What did you do to your computer today?

[framling]

I managed to get Kiwix to finally work on OS X 10.5 (PowerPC) even though I don't think they ever had a PowerPC-working build. There are some PowerPC builds around but the components inside the app bundle (contentManager.dylib, xapianAccessor.dylib, zimAccessor.dylib and zimXapianIndexer.dylib) were all build for Intel-only. Therefore, Kiwix did not work.

It does work now after re-building the components and the XUL framework, and I can browse Wikipedia offline from the safety of my iBook G4.

If you enable ZIM indexing, the CPU will surely get gimped for few hours, as seen in my screenshot.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

You can also use Firefox Dynasty, which works with OS X as far back as Mountain Lion.

Anyway, getting the "new" A1286 set up... Did discover that you can't have both a MacOS Extended partition and an APFS partition on the same drive, so going to have to set up an external SSD or hard drive for the currently installed Catalina OS.

If you stick with legacy macos, there are some great still-supported browsers. My favs are Basilisk and Jazzny's Powerfox that was forked from Basilisk. Powerfox focuses on earlier PPC and Intel macos but works just fine on newer old macos like El Cap and Catalina; effectively macos compatibility that mirrors basilisk except Powerfox additionally reaches back to Leopard and Tiger and across architectures from Intel to PowerPC.

I am also a big fan of Wicknix's SeaLion for old macos. He also put together BrassMonkey that has a very nice seamonkey inspired mail suite and other goodies built into it.

There are lots of neat still supported browsers for these old macs & macos

 

[Volvo242GT]

Firefox Dynasty is modern Firefox with the necessary code to allow it to run on the older OS X versions. Am using the 145 version of it, and it seems to work fine with 99% of the websites out there.

So, the A1286 has turned out to be more of a problem child than the first mid-2012 A1286 I owned for myself. That one looked pretty beat and had an iffy headphone jack, plus a temperature sensor that wasn't working right. This one, the board has corrosion in spots, and had corroded case screws, etc. Started cleaning it up with 99% IPA, and installed the 16GB RAM from my old late 2011 system. Powered it up and it's imitating a PowerBook 180 with severe tunnel vision.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Firefox Dynasty is modern Firefox with the necessary code to allow it to run on the older OS X versions. Am using the 145 version of it, and it seems to work fine with 99% of the websites out there.

So, the A1286 has turned out to be more of a problem child than the first mid-2012 A1286 I owned for myself. That one looked pretty beat and had an iffy headphone jack, plus a temperature sensor that wasn't working right. This one, the board has corrosion in spots, and had corroded case screws, etc. Started cleaning it up with 99% IPA, and installed the 16GB RAM from my old late 2011 system. Powered it up and it's imitating a PowerBook 180 with severe tunnel vision.

FF Dynasty is my middle son's favorite too and what he uses on he and his older brothers imac to watch his youtube kids account ( currently obsessed with electric motorcycles ) but I think he likes FFD most because of the colorful theme options he has access to (He is 6). I find my oldest using Basilisk because he likes Epic books a lot and the site runs best on that particular browser for him on the lagacy macos on that box.

This morning I streamed the Popes St.Peter Square Palm Sunday mass at the Vatican on my MX25 09 macbookpro. I've been sick all this week, so didn't want to expose everybody to whatever this annoying viral gunk is.

 

[Yoda]

Though I have a PowerBook 170 in front of me today, on which I plan to complete a writing project later, the computer I am doing battle with is not a Mac but a Tandy. A Model 600 in fact - a machine which dates from 1985, and not highly thought of then, let alone now.

This is largely due to the fact it isn't DOS compatible, but is, instead, fairly useless.

It's built like a tank, has an 80-character, 16-line non-backlit screen, a stunningly good keyboard, a mere 32k RAM, and an operating system designed by people for whom computers and their users were seemingly entirely unfamiliar. They went on to write the manual, which is not one the best you could hope for either.

The computer works, if it could be called that, but the struggle on this occasion is attempting to get files off it. It has a single-sided 3.5-inch floppy drive, which should make it easy, but the 600 produces files in some kind of 'Works 1.2' format, which nothing can read or seemingly convert, including Works or Word versions in DOS, or even LibreOffice which manages many curious file types, but not this. All I get is a header, then garbage characters, sometimes including the command menu. There's a method described in the manual to copy the file out in ASCII, but each time I try I get a whole different collection of some parts of my text, and lots more garbage.

The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over, expecting different results.... but it actually does.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Today I tested two of my iMac g4s & a g4 mini to make sure they still worked and survived a tumble off some storage shelves in my office when their metal supports fatigued sending all sorts of stuff tumbling to the ground. This was last week Tuesday while my three boys & I were eating dinner. I feel SO lucky that the boys were not in my office as they love to get up on that shelf and play with my vintage transformer and gobot collection. So many times I’ve been in there with them too & my littlest 2.5 y/o loves to sit right below that shelf on the ground - scary thought just makes me sick to think about . Everyone is fine of course but holy heck!

Addirionally, something whacked my a1047 on the way down (maybe one of those big krks) which caused it to kernel panic. Luckily it rebooted without issue and I haven’t experienced any weird behavior … yet

BEFORE

AFTER

1.) Good news is that the iMacs & mini all survived a 6-7ft tumble and are working fine. I did have one dvd rom stop working but that was due to the pata cable coming loose from the jolt of the fall which was easy to fix.
2.) The two big 8” gen1 krk studio monitors did NOT survive without damage - the 1st driver ejected itself out the front of its enclosure and the 2nd launched capacitors off the interior pcb. I fixed both and they are next to my record player set up & sound great.

Initially I wasn’t going to use them until I built some sound isolating stands but things have changed haha. Moving forward, I’m going to install a 3rd shelf which will prevent me from loading too much on any one single shelf which I am a fan of doing. Tetris & Jenga are two of my favorite games after all lol. I am also going to add a fourth steel foot + L brackets on either side/end. I really dont want to have this happen again so along with that additional shelf, a steel foot every 2 feet effectively.

I also installed my 2nd HD5770 into my cMP 1,1 and installed an owc Mercury Accelsior M2 pcie card formatted a Liteon 128gb ssd & am currently cloning my el cap installation over to it. This card unfortunately was not bootable in my a1117 PMG5 but hoping it will be here and if so, it will be fun to match up benchmarks against two 128gb sata SDDs in software raid-0.

On a side note, I am tempted to empty out both my office and the guest bedroom for a repaint and new carpet installation LOL. We’ll see but I’m pretty sure it’s already on my honey list haha.

Fun never ends.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Nice, turns out the Accelsior msata is completely bootable in this cMP 1,1. Benchmarks don't beat the sw raid 0 but it is perfectly snappy regardless. I cannot tell any difference for normal DD tasks.

Ive never found great performance with Liteon, so I will keep hunting around for a Samsung, Intel, Crucial etc msata to see if I can squeak out better performance. Also, I havent gotten around to flashing the 1,1 to a 2,1 and installing the new cpus lol. I was sick last week, we're on the road for spring break this week sooo ... next week LOL.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Huh I just realized something cool with Pithos pandora front end for Linux. When you stream with a free Pandora account using Pithos, that account with ads becomes ad-free.

I’ve been streaming for days non stop and have yet to hear a single ad.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I went ahead and installed MX25 on my kiddos 2009 imac for improved and more nuanced parental controls as elcaps is pretty broken at this point. This act led to the adventure below: lol

TL;DR If you're running MX25 on a legacy Intel Macintosh and you're getting an ACPI boot error + whacko max fans, boot with systemd & reset your SMC to fix this issue, then verify with lm-sensors in xfce Terminal.

I have been experiencing an ACPI boot error with uncontrolled max fans on a late 2009 24" imac. I was able to get this under control and I believe what worked was this:

1. switch from sysvinit to systemd via MXtweak and reboot
2. Powerdown and unplug holding the powerbutton for 30 seconds to reset this old imacs SMC
3. Reboot into gui & voila, ACPI errors & blasting fans are gone.

Now around this highly distilled list, there was a frenetic and chaotic mess of me trying to think through what was going on. Some other things in between these steps that I did, included installing lm-sensors+Psensor to make sure that my cpu & gpu temps were ok so the max fans were not stemming from that (which they were fine - excellent infact as I repasted both a few month back). I then tried to install CoolerControl and get it to work on MX25. Initially, I could install the Debian package however it would not work once installed with sysvinit and I was unable to get it to work despite next steps on their website. Anyhow, CC told me that it was unhappy with sysvinit so I ultimately switched to systemd. This absolutely got CoolerControl up and running but like lm-sensors, it too did not see the fans, just my gpu & cpu. In addition just in case there was some need for it (to see the fan/sensors), I installed liquidctl but fyi it did nothing as its primary function is for lcs systems and was a complete waste of time; me just grasping at straws really. After much fussing and leveraging lm-sensors, I noticed it continually would not see any of my fans/sensors outside of the gpu/cpu and I know those temps were solid so after some additional research I thought there must be some issue with MX talking with the logicboard and was trying to figure out what broken system was causing this; enter pram/smc. I read where a mint user was also having issues with their fans and a smc reset fixed this for them, so as a last ditch effort, I tried this as well and low and behold, it worked! - well I assume that is what fixed it anyhow thus is what I'm going with lol

It's Friday, so everyone have a fantastic weekend!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I have been fine tuning MX25 on my boy's early 2009 24" Imac 9,1. The point as spoken to earlier is to create a safe environment and employ basic Parental controls within MX25.1 due to limitations of El Cap. To this end, most recently I figured out how to create SSBs in MX using Firefox's FireSSB add-on. This works incredibly well; the only drawback being that FireSSB was built by a non-english speaker and as such their English language resources translation are .. interesting to decipher haha Still, glad they are there and the add on is great. It allows me to create standalone access to some of my younger kids (2.5 & 6.5y/o) favorite to-dos (Epic online books, PBS kids tv and games etc.) without access to a FF address bar or any browsing tools that could get them outside their guard rails and into the grown up internet.

I also picked up a cheap pair of used Logitech Logi speakers at the goodwill for $5 bucks. If there was one sore point with MX its that audio while working fine, has zero EQ, so audio can sound extremely harsh and not treat speakers well. I have fixed this with Easy Effects+PipeWire's easyeffects effect bundle that includes an excellent 32 band EQ. I noticed on not so great Jazz recordings I stream via Pithos for example that the speakers would distort badly around 571 hertz, so with this handy app+ EQ, I have easily been able to roll that back a bit and create an excellent sound and save that as an automatically loaded preset upon opening the app which I added to autostart when anyone boots with Pithos, Freetube, FF all set to leverage EE. So now the kids have some very nice sound for $5 bucks and my time figuring out a gui EQ.

Lastly, I technically havent employed this quite yet as I am unsure if I want to drive this from my router or if I want to employ it only for this computer at this time but I think I have settled on OpenDNS FamilyShield which is a modifiable but designed to be highly plug and play DNS filter to keep my kids from malicious and adult content (especially my oldest 8.75 y/o who has limited browsing access for school) and for my own ease sacrificing less time investment in set up and management. Anyways, I need to think a bit more on how exactly I want to employ this but will get on with it next week I think once I decide on next steps.

 

[Volvo242GT]

Reposted from the less-reliable site...

Been busy. Did a lot of work on a client's machines, backing up his data onto another drive, fixing some issues on his 2020 intel equipped Air, removing his data from his old 2011 Air that he wants sold, parting out his "problem child" 2017 Air, and getting a mid-2012 A1278 MBP set up for him, to replace both of the older MBA machines, and to hopefully replace his mid-2009 A1278.

On my own machines, I parted out the second "problem child" A1286 that I recently purchased, swapped said computer's battery into the A1286 I got back from the aforementioned client, since that computer had a battery that said "Service Recommended" in System Profiler, and got my old late-2011 A1286 ready for a friend to replace his GPU-damaged early-2011 A1286 with. At least, the ATi chip in mine still worked fine when I retired it a couple months ago. The desktop machines seem to be working fine these days. I do want to max out the RAM on the G4 DA, and need to get a 17" LCD Studio Display for it, since the Cinema Display I'm picking up for the Mac Pro won't work under Mac OS 9.x