out that from a filtering point of view, Apple is really good. I pretty much never find offending penis enlargement emails in my inbox, but the junk mail box will usually show 50-60 items each morning during a spam storm – and that bugs me.

    Apple users tend to get spammed by farms that send millions of junk emails per hour, and it generally takes Apple a week or two to figure out the domain lighting them up is 110% garbage and block the domain. But, if you don’t want to deal with the noise for that week or two, here’s the fix:

    Okay – Log into iCloud and go to Apple Mail.

    First, figure out the domain; this can be done by clicking on a few offending emails so that they open in the view window and clicking on the arrow next to the sender’s name. The domain will be something like spammer.org or junkmail.com. You’ll probably notice that most of them are coming from one particular domain – make note of this.

    From there click on the little gear icon above the mail box list and go to preferences.

    From the preferences window, click on “rules” in the left panel and then in the right window click on “add rule” – this will change the dialog in the right window to the rules panel.

    You’ll see two inputs here: the upper one will have a drop down that says “is from” – put the domain in the box under this. The lower section will also have a drop down, click it and select “move to trash and mark as read”.

    Now click “add” and then “done”.

    Congratulations! Everything coming from that particular spam cannon will now automagically go straight to trash and be marked as read so you won’t even know about it.

    I recommend checking your domain-level round-file rules once a month or so to see if they’re still needed. Apple will eventually get around to blocking them, and then you won’t need it.

    Listening to "Synthetic" by The Midnight

  • Update

    Today I fiddled with ye olde website a bit; adjusted some look and feel, added search functionality, and imported everything from LiveJournal just in case Livejournal becomes a casualty of global tensions.

    I’m still missing everything from March 25th 2021 to March 2nd 2022 due to a database kerfluffle with Dreamhost – but I’ll live.

    I think I managed to import all of the media from LiveJournal as well, and any missing images are probably from third party servers that are long gone… But I’ll be reviewing everything over the next week to make sure.

    Because there are so many entries now, I switched to a synopsis format for the posts with a ‘read more’ option should something catch someone’s attention, and upped the number of posts per page to ten. This reduces the total number of pages to under a hundred, which is easier to flip through.

    Listening to "I'm a Believer" by Ollie Wride

  • M2

    The new M2 Max MacBook Pro arrived today…

    Even the shipping box is an origami masterpiece designed to protect the laptop box, which is another origami masterpiece… Apple just loves to engineer things.

    It took about an hour to transfer my life from the M1 to the M2, and with that most of the security stuff transferred as well – so I don’t have to re-authenticate a thousand websites.

    My Adobe account, my Microsoft account for work, and the profile from Fastmail (my personal email provider) needed to be reauthenticated / reinstalled, but everything else seems to have made the move without issue.

    Now to find something to watch in 4K on the monitor, which is now running at 120hz and TOSLinked to my stereo. 😀

    Listening to "Fahrenheit" by Neon Nox

  • It’s that time again…

    As is tradition for me; new year, new Mac.

    Apple is giving me a bit over $1300 in trade for my current M1 Max laptop, so the New Hotness is only running me $2200 and change… Happy Birthday to me I suppose.

    I talked myself out of the upgrade a couple of times because processing-wise it’s only a twenty percent bump or so, which is hard to justify $2000 on – but it also has WIFI 6e and HDMI 2.1 and that cinched the deal…

    Wifi 6e is the new 6Ghz band, which not only goes faster but is less susceptible to the hundreds of 2.4/5Ghz routers in the area (and the microwave in the kitchen).

    And HDMI 2.1 is the 48Gbit standard that will allow me to run my new 48″ monitor at 120hz, which is a marked image quality improvement.

    Oh, and the extra GPU grunt in the M2 Max will be a nice bump in my gaming FPS.

    So, yeah – new Mac in a week – which is par for the course.

    Listening to "Synthetic Nights" by Marvel83'

  • Work

    It’s a cold, grey, and somewhat snowy day outside and things are a bit slow here at the office, so I figured I’d show off my work setup while waiting for the first emergency…

    My desk, where I run everything for the company…

    There’s my workhorse M1 Max 16″ MacBook Pro, hooked to a Satechi USB-C hub, which runs my circa 2003 Microsoft IntelliEye mouse and Apple A1048 keyboard – both of which I’ve been using, yes, since 2003…

    Back in 2003, the IntelliEye was the pinnacle pointing device and even us Mac people grudgingly used them… Even today the mouse holds up to newer, higher-tech offerings well – and as an added bonus is from a time when people had big hands, so I find it comfortable to use.

    After 20 years, I’m just used to how it tracks and it’s almost an extension of my arm at this point.

    The A1048 is a really nice keyboard to use, and again after 20 years I’m just used to it. It’s got a very unique switch profile where it’s kind of like a rubber dome mixed with something linear; I like it, but others have made weird faces when typing on it.

    I like this keyboard so much in fact that it gets a yearly tear-down for cleaning – which is its major design flaw… The clear plastic ‘tray’ the keyboard sits in, as well as the aluminum switch plate under the keys, collect grime and show it to you. So once a year my neat freak gets triggered and I disassemble the thing and clean it.

    Oh, and all of the keycaps were replaced about five years ago with new-old stock – which is why it still looks brand new.

    Listening to "Any Way You Want It" by Journey

  • Early Birthday

    Today a friend came down to visit, so we went over to Cheddars for lunch and then wandered over to Microcenter… He’s been looking for a new monitor for some time now, and Microcenter is a pretty nice place to buy tech stuff.

    Anyway, the monitor he wanted was in stock, but I spotted this really nice 48 inch LG gaming monitor (LG 48GQ900-B.AUS) that was on sale and it was a really good deal – so he bought that one. Then he decided that I needed a new monitor and I got a new 48 inch LG (LG OLED48C2PUA) as an early birthday present…

    It’s *HUGE*

    Because of this new addition to my desk, my roommate was given my month-old 4K Dell 27″ (the one with the thunderbolt hub in it) to replace his failing 27″ 1080.

    Ultimately the new 48″ is really nice on my old eyes, and gaming on it is a real hoot. I’m pretty happy – even if I can no longer see half of my office. 😀

    Listening to "The Call" by Regina Spektor

  • Cleaning

    Back in March I bought the 16″ MacBook Pro I’ve been using this year, and by using I mean it’s basically an electronic RV that I move from place to place and live out of – for both work and home use.

    The machine runs about eighteen hours a day, seven days a week – and longer on holidays. I even tend to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in front of the machine while I’m working on things…

    So, this morning I broke out my iFixit oddball screwdriver set and popped open the laptop for a thorough cleaning to evict any accumulated cruft.

    And after two lengths of eight weird apple pentalobe screws and some tense moments prying on the bottom cover to release the clips – I was in.

    The innards of the 2021 16″ MacBook Pro “Max”

    Overall the insides were cleaner than I expected; the several right-angle bends used for the intakes (the oval holes on each side where the battery is) does a pretty good job of separating out the dust. Most of the grittier stuff was on the case lid, where it falls out of the air stream as it flows around the bends – which is good.

    The fans and heatsinks themselves were pretty clean, and given the extremely fine blades and fins this is also a good thing… It wouldn’t take much to impair them.

    Anyway, cleanup took a few minutes, then I put it all back together… The hardest part of the whole ordeal was getting the bottom back on the laptop; it’s held on with massive amounts of over-engineering to remove *any* flex so that the laptop feels like a solid chunk of aluminum.

    Listening to "Cliffhanger" by 80's Stallone

  • BBSing

    For the sheer Back-To-The-Future-Ness of it, I’ve spent some time over the last few days working out how to get 20th century analog to work with 21st century digital.

    See, back in the 80’s and 90’s pretty much everything was analog – especially the way we talked to other people. Radio, TV, the telephone, and even our computer modems used analog signals. But these days there’s pretty much no such thing as analog anything, let alone a phone line, which makes using a 90’s modem a bit of an exercise in haxx0ring reality…

    For example, here at work my phone system uses a VOIP-based digital PBX to route calls around internally, and both the phones and the voice transport are digital. If someone places a call outside the building, the call is routed over a fiber connection to CenturyLink using what is essentially a sub-channel of the several gigabit connection into the building. From there the call is routed over the Internet to some other provider before being converted back to analog voice at someone else’s phone.

    This works great for people, who have limited perceptual acoustic capability, but modems use a lot more of the audible spectrum to do their thing… Which is what all of that electronic screeching is about when modems and fax machines connect to each other; they are working out how bad the phone line is and how much acoustic space they have to talk to each other.

    So, given all of this I’ve been teaching my PBX that analog isn’t a bad thing by working out a custom codec (basically an analog to digital sound converter) and some special rules for the timings and encapsulation used to turn modem screeching into 1s and 0s for the Internet.

    And today I was successful in making an end-to-end modem connection to a friend’s BBS using ‘period’ hardware…

    Said BBS has been running since 1992, I’ve had an account on it since 1993, and I still have hardware that I used in 1994 – so as something of a 30th anniversary thing I set my wayback machine to the early 90’s and made a phone call.

    To do this took a surprising amount of work…

    First, I had to get my circa 1994 Powerbook 165c working, which required replacing some capacitors in the backlight assembly. Then I had to bodge a serial cable that converted from 1994 Apple 8-pin to regular 25-pin. Then I had to get a decent BBS terminal application onto the 165c.

    This software installation required two additional computers of various ages and several operating systems to move data from the present-day internet back in time to 1994…

    See, the 165c uses antiquated file systems based on what density and how many sides the 3.5″ floppy you stuck in it happens to have – while my M1 Max laptop has no idea what a floppy is, let alone what MFS or HFS is.

    So, the solution was to use my recently repaired G5 iMac as the intermediary, as it can read USB2 flash storage as well as operate a USB floppy drive, and it can still run OS9, which can read and write HFS on 1.44M floppies.

    So the process is simple:

    1. on the M1 laptop go to an internet archive of ancient Motorola 68K Apple software
    2. download “Black Night” (an ancient ANSI BBS terminal application) as a .SIT (Stuffit) archive
    3. put that onto a USB2 flash drive via a thunderbolt-to-USB adapter
    4. plug USB2 flash drive into the G5
    5. move the stuffit archive to the desktop
    6. fire up the OS9 compatibility layer in OSX 10.3.6
    7. decompress the .SIT archive
    8. copy resultant installer to a floppy I formatted in the 165c
    9. put floppy into the 165c
    10. and install software.

    See? Simple.

    How2Install stuff on a 165c in 2022… The process goes right to left.

    From here it was just a matter of configuring Black Night to use my old USR V.everything modem, which is using the DB-25 to Apple cable and the modified modem-friendly port on my PBX to call a BBS across town…

    Connecting at 12,000 baud over several back and forth A/D-D/A conversions – not bad!

    Pardon the HVAC noise in the background; my office has some impressive forced ventilation because I routinely let the magic smoke out of things as part of my day-to-day duties. 🙂

    And a photo for posterity

    I’d not been on EOTD in a couple of years, so it took some time to catch up on my ‘e-mail’ and the forums, but it’s nice to see that the system still gets some use… I replied to a bunch of folks going back a year or so, and now I’ll wait to see how long it takes to get a reply. 🙂

    Listening to "When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies" by Gunship

  • MacBroke Pro

    One of the responsibilities of being an “IT Professional” is supplying computer fixes for friends, employees, friends of employees, etcetera.

    Today’s example is a 2011 15″ MacBook Pro belonging to the daughter of a friend of the CFO, and the symptom is “won’t boot and contains all of the stuff she needs for a college paper”.

    Normally I would just mount the laptop as an external drive and copy whatever is needed to my laptop in order to zip it up and hand it over – but in this case they weren’t sure what data was needed, where it was, or what program it might be locked into. So the better option is to get them back into the machine by either fixing it or transposing the HD to a similar laptop.

    Booting the laptop results in a hang at about three quarters of the process with the occasional band of GPU noise on the screen.

    It looks like a failed GPU, but we need to determine this is the case. So we boot the machine into single-user with CMD-S a the boot chime to get the boot process text scroll and, yep, it hangs after initializing en2 – which is where the OS initializes the external GPU.

    Okay, time for some pointy-hat wizardry…

    Macs are basically *nix machines with a candy-coated user interface, so we can use this single-user text environment to tell the laptop to never use the external GPU and instead use the CPU graphics exclusively.

    This is done by setting a parameter in the nvram… The format for this is nvram <UUID>:<EFI var name>=<value> – so…

    nvram fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9:gpu-power-prefs=%01%00%00%00

    This will allow the laptop to boot into the graphical recovery mode (CMD-R) so that we can proceed…

    See, Macs defend themselves from even well-intentioned poking and prodding of the core parts of the OS, and being as we need to now stop the OS from loading the kexts (drivers in Mac-Speak) for the now disabled video card, we need to turn that off.

    Once we’re in recovery mode, we can open the terminal and disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) with:

    csrutil disable

    Now we need to reboot back into single-user mode (CMD-S), because we need run a few more text commands to keep the system from getting confused…

    sbin/mount -uw

    This mounts the HD with read/write permissions, which we will use to move the discrete GPU drivers into a different directory where they won’t get loaded (but you can put them back if needed). So let’s make a new directory for the files…

    mkdir -p /System/Library/Extensions-off

    Now to move them…

    mv /System/Library/Extenstions/AMDRadeonX3000.kext /System/Library/Extensions-off/

    And lastly we need to touch the extensions directory to tell the OS that something changed…

    touch /System/Library/Extensions/

    After one more reboot the laptop is now working well enough for the user to back up their stuff and finish the paper.

    And another happy customer…

    Listening to "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" by Timbuk 3

  • Watch

    I have successfully written, compiled, and executed an app on the Apple Watch…

    Ye olden Xcode IDE

    Success!

    The most complicated bit was dealing with dependencies, the code signing, and granting myself permission on everything to allow the non-Apple Blessed code to run…

    Basically this will only run on my watch because it’s associated with my phone which is associated with my laptop which is attached to my developer account.

    But it does in fact run – and that’s good enough, for now.

    Listening to "And We Danced " by The Hooters

  • Case

    The new case for the iPhone came in today…

    I figured making the iPhone SE look like the Macintosh SE was oddly apropos.

    Listening to "Blue Morning, Blue Day" by Foreigner

  • Mindful

    With the return to the iPhone I’m also able to return to wearing my iWatch, which completes my iLife iSuppose.

    Before I could set up the watch with the new phone I had to download and install a big OS update on the watch, which took most of an hour…

    An OS update – for a watch. The future is weird.

    Anyway, it’s been a few months since I last interfaced with the watch, and even longer since I’d seen one in a default configuration… So I’d forgotten just how much attention budget the thing burns in its out of the box state.

    For example, it will interrupt me to remind me to be ‘mindful of the moment’, which, at that moment, tends to be ‘why are you pestering me? I have to get this done ten minutes ago…’ It also likes to remind me to breathe and relax, which invariably happens in the middle of some emergency and only serves to increase my stress. Then there’s the ‘get up and move’ which is guaranteed to happen several times in the middle of a whirlwind session of deep concentration in whatever IDE I’m spending the day with.

    I can, of course, turn this stuff off – and I will. I just find it interesting that this is the default state for the most worn digital accessory on the planet, so I get to thinking about it; am I an outlier who is simply too busy of a day for all of the hippy dippy built into the watch? Or does it bug a lot of people?

    Listening to "The Finer Things" by Steve Winwood

  • iPhone

    The new iPhone arrived this evening and I have it all set up… It’s pretty nice, and usable one-handed, which is a bonus.

    My current office set up as a sample image.

    Oddly, I have to get another sim from Ting (my carrier) for the 5G capability of the iPhone, so that means getting a new number. And, in an attempt to curtail the spam calls, I selected the ‘wilderness’ area code of Colorado for my number; 970.

    970 covers the mountains and the no-man’s-land of northern and north-eastern Colorado. Upon getting the new number though I had to laugh; the new number is exactly one number off from the phone number my family had for most of my childhood.

    At least it’s easy to remember I guess.

    It’ll be a few days before its active though as I have to wait for the sim to get here and then activate everything. And then I get to go through and redo all of the contact numbers at all of my banks and whatnot.

    Oh well. If I’m lucky I can keep this number for a while just for the novelty.

    Listening to "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats