What did you do to your computer today?

PentaxEnthusiast

Tinkerer
Jan 27, 2026
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SATX
Worked on my website a bit this afternoon. Added some text boxes, added some newer videos and figured out how to embed a short video. For some reason, the short link which is provided for embedding, that linke has a /shorts/ in it (like youtube.com/blach blah blah/shorts/blah blah blah ). This did not play well with <iframes>. For it to work, I had to change that to /embed/. Once this was done, the short would embed and function as expected. Interestingly, a normal longer form video includes the /embed/ in its address. Kinda weird but whatever haha. I also added a bb forum for nostalgia's sake which took all of two minutes literally. I had to use another free service that inculded unlimited hosting as my neocities account (also free lol) only supports static hosting. Anyways, had fun puting that together and cleaning up some bobs n bits I forgot to get to last time I was in it.

I'll share my retro site with you guys. Please don't laugh too much lol :)It is a work in progress. Anyways, having fun walking down memory lane with my website.
Hey, this is awesome!!!
 

phunguss

Active Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
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Stillwater, MN
Yesterday, I worked on a "dead" MacPro4,1 that was upgraded to 5,1. Could not get a boot chime or video out. Tried different drives, RAM assortments, different video cards. Still nothing. So I pulled the CPU tray (single) and removed the heatsink. I did a little cleaning of dust and since I had a couple spare LGA1366 processors laying around, I swapped in a 6 core/12 thread 3.3GHz Xeon. Applied thermal paste and installed the heatsink. It then booted up fine. I installed OCLP on the 2TB internal HDD and was able to boot 10.7 through Sonoma. Maybe it was just a bad/failed CPU.
 

Certificate of Excellence

Active Tinkerer
Nov 1, 2021
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Well, AT&T fiber went down over night with expected fix by tomorrow morning so the kids and I will be having fun like it’s 1985. I doubt ATT will get back up until then so we’ll see how the kids handle zero Idevices haha. I think I’ll break out my nes and show them the coveted cartridge blowing technique. We’ll see :) I did get MX25.1 installed on my tower today (DL’d before the fiber went down) so very happy to have that up and running. Super fast & snappy smooth and I was able to install despite the lack of connectivity which was nice.

*Update
Screenshot_2026-02-20_15-37-32.jpg

Just realized that neofetch has been deprecated and now replaced with fastfetch lol. Super snappy on this box. Also ATT got it done and service has returned as of about an hour ago + they are going to credit my account for the loss in service. Happy all things considered and ITS FRIDAY :)

Have a great weekend everybody!
 

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Certificate of Excellence

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Nov 1, 2021
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.... I want to document/reference and have a little Web Ring button on the bottom, if anyone remembers those.....
I think at some point I will add a page with all the old webring widgets I can find. Kind of like this place except with WR widgets. There was a site I made my way to that had a bunch of them but for the life of me I can't recall where that was lol. I should have bookmarked it - Derp. Anyways if you are interested in creating a webring, this site has some pretty good step by step instructions on how to implement it. There are others but this one seemed really straight forward to me.

That's cool.

Hmmm, just realized that the title of the thread had a typo in it.

-J

It was a daily reminder of the human condition for me. I rather enjoyed it frankly. :cool:
 
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phunguss

Active Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
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Stillwater, MN
I think at some point I will add a page with all the old webring widgets I can find. Kind of like this place except with WR widgets. There was a site I made my way to that had a bunch of them but for the life of me I can't recall where that was lol. I should have bookmarked it - Derp. Anyways if you are interested in creating a webring, this site has some pretty good step by step instructions on how to implement it. There are others but this one seemed really straight forward to me.



It was a daily reminder of the human condition for me. I rather enjoyed it frankly. :cool:
Cameron's world? OMG, my eyes hurt!!! All those 1990's animated GIFs is crazy! That page must have taken forever to load on a slow connection.. and the sheer power of a CPU/GPU to keep all of them moving at the same time? Oof-da!
 

Certificate of Excellence

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Nov 1, 2021
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Cameron's world? OMG, my eyes hurt!!! All those 1990's animated GIFs is crazy! That page must have taken forever to load on a slow connection.. and the sheer power of a CPU/GPU to keep all of them moving at the same time? Oof-da!
I had a few sites on geocities back in the late 90s that I built over 56k lol. You’re not kidding a page like CW would ‘ve taken 15-20 minutes to load Lol! I do recall simple animated gifs like that - just a couple inching their way down to completion on 36.6-56k.

In today’s day of high speed internet, it would be fun to have a page that automatically throttles down to emulate what internet in the 90s was really like, pixelated low res pics, gifs n all :D
 

Certificate of Excellence

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Nov 1, 2021
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My son has somehow turned on the cursor highlight (the black, obnoxious square around it) and I for the life of me can't remember how to turn it off. He's managed to do this in two programs!
Haha, that's pretty funny :) My middle kiddo about 4 years ago was whacking on the keyboard of one of my intel macbooks and somehow turned half the keyboard off LOL. This was in a brand new to me operating system - ElementaryOS that I was demoing for the first time, so I had zero idea how to undo what he had done as its environment is Pantheon based. It took a couple weeks of research to figure out that what he did was somehow hit a hot-key combination that switched what sort of KB I had. Elementary was pretty nice I thought although it at its core is ubuntu, so came with the same quirks that had to be worked through prior to it being 100%.I liked how similar it was to macos though. Very intuitive to any longtime mac/macos user.

What operating system was this done in?

Today was mostly bike maintenance before and after a downhill ride I had with my boys and a few of the neighborhood kids and one other dad. I did get to downloading & installing Pithos Pandora player.
Screenshot_2026-02-20_15-37-32.jpg


Crushing sound through some ancient Cambridge soundworks "Surround Station" PC speakers I think my Dad originally bought in the late 90s and I later inherited when he upgraded to something else. These are really great speakers even after all these years.
 
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PentaxEnthusiast

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Jan 27, 2026
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Haha, that's pretty funny :) My middle kiddo about 4 years ago was whacking on the keyboard of one of my intel macbooks and somehow turned half the keyboard off LOL. This was in a brand new to me operating system - ElementaryOS that I was demoing for the first time, so I had zero idea how to undo what he had done as its environment is Pantheon based. It took a couple weeks of research to figure out that what he did was somehow hit a hot-key combination that switched what sort of KB I had. Elementary was pretty nice I thought although it at its core is ubuntu, so came with the same quirks that had to be worked through prior to it being 100%.I liked how similar it was to macos though. Very intuitive to any longtime mac/macos user.

What operating system was this done in?
Oh yeah, they always find ways to do something! Hahaha.

This is on 9.2
 

Volvo242GT

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Feb 7, 2022
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It could be worse. In late 2014, my niece was playing with a couple friends in our bonus room. For some reason, they decided to make a tent, using my sister's original intel iMac as one support for the sheet. Well, pulled the computer over onto its face. Display cracked internally. Since it was a 2006 machine, we wound up getting a 21.5" 2009 version to replace it. Parted out the old one.

Today, tried to install the ATi Radeon HD 5870 video card. Got the fan going, but spaced out, and forgot that the card needed two harnesses to power itself. So, no video. Reinstalled the GT120 card, leaving the ATi card in place. Getting another harness this coming week. I did pull the drive from the A1286 and cloned the High Sierra install to the 1.5TB drive in the Mac Pro, so I can dual boot Mavericks and High Sierra now.
 

phunguss

Active Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
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Stillwater, MN
Today I worked on a dual CPU MacPro4,1 and did the firmware upgrade to 5,1. Quite the process now.
MP51.0089.B00.jpg

Started with El Capitan, and followed this guide to get it done (then another update through High Sierra). Had to swap out my HD 5770 original GPU for a Quadro K4200 (I only had a single power cable available but 5 more on order now) to get the Mojave installer to work (Metal required for final 144.0.0.0.0 update).
144.0.0.0.0.jpg

Original Quad core dual 2.2GHz
dual2.2GHz-original.jpg

Once I get the Firmware up to 144.0.0.0.0, then I can run OCLP and lots of versions of MacOS. I purchased two X5680 Xeon 3.3GHz CPUs and delided them with a vice. That should make a nice improvement in speed.
dual3.3GHz-cleanup.jpg

Dual Quad score in GB5
Screen Shot 2026-02-21 at 8.41.32 PM.png

Dual Hex score in GB5
Screen Shot 2026-02-21 at 9.08.26 PM.png
 
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Certificate of Excellence

Active Tinkerer
Nov 1, 2021
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Today I worked on a dual CPU MacPro4,1 and did the firmware upgrade to 5,1. Quite the process now.
View attachment 26931
Started with El Capitan, and followed this guide to get it done (then another update through High Sierra). Had to swap out my HD 5770 original GPU for a Quadro K4200 (I only had a single power cable available but 5 more on order now) to get the Mojave installer to work (Metal required for final 144.0.0.0.0 update).
View attachment 26932
Original Quad core dual 2.2GHz
View attachment 26929
Once I get the Firmware up to 144.0.0.0.0, then I can run OCLP and lots of versions of MacOS. I purchased two X5680 Xeon 3.3GHz CPUs and delided them with a vice. That should make a nice improvement in speed.
View attachment 26930
I picked up a lidded pair of 3.0ghz x5365 xeons last summer for like $5 bucks lol that I need to delid to bring my qc 1,1 to 8 cores. LOL They're sitting on my tool rack in my garage (still in their box) next to my bench - been there all winter. Hoping to get to that project soon. Then I'll upgrade that cMP to dual boot MX 25.1 & elcap.

Hey, this is awesome!!!
Thanks. Its gone through some changes and I have more planned. It is a source of amusement for me anyways. I need to get back into the blog. Plenty of neat stuff to write about.
 
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