Category: Modern Computing

  • Cellphone

    Prior to my first cellphone I had a pager… In the early 90’s everyone had a pager as it was far less expensive than a cellphone both in cost and in service fees… Some places would even give you the pager for free if you signed up for a yearly contract.

    My pager had a fancy multi-line LED display on it that would show the name and number of the person who paged, so I could then find a payphone to call them back and find out what was up.

    My friends and I had various codes worked out where we would put in the call-back ‘extension’ things like 518. 518 meant “meet at Denny’s at 6pm” – which was easier and cheaper than finding a payphone.

    I got my first cellphone in 1995 shortly after I’d gotten into the I.T. department at Intelligent Electronics (I.E.). The phone at the time was a Motorola “MicroTAC” of some variation that was basically the cellphone you saw in every movie, TV show, and music video of the early 90’s.

    I recall that it was fairly expensive to purchase, a couple hundred bucks, and even more expensive to operate… I want to say it worked out to about a dollar per minute to use it. Fortunately I.E. covered part of the cost because I was on-call.

    The next cellphone was a Motorola “StarTAC” in 1997. Like the MicroTAC before it, the StarTAC was the cellphone to have in the late 90’s. I used the crap out of that phone as I was working contracts in D.C. at the time at places like the Pentagon and my entire life centered on that phone and my day planner.

    In 1999 the StarTAC, in its belt holster, got caught by the seatbelt in a friend’s Jeep and flipped off my belt and into a nearby puddle – which ended the StarTACs run as probably the most used cellphone of my entire life.

    After this, I got into Nextel’s ruggedized phones and used a Motorola i1000 plus and then an i305 for many years…

    On February 26th, 2008 I got my first iPhone. An iPhone 1 – the first iPhone…

    The iPhone had been out for about a year at that point, but I wasn’t real enthused with the walled garden aspects of it… When it first came out it was an entirely closed system and the phone would only run what was on the phone from Apple. And this seemed like a waste to me as, in my humble opinion, the iPhone was actually a Newton with a cellphone built into it.

    In early February Apple announced that an SDK was coming soon, and starting with iOS 2.0 people would be able to write apps for the iPhone – so I jumped on the bandwagon.

    And in March the SDK arrived… And the rest is trillion dollar history.

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is CYHH5916-1024x768.jpg
    One of the first photos I took with the iPhone 1. My cat, Marshal, doing what cats do – sleeping.

    Since then I’ve bounced around to various phone makers here and there and have had things like an LG V20 and a Blackberry PRIV, flagship phones like the iPhone 12 Max, and cheap ‘burner’ phones like my current Nokia 6300 4G.

    Today I will be circling back to the iPhone once again, but this time instead of a gigantic “two-hander” $1200 uberphone, I’m going with the much more sanely priced 2022 “SE” which I picked up for $400.

    The 2022 SE was announced on March 8th and is the 13th generation of the phone I picked up in 2008…

    I kicked around the idea of getting one for a month or so before pulling the trigger… Mostly I’m returning to the fold because I miss having a decent GPS-enabled camera in the phone and I’ve decided to not sell my Apple Watch, which requires an iPhone to operate. And, I can justify $400 for a current generation smartphone that is still a pocketable size.

    The 2022 SE is basically a 2016 iPhone 8, filled with the guts from the 2022 phones. So it’s about as future-proof as you can get in a cellphone and should get software support for at least five years.

    Anyway, the new phone will be delivered sometime today direct from Apple.

    Listening to "If Anyone Falls In Love" by Stevie Nicks
  • RTFM

    Last evening I got a note from ebay stating that the buyer of the motherboard I recently sold wants a refund because it doesn’t work… The note the buyer included stated that he can’t get one bank of ram to register and the VGA port doesn’t work. And, ultimately, because the ad didn’t mention the VGA didn’t work he wants his money back.

    Ebay’s rules specify that the ad has to be in error or different from the product delivered to trigger a refund, which is the reason for that last part…

    I immediately sent him a note explaining that the Supermicro X12SPA-TF is a very advanced board (which is why they cost $700) and that he would have to reference the PDF on the Supermicro website for ram installation.

    Additionally, both my written ad and the Supermicro website I referenced in the ad mention that the onboard VGA is reserved for IPMI and is not a CPU output.

    I then sent a second note attempting to help him set up the board, sight unseen, from another state, over ebay’s messaging system…

    I mentioned that I just remembered that I had disabled the onboard VGA via the jumper for that purpose (JPG1) and asked him to check that the jumper was on pins 1 and 2 – and even explained where said jumper is on the board.

    This is in the manual by the way.

    Then I thought about his ram issue a bit; this board uses three 8-pin 12V CPU power connectors; one for PCIe power, and one each for each hemisphere of the CPU which references one bank of ram… JPWR1, 3, and 4 are all required for the board to operate, and there are very few boards that use two CPU power connections, let alone three, so he may not even have a PSU that will support it…

    Either way, I’m guessing he missed one of the 8-pins.

    So, now I wait.

    I read up a bit on ebay’s arbitration process and it sounds like if this guy just doesn’t want to RTFM the default is for ebay to give him a refund and bill me for it. So there is a very real chance that the $700 motherboard I sold for $600 and after fees and shipping netted $500 for, will actually cost me about a hundred bucks and quite possibly a motherboard…

    Ebay, of course, makes money on the ordeal either way. So there’s no real vested interest in any of this from their end of things.

    Live and learn I guess. I just wish the classes didn’t cost so much.

    Listening to "Broken Wings" by Mr. Mister
  • Processing

    Yesterday I decided to put the new laptop through its paces with some complicated video work – just to see how well it performed.

    I have a couple of collector’s item DVDs in my collection, and I’ve been wanting to do some fancy video processing on them like cleaning up the NTSC noise, doing some timing work, and upscaling them to 1080p. The M1 Max CPU in my laptop is, in theory, just the right tool for the job.

    I started off the evening with a simple transcode of a ‘standard definition’ DVD to H264 using my external USB DVD reader/writer just to see if it was possible… See, even though DVD is basically a dead format at this point, I still need to contend with things like DRM and most of the really good utilities for this aren’t exactly ARM-native code.

    It turns out that my old standby, HandBrake, has a beta for an ARM-native version, so I gave that a whirl.

    The first pass was a simple read of the stream from the DVD, upscaling it to 1080p with a selection of deblocking and NTSC filters, and writing it out to the laptop’s drive as an H264 file in an MKV container.

    It did this at about 116 frames per second, which is about four times the regular playback speed.

    Impressive, but I didn’t manage to push the CPU past 30% while doing this; something was being a bottleneck… And that something was the USB2 DVD rom.

    So for my next test I ripped the movie from the DVD to a single MPEG2 A/V stream on the local SSD using VLC, then ran HandBrake against that with the above upscaling and filter configuration…

    It transcoded a 1 hour and 29 minute movie in 4 minutes 14 seconds.

    Wow.

    This actually managed to push the processor in the laptop; it did in fact get warm and the fans came on… Not that I could hear the fans mind you, I just got an indication of their RPM changing from zero in Sensei.

    Okay, so Apple wasn’t kidding – this thing is fast. So – what else can it do?

    I’d recently spotted some development code someone was working on that did machine-learning interpolation of video to upscale the frames per second by adding ‘tweening’ between frames. What this does is dramatically smooth out the motion of the video using “AI”, but it would require getting under the hood a bit in MacOS.

    So, I spent an hour or so carefully massaging things to get the interpolation code to run and, it worked! Until it didn’t and my laptop kernel panicked…

    The resultant force-reboot and subsequent attempt by MacOS to ‘fix’ what I’d done cratered the OS. Luckily, TimeMachine was available to save the day.

    At about 11pm I had the Laptop back up and running from the 5pm snapshot and everything seems okay.

    I think I’ll wait a bit before trying the frame interpolation code again. πŸ™‚

    Listening to "Hysteria" by Def Leppard
  • For sale

    Well, I’ve had my first encounter with selling something on ebay.

    For the most part, it’s pretty painless… I wanted to sell an old motherboard and my old Cintiq tablet to make a little extra cash for frivolous things like groceries. So I took a few photos, filled out the forms, and listed them.

    One thing ebay doesn’t mention until you’ve actually sold something is that they take 13 percent of the profit right off the top, plus another 30 cents for some generally opaque reason. So, for the $700 motherboard I sold for $600, ebay sucked up $77.70 – and I had to pay for shipping, so I’ll net about $500. And after all is said and done I’ll get about $250 for my old Cintiq.

    Not great, but it beats sitting on this stuff for no real reason I guess.

    Now I’m waiting for ebay to release the money… See, I’ve never sold anything via ebay so I’m suspect I guess. This means there’s a hold on the funds until some algorithm somewhere is satisfied that I’m not ripping people off.

    I’m not in a hurry, so it’s okay – but the first brush with ebay leaves a bit to be desired.

    I also put my PC up on Craig’s List for a few days; but as I expected it’s just too expensive and too “one-off” for the general population; few people get why a Xeon Gold 6312U CPU costs $1200, and a 3090 is around $2500 right now. A $5000 PC just isn’t a popular item currently…

    But, my roommate decided he wanted it, and will be making payments for a while. So while I didn’t get an instant payoff of the new M1 Max laptop, it’s covered – it’ll just take a year or so.

    Listening to "Hold Me" by Fleetwood Mac
  • Busy…

    On the home-front, between finishing the move and unpacking, being down with the flu for a week, cleaning up the old townhouse, and offloading a gun safe and cast iron cookstove the previous owner left behind β€” I’ve not had a lot of spare time this week.

    At work I’ve been trying to drive a transition to cloud-based services versus a server-room full of antique servers and busted thirty year old AC units… Which went from ‘easy with a bit of figuring out’ to ‘unbelievably complicated’ because other departments got involved.

    So, while the other departments fret and worry about the unbridled horror that is change, I started moving the external-facing web servers to hosted solutions. 

    The main company website is just a WordPress site, so migration to another WordPress install isn’t exactly rocket surgery. And I got this done and operational on a test environment Wednesday.

    Of course there’s more to this than just moving some data; the world needs to know where to find that data and the DNS for the domain is complicated; Google Workspace integration, Zoho MX record tomfoolery, and an entire class-C address space full of can’t be down for any time at all or it’s curtains for the free world services.

    But, because the new host is out of my control and may do network things at random without asking for my input, I decided it was best to let them handle the DNS because they can adjust it to compensate automatically… So I did all of the configuration and whatnot, and then waited until after hours on Friday β€” when traffic is historically the lowest β€” and switched the DNS at the domain level.

    And at about midnight last night the global DNS settled out and things transitioned…

    Of course that’s when I discover that a bunch of stuff in the website we paid some marketing company to half-ass was all statically linked to some CDN somewhere β€” so for the next hour I was running mysql queries to iron out the link bugs.

    Then there was the problem where the contact form marketing insists on having in the footer of every page was freaking out at the varnish cache and melting down the server from Ajax calls to refresh the form content… So I re-wrote the form handler to not worry about the cache because I don’t use Google Captcha and don’t need to do weird post tricks to appease the mighty “G”…

    Then the PDF poster they were using on the site got mad because the PDF data and the display plugin that was displaying it were now from different servers, which caused a browser error β€” so now the site is just displaying PDFs as a page versus an fancy dialog box.

    In the end at about noon today I not only had the site running 100%, but performance-wise it’s testing better than it ever has.

    I probably should have just re-written that marketing company abomination years ago…

  • Annnnd β€” scene.

    As of yesterday afternoon I’m officially moved.

    After dinner at “Cheddar’s” down the road, I spent the evening getting my bedroom and office set up, and after an exceptionally restful night’s sleep β€” I’m ready to tackle another day at work…

    Got the battle station all set up in the office, which has a mere five windows and looks out on the forest. I’ve spent the better part of an hour this morning just listening to the birds out there.

    Now for the first video meeting of the day…

  • Bad Battery

    As most folks know, rechargeable batteries can swell up when they fail. And I see that pretty often here at work given just now much hardware is floating around for employee use. But occasionally the failure is more spectacular than usual.

    Yesterday I get an email from a tester stating that his MacBook Pro won’t turn on and he needs a different one for the project he’s on. 

    I ask a few questions over email, and he’s totally unsure of why the laptop just stopped working all of a sudden. So I tell him to bring it in and I’ll swap it out.

    And here’s what he brings me…

    Nope, no idea why that laptop isn’t working… Total mystery…

    Yes, that’s really the aluminum base plate and palm rest forcefully bowed out. And this of course shoves the palm rest into the screen β€” fortunately the screen looks to be okay.

    After carefully removing a dozen tiny screws from the bottom plate, because the bottom plate was under enough stress to make them shoot out and fly across the office, I was able to extricate the battery.

    Looks fine to me. Not sure why the laptop isn’t working…

    What’s funny is the battery is covered in Do Not Remove stickers and uses tri-blade screws… I’m a rebel; a sticker that says do not remove and weird screws is simply a challenge.

    Anyway, I was able to flatten the case back out and I’ve got an aftermarket replacement battery coming. Hopefully nothing on the logic board was broken by the stress from that swelling battery, and if not I’ll get this back into service next week.

  • Secondlife Sightseeing

    Back in 2018, the group I ran role-play sims in SecondLife with decided they wanted to play in a futuristic space setting.

    Of course to do this required a sim build, a story, and some rules. So while they came up with the rules they sent me off to make the story and rough out a place to play within that story.

    That place would eventually be called “Aedis”. And by the time I was done there were a half dozen alien races, a timeline spanning about a thousand years, a slew of interesting genetic alterations for players, and this massive city that served as an example of Humanity’s corporate prowess and galactic business acumen.

    Aedis itself resided on the watery moon of a nearby gas giant many lightyears from Earth, and served as both the HQ of several huge Earth conglomerates as well as a massive shipping hub and warehousing system.

    The city itself was divided into two major levels: the lower city where everyone lived just well enough to be useful for their corporate masters, and where everything was built into and around the massive machinery that powered Aedis, created its energy dome, and generated its breathable atmosphere. Above this squalor was the upper city, where the rich and powerful lived in luxury amidst sweeping parks with views of the perpetual twilight light given off by the system’s brown dwarf star, and lived within lofty luxury spires.

    And in SecondLife it looked a bit like this:

    It’s difficult to get a sense of scale from static images, but that bridge in the lower center is probably a hundred meters long. On the left is one of the fusion reactors that burn deuterium found in the moon’s water. That one is “B7”, which denotes its position on a 7×7 grid.

    B7 is also the name of the district, because it surrounds the particular reactor. B7, being on the outer edge of the city grid, is also close to the massive ports that surround Aedis – so there’s a lot of alien presence as well as a fair amount of crime.

    One of the surface-level shopping blocks. Pretty much everything structural in the lower city, that isn’t reactors, piping, and cooling arrays, is made from a nanite-assembled concrete. Which is why everything has a similar dark grey modular appearance. Any renter’s “style” is typically done via lighting and holoprojectors as the nanocrete is incredibly resistant to modification.

    Looking from a surface-level building back toward some reactor machinery. B7 is on the left.

    Another surface-level building. On the left is a hospital of sorts… Most medical services are run by medical staff that ran afoul of something or someone in the upper city and moved to where there are fewer questions asked.

    Moving from the surface level to the subsurface levels of the lower city is managed by way of these massive equipment tunnels. These tunnels are the quickest way between the subsurface and the surface, but can be dangerous because the automated machinery that the tunnels were made for aren’t big on personal safety. Other paths exist between levels, but tend to be long and convoluted.

    The subsurface of Aedis is where the truly destitute live – like termites boring into the walls and spaces between Aedis’ infrastructure. Above is one of the bazaars that reside over a massive open coolant tank.

    If you go down far enough, you eventually come to the hazardous machinery levels of Aedis. Here you’re peering out of a gantry across a space hundreds of meters wide, and looking over the water inlet pipe for reactor B7 about two hundred meters above.

    You’d never guess that I used to work in the games industry I guess.

    Oh, and for anyone versed in SL; the above is a mere 3000 prims out of the 20,000 available… So plenty of prims left over for players to make it ‘theirs’.

    Anyway, the reason for this trip down memory lane is that LindenLab finally offered to let me spin up another sim… See, they’ve been in the middle of a move to “The Cloud” for their infrastructure for most of 2020, which meant no one could spin up additional sims. 

    And a few months ago, some folks I know were asking about renting a sim from me but that capability had been shut off… So I got put on a waiting list.

    And the wait ended today.

    So, I spun up Aedis to see if anyone would be interested in using it as-is. If not I’ll wipe everything out and let someone I know build their own thing on it. If they’re not interested now (it’s been a few months), I’ll probably use it for myself for a while β€” just for the fun of building entire cities and whatnot. πŸ™‚

    Maybe I’ll finish the upper-city… Maybe…

  • The world according to Microsoft…

    Super busy with a project right now, but while this .iso comes down from Microsoft I just had to post an observation…

    Microsoft’s “Hyper-V” is their house-brand hypervisor for virtual machines, and in general it does what any virtual machine system does. But there’s always a weird Microsoft gotcha.

    A Hyper-V VM has a few boot options: You can mount the host’s CD/DVD, you can virtually shove an .iso into a virtual device, and you can boot from a floppy.

    But you simply cannot boot from USB.

    Boot from a floppy β€” but not from USB; that’s so Microsoft. πŸ™‚

  • Cyberpunk 2077, part 2

    Well, I finished the storyline for Cyberpunk 2077, and it was pretty incredible.

    The game was $60, and I think it took me about 40 hours to finish the story β€” so a buck fifty an hour, and it was definitely worth it.

    I managed to avoid all spoilers and simply played “V” as I felt best suited the character I had in my head: A super suave corporate cyberdeck wizard run afoul of corporate politics and now on the run; fallen from the ivory tower and now hiding among the detritus of society… And trying to climb her way back.

    And, awesomely enough, that was exactly what I got!

    I ended up with the Caliburn sports car (totally murdered out), ultra-flash suits, a huge bankroll of eddies, and the ability to melt minds through someone’s TV with the mere snap of my fingers.

    In the end I got the “Panam” conclusion to the story, which I’ll not spoil for anyone. But it was a good ending… Well, as good as Cyberpunk gets.

    See, Cyberpunk has always, since the tabletop days in the 80’s, been a seriously dystopian fantasy; there are no happy endings in the neon and chrome future… Live fast, die hard, and leave an attractive corpse β€” that’s Cyberpunk.

    I only ran into two bugs that really halted my progress. One was early in the game when I went to Vik’s (the ripperdoc), and the second was the train heist that got the nomads their hover tank.

    Both were eventually worked around after an hour or so of browsing forums.

    In the end I really, really liked Cyberpunk 2077. It was a glorious throwback to my younger years and I’m definitely hoping there are more games in this style, with the same attention to detail.

  • Cyberpunk

    So, CDProjectRed’s “Cyberpunk 2077” released a few days ago.

    I’m an old fan of Cyberpunk, from back in the late 80’s when it was a tabletop roleplaying game from R. Talsorian Games. So, when it was going to be turned into a computer-based RPG, I got early seats on the hype train.

    The problem for me and gaming is always work hours; I just don’t have a lot of time for games these days. That and I’m in a Mac-phase right now, being very unenthused with the direction Windows has gone β€” which means my gaming options are limited.

    But, after some internal arguing, and the fact my current client will be non-responsive for a while due to being embroiled in a massive nation-state level hack, I decided to ‘bootcamp’ my iMac and load Win10 (20H2). This was followed by loading Steam, and then paying for and loading Cyberpunk 2077.

    The Steam portion was the most complicated step, because I’ve not used my Steam account in forever and forgot the password… But Steam password recovery is incredibly onerous and I was unable to prove I was me β€” so one new Steam account later and I was able to give them money for the game…

    Cyberpunk 2077 is really pretty. 

    My iMac has a Radeon pro 5700 xt and a 10th gen i7 in it, so it’s more than capable for the game. Granted, I can’t do any of the Nvidia raytrace or DLSS stuff β€” but I’m still pretty happy with how Night City looks.

    So far my biggest complaints are some blocker bugs such as one where you drive to see your buddy the ripperdoc, and upon getting out of the car the game CTDs… This looks like a cell load issue though; I found that if I drive past the location, make a u-turn, and come back towards it so that the area is in view as I approach and has a chance to load it works fine. Probably because the actual location is ‘underground’.

    CP2077 is also another KB/Mouse UI tacked onto a game that was built around a console controller, so the PC controls are clunky… But this is a problem most newer games have and I just have to live with it.

    So far the story for CP2077 is pretty good. I decided on a Corp enforcer type character, like I used to play waaaay back when β€” and I’m probably 4 hours into it and having a lot of fun. πŸ™‚

  • Server Shenanigans

    Not a lot of updates this week mostly because I’ve been pretty busy with work.

    Right now I’m front-loading the setup hours for a test that requires five 2012r2 servers. I’ll be using some the Dell “PowerEdge” 1950 III servers I picked up from Dell for a series of tests I did for the State of Colorado in 2008.

    The 1950s are a bit slow compared to more modern hardware around here (dual  Xeon E5405 CPUs and 16Gigs of ECC DDR2), but they’re still workhorses and I use them for a lot of testing… Most of the three-dozen of them I got for the above testing are still running the original 250G HDs they came with, and some have been running 24/7 since that testing.

    The company website runs from one of these 1950s in fact.

    The test in question is another “Marketing Test” where I will be doing 3rd party comparisons between products to generate pretty graphs that the client can use to sell their software. And being as none of the data of interest actually involves server performance β€” 1950s. πŸ™‚

    I’ve done a lot of these over the years; the first one was for “NetZero” back in 2006 or so, where I had several ten-machine banks of Dell desktops running scripted browser instances clocking the load times of a series of 20 web pages over various dialup providers… That was a crazy number of phone lines, and the modem cacophony on the redial phase was epic.

    These comparison tests are easy to do mechanically, but the report process is always a bear… The client wants a report that says THREE MILLION PERCENT BETTER THAN BRAND X! β€” of course, but that’s rarely the case. And because I’m an engineer and facts don’t care about feelings, my reports are rarely good sales fodder.

    Which is why these days I design the test, execute, and gather data β€” and the QA Director creates the word salad that makes the client happy and yet sticks to the findings. Which works better for everyone involved.

  • Update…

    Here we are, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s a 4-day weekend for me starting tomorrow, so I might actually get a chance to muck about with the new expansion for World of Warcraft over the next few days!

    The Murano just ticked over 13000 miles this morning, so I’m averaging right about 464 miles a month since July 13th, 2018. That’s down from the 555 miles/month I was averaging in January, so I guess that’s one up-side to zombies; the Murano is literally just broken in mechanically.

    This week I deleted my last Google account, the one I was using to host a few YouTube videos, so I’m now a 100% free-range Internet User. I never really had a presence on Twitter, but I bailed on that back in January of 2018. And I’ve never had a Facebook account because I thought it was creepy from inception…

    I also deleted my FA account this week; I never really used it save to contact artists for commissions, which I can do just as well without an account. See, FA is pretty much a porn site, and I’m just not into all that so I didn’t have much use for the place. That and while I don’t mind activism in-principle, I’m getting burned out on everything having to rub its HashtagYourCauseHere activism in my face 24/7… FA has been downing the koolaid at an epic pace for months now, and I got tired of it.

    So, I’m down to just ye olde journal here for my ‘social media’ footprint.

    I’ve been using the M1 MacBook Air for all things work for a week now. Performance-wise it’s tricky to spot the differences between the $1000 Air and the $5000 16″ Pro I used to use.

    There are the typical bugs one would expect with such a major shift in architecture, but other than the Safari vs. Google Meet audio issue, I’ve been able to ignore most of them. And the Safari issue isn’t due to the M1 as it happens on my i7 iMac as well… It’s something to do with “Big Sur”, and it’s been reported extensively to Apple (myself included) β€” so I expect an update any day now.

    I also ordered a case for the M1; it’s being made in GenΓ¨ve, Switzerland and should be here in a couple of weeks…

    In other work-related news I got this year’s holiday card done and approved in record time; 5 hours total spread over two revisions. It was sent off to the printer and the 700 stamps were ordered yesterday. So, yay me!

  • WinDos Tehn

    As you can probably tell from ye olden journal here β€” I’m primarily a Mac user. I also spend an unhealthy amount of time in various flavors of *nix, which is pretty similar to using a Mac if you open the terminal full-screen.

    But I also have to support windows, because in I.T. windows is generally what you’ll find installed in whatever the problem is that just landed on your desk.

    Today, for example, I’m having to set up an HP EliteBook 850 G5 laptop for a tester who is working from home. This will take roughly half a day to complete. 

    Not that this is a slow machine; mid-tier i5, 8gigs of ram, 256gig SSD. It’s that Win10 is such a mess these days… Let me illustrate.

    It begins by resetting the laptop to remove the previous test/tester data, because believe it or not that’s the quicker option to completely reloading the machine. Luckily, Win10 has a handy facility for doing this; system reset, which is logically located in the system update controls… 

    Apparently wiping out the entire system is an update β€” who am I to argue?

    That’s not horribly surprising though; this is, after all, the same OS that has trained an entire generation to press start to shut down…

    After stepping through the various menus to indicate that, yes, I really do want to wipe out everything and reload, the OS restarts and the laptop thinks for about fifteen minutes while Win10 gets its ducks in a row.

    Once reloaded you get to the system setup process. Cortana starts jabbering at you, but with the click of a microphone icon you can silence her β€” because of course mute is a microphone icon.

    Then you get to create an account. Win10 is rather insistent on forcing you to create a Microsoft Account, and as versions of win10 have progressed it’s gotten tricker and trickier to avoid this.

    See, as a business, locking a company-owned device to a third-party account system controlled by an employee is, well, stupid. Fortunately you can still bypass win10’s insistence on a Microsoft account by simply disconnecting the machine from the network… As soon as win10 cannot talk to the Eye of Sauron there in Redmond, it relents and lets you create a local account.

    At least for now.

    Okay, so we made it to the desktop! So far it’s only taken about 20 minutes to reset the machine β€” but we’re not done yet… Now it’s time to reconnect to the network and do updates…

    Updating win10 is a special level of hell because it’s incredibly slow, obtuse, and subject to a high incidence of failure. For example; I clicked ‘update’, the laptop thought about this for about ten minutes, and then responded with a cryptic error message that translated to ‘time not set right’.

    Sure enough β€” even though the clock control panel showed the little slide button as enabled for “automatically set time”, I had to toggle it to actually get it to set the time. And even then it had the timezone wrong.

    So with the clock now reading the correct time, we re-run the check for updates and wait another ten minutes for the panel to populate with the dozen required updates. But seeing what updates are required is the quick part, actually downloading them can take a while… In this case it was about 20 minutes.

    Now we have to restart the machine to actually install the updates. The screen turns blue and the whirly thing whirls above a note that states “your PC will restart several times”. And I wait some more.

    The whole update process takes four reboots spread over about an hour. So now I’ve got two hours invested in just setting up a machine for testing β€” but wait! There’s more!

    After the fourth reboot the screen comes up and says “Hi β€” we have some updates for you. This might take several minutes β€” don’t turn off your PC” and I wait another five minutes as the screen slowly color cycles.

    Setup, part the second is required. This is apparently because one of the updates redid the user preferences enough that I once again have to go through the new user setup and be shown all the ways Microsoft will collect my data.

    Now I have about two and a quarter hours invested, but I once again have a desktop! But β€” I know this game, this is an illusion because that was only the first batch of updates…

    Back to the updates control panel, another five minutes of thinking, and yes β€” more updates that take another five minutes of downloading before the inevitable five minute reboot and install cycle.

    Two and a half hours now.

    Once we’re back at the desktop I know there has to be at least one more update β€” because there’s always one more update. And sure enough, after another five minutes of thinking the “2020-11 Cumulative Update” appears…

    This is apparently a bigger deal than update part two because it takes a solid ten minutes to download and another fifteen minutes to install before the requisite reboot.

    Back to the blue screen with the whirly thing that is “Working on updates” for another ten minutes…

    Eventually, after almost three hours, the laptop is ready to go. Well β€” mostly.

    See, Win10 will now do some sort of file maintenance in the background that will bring the machine to its knees for an hour or so. This is on top of making sure to load several games, social media apps, and other bloat that is apparently required on a business machine.

    So there you have it; the four-ish hour Win10 reset process.

    Bleh.

  • 1990 – 2020

    1990’s PowerBook 165c, 2000’s PowerBook G4, 2010’s MacBook, 2020’s MacBook Air

    Four decades of Apple laptop in one photo, which also covers all of the major hardware versions; 68k, PPC, x86, and M1.

    What a long strange trip it’s been.

  • MacBookAir 10,1

    After what was undoubtedly a harrowing trip from China, my new M1-based MacBook Air arrived today.

    By now there are countless reviews of the M1 architecture available online, so I’ll make mine brief…

    It’s eerily good… 

    The M1 manages to bring back some of that sense of computer wonder I’ve not had since the early 80’s… I can’t really wrap my head around how it’s doing what it’s doing. I know all about 5nm process, RISC systems, unified memory architectures, PCIe gen4, and on and on β€” but the M1 still manages to have some kind of voodoo that boggles me.

    I mean, no moving parts at all, no real heat generation, and no wires β€” and I was running around in World of Warcraft at well over 60fps with my usual graphic settings and showing 6 hours of battery available.

    WoW is a native ARM app though β€” Blizzard didn’t waste any time coding for the new architecture. A real test would be something not written for ARM that would need to use Rosetta 2 translation to run…

    Enter SecondLife.

    I’ve used SecondLife, specifically Luskwood in SecondLife, as something of a torture test for any new hardware with rendering capability for almost two decades. See, SL is an unoptimized mess when it comes to rendering because geometry, textures, and animations are left up to the people in the system β€” and they’re not exactly interested in things like render budgets or resource envelopes.

    So, something like my old bleeding edge gaming rig with a thousand watt power supply to run a Titan-XP video card and a liquid cooled i7-7700K CPU typically saw 40-50 FPS in Luskwood. And was generally a space-heater whilst doing it…

    The M1 MacBook Air β€” again passively cooled and running on battery β€” was averaging around 25 FPS in Luskwood with similar settings.

    The $999 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 4+4 CPU, 7-core GPU, 8 Gigs of unified memory, and 256 Gigs of SSD.

    That would actually be impressive for a desktop windows machine with discrete graphics β€” but the MBA is a passively cooled SOC… And what makes it weirder is that level of performance was still showing around 6 hours of available battery.

    And remember, this is with the 30-ish percent hit for code translation as well…

    That’s just creepy.

  • Apple’s Big Sur(prise)

    Yesterday MacOS 11 β€” aka “Big Sur” β€” was released upon the world, and that’s where things went wrong for pretty much everyone.

    I’m not a big proponent of ‘version zero’ anything, and accordingly I’d planned to leave OSX 10.15 on the iMac and leave the OS 11 experimenting to the new M1 laptop arriving Monday.

    This, of course, isn’t how things played out.

    I left work early yesterday to be available for a couple of packages that were arriving. One of those packages was a Satechi USB-C hub / monitor stand, which is fabulous by the way.

    Anyway, I got an email from the duty IT guy asking about a system on an external address, so I went to open my Excel spreadsheet of IP info β€” and nothing happened. Excel just bounced in the dock and that was the extent of it.

    Okay.

    As I’ve written here, Apple’s “Catalina” has a lot in common with Microsoft’s “Vista” in that permissions problems are the new normal. Accordingly I somewhat assumed there was a permissions issue with MS Office stemming from the explosive TimeMachine restore I did to the new iMac on Wednesday. In fact I was still ironing out permissions issues when this mysterious Office problem was exposed.

    So I tried to open a word doc to verify the Office issue; same dock bounce with MS Word.

    Okay…

    My theory now was that the TimeMachine restore was simply too far gone from various permissions issues, and that a reload from scratch would be the best solution in the long run. Fortunately I keep multiple redundant copies of all of my data, so a bare-metal restore of a system only impacts me in as far as having to spend an hour getting two-factor texts to set up new browser cookies from my banks and such.

    So, one reboot / CMD-R later, and after providing two forms of ID, I’ve erased the SSD in the iMac and am expecting to just reload the iMac to the factory “Catalina” OS.

    Nope. The OS restore is timing out and failing.

    What the hell?

    Off I go to the Internet on my iPad to try and suss out why everything Apple is a shitshow right now, and discover that due to a server at Apple falling over 3rd party apps (like MS Office) won’t launch. 

    So I didn’t actually need to reload the machine because the local software problems are actually a remote server problems? What the hell Apple…

    To compound my current issues, it’s also Big Sur day and everyone on the planet is trying to download the new OS from Apple. This is what is causing the timeouts I’m seeing when trying to reload my new iMac.

    Okay. I’ll just bite the bullet and install Big Sur if I can’t get Catalina to install.

    Nope, that’s not working either. Something at Apple is causing the Big Sur install to fail for pretty much everyone, but if I VPN into another country I can at least download the installer… So I VPN into Amsterdam and 30 minutes later have the 12-ish gig installer for OS 11.0.1.

    Huzzah!

    Okay, now to make an installable USB for it; open installer package, find the media build app, sudo a terminal session and write out the installer to USB. Piece of cake.

    I stick my hot-off-the-press USB into the iMac and option into the boot selector, select Big Sur, and am told that the iMac won’t allow me to install from external media…

    Ahh T2, how I loath thee…

    Okay, reboot back into recovery, supply three forms of ID, get to the secure boot options and unlock the iMac… Then reboot, option into the boot selector, and install Big Sur.

    Ultimately, the entire process was a simple six hour ordeal involving everything from packet sniffing network connections to terminal wizardry for an OS that is advertised as “it just works”.

    But, hey β€” Big Sur is actually pretty keen; at least in the hour or so I got to mess with it before I had to call it a night for work today. If Apple managed to make it less “Vista” though, I’ll call it a win.

  • iMac 20,2

    The iMac I ordered last week arrived from Ireland today and I spent several hours getting it all set up.

    The ram install went pretty easy; remove ram cover, pull out two special all-black Apple 4Gig so-dimms, install two equally special Crucial “Ballistics” 16Gig so-dimms, put back ram cover, and press button.

    2020 OSX “Catalina” has an awful lot in common with 2007 Windows “Vista” in that everything you do with the system spawns a permissions popup… It turns out that this handily breaks the TimeMachine restore from one machine to another, because all of your installed apps will grenade on first boot due to components being blocked by dozens of permissions popups.

    It’s annoying to have to relive those horrific Vista days from over a decade ago; but we all do what we must in the name of security I suppose.

    Anyway, everything was ultimately fixable and I eventually got settled in on the new machine:

    The iMac is currently syncing data between itself, iCloud, and Backblaze… I’m not sure why as the data in all three locations should be identical β€” but what do I know.

    While I was picking up the ram from Microcenter today they caught me with a “Black Friday” sale on Apple Watches so I have one of those now too… It’s the cheap one; ‘space gray’ aluminum and a plastic band β€” but it does unlock the iMac when I sit down at my desk, so that’s handy.

    And speaking of Black Friday; I gather that the traditional day-after-Thanksgiving sales event is now the entire month of November or something.

    I got my old MacBook Pro erased, reloaded, and into the return box for the $2000 trade-in on the iMac. I’ll drop that off at FedAxe tomorrow and hope that it arrives back at Apple in one piece.

  • The inevitable computer upgrade

    Last night I ordered a new iMac; what may be the last of the big Intel machines from Apple.

    27″ 5K screen, 3.8Ghz Intel Core i7-10700K, 8gigs of 2666MHz DDR4 ram, a terabyte of SSD, and a Radeon Pro 5700 XT with 16GB of GDDR6.

    I specifically ordered it with the least amount of ram possible because I can upgrade that to 32gigs on my own and for about a quarter of the cost. I went with the i7 versus the i9 because I don’t really do massive multithread work and instead need fewer but faster cores, and the i7 is just that. I also went with 1TB vs something larger as I already have big external drives and terabytes of cloud storage β€” and the jump from 1TB to 2TB internal was like $400.

    It should arrive between the 13th and 17th of this month β€” riots willing of course.

    The 16″ MacBook Pro I have now is a stellar laptop and I picked it up because it’s small and fits into my stuff reduction plan. But since I purchased it I’ve added an external GPU, external PCIe box with my old PCIe SSD in it, a 34″ wide aspect monitor, Bose speakers, etc, etc.

    At home the laptop sits on top of the eGPU box, which is about half the size of a regular PC, and has a ton of wiring plugged into it to make all of the external stuff work. All told there’s an entire end-table covered in gear that interfaces to the laptop β€” or about three times the volume of a 27″ iMac.

    Basically I don’t use the laptop as a laptop β€” it’s more of a small form-factor computer that I plug lots of stuff into.

    There’s also the complexities of an eGPU; it works, mostly, but having an ATI 5700 XT in the box and connected over thunderbolt only gives the card 4 PCIe lanes β€” so it’s operating at about half-speed all the time. Which is fine, I didn’t do the eGPU thing for bleeding edge gaming, it was more to reduce the thermal load on the laptop while doing graphically intense things for hours.

    The iMac on the other hand has basically the same card, but operating at full 16-lane PCIe 4.0 speed. So graphically it’s a pretty substantial upgrade and should make Warcraft and Second Life even better. πŸ™‚

    The iMac also has a nice 1080p camera, studio-grade microphones, and some quality speakers built-in… So the many weekly online meetings I have to attend won’t require a random camera stuck to the top of my monitor, and a separate mic and my headphones to limit echo.

    Lastly Apple gave me about $2000 in trade for the laptop, and 0% financing for 12 months β€” so the new iMac winds up running me about $120 a month for a year. That’s doable.

    And, hey β€” I took care of both the Christmas and Birthday computer upgrades in one easy purchase β€” so I’m ahead of the game. πŸ™‚

  • MacBookPro 16,1 Reload…

    Today was spent reloading OS X 10.15.7 on my 2019 16″ MacBook Pro.

    Not as big as the 2004 17″ Powerbook G4 I had years ago, but it’s much, much more powerful. Come to think of it, it’s probably not as big as the 14″ PowerBook G3 I had in the late 90’s either.

    OS X allows you to just move all of your applications and data from machine to machine very easily β€” but this includes all of the cruft and oddities as well. So the assorted software flotsam in my laptop has been accumulating since I picked up the 15″ MacBook Pro in August of last year.

    I’m also a systems engineer and a programmer, so the innards of my machines get an inordinate amount of poking and prodding, experimental drivers for things, and lots of python and java fragments to do things you’re not supposed to do β€” and this tends to slowly destabilize things over time… And then there’s Xcode, which does all manner of horrible things to the OS in the name of making iPhone apps…

    All in all the complete wipe and OS reload, even over the congested wifi here at home, only took 20 minutes. Oh, that’s another thing; Mac recovery media resides on the internet, so you just hold down command-R on boot, the firmware connects to wifi/ethernet, and you’re off to the races.

    The rest of the afternoon has been re-installing applications and getting texts on the phone to do the two-factor authentication for dozens of online accounts.

    I make extensive use of Apple’s “iCloud” for backups and data retention, which means all of my browser sites, logins, and passwords were ready to go instantly, as well as all of my calendar and contact data. “iCloud Drive”, the data storage portion of the system wasn’t as finely polished and it took some pointy-hat terminal-wizardry to track down the sync processes, kill them and their data store, and get the sync working again… There was some sort of race condition with pending deletes on the server side and pending syncs on the client side. But the mountains of data that lives on my laptop were eventually restored in short order.

    It’s nice having gigabit fiber here at the house when it comes time to shuffle an entire HD of data from point A to B.

    My backup’s backup is on Backblaze just in case Apple fails me, but it wasn’t needed today…

    So, the sum-total to wipe out and restore my entire life still takes about six hours, even here in the bright and shiny digital future. This basically proves that while processing and data speeds are insane now, so is the amount of data we tend to accumulate β€” so it balances out.