Daily driving a G4 TiBook: brain dump
Posted: Mon Jul 15, 2024 9:59 am
So I've already posted a bunch of very random updates all over the forum, and I have many more random thoughts written down in the Stickies app. I think I'm gonna do a bigger post on my blog with the summary/conclusion, but meanwhile post smaller / more regular brain dumps here.
- Intro: https://bb.deadnet.se/viewtopic.php?p=430#p430 & https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/
- Software & recommendations: https://bb.deadnet.se/viewtopic.php?p=431#p431
Challenge Day 1 (2024-07-13)
- Fan noise is awful; I'm concerned about the machine getting too hot (placed it on top of another fan), especially as I'm almost constantly trying to compile something, and the temperature outside regularly surpasses 30°C.
- Less built-in apps; particularly missing: Notes, Reminders. Actually great: iTunes, Finder, Terminal, Stickies.
- "Traditional" scrolling on the mouse wheel feels wrong - perhaps it was a controversial decision around 2007, but once the world embraced smartphones & touchscreens, "natural" scrolling made so much more sense on all devices. I find myself clicking scrollbars a lot, as it's less confusing than having the content move in the reversed direction.
- The machine has impressive support for basic USB1.1 devices; tested a hub, a mouse (with a wireless receiver and with a cable), Ergodox keyboard, an external CD drive, and everything Just Works™. This is a huge contrast to anything and everything I still remember experiencing as a kid growing up in the 90s, everything had its own weird cable and an exotic (and often shitty) driver/software. The USB2.0 PC Card is detected by the system and provides power to a USB fan, but actual devices such as keyboards are not detected by the system.
- Screen & Accessibility: zoom works beautifully, and would normally be a must-have in my regular 4k@1x (43") setup, but with the same screen at 1920p it's not necessary. I have many less windows open (since the machine can't multitask THAT many things), and the windows take up more screen space, which all balances out.
- Actually works really well with Unicode! Fonts look great, including support for fonts in native applications; lack of Electron (or other lowest-common-denominators for getting interactive pixels on the screen) actually feels like a blessing.
- The green "zoom" button on each window actually does the good/sane thing (resize the window to how big/small it "wants" to be). I wish it was still the default on modern macOS.
Challenge day 2 (2024-07-14)
- Compiling software is sloooooow. So far managed to build: LibreSSL, OpenSSH, curl, and git. The latest versions of everything but git were surprisingly completely painless to build.
- Specifically, git makes too many assumptions, required a lot of recompiles after hacking / working around old OSX quirks. I hate autohell, especially when it ends up misdetecting features and forcing me to try&error&recompile everything again and again (because the compiler flags have changed). Notably: it misdetected/assumed native support for arc4random (not sure which OSX introduced it) and libdispatch/GCD (available only since 10.6). I'm considering cleaning it up & contributing my patches to the upstream, just for shits and giggles.
- C sucks - compilation speed (so much CPU time wasted on processing header file text), changing one innocent flag requires rebuilding *every* single file, etc. I've been living in my Golang/Python/Lua bubble for a while, enjoying pre-built C/C++ software, and keep forgetting just how painful and wasteful compiling large C software can be.
- In the early evening, I've interrupted this challenge to spontaneously participate in a different one: Factorio multiplayer speedrun
We've managed to complete Lazy Bastard, There is no Spoon, Steam All The Way, and So Long & Thanks for All the Fish achievements - in 5h52m51s, on a public server, on default (as opposed to any%) mapgen settings. The biggest challenge was dealing with random griefers who kept draining the base from iron by upgrading all the wrong belts.
Challenge day 3 (2024-07-15)
- Since "work" matters don't count as a part of the challenge, I've used my modern Mac to organize/tidy up some emails, calendars & TODOs for the upcoming week. I don't have a whole lot to get done right now (continuing to enjoy my extremely flexible schedule), but as I can't access/sync my PIM apps from the TiBook (yet?), I've made this exception. I would like to be able to access all of that in a more cross-platform manner - too many of my things are firmly stuck on iCloud; meanwhile Gnome continues to be Gnome and rejects patches that fix actual problems: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-on ... quests/131 ...
- Not having any modern chat apps (Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage, etc) on the TiBook makes it unnecessarily cumbersome to reply to friends in longer texting sessions. I'm used to using the keyboard here. Unfortunately, some services (e.g. Discord) outright ban third-party clients. I wish there was a single, good, and modern app (with an open protocol) that I could wholeheartedly recommend to non-technical people, but every single damn thing is just a mess of compromises or poor trade-offs.
- To be continued!
- Intro: https://bb.deadnet.se/viewtopic.php?p=430#p430 & https://www.rollc.at/posts/2024-07-02-tibook/
- Software & recommendations: https://bb.deadnet.se/viewtopic.php?p=431#p431
Challenge Day 1 (2024-07-13)
- Fan noise is awful; I'm concerned about the machine getting too hot (placed it on top of another fan), especially as I'm almost constantly trying to compile something, and the temperature outside regularly surpasses 30°C.
- Less built-in apps; particularly missing: Notes, Reminders. Actually great: iTunes, Finder, Terminal, Stickies.
- "Traditional" scrolling on the mouse wheel feels wrong - perhaps it was a controversial decision around 2007, but once the world embraced smartphones & touchscreens, "natural" scrolling made so much more sense on all devices. I find myself clicking scrollbars a lot, as it's less confusing than having the content move in the reversed direction.
- The machine has impressive support for basic USB1.1 devices; tested a hub, a mouse (with a wireless receiver and with a cable), Ergodox keyboard, an external CD drive, and everything Just Works™. This is a huge contrast to anything and everything I still remember experiencing as a kid growing up in the 90s, everything had its own weird cable and an exotic (and often shitty) driver/software. The USB2.0 PC Card is detected by the system and provides power to a USB fan, but actual devices such as keyboards are not detected by the system.
- Screen & Accessibility: zoom works beautifully, and would normally be a must-have in my regular 4k@1x (43") setup, but with the same screen at 1920p it's not necessary. I have many less windows open (since the machine can't multitask THAT many things), and the windows take up more screen space, which all balances out.
- Actually works really well with Unicode! Fonts look great, including support for fonts in native applications; lack of Electron (or other lowest-common-denominators for getting interactive pixels on the screen) actually feels like a blessing.
- The green "zoom" button on each window actually does the good/sane thing (resize the window to how big/small it "wants" to be). I wish it was still the default on modern macOS.
Challenge day 2 (2024-07-14)
- Compiling software is sloooooow. So far managed to build: LibreSSL, OpenSSH, curl, and git. The latest versions of everything but git were surprisingly completely painless to build.
- Specifically, git makes too many assumptions, required a lot of recompiles after hacking / working around old OSX quirks. I hate autohell, especially when it ends up misdetecting features and forcing me to try&error&recompile everything again and again (because the compiler flags have changed). Notably: it misdetected/assumed native support for arc4random (not sure which OSX introduced it) and libdispatch/GCD (available only since 10.6). I'm considering cleaning it up & contributing my patches to the upstream, just for shits and giggles.
- C sucks - compilation speed (so much CPU time wasted on processing header file text), changing one innocent flag requires rebuilding *every* single file, etc. I've been living in my Golang/Python/Lua bubble for a while, enjoying pre-built C/C++ software, and keep forgetting just how painful and wasteful compiling large C software can be.
- In the early evening, I've interrupted this challenge to spontaneously participate in a different one: Factorio multiplayer speedrun
We've managed to complete Lazy Bastard, There is no Spoon, Steam All The Way, and So Long & Thanks for All the Fish achievements - in 5h52m51s, on a public server, on default (as opposed to any%) mapgen settings. The biggest challenge was dealing with random griefers who kept draining the base from iron by upgrading all the wrong belts.Challenge day 3 (2024-07-15)
- Since "work" matters don't count as a part of the challenge, I've used my modern Mac to organize/tidy up some emails, calendars & TODOs for the upcoming week. I don't have a whole lot to get done right now (continuing to enjoy my extremely flexible schedule), but as I can't access/sync my PIM apps from the TiBook (yet?), I've made this exception. I would like to be able to access all of that in a more cross-platform manner - too many of my things are firmly stuck on iCloud; meanwhile Gnome continues to be Gnome and rejects patches that fix actual problems: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-on ... quests/131 ...
- Not having any modern chat apps (Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage, etc) on the TiBook makes it unnecessarily cumbersome to reply to friends in longer texting sessions. I'm used to using the keyboard here. Unfortunately, some services (e.g. Discord) outright ban third-party clients. I wish there was a single, good, and modern app (with an open protocol) that I could wholeheartedly recommend to non-technical people, but every single damn thing is just a mess of compromises or poor trade-offs.
- To be continued!