What did you do to your computer today?

[PentaxEnthusiast]

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]

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]

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

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!

 

[Volvo242GT]

That's cool.

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

-J

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

.... 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.

 

[phunguss]

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.

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]

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

 

[PentaxEnthusiast]

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!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

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.

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.

 

[PentaxEnthusiast]

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]

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]

Today I worked on a dual CPU MacPro4,1 and did the firmware upgrade to 5,1. Quite the process now.

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).

Original Quad core dual 2.2GHz

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.

Dual Quad score in GB5

Dual Hex score in GB5

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

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.

 

[Trash80toG4]

Not specifically on any individual computer, but I finally got the 1440p Display up on a flexible wall mount so it's centered comfortably in front of my Mouse/KBD/TrackBall setup. I can now roll the desk out to get at what will be storage beside and behind it. Now I only need to yank the Power/USB cables off the Hub on the desk to roll it around!

Now that the main screen is far enough from the TelCo Rack on the other side of the 1920x1200 portrait panel I can reposition and rotate that one to landscape mode on its own flexible wall mount. That way I can use it as a second screen when I flip the KVM switch over to the MDD/FW400. PITA that I've yet to find a way to do Portrait Mode under OS9.

Next to get the HP ProBook Dock onto a platform on yet a third wall mount so I can swing everything around to my hearts content. Still working on setting up that PPC Challenged MDD/FW400. One day I may get this all sorted out, maybe for Marchintosh?

 

[Trash80toG4]

Glad that word salad was clear enough to like, mate! Straightened up just enough for the pics:

Don't mind the 20mm Ultrawide distortion, was trying to get far enough back for a pic small enough to post full size. GraphicConverter is offline ATM. Trackball kept me on computer whilst in rotator cuff sling for seven weeks up to New Year's Eve and still find it useful. Mouse pad area was half as wide with main screen still off center before yesterday.



Overview shot: second ProBook/Dock/Ubuntu workstation is behind the big "I" shaped plywood of the modified pivoting wall mount on rack. Defaulting to the main and portrait screens with blank native panel.

G4/OS9 graphics workstation is the bottom shelf of rack. Now there's room enough the portrait can be rotated as horizontal second screen until I can figure out how to do get it set up under OS9. It was almost touching the rack in portrait mode before yesterday.

Should I do a dedicated topic on setup's many crazy features? That's still a long ways off. For now I think this qualifies as what I did with my computer(s)

 

[Volvo242GT]

^Yes, might as well.

Got Wi-Fi on the Mac Pro, finally. Yes, I know that I'm showing a screenshot of the other forum site. Had to use a couple Nikon Nikkormat FT series shutter mounting screws to mount the Airport Extreme card to the logic board. All of my Apple screws were too big, or coarse thread. So, there are a couple brass slotted Nikon screws inside the machine.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

So over the past few days I have been trying to to figure out how to embed a macintosh chime mp3 montage I made. The file itself was tiny as far as audio files go - maybe 400k? Making it took all of maybe 5 minutes? - easily accomplished with free Clideo audio merger. Within those 5 minutes, I stitched together a collage of bongs and saved to multiple formats (mp3, mp4, ogg etc) onto my macbook.

Then I hit a roadblock. Neocities supports direct audio upload for paying customers. Hmm my account is a static free one ... well I'm not paying $5 a month for the priviledge of puting mac chimes on my website. Call me cheap, whatever - That's stupid LOL so Im not doing it. SO with that I set forth trying to figure out how I could get sounds hosted elsewhere onto my website. I figured I was going to be using <audio> or <iframes> to accomplish this which I was ultimately correct after ALOT of being wrong. I have accounts at bandcamp, soundcloud, youtoobies etc. and while those were easy to upload to, to get a link that would properly embed wasn't possible ... I mean maybe it is but at least I couldnt figure it out with the low-tier account I had lol. I then thought about my google drive which I never use, so figured Id give that a shot and get some use out of it. I researched a number of purported solutions that were within the 2020s using html <audio> and manually creating an embeded link (similar to what I did for the YT shorts vid) but for the life of me I could not get it to play. I could get the player on there - no problem, but no dice on playing the file. I tried a number of sources, file types etc. but same result. That was yesterday. I cut my losses and onto getting my older two kids off the bus and scooping my 2y/o from daycare.

Today I have success ... kinda. I mean, I call it success. Is it exactly what I envisioned? No, not exactly but I'll take it for now and it isn't costing me anything either nor should it. Instead of using html <audio>, I am using the raw embed file off google drive and dropping that into <iframes> and then manually adjusting down its size. I can't make it blue like my site as I intended to ... at least I don't understand how I could do that yet (maybe in the future) but I have a functioning play button! YAY lol Below you can see me testing on my "under construction retro console page". The player on the right is <audio> which is broken and the player on the left is 100x50px <iframes> and it plays just fine. Do I like the look of <audio> better? Yes. Do I understand how to adjust its look better. Yes. but its broken so there's that part haha. I'll take the <iframes> win for now.

Retro Consoles (Under Construction)