RIHAHN.COM

Month: November 2020

  • Post TDay Post

    My four days off went better than they usually do in that I actually took four days off.

    I was technically at work until about midnight on Wednesday working out why these new (for work) Fanvil IP phones wouldn’t do VPN. Once that was resolved, I spent Thursday through Sunday either doing the food coma thing or playing World of Warcraft.

    The holiday lunch/dinner/leftovers for several days went off without a hitch. There was ten pounds of bone-in glazed spiral-cut ham, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, diner rolls, and a chocolate mouse cake for desert. I still have probably three pounds of ham, and most of the cake left.

    The cake was amazing, but I’m not much of a sweets person and one slice was enough to sate me for another year. And I’m about ham’d out — I’ve had ham, ham sandwiches, ham cheese and crackers, ham and baked beans… I’m done.

    I tend to set out a pretty big spread for the final two holidays of the year as I want to make sure I have plenty in case anyone I know doesn’t have anywhere to go. But with zombies and all this year, where the “Guestapo” has been breaking up family meals because of the lockdown mandates, it was just me and the roommate.

     The rest of the time off was spent plumbing the depths of the afterlife in World of Warcraft’s latest expansion.

    “Shadowlands” has been pretty good so far. I really like the look and feel of Ardenweald and Bastion, and accordingly that’s where I’ve spent most of my time. My Tauren Paladin is working with Ardenweald and my Draenei Mage is teamed up with Bastion, and both are level 60 and working on the “Torghast” quests to get access to the Runecarver.

    As I surmised with the Endless Halls maze for the “Lucid Nightmare” mount, the Endless Halls was a tech-demo for procedurally generated dungeon content… And Torghast is, quite literally, the end-game for that tech demo.

    Ultimately Toghast is pretty ‘rinse-repeat’ and I can already tell I won’t be spending a great deal of effort on it. For now though it adds enough variation to the theme to allow me to slog through it for specific quests.

    Of the two characters I think the Mage is having the easier time. While the mage dies quite often and the paladin has yet to be killed, the improved damage output of the mage just improves the overall flow of the game.

    Also the storyline for “Shadowlands” has been quite good; at least the two small slices I’ve seen so far have been. Ardenweald wins the contest though with one deft storytelling move; bringing back a beloved character in a well constructed non-cringe fashion.

    WoW, as a game, has had a few deeply emotionally impactful quest elements over the years, such as “Crusader Bridenbrad”, and the death of Ysera in the Legion expansion. You can now add the return of Ysera in Shadowlands to that list.

  • Scenes from my daily stroll

  • 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) — so I expect an update any day now.

    I also ordered a case for the M1; it’s being made in Genève, 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!

  • PowerBook 5,3 (Special Project Update)

    My PowerBook G4 has been under the proverbial knife getting all of the worn parts replaced with new old-stock parts — which is a nice thing about the older laptops; user serviceable parts inside.

    The G4 now has a new DC-in and left-side USB board, a new NVRAM battery and right-side USB board, a new bluetooth module, new battery to charge controller harness, a new battery, new 65w charger brick, and a new 8x “superdrive”.

    Older 4x superdrive removed (the empty spot with the writing on it)

    NOS 8x drive foreground and original 4x drive. The new M1 MacBook Air is in the background.

    NOS NVRAM battery and USB board installed. There’s two Panasonic lithium coin cells under the plastic.

    Old DC-in board removed – check out the scoring on the barrel connector. The ambient light sensor is in the clear plastic at the top of the board.

    NOS DC-in board in place, as well as the NOS bluetooth module (small board on top of the speaker housing)

    Once everything was done I buttoned her back up, ran the hardware checks to make sure everything was functional, and then re-installed OS X 10.5.8 to test the new drive.

    Everything seems to be working fine.

    The new charging system works — the light on the DC in from the wall wart now works and the battery took a full charge and tested to a 2.5 hour run time (back in the early aughts 2 hours was pretty good for a desktop replacement machine). And the system keeps time now when it’s unplugged… Bonus.

    All in all, I’m fairly happy with how it all went. And the G4 is now pretty much new. 🙂

  • Lockdown Update

    As of Friday we’re back to March lockdown levels:

    Just when things were starting to feel ‘normal’ again…

    And in case that wasn’t enough, this morning at 9am we all got the emergency alert on the phone:

    I’m officially tired of zombies…

  • WinDos Tehn

    As you can probably tell from ye olden journal here — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — but wait! There’s more!

    After the fourth reboot the screen comes up and says “Hi — we have some updates for you. This might take several minutes — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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.

  • Holiday via UPS

    While I hear that celebrating Thanksgiving is frowned upon these days for reasons ranging from ‘catching a case of the zombies via direct eye contact with someone’ to ‘some people did something several generations ago and we should all be mad about it now’ — as an official crotchety old dude I don’t care and plan to put myself into a food coma anyway.

    The biggest hassle for me is actually acquiring the fixin’s for said food coma.

    Given the semi-perpetual state of paranoid delusion in today’s world, going and physically participating in the act of shopping is entirely too ridiculous for me… The sight of someone masked up behind a face shield, wearing gloves and a painter’s jumpsuit, and eyeing everyone around them as if they are plague personified while manhandling the produce tends to make me point and laugh. And that tends to label me as an uncaring jerk by everyone in the vicinity…

    They’re not wrong, but I should still maintain appearances in order to prevent a visit from the Ministry of Love.

    Fortunately there’s this new system called the ‘gig-economy’ that exists to turn mechanical wear on a vehicle into minimum wage. So I just order what I need and wait patiently for it to magically appear on my doorstep via underpaid delivery fairy.

    In general I’ve been averaging an 80 percent success rate in actually getting what I order via dice-toss-delivery, which is apparently good enough to keep me using it.

    Anyway, this sort of process is how I solved the Thanksgiving dilemma; I have a full-on feast arriving via UPS from HoneyBaked Ham.

    My usual holiday ritual used to involve standing in line at the local HoneyBaked Ham store a few days prior to whatever food-based holiday was on the calendar. Now I have a big box of frozen stuff showing up, which will then go into my freezer until a few days before the event.

    Shipping added a bit to the overall cost, of course, but I think it was worth it to avoid the potential problems with visibly exceeding my festivity ration for a verboten holiday.

  • 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — again passively cooled and running on battery — 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 — 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.

  • Historypeats…

    Can you even imagine Apple computers without Intel CPUs in them? We’re definitely living in the future or something.

  • Apple’s Big Sur(prise)

    Yesterday MacOS 11 — aka “Big Sur” — 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 — 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 — 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.

  • MacBook 7,1

    Being as I traded in my 2019 16″ MacBook Pro on the new 2020 27″ iMac, meaning it needed to go back to Apple, I’m running on an old 13″ MacBook for work this week.

    Apple MacBook “Core 2 Duo” 2.4 13″ (Mid-2010) running 10.13.6

    Like the rest of my Mac Stuff, this 2010 white polycarbonate MacBook is both a fully working system and is in excellent condition. It’s been upgraded to 8Gigs of ram (the max it will use), and has a new 120G SSD and battery in it — both from Newer Tech.

    With the zombies and all I have a lot of videoconferences to attend of a day, and the MacBook Pro used to be my go-to for daily operations here at work. I’m happy to say the decade-old MacBook, while a bit more sedate, works just as well.

    A half dozen VPNs for remote operations on servers, running both wired and wireless networks, monitoring email, video chats, working on documentation, running iTunes, cruising the web… I’ve not found anything it won’t do.

    So, even though I only need this machine for a few days before the new laptop gets here, it’s performing admirably.

    Oh, that’s right! I ordered one of the new M1 laptops on Tuesday. I got the notice from Apple that it’s leaving Shanghai today and will be delivered Monday.

    When it gets here and I get it set up, I’ll be sure to comment on the performance of the new “Apple Silicon” — as well as post a photo of a 68000-based Apple laptop, a PPC-based Apple laptop, an x86-based Apple laptop, and an M1-based Apple laptop all running at the same time… 30 years of architecture changes, and I have mint examples for all of it.

    It’s a hobby.

  • 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 — 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 — 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.

  • Xserve 2,1

    A few weeks ago I was successful in re-acquiring my old pre-y2k rihahn.com domain, and decided I should put some sort of service on it. Said service would have to be suitably archaic though, so I spent some time pondering it…

    Last week I settled on using an old Mac, and briefly had my dual G4 “MDD” tower running a web server – but going alllll the way back to PowerPC was a bit too archaic. So I decided to fire up my old Apple Xserve 2,1 from early 2008 and put it back into service as my personal web server.

    The Xserve is archaic enough to be worthy of my old domain name, yet new enough that putting it on the modern Internet isn’t a war-crime.

    After some fiddling, which included locating eight 2Gig sticks of DDR2 FB dimms in an old box in the storeroom and three 1TB HDs that would actually run in the Xserve (they’re notoriously picky about HDs) – it lives!

    The site is being served from OS X Server 10.6.8 using the built-in web services, and will probably end up as just a curious collection of old road signs pointing in various directions down equally old dirt roads to ghost towns of bygone eras.

    Welcome to an unmarked exit off of the information superhighway in the middle of nowhere.

  • PowerBook 5,3 (The Special Project)

    Back in early 2004 I moved from my home / unicorn sanctuary in Avon Colorado back to Fredericksburg Virginia for a potential teaching gig. This move was fairly spur of the moment and ultimately entailed getting rid of pretty much everything I owned that wouldn’t fit into a couple of suitcases. This included my fairly bleeding-edge PC that I’d built, but part of the deal with accepting the position was getting a new laptop to replace the PC.

    Now, I’ve always been fairly agnostic when it comes to computers — I’ll use anything really. But having gotten my start in the early 80’s on machines with a lot of … let’s say idiosyncrasies … I’ve always been into the underdog systems like Amiga, Apple, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, etc. I’m also an official old-school pointy-hat Unix wizard, so I tend to prefer Unix-like systems whenever I get an option.

    So that all said, the laptop I requested was a brand new hot off the press 17″ Apple Powerbook G4. At the time in early 2004, the 1.33Ghz model was the tippy-top of the Apple line – $3200 of brushed aluminum and PowerPC architecture — and that’s what I was bribed with. The day I picked it up from CompUSA, I also picked up another gig of ram for it. That 1 gig stick was about $250.

    I pretty much lived off of that laptop until shortly after I started at my current place of employment. I had to sell it to finance a PC being as all of the work I was doing at work was Windows-based and I needed a comparable system… And PC gaming was a big deal at a place that tested PC games for some weird reason…

    But, I’ve always missed that laptop; it’s still the best laptop ever made in my not-so-humble opinion:

    • It’s from back when thermal performance was more important than being thin. So it’s huge, heavy, and built like a tank.
    • It has a screen that’s large enough you can actually see things from a few feet away.
    • It has every kind of port you could ever want built-in, versus today’s penchant for two generic ports and a bag full of dongles.
    • There’s an actual CD/DVD burner in it!
    • It has an amazing keyboard with actual keyboard sized keys and keyboard-like travel.
    • And it runs OS X, which is really BSD Unix with a candy-coated interface.

    All that said, over the years I’ve on-again, off-again thought about acquiring another of these laptops just to have one again. But I had some criteria to meet if I was to purchase one just for “old time’s sake”… It needed to be a 17” 1.33Ghz model in absolutely mint condition — preferably still in the original box — and not cost a thousand dollars. I wanted to be able to pretend that I was the first owner, but I also know the G4 is just a curious footnote in computer history and really isn’t useful for much these days — so it’s not worth anything outside of sentimental value.

    Well, all of my criteria was finally met a few weeks ago, and yesterday a virtually new 1.33Ghz 17″ G4 arrived.

    About an acre of aluminum with an apple logo right in the middle.

    A couple of rub marks around the bezel, but otherwise in pristine condition.

    Usually the first question is “How big is that thing!?” Well, each palm-rest is the size of a CD case for a size comparison.

    This is a ‘low miles’ PowerBook5,3 which has an 80G IDE HD and 1GB of ram. And while that’s nicely stock for this machine — I can do better.

    I ordered 2 gigs of ram for the machine, which is the max it will hold and should be here later today. I also decided to add an SSD to it.

    SSDs for PATA (IDE) systems were around in 2003, but were prohibitively expensive ($1000+ for about 60GB) — so I never put one in the laptop. But here we are in the future, so I was able to secure a 120GB mSATA drive and a 2.5″ mSATA to IDE adapter for about a hundred bucks.

    Now to install it…

    About 10,000 screws later and welcome to the internals of a G4 PowerBook. The mSATA and adapter are on top.

    It’s nice to see the inside of the laptop is just as pristine as the outside. There was some evidence of use like a little bit of lint around the fans, which I took care of while I was in there, but otherwise nice and clean. Even the kapton tape Apple used to hold everything in place was still sticky and holding everything in place.

    After about two hours of hardware and software install, here we are:

    The laptop still needs its memory upgrade (this evening some time) and a new battery — which will happen as soon as I find one for under a hundred bucks. But otherwise, is actually really usable.

    Safari works (mostly) and iTunes works (mostly), so I’ll restore one of my backups to the machine some time this weekend and play around with antique photoshop. 🙂

  • PowerBook 165c (Back in the 90’s…)

    This morning’s bit of computer wizardry was bringing an Apple Powerbook 165c back to life.

    System 7.1, circa 1992… The first Macintosh OS you actually had to purchase.

    The interesting thing with the 165c is it was the very first laptop with a 256 color display, and said display is a 9 inch 640×400 passive LCD. 

    As an aside, making a laptop with bezels this large here in 2020 would be a war crime.

    This 165c has 8MB of ram and a 120MB HD (That’s megabytes — the average photo out of a modern iPhone is a bit less than 5MB, so you can fit about 25 photos on this drive). And the HD still works, which is kind of amazing for being a 27 year old moving part.

    In 1993 when these came out they were around $3400, which is roughly $6000 in today’s money — and that’s pretty expensive no matter what era you’re from.

    This one needed a diode replaced on the mainboard, which with equipment this old is an easy fix… Said diode is actually visible without a magnifying glass and can be reworked with a standard soldering iron.

    Once it was working I fired up Crystal Caliburn on it for fun…

    Mmmm… Electronic Pinball.

  • PowerMac 3,6

    Today’s ‘nothing better to do’ project was reviving an old dual-G4 tower.

    Absolutely original dual 867Mhz G4 with the Nvidia GeForce4 MX video, 2Gigs of ram, and 60Gig HD it came with. Running OS X 10.3.2.

    It’s always interesting to me just how small and snappy old operating systems were. This machine is basically a pocket calculator with less storage space than a $20 USB key, and OS-wise it feels a lot faster than my bleeding-edge MacBook Pro…

  • 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 — and the jump from 1TB to 2TB internal was like $400.

    It should arrive between the 13th and 17th of this month — 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 — or about three times the volume of a 27″ iMac.

    Basically I don’t use the laptop as a laptop — 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 — 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. 🙂

    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 — so the new iMac winds up running me about $120 a month for a year. That’s doable.

    And, hey — I took care of both the Christmas and Birthday computer upgrades in one easy purchase — so I’m ahead of the game. 🙂

  • Special Project…

    I’ve got a bit of a special project coming up in the next week or two. Nothing work related, this one is a personal project and it requires these:

    OSX 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5.

    I have another boxed 10.5 set with the “New Version 10.5.4” sticker on the front.

    You could say I’ve been doing the Mac thing for a while… I have actual boxed copies of operating systems going back to System 7, which was early 90’s and ran on my Quadra 800…

    10.3 is what came on the Special Project.

    10.4 is notable for still being able to run OS9 and associated applications, which was lost in 10.5. 

    10.5 is the last official version of OS X that will run on my Special Project.