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 — 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…
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.
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.
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. 🙂
Everyone in chat was showing off their computer space, and I played along.
Here’s where I run the universe for all of the Roanoak players.
Ahh, my trusty iMac. And on the left end of the desk is all of the 501(c)3 paperwork I’m working on.
My one year lease here was up on the first, but I’m only extending it for two months because I’ve got a new place lined up that will be pretty special – but it won’t be ready until the end of next month…
Oh, and Zeze will be moving in with me, as will Fury from Luskwood on SL (who is also an employee at work). Kalira is moving to Longmont with her harem and I think Zeze will finally be moving on from that sordid tale…
I’ve always been a big fan of Apple machines – probably my constant desire to root for the underdog mixed with a love for Unix.
Anyway, with my birthday fast approaching, today I drove over to the Apple Store in Park Meadows and picked up a new 27″ iMac. 3.4Ghz quad-core CPU, 8gigs of ram, a 1TB “Fusion Drive” (256G SSD, 750G HD), and a GTX 680MX video card.
It’s huge on my desk – but I really like it.