I recommend doing that with a fifth of scotch. The more I have to use W10, the more I hate it. It's a forced downgrade.

I just watched Rambo: Last Blood

Pretty good, albeit dark, story. Go John Rambo!

Had to use the password recovery tool for the admin account on my brother's computer prior to the Windows 10 upgrade and changed the password with a new one after blanking the password, plus, I upgraded the computer to Windows 10. Only 1 system left and that's my mom's "red plague" laptop.

Actually thinking/researching about how to give some use to my Raspberry Pi 3. Basically, I want it to boot straight to DOSBox-X or Mini vMac emulator, to look like a real vintage pc or mac. Currently it has no use - I replaced Raspbian's default environment with XFCE and themed it to look like windows 95. Even my dad was fooled by it when I showed it to him...

I also have parts of my old hackintosh lurking around, and been thinking about how to give it some use too for older systems. they are a Gigabyte GA-H97N-WIFI, i7 Haswell, Nvidia GTX 750, and the ssd/hdd were stripped out for use in other machines (the SSD was a gift for my dad's revived iMac 2009, and the hdd is my daily external USB drive for use at work). Maybe I will sell the GPU and build a very small pc for use somewhere, it used to be my simracing rig five years ago. I have two empty classic mac mini cases but the mobo doesn't fit it, sadly.

To sum up, my modern activity today is to find ways to reuse my old stuff... I guess so.

I just got the GTX 1650 Super I mentioned a few posts up. I have to say, it's exceeded my expectations in every way. It consumes less power than I expected and performs better. My total power draw at the wall only climbed 23W over the 750 Ti, from 118 to 141 watts (measured with Furmark). 3D benchmarks are typically 2-3x faster. For example, Timespy went from 1420 to 4294, userbench gpu score went from 19.3 to 58.5, FFXIV score on max details went from 5278 to 10906, and Dirt Rally on Ultra details went from 41.26 to 90.44 fps. Doom 2016 was insane. On the 750 Ti I had to play on Medium settings due to 2GB VRAM limit for about 50-60 fps average. With the 1650 Super, I maxed out every detail in the game and it's running almost a constant 200 fps. This is crazy, I don't know how I'm getting 4x the performance in this particular game. I still haven't tested Bioshock Infinite, Metro Last Light, Metro 2033, and Crysis. Will get those results in the next couple of days.

A couple of system details:
HP EliteDesk with a proprietary, non-upgradeable 320W PSU
i5-4590
12GB RAM
1680x1050 monitor, so framerates are a bit better than those reported in standard 1080p tests.

Just flashing a micro SD card with Ubuntu Mate to test on my rPi3... should be a few hours of fun (NOT).

I've lost an entire day trying to compile correctly iDOS 2 for my iPhone (the iPad one compiled flawlessly, runs smoothly, I can't understand why).

Both are running well now. Apparently I had to recompile and reinstall because 1) iOS 13 broke something and 2) My certificate expired and I needed to use a new one.

Also installed BasiliskII on my iPad to try out. Some say it does have networking, through SLIRP method, I think.

iDOS 2 can do a similar thing, but requires something in the middle to provide access to the Internet, acting like an ISP.

Now to find something better than the confusing RetroArch, to emulate certain video games I like, for example NES, SNES, Mega Drive and Atari 2600. I have GBA4iOS which covers quite half of the fun.

And suffering with a very HOT weather here in Rio, above 40 degrees celsius and feeling like 52 *YIKES*

EDIT: Ubuntu Mate was a very big error. Oh dear. Back to Raspbian...

EDIT 2: I can't find a proper ROM for the Basilisk II, so... I ditched it (for now) and kept with Mini vMac. I'm not trying to install QEMU on my macOS, to try and emulate a rPi3, so I can test out my ideas without reinstalling everything on my rPi3 for each idea. Hopefully I can find a way to boot straight to DOSBox on my rPi3 and look like an ancient pc, while I keep running on the background some scripts to improve networking (such as stunnel for Outlook, WRP for browsing modern pages...)

Upgraded... Downgraded? Sidegraded? Slightly-down-and-a-little-to-the-left-graded my 2012 Macbook Pro from a 2012, 1TB 5400RPM HGST drive to a 2008 200GB 7200RPM Seagate drive, since I was reinstalling anyway.

Why the crap would I do this?

For a long time, I've been getting increasingly reluctant to carry this thing around with the old drive. Even though I have regular backups, 1TB is just too much damn data for a portable device. The old drive was like 97% full and I don't even know half the stuff on there anymore - the Downloads directory alone was a catastrophe, and looking for "I know it's on here somewhere!!" things became a deep dive into pain county. If this laptop had been stolen or lost with the old HDD in there I'd have been up shit creek on so many levels.

Plus, OS/X's shitty filesystem CHOKES if there's not a good 10-15% free on each volume. I find a smaller drive makes it a LOT easier to manage what's on there and maintain a decent level of free space.

I ended up bumping the OS up to 10.11 El Capitan. I swore I was going to go back to Mountain Lion, but common sense prevailed and I decided to give something that will run recent programs a shot. So far it hasn't done anything to really piss me off, although I'm going to have to deal with SIP & the 'allow unverified apps' setting toggling itself off eventually. This is the first time I've done a complete re-install from scratch in the time I've had this thing (since new, in 2013.) I'm enjoying the improved responsiveness of a fresh install with nothing but free space on the drive, and I don't hate the 'flat' design as much as I thought I did. Never did like Mavericks much TBH.

Why no SSD? Because I don't have a spare one, I didn't feel like spending any money, and I wanted this done TODAY. I can always swap one in in the future.

The old drive is now in a dock, so I can even boot back into Mavericks off it if I need to. I'll be copying the data & programs from the old drive over on a strict 'as-needed' basis and getting rid of a ton of flak in the process.

1TB is definitely too much. I have a 2013 MBp with a 1TB SSD and I’ve just used almost 100gb so far.

You can use newer OS on unsupported macs with dosdude1 patches. I did it to a 2009 iMac and so far its excellent.

xjas wrote on 2020-01-22, 10:41:

I ended up bumping the OS up to 10.11 El Capitan. [...] So far it hasn't done anything to really piss me off ...

Achievement unlocked: first major aggravation under El Capitan. While trying to install ffmpeg via Homebrew, I ran into a bug in SDL2 which prevents it from building from source. It's actually long fixed for 10.10, and doesn't apply to 10.12+, so in other words, it ONLY applies to El Capitan. (Apparently it's supposed to be fixed in the next point version of SDL2, but that's nowhere to be found.) Turns out Macports patched it out months ago, but Homebrew can't be bothered, so I had to figure out their utterly byzantine and terribly documented method of patching incoming source tarballs. Seriously, this shit is only readable if you're a full-time Homebrew dev and already know the structure of their spaghetti string of files inside & out. Apparently putting a simple example file up with "this is how to apply a patch" is beyond the scope of the project team, or something.

For those of you who are wondering how stupid this gets: Homebrew lets you install a package in "interactive mode", where it un-tars it, presents you with a local repo and lets you change the source before installation. That's great, but then when you're done, you save your changes, and then you're expected to diff your local repo against the master one, copy your patch to the clipboard, and it evaporates your local repo with all the changes you made. THEN you're supposed to edit the Homebrew "formula" (a Ruby script that tells it how to build & install the package) and tell it to apply the patch there, but the documentation for these scripts is COMPLETELY obtuse about using the patch you just created and only barely explains how to do it for one that's already online as a Git commit.

Why can't it just use the source from the local repo that I already edited?!

I never did figure out how to get it to apply a patch from a local file. I ended up pointing the install script to the patch on Macports's Github, i.e. Homebrew's "competitor." That worked, but gragh!

I'm pretty well versed in general coding and Unix style dev stuff, but the way some of these big projects are strung together makes my brain hurt.

Built my brother a HID "jurassic park" flashlight for his birthday.. it turned out pretty awesome and still has plenty of storage inside. It shines a few hundred yards easily -- brighter than my HID and LED car headlights. The reflector housing I used was dirt cheap, but does the job. It should get close to an hour of runtime with the battery I put in it. All parts purchased off Amazon.

- $8 --- .50BMG ammo box
- $48 --- 4S LIPO battery (5200mAh)
- $17 --- 55w AC HID ballast
- $12 --- 55W H3 6000k HID bulb
- $9 --- Blazer C52CW 6.25" off-road light (removed the 100w H3 bulb)
- $2 --- 4 position 8-lug term strip
- $7 --- DC volt meter, green LED display
- $2 --- 10A inline fuse
- $2 --- XT60 connectors
- $10 --- STARK Search Light rocker switch
- $5 --- LIPO battery alarm (buzzer)
- $free --- misc wire and connectors I had laying around

I'm beginning to really like TKL appliances, so long as they're not publicly exposed.

Working on renovating the room, my WIN98SE box will live in and also working on a SFF/HTPC box to have as a side computer for internet access and researching stuff.

I noticed a strange issue while checking my browsers on macOS Mojave. All Blink-based browsers (Edge, Chrome, Opera) are not rendering the font correctly on all Microsoft websites. Only Safari renders correctly. WTF? It should render Segoe UI, yet they render some other font. The problem only happens with Microsoft websites.

EDIT: I just fixed it. Open Font Book > File > Restore Standard Fonts. Then reboot. But I don't know if it was that or some command I ran in Terminal before.

My boss upgraded his home to gigabit internet so I went to Fry's to pick up a new router for him.
That was a mistake.
Much empty. ☹️

Sent off one of my 16G EUDIMM to micron 2 weeks ago. Just received a mail saying they've got my package.

Running my daily driver w/o a mem stick is like... running a six wheeler with one wheel gone.

You know it's ok, but that empty spot is ...

oh dear.

Today I decided to try and set up QEMU on my raspberry pi 3B. What could go wrong?

I'm getting really pissed with raspbian now. This sure is easy to set up for a headless configuration, but now, when I try to set up QEMU for some emulation...
Heck, I did "sudo apt-get update && apt-get install qemu -y" and after installing it, or I thought it was installed because the message was a success... "which qemu" returns nothing. I'm really, really pissed. Raspbian Buster is a total disaster - Switching to Ubuntu MATE was worse, because the setup for a headless configuration is completely messed up and does not work like it does on Raspbian. I tried to install Arch Linux but every attempt simply didn't boot it.

PISSED.

Edit: Just threw the rPi3 into the bin (I actually left it to my dad, who might have a better use for that sh*t).

<rant>
It's utter ridiculous how limited it is. No emulators can run on it properly, DOSBox, QEMU, nothing - and it's the only thing I want to do with that. I have no other use for that tiny thing running on a stupid ARM architecture. Seriously, nothing. I'd rather get something that small running on x86 architecture. I've tried to install several different distros (Ubuntu MATE, Arch Linux...) and they all run so f*$*$#ing slow on it and couldn't compile anything properly.

I still don't understand the hype that is on the Raspberry Pi.
</rant>

I haven't used QEMU on a Pi as it's quite CPU heavy for that job. I've used DOSBox on a Pi, as have others.

The executable for qemu isn't "qemu". Even the package, "qemu", isn't what you want.

Package: qemu Version: 1:4.2-3 Priority: optional Section: otherosfs Maintainer: Debian QEMU Team <pkg-qemu-devel@lists.alioth.d […]
Show full quote

Package: qemu
Version: 1:4.2-3
Priority: optional
Section: otherosfs
Maintainer: Debian QEMU Team <pkg-qemu-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Installed-Size: 99.3 kB
Homepage: http://www.qemu.org/
Tag: admin::virtualization, hardware::emulation, implemented-in::python,
role::metapackage, suite::openstack, system::cloud, system::virtual
Download-Size: 70.9 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://packages.devuan.org/merged unstable/main amd64 Packages
Description: fast processor emulator, dummy package

Notice, it says dummy package. It's there simply for legacy purposes.

There's a whole host of tools which form the project. Try installing "qemu-system" and looking for "qemu-system-i386".

gdjacobs wrote on 2020-02-15, 23:43:

I haven't used QEMU on a Pi as it's quite CPU heavy for that job. I've used DOSBox on a Pi, as have others. […]
Show full quote

I haven't used QEMU on a Pi as it's quite CPU heavy for that job. I've used DOSBox on a Pi, as have others.

The executable for qemu isn't "qemu". Even the package, "qemu", isn't what you want.

Package: qemu Version: 1:4.2-3 Priority: optional Section: otherosfs Maintainer: Debian QEMU Team <pkg-qemu-devel@lists.alioth.d […]
Show full quote

Package: qemu
Version: 1:4.2-3
Priority: optional
Section: otherosfs
Maintainer: Debian QEMU Team <pkg-qemu-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Installed-Size: 99.3 kB
Homepage: http://www.qemu.org/
Tag: admin::virtualization, hardware::emulation, implemented-in::python,
role::metapackage, suite::openstack, system::cloud, system::virtual
Download-Size: 70.9 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://packages.devuan.org/merged unstable/main amd64 Packages
Description: fast processor emulator, dummy package

Notice, it says dummy package. It's there simply for legacy purposes.

There's a whole host of tools which form the project. Try installing "qemu-system" and looking for "qemu-system-i386".

Thanks, but I've just decided to give up on it. The thing is simply not worth the hassle of hours trying to set everything up the way I want. The rPi has nothing to offer to me apart of a (bad) emulation experience. I've used it with retroPie in the past, to play old games such as Atari. But actually, I can do that on my "idevices" and mac with relative ease.

Alrighty. The tip about Qemu applies in a wider context, fwiw.

I was browsing some tech news and found the “new” Ubuntu 19.10 and screenies of the upcoming Windows 10X. I could not stop thinking about one thing:

Did anyone notice how these two OS versions now look much more like a tablet OS? If this is the future, HELP!!! I really do not want that.