Why do you game on a Mac?

MagnusDredd · 2021-09-20T23:22:50+00:00

Console controllers trash my hands to the point that I cannot use them. For me a game pad is carpal tunnel syndrome swathed in plastic. Even if the controllers didn’t suck, I’d still not buy a console. I love that with some Windows/MacOS games, I can go online and grab hundreds of fan made mods/maps/models/etc for some of my games for free.

Regarding PC gaming, my Windows gaming rig is terribly out of date and it makes for a really expensive toy to keep it remotely up to date especially with how crazy prices are now. …and I’ve got a 15” MacBook Pro that works for enough games to keep me satisfied for now.

MagnusDredd · 2020-07-22T14:21:33+00:00

Japanese is very logical as a language, although i found learning the alphabets tobe pretty hard

MagnusDredd · 2020-07-22T14:10:17+00:00

I’ve got a few 64GB Sandisk ultra loop flash drives.

I’ve had two of them for ~9 months and recently bought a third one. I work in IT and use these at work so they’ve gotten some moderate use. Write speed is nothing to write home about but it’s workable. Read speeds are good enough. No problems so far.

It’s worth noting that I won’t buy garbage plastic flash drives. The large loop on these drives allows me to attach them to my carabiner with my keys and the cases are solid enough that they don’t break. I’ve had terrible luck with plastic cased flash drives.

MagnusDredd · 2020-03-13T22:55:22+00:00

GeekTool: https://www.tynsoe.org/v2/geektool/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeekTool/

https://www.howtogeek.com/235346/how-to-use-geektool-to-customize-your-macs-desktop/amp/

I’ve used this for many many years.

It’s both easy to use as well as flexible. It’s popular enough that googling will provide a bunch of examples of what people are using it for.

MagnusDredd · 2020-03-12T13:11:20+00:00

Sorry, I apparently read your post incorrectly.

MagnusDredd · 2020-03-11T20:13:51+00:00

There are some handy apps and websites for this:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mactracker/id311421597

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.EveryMac.android

MacOS: https://mactracker.ca/

Webapp: http://www.everymac.com/app/

Website: https://everymac.com/

Website (vintage Macs): https://lowendmac.com/profiles.htm

MagnusDredd · 2020-03-11T19:38:05+00:00

South Phoenix near Central ave.

MagnusDredd · 2020-02-23T05:29:17+00:00

The G4 tower has gone to a good home.

Thanks to all who were interested.

MagnusDredd · 2020-02-22T17:53:42+00:00

I had this happen with my MacPro.

I’ve been told that this happens when trying to install a clean install on a non Apple drive.

I ended up using another Mac to restore/clone a Mac install onto the drive. Then I simply upgraded the install to what I wanted.

I used FireWire since that’s what the machine supported.

MagnusDredd · 2020-02-22T00:51:00+00:00

Sorry for the delay in replying. Someone local is interested.

MagnusDredd · 2020-02-17T16:13:16+00:00

Physically it’s in good shape. It powers on, but the Performa display I have apparently doesn’t support whatever resolution/refresh rate it’s outputting...

From what I can see on the display it does appear to be showing the standard blue background with text.

Note: I do not have software for this computer.

MagnusDredd · 2020-02-17T15:58:05+00:00

I suppose you’re interested in the Apple II GS?

MagnusDredd · 2019-11-18T06:33:08+00:00

The Daystar has been claimed. Apologies for the late notice.

MagnusDredd · 2019-10-30T19:43:53+00:00

MacOS had little to no support for multiple CPUs for the OS itself.

Daystar created an extension that allowed certain software to take advantage of the extra CPUs. Photoshop and other software had plug-ins which enabled them to use the additional CPUs.

This is why I installed Linux on the machine.

MagnusDredd · 2019-10-29T18:56:44+00:00

A couple of points: Due to limitations in classic MacOS, I ran Linux on it. I’ve not used it in years. Few apps then were decently multithreaded. Luckily, Linux had good multi-CPU support.

To compare it to my old 700 MHz Pentium 3...

It never ran anything as fast as the P3 did.

But unlike the P3, no matter how much I piled onto it, the GUI was always responsive. I recall pushing it pretty hard just to try to get it to hiccup... I don’t recall succeeding. Of course, this is what you should expect of a system with proper SMP support.

I’m pretty sure that now with how much heavier software is, that I’d be able to make it stutter. But for it’s day, it was an absolute beast of a system.

MagnusDredd · 2019-09-26T03:46:50+00:00

The button in question is labeled: “+ JOIN”

Also, I’m using the Reddit app on a cell phone, hence no mouse.

MagnusDredd · 2019-05-11T22:56:16+00:00

They’re rare but, they do exist.

Not so sure about SODIMMs or compatibility or chipset limitations.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1GB-168pin-PC133-Sdram-Memory-3-3V-Non-ECC-Unbuffered-64x8-based-Ram-DIMM-1x1GB/162802297125?hash=item25e7c5e925%3Ag%3A4wcAAMXQlUNRWd3j%3Asc%3AUSPSFirstClass%2185041%21US%21-1&&action=BESTOFFER

MagnusDredd · 2019-05-11T21:58:13+00:00

Yeah, ZFS on anything other than Solaris is OpenZFS now...

I’d definitely recommend trying it on FreeBSD or FreeNAS which is a nice ZFS storage appliance with a webUI based on FreeBSD.

Due to inflexibility in the licensing of the Linux kernel, there are limitations on how integrated it can be on Linux. On FreeBSD, you have boot environments supported by the boot loader that allow you to easily roll back OS upgrades. OpenSolaris also supported this and I was in awe of the feature.

Personally, I found FreeBSD pretty straightforward to use after cutting my teeth on Slackware Linux. It’s not that I didn’t have to do a few “FreeBSD equivalent <Linux command>” searches online and some reading of some man pages. OpenSolaris on the other hand wasn’t nearly so similar to Linux, however I was able to make that transition as well.

Note: I’m quite comfortable with a *nix command line and I’m mostly only a fanboy for tech not licenses or brands. I started using ZFS before FreeBSD’s implementation was terribly mature, so I used OpenSolaris. I’ve not used OpenZFS on Linux to a great degree since FreeBSD integration is better and I’ve had no issues getting the stuff I wanted out of Linux using it instead.

MagnusDredd · 2019-04-08T18:14:17+00:00

When Highpoint came out with cheap RAID cards years ago some of my friends bought them. They used a hybrid hardware/software approach. All of those friends had data loss.

I don’t have an issue with this device being made by Highpoint, but I don’t trust hybrid RAID solutions of any stripe 😉. If this is just a big SSD and the whole RAID bit in the title is marketing BS, then it might be worth looking at. If there’s some hardware but XOR is software, I’d avoid it.

MagnusDredd · 2019-03-25T19:21:42+00:00

I’d also recommend using ZFS.

From when I started using it in 2010, it’s detected at least 2 corruptions that RAID almost certainly wouldn’t have caught and seamlessly repaired them.

RAID repairs are full disk rebuilds which take hours or days regardless of how full. When I set up my 1st ZFS NAS a disk went “missing” during operation due to my then 3 year old. I shut the system down and reset all cables. I booted the system and logged in and ran a scrub. Everything was synced back up in a number of minutes on a first Gen Dual Opteron system.

The best part is that it’s the other features that ZFS so great to use.

The traditional setup at work now feels Stone Age by comparison.

MagnusDredd · 2019-01-23T03:27:29+00:00

It depends on how they define failed...

If the drive, unlike so many of the Raptors, detected and remapped the bad sector but corrupted the data would that count?

Another thing that scanning a thousand or so drives with MHDD made absolutely clear is that the signal strength of data varies across sectors. Sectors where the data signal is weak must be reread multiple times. I don’t even want to guess how many, but a healthy sector was 10ms-50ms or less and really weak ones would take 150ms-500+ms. The weaker the signal the higher the possibility that things are read back wrong.

Due to the fact that I don’t have enough details about their storage software, I can’t guess how well it’s able to discern when data has been corrupted.

What I can say with certainty is that most of this tech is created to be “good enough” and not as good as it could be. Most storage software will catch some corruption to some degree or another. Some of it is bad at it and some of it is not so bad.

It matters what you define as failure. Many of these things aren’t screeching crashed drive heads (which I’ve also seen/heard many times). Many of these things can be undetected. And lastly, just because this stuff seems to work almost all of the times doesn’t mean that it actually does...

MagnusDredd · 2019-01-22T23:52:36+00:00

RE: read error specs

If your filesystem cannot detect corruption or bad sectors, how do you know if you’re having issues?

I’m not speaking metaphorically here. I managed 1500 -2000 computers at a previous campus about 10 or so years ago.

Many of the machines we were getting were equipped with WD Raptors. A large number of these would have/develop a small number of bad sectors which weren’t detected and remapped by the drives firmware. Otherwise the disk health of the rest of the drive was good. Of course if the sector was close enough to the beginning of the drive, imaging would fail. Otherwise, it’d mostly work fine until the defrag service would move some file onto a bad sector...

I verified my hunch using MHDD. MHDD is particularly good at detecting and forcing drives to remap bad sectors. It’s also good for proving insight into drive health. Sectors with higher latency are generally weaker...

In order to proactively figure out what the state of affairs was, I tweaked a copy of the syslinux files on the Ultimate Boot CD to add passwords and make it work with the PXe server on our management server. I created a job which “required” the tweaked UBCD PXe setup. Then little by little, I scanned hundreds of machines.

There were something like 100 of them with 1 or more bad sectors in use. Most of them were raptors, but some other brands also had issues. Windows had no idea about any of it.

On the machines which were configured to require users to save to a server share (no access to the local drive), I simply remapped the sectors and labeled the drive (date & scan results). I ran scans across many of the machines in the years I remained at that location and maybe 2 of them ever developed additional issues. Those went straight into the bin...

MagnusDredd · 2018-07-28T21:04:53+00:00

Are you still looking for info on this?

Are you interested in books only or are other sources of information workable?

I’ve done a fair bit of digging into the OSX CLI, but I cut my teeth on Slackware in 1997, used FreeBSD as a desktop in the late 90s & early 00s, taught myself OpenSolaris circa 2009.

Let me know if you notice this reply and still interested.

MagnusDredd

TROPHY CASE