RIHAHN.COM

Month: May 2022

  • Movies

    It’s been a hot minute since the last time I went to the movies… Between needing a space suit for one year, and then the economy being pure suck for the next, it’s just not been feasible.

    Well, I finally decided to bite the proverbial bullet and go see “Top Gun : Maverick”.

    One of the displays running the trailer at the Harkins theater I went to.

    Unfortunately, by the time I decided to take out a loan to go see a movie, every local AMC was sold out for the weekend. So I tried the nearby Alamo Drafthouse and it was the same story…

    Eventually I found a Harkins theater up at the mall that use to be the old Stapleton airport, and not only were their theaters almost empty, the seats were $9 each.

    That’s a bit more than 50% less than what AMC wants…

    So I drove up to the theater, which is about 40 minutes away, and made sure to leave myself plenty of time for the terribad traffic on I-70. And arrived at the mall just in time for a random hailstorm; so I sat in the car for a few minutes imagining that it was about to look a lot more like a golf ball.

    Never fails.

    Fortunately the hail was essentially slush and my car is fine.

    Anyway, the new Top Gun movie is really, really good. It was very respectful of the original movie, had lots of great action and meaningful interpersonal scenes, and thoroughly wrecked modern CGI green-screen movies with practical effects and literal fighter jets.

    All in all, a worthy movie for my hard earned cash. I’m glad I decided to pay the theater tax to see it.

    Listening to "Let the Day Begin" by The Call

  • 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

  • April Showers Bring May Blizzards

    It snowed all night, so here’s how things look here in Colorado this morning…

    If it looks cold, that’s because it is; it’s 28 degrees outside. 🙂

    Listening to "Explorers" by The Midnight

  • Weather

    Yesterday it was almost 90 outside, today it is…

    Listening to "Girl Can't Help It " by Journey

  • Airport

    Another interesting old bit of Apple tech I have laying about here at home; the Gen1 Airport Express.

    Before the Apple TV, if you wanted to pipe iTunes to your stereo on the other side of the room, you needed one of these – which is why I bought this one back in 2004.

    Unlike a lot of the other older Apple stuff I have cluttering up my house, this no longer works with modern hardware… Well, it still mechanically works just fine, you just need an early 2000’s Mac to connect to it and configure it.

    Fortunately, I have a few of those. 🙂

    Interestingly these had pretty good analog sound quality due to the TI Burr-Brown DAC they used, and with Apple Lossless (ALAC) and using TOSLink (that headphone jack also houses a laser for fiber optic use) the output was 1:1 to the original CD – over wireless!

    It was pretty cutting edge stuff in 2004.

    I used this with a Sony SAVA 500 home theater setup, which was also pretty good for someone without a zillion dollars to spend.

    These days it’s all about the Apple TV, which has enough CPU grunt internally to run its own network connections and Apple Music application. And everything is ALAC now…

    Listening to "Who Can It Be Now?" by Men At Work

  • Sauce

    I’m a big fan of hot sauce and tend to put it on everything, because everything can use a bit more spice in my humble opinion.

    I’m also a bit of a hot sauce snob; I like the heat and appreciate anything that can make a little sweat break out on my brow – but it also has to be flavorful… There is a lot of sauce out there that simply tastes like burning, and I’m not a fan.

    So, my refrigerator has a door pocket reserved for various hot sauces, but the one I tend to use the most often when I have it, is “Diablo” packets from Taco Bell.

    No, really. “Diablo” is really, really good sauce – good enough that once a month I get a couple of soft tacos and ask for as many sauce packets as the nice person at the window will part with, and then squirrel them away for later…

    Now, the astute among you may be telling their monitor, “Just buy it in the bottle at the store – they sell Taco Bell sauce there!” And while you would be right, at least around Denver all you can get is yellow (mild) and red (hot). The “hot” is essentially spicy catsup and I’m not a fan of that either.

    But recently Target of all places started carrying Diablo bottles, so yesterday I picked up a couple…

    Mmmm, Diablo sauce…

    What’s interesting is Diablo does not appear to be exceptionally shelf-stable; the bottles I picked up were just put on the shelf, and expire in mid July. So this may explain why it’s so hard to get outside of a trip to Taco Bell.

    Either way though, this makes me pretty happy. I’m off to scramble some eggs, make a Denver omelet, and slather it in Diablo sauce – back in a bit!

    Listening to "Private Eyes" by Hall and Oates

  • WoW

    Blizzard, owned by Activision, owned by Microsoft (Microblizzavision) announced the next expansion for World of Warcraft (WoW) about two weeks ago.

    It piqued my curiosity…

    See, I more or less gave up on WoW during “Battle for Azeroth” (BfA) as I mostly play for the setting, and the setting had ceased to be “Warcraft”. The current expansion, “Shadowlands”, is such a radical departure from the overall setting that even the company’s writers have no idea where to go with it. So it’s a mess of disparate systems with a janky storyline and a lot of pointless time sinks that only serve to annoy.

    In short, WoW is a mess right now and has been for several years. And the abysmal user numbers these days prove this out.

    So Blizzard went off to have a rethink apparently; they pulled people off of the current expansion (cancelling an entire content patch) and set about working on all of the broken stuff… And announced the end result two weeks ago.

    “Dragonflight”

    Dragonflight makes all of the right noises from Blizzard management; “going back to a grounded Warcraft setting”, “getting rid of borrowed power”, “more focus on core functionality instead of layers of systems”, and “putting the RPG back in MMORPG”.

    Basically my laundry list of gripes were being addressed, so I re-upped for 6 months to signal my approval of the better direction and have been playing catch-up this week.

    When I quit during BfA, I canceled my account completely, so I had to start up a new account and begin from the ground floor; level 1.

    Last night I made it to 53 (out of 60) and have started on the Shadowlands content… Fortunately Shadowlands is 2-3 content patches along and most of the truly bad stuff has been edited out. So it’s still a weirdly disjointed story with too much emphasis on Mary Sue NPCs, but at least it’s not painful to level through.

    Once I hit 60 I’ll attempt to meet up with a few friends who still play, and bum around the world doing things like unlocking mounts and looking for fancy armor bits until Dragonflight launches.

    Given how expensive it is these days to leave the house, $12 a month for WoW, if it’s fun, seems like a good deal…

    Listening to "Sailing" by Christopher Cross