Knuckledragger

...ayep, Catalina is its own unique brand of Cupertino crafted hell.

After two days of attempting to install Mojave, I just said "uncle" and started the upgrade process for Catalina on one of Macs. RIP all of my old 32 bit apps (and like 2/3 of my Mac-compatible Steam library) but at least I'm moving forward again.

Test Tone @ Home live right now: https://mixlr.com/illuminator/

Hello, I am an officer in the Obvious Army. I bear the rank of Captain. I bring you this warning: Don't buy cheap bluetooth keyboards. Cough for for an AAPL branded one (even if it has really lame arrow keys) or at minimum a Macally.

Happy borkday!

I have never worked inside a Mini, but it does not seem particularly appealing. Especially for someone with as freakishly large man mitts as myself (I am on the opposite end of the spectrum as our esteemed Commander in Chief.) OWC will include a 512GB SSD for $60 more, raising the price of the quad core model to $710. TBH, that sounds more than worth it. Somewhat related: in February of 2019 I replaced the GPU in my Wintendo. When I did so, I apparently knocked the power cable for my Blu Ray drive loose and didn't notice until ...yesterday. I do not use optical media terribly often. I had a panicked search for photos I took in 2005 that had been missing since February 2006 and only discovered the fact ...also yesterday (more on that in the photography thread at some point.) It took me a couple hours to disconnect 593 cables from the Wintendo, haul it out from its corner, blow a considerable amount of dust out from inside, find the damn drive power wire and plug it in (SATA connectors are the devil.) That was inside an extra wide Fractal case which engineered specifically to be easy to work in. Even in that environment, my hands were too big to get where I needed to reach. I cannot imaging me trying to wrangle small and delicate components inside a Mac Mini.

I'm trying to decide between two machines. Both are late 2012 Mac Minis. Refurb'd 2.5GHz dual core i5 (MD387LL/A), 16GB Memory, 512GB SSD $572. Refurb'd 2.3GHz quad core i7, 16GB Memory, shitty 500GB spinny HDD (I have a spare 256 GB SSD) $650 It is worth the extra $78 for the quad core i7? The machine is going to function as media playback box (HTPC, more or less) and possibly a Steam machine for light 2D gaming (something I talk about but never actually do.) Actual internal storage is irrelevant as I'll have an ext HDD enclosure attached.

Last night's show is up: There's a good number of atypical tracks in it.

After a two week hiatus, Test Tone @ Home live right now: https://mixlr.com/illuminator/

Accurate.

(Audio Snob coughs nervously.) Click for slightly bigger. meow_irl #1 fan! Turquoise Hexagon Sun. Hopstretch is an alien confirmned. me_irl Happened right here in scenic western MA. STC Executel. Fake but neat. An aerial photo from 1967 shows plumes of industrial waste flowing in the Cuyahoga River and emptying into Lake Erie. Cleveland, Ohio. Key bridge Washington DC at sunrise.

Endured 2 1/2 days with no power (because of freak storm and record incompetence on the part of National Grid) while all three of my neighbors ran their generators (cannot blame them.) Also lacked running water (because well and electric pump) and had minimal contact with the outside world. What Apple does to older iPhone batteries via their malicious code should be illegal and punishable by death. What T-Mobile does to "unlimited bandwidth" customers after the first 2GB is punishable by hanging in more civilized countries. What they claim is "speeds up to 128lkbps" but in reality what they do is limit all data for periods of time. This becomes a might frustrating when one is furtively trying to load, say, an electric company's outage map page in Chrome. Also, there's a bug where iPhones won't display the "trust this machine?" dialogue when connected to a Mac and instead go BONG BONG BONG BONG forever. This means they iPhone won't even charge off the Mac via USB. They dance on both side's of Hanlon's Razor over there at 1 Infinity Loop. I ended up charging my phone with a car battery and an adapter. I was (and still am) not so secretly praying that Fat Donny presses The Button in a roid rage.* *This couldn't actually happen even if he wanted to do so. Every day the POTUS is given a card with a bunch of launch codes on it. Only one is real and the rest are fake. I'll be you a wooden nickel Trump doesn't remember which one is correct 5 minutes after receiving the card. Ironically, we're safer from nuclear annihilation under his tiny, cheeto-stained hands than any other president since WWII.

Wait, you don't have six pairs of in-wall speakers to switch between? Can you ever call yourself an audio snob?

R.I.P. Eddie Van Halen(!) https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2020-10-06/eddie-van-halen-guitar-dies-65