A Bulletin Board from the backside of the internet

Pre-blerb
I decided early on, long before the challenge rules were set in stone, that I would do my own thing for this years challenge.
How it came to be old Apple hardware, however wasn't planned. I bought a 12" Powerbook G4 quite a while ago, because I've always thought those machines are really neat looking.
And since I then already had that, an it's over 20 years old and cute in every possible way, I figured I would just use that for the OCC,
and also take the opportunity to spice things up a bit by going mobile.

I did some tests with it to test the concept, which worked fine. At least for a bit. The Powerbook had always been a little flakey.
You see, the RAM configuration in Apple laptops of that era is slightly strange. They have an amount of base RAM soldered to the motherboard, and then a single slot for RAM expansion.
It is fairly common for the onboard RAM to go bad on Powerbooks and iBooks of that era. This causes instability, kernel panics and all sorts of fun stuff.
I solved this in my Powerbook by desoldering and lifting the power supply pins of the memory chips to disable the onboard RAM completely.
This solved all instability issues for a while. Sadly though, it appears that something else is now borked in the machine, because no matter what I try with different RAM modules and
other fixes, nothing helps. I guess it's just dying at this point. Having been tossed round for 20 years, running hot, having had all sorts of thermal cycles and what not.

So with my OCC plans shattered, I damage-controlled and picked up not one, but two Macbooks from the 2007-2008 era. The first one was really cheap. Too cheap, really.
It's a 15" Macbook Pro from 2007. I picked this one because it's one of the last ones to retain the same aluminium design language of the older models, before they went unibody.
This turned out to be kind of a lemon however. It was in much worse condition than I thought, and what was described. And worse than that, It had a firmware lock put on it!
This meant that I couldn't even install an OS on it. This is where I panicked even more and quickly snatched up the 13" 2008 I ended up using the challenge.
But! As it turns out after I had calmed down a bit and did some more research, the firmware lock security is not the greatest, and it was only a matter of altering the hardware config to
once again be able to reset the parameter RAM and disable the lock. In other words, I could disable the lock by removing one RAM stick and reset the parameters. Silly, I know.
But the MBP still wasn't great, and frankly I'm kind of sick of talking about it even. All I'll say is that it's been delegated to desk-duty, and is connected to an external Cinema Display and peripherals.

The 13" Macbook then.. It's one of those "unibody" white plastic things. I've never been too fond of them to be honest, but it was also very cheap, and cleaned up surprisingly well! What's more, the original battery
is still fine, and gives the computer about four hours of runtime. Pretty dang impressive considering its age!
It has 2.5GB RAM, and a 192GB SSD I shoved into it. It'll be interesting to see how I'll like it over the week. I suspect I'll grow to like it more than I am right now, because it's honestly kind of nice to use.
The keyboard is pretty nice, trackpad is fine, and it's a decent size. The display brightness could've been better, though. But you know... Old laptops and such. It's a thing.

Instead of approaching this week as a true challenge, I instead figured I would make it more of a fun activity and experience. I've used a 486 with MS-DOS for a week, so a 2008 Macbook is basically cheat-mode.
And since I am hosting this forum locally, I thought I would blog about it on here, rather than setting up ANOTHER site just for the week.


Day 1
My plan to go mobile is off to a great start. The weather is very gloomy, and the forecasts says it's supposed to rain the entire day. So I'll have to make do with spending the first day indoors.
As it's a DIY-type OCC, I have not yet decided if I'm going to stick solely to the 13" Macbook, or also use the desktop-duty Macbook Pro for when I'm at home. They are nearly identical in specs, and
run the same software setup. I even set that system up by restoring from a Time Machine backup i had previously done on the Macbook. It's really more of an ergonomics thing.
Time will tell, I guess.

The morning... well, up until lunch I mostly spent watching videos on invidious, to catch up on some subscriptions. Also some chatting on IRC, web browsing, and did some laundry. Exciting!
I have a strong feeling this gloomy and rainy day is going to turn out to be on the less productive side of things.

I find myself doing today's computing on the couch.. I should probably consider something more ergonomic before I kill my back. I did however get around to ripping some "new" CDs I recently bought and stuffed them into iTunes. So I'm currently cranking some tunes via the little speakers I have set up in the living room.
It has an Apple Airport base station connected to it that outputs audio from my computer. It's nuts to think that adapter is 19 years old at this point. Also rain, rain and more rain! Can you tell I'm going all 2008 as well?

Day 2

This day turned out a whole lot better in terms of weather, and will to actually do stuff.
I spent the morning catching up on Youtube subscriptions again, did some catting, and finally, after trying five different launchers got Quake 2 running. So I played some of that. Oh, I think I forgot to mention it, but I installed ScummVM last night and shoved The Secret of Monkey Island into that and started playing some.

I did this until lunch. After lunch I headed into the city and went to a park/garden/disc golf type thing and sat my ass down on a bench.
I got about an hour of tinkering in here, doing some research on why the F a 2007 Macbook Pro might get a sticky volume-down key randomly. and chatted a bit on the IRC. The girlfriend then decided she needed attention, so the sesh was cut a bit short. The weather was effin lovely though! Once home I swapped the wireless keyboard out on the Macbook Pro setup, and put a standard Apple USB keyboard in its place to see if that'll fix the volume control issues. (This fault also wakes the computer, so it's not just software)  Then dinner, some Youtube catchup, IRC stabbing, and now we're here. The plan for this evening is to play Monkey Island, have coffee, and probably continue watching Superstore.

Oh yeah.. I decided last night that I will be using the desktop-ified Macbook Pro while I'm situated at home. Since it has the same performance and OS setup, I don't feel like it's cheating. It's just another copy of the same system. With less back pain. lol.

With less back pain. lol.

I'm definitely not the one laughing, I've been seeing laptops as something between necessary evil and an insidious trap for a while now. The back is better when it's straight, the wrists happier in a more natural position, etc. Gonna throw this one in for inspiration: https://old.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/

Hehe yes! And it does not get better with age either. If you're hurting yourself while at the computer, you're really just doing it wrong.

This one springs to mind. I just can't stop picturing getting my face smashed in my a falling CRT when that strap fails.

headcrash wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2024 5:07 pm Day 2
I will be using the desktop-ified Macbook Pro while I'm situated at home. Since it has the same performance and OS setup, I don't feel like it's cheating.

There are really no rules this year, so it can hardly be called cheating anyway.

Hehe yeah I suppose that's true! It just feels a little "cheaty" in my head, even though it isn't.

So..
Day 3

I went outside today, failed to find a good spot to set down, and realized my idea to go mobile each day is really just flawed this time of year. It's too hot, sunny, randomly rainy, bright, and insects everywhere. I might revisit the idea in the fall sometime when it's a little darker and cooler out, so I can see what's on the display as well, lol!
So I decided that I will continue the OCC at home on the desktop-ified system. That laptop turned out it has a slightly faulty keyboard (probably previous liquid damage) that appears in the form of the volume down-key sticking randomly. That both turns the volume down completely, and it also randomly wakes the system up from sleep. This got really damn annoying, so I solved that by creating two "programs" in the automator on Mac OS. They run shell commands that disable or enable the kext for the internal keyboard. This means that I can disable and enable it using two icons in the system dock, and get rid of the sticky key problem while it's not being used.

So I've done that today.. Watched some more tv shows, and the GF came over to hang out and have dinner.

Day 4 already? sheesh.

I didn't spend any time at the computer for the first half of this day. I took care of chores, went grocery shopping etc. Also watched a bit too many episodes of The Office. Nothing too exciting really.

The afternoon so far has been spent firing up my TrueNAS server again to let it scrub the drive pools and tinker with whatever it sees fit. This mostly to prevent bit rot on the SSD arrays it's got. I don't use the server currently, so it will be spun back down shortly. It's kind of funny how I, instead of using that perfectly sensible and really quite nice server, am opting to use an ancient fucking Mac Mini with a single external hard drive as NAS, and a modded DELL thinclient (Wyse 3040) to do pihole DNS shenanigans and SSH hopping. I've always been one for weird and creative solutions. This doesn't mean it'll be the best solution, but I like weird. And this is very period-correct with all the trashy Mac things I've been into lately.

On that note.. Why all this e-waste Mac stuff, you may ask? Well, it's cheap as balls, and I've always been intrigued by Apple computers and their peripherals. Both from a hardware point of view, but also software and design. I've got a soft spot for that early-late 2000s clean industrial look they had going.
And it's something different from Linux. I've dabbled with that so much at this point, both at home and at work that it just doesn't excite me anymore. So this is a way to spark back some interest in weird old crap. And it works! I haven't had this much fun with computers for a long time. Who knew it'd be a load of old fruit, though.

Anywhoos, I'm at this moment tinkering with getting Quake 2 to behave on the MBP desktop setup. The game runs, and I got mouse enabled in window-mode. But I would like to do some multiplayer, which turned out to be a problem. I got the OCC server tekk set up added and connected once. Upon connecting the server seemingly crashed, and after that I am totally unable to reload the server list. I can add stuff to the address book just fine. But nothing ever shows up in the list. So I'm going to try a completely different copy of the game at this point. The one I found first is of questionable origin, and is seemingly not completely original. I'm sure that doesn't help.

Day 5!

Right, today then..
I spent a few minutes this morning trying to get an old version of Mumble to connect to a modern server.
The snag being that all of the client versions that run on Mac OS 10.6 are too old to connect to modern servers. So I tried to yoink the certificate generated by a newer client and imported that to the old one. But no dice. It seems like they have changed some core components in how the client talks to the server over the years. Ah well.

I then took my bicycle into town and bought beer for a Quake 2 hangout. Went home again, made lunch, and then somehow managed to warp myself to the evening using Youtube and the Superstore TV show streamed off my NAS. Time travel is weird.

Oh, right! I also managed to stab myself in the left thumb while prying open an Apple Lightning to USB host adapter. This to see if I can mod that into a USB attached card reader, to read Sony Memory Stick cards from my Mavica camera on the go.

Day 6

Very little time has been spent doing computer-y things today. I've spent some time watching The Office re-runs, and worked on the car.
Exciting day, I know.

Here's a french cat as fill material

Aight, Day 7 then!

To be honest I haven't really spent any time on the computer today. I spent a considerable amount of the day with the GF out on town, hanging out, eating, snapping pictures with the old Mavica camera etc.
I'll update with some of the pictures later!

If there is anything to take from this week it's that it's surprisingly smooth sailing to use an old ass version of Mac OS. It's damn near a modern computer experience, apart from the usual crap with the browser, and the email client being a little grumpy. But other than that I haven't had any issues at all. So the week was a success in that regard. It's a shame the mobile outdoors idea mostly flopped. But such is life..
For next year I'm pondering going the DOS route again, but on my luggable 386 in the form of a Toshiba T5100, if it's still working, that is.
I'll see. It's a long time to go still. I'll likely do some sort of OCC-y thing before then if I know myself right.

Thanks to everyone who has read about my sort of lazy adventures. I'll post some unrelated Mavica pics later on and then call this blog done.