Aaron44126

If you are up for weird chess, I have got some enjoyment out of Really Bad Chess. (Android | Apple)

Terrible luck with laptop displays. Every single personal laptop that I have ever purchased has come with or developed a display issue that I had to have serviced, be it stuck pixels or debris stuck in the LCD or whatever. Actually, a new display issue with my Precision 7770 was part of what kicked me into switching to the MacBook. (This is just personal systems. My work systems have always been fine ...) Anyway, as it turns out, the MacBook Pro is no exception. Last week I noticed a "bright spot" on the MacBook Pro. Only visible on a bright background, it covered way more than a few pixels, being about three-quarters of an inch tall and one-quarter of an inch wide. It may have been new or it may have just taken a while for me to notice since I normally use "dark mode" applications. I took it to the Apple Store and the tech there easily saw the issue when I pointed it out and didn't give me any grief about having the display replaced. I left the laptop with them on Friday, and they promptly sent it to a service depot in Tennessee where the display replacement was performed on Saturday. I just got it back now (Tuesday) because the service depot couldn't ship it out until Monday. A letter says that the display panel was replaced, and also the "lid angle sensor" which they said had physical damage...? I was not charged anything for the repair. So, four-day turnaround, but it could have been two-day if there wasn't a weekend in there. I was mostly kept on-edge by inconsistent tracking updates, both on the end of Apple and UPS. For example, UPS tracking showed it moving through the system early this morning but it never showed "out for delivery", so I was sure that it had missed the truck and I'd be waiting another day. But then it just showed up at my door... without the driver knocking for a signature... even though "signature required" is printed right here on the shipping label. Anyway. I hope that was my last laptop display replacement? (Ha.)

Twitter... I mean X... "took" the @X handle from a photographer. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/26/x-twitter-handle-account-owner-not-paid-elon-musk-rebrand/

I've had more time to use it, so more impressions. The biggest thing that has struck me is, Apple really knows how to make a laptop. I mean, setting aside for a moment the fact that there isn't really any modularity to it so you can't upgrade the RAM or storage, and it's not even that straightforward to replace the battery, which is a quite notable downside to me. And the fact that it doesn't have a numeric keypad for some reason. As a "PC", it might be a bit of a disappointment, but as a laptop, it is a really nice system to use. Some comparisons with the Dell Precision laptops here because that's what I've been using for the last 10+ years. I have zero complaints about fan behavior. The fans ramp up when there is a big compute load (but only get about half as loud as my Precision systems did), but otherwise the system is silent during normal use. Battery life is borderline ridiculous. I haven't had the battery drop below 50% yet and I'm using the system "unplugged" way more often than I did with the Precision, which I'd be lucky to get 3.5 hours out of if I was being pretty careful. And there's the fact that it doesn't get hot when idling, whereas my newer Precisions were always on the warm side (especially the bottom/back) which didn't make them that nice to use as laptops. And lastly, you can use the system at full performance on battery power. I was playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider yesterday on battery and it still maintained a consistent 60+ FPS at 1500p/"highest" graphics preset. Now, obviously a situation like that means you can't run on battery for more than a couple of hours. I only did about 20 minutes and the battery dropped from 80% to 64% during that time. But, the Precision systems throttle down hard on battery (the GPU especially) so gaming on battery isn't something you can really do. Bottom line, I guess, is that this system strikes a great balance between battery life and performance, and shifting between them depending on what you are doing. On the "PC" side, you sort of have to pick which model laptop you want based on which of these is more important to you. I do hope new regulations coming out of Europe at least mean that the battery will become easily swappable in future models. I don't really have any hopes for the RAM and SSD ever being swappable again. You have to get the system with the specs that you need for the duration of its life. One thing I'll note is, if you pay for the ongoing AppleCare warranty, they'll replace the battery for you at no cost if the OS triggers the "your battery is degraded and should be replaced" warning. I'll also note that it attempts to save the battery lifespan by only allowing it to charge higher than 80% once per day. (You do have the option to force a full charge if you know you're going to need the power.) Another thing that I noticed is that it makes the efficiency cores primary, not the performance cores, which is backwards from how Intel is doing it. macOS actually seems to take steps to avoid using the performance cores at all unless there is sufficient CPU usage. There is no way to force a process onto the performance cores, as far as I can tell. Regarding the display. When I saw this, I got to looking at the display response times, and saw reviews showing a slow response time of 40+ ms, not a great figure. I saw people on Reddit complaining about this as well. It does seem to be better than the M1 models which are even worse. Poking around with this myself, I am not able to see any issues with "ghosting" when scrolling or when watching videos. The response time is normally fine. I haven't observed any issues or latency/delay while gaming. It's not perfect though by any stretch. Situations when drastic changes to the mini-LED lighting are needed cause visible issues. For example, an easy one to see is moving the mouse cursor around an all-black background. The mini-LED lighting seems to be on a slight delay to keep up with where the mouse cursor is. I've seen practical issues when watching videos that involve a lot of "all black" as well. Another easy one to see is ending credits to a TV show or something. If there is no "scrolling" or "fade in/out" and the credits are just popping from one set to the next with an immediate transition, you can see the mini-LED display take a moment to figure out which zones should be lit at each transition. Also, scenes that involve a lot of darkness and quick transitions can look a little funny. An example would be the very opening moments of the Foundation season 2 premiere. There is a quick series of dark black and white shots with moments of black in between, and I could see the mini-LED display "confused" about whether some zones should be lit or not at some parts. One other thing I've seen is the backlight being a little weird when working in the Windows command prompt in an RDP session, where the command prompt background is all black. So, areas of abrupt motion or quick transitions on top of all-black seem to be the problem areas. This would probably need a switch to OLED or micro-LED to fix. Otherwise, the display is brilliant. With regards to macOS itself. Overall, I am finding the experience to be pretty smooth, even though I am still figuring it out somewhat. (I use to admin a bunch of Macs but never have used one as a "daily driver" until now.) I'll say that I'm now regularly using the system with 20+ windows open and there is no hitching at all in the UI, it's really smooth. I have "Time Machine" set up to back up to a network drive and that seems really nice for keeping file history. (Hourly snapshots for a day, daily snapshots for a month, and weekly snapshots "forever" until the drive runs out of space. It uses hard links to consolidate identical copies of files in different snapshots without taking up additional space to store them, similar to "Timeshift" on Linux.) I've had to do some scripting to get system behaviors that I want, like correcting the display backlight setting to my preference when I plug in or disconnect from AC power, automatically locking the session and power off the display if I shut the laptop lid, or automatically switching the system to a 16:10 display mode for gaming so that the "notch" is hidden but I don't get black bars on the left and right side of the display. This is something that I don't really count as a negative. I did similar work in both Windows and Linux to work around "idiosyncrasies" of those systems that didn't jive with the behavior that I wanted. I'm normally a mouse guy but I've been making use of the MacBook trackpad. It's way bigger than any "Windows" trackpad that I have used. Gestures for scrolling, zooming, switching between multiple desktops, going "back" in the web browser, moving apps out of the way to expose the desktop, and bringing up Launchpad are implemented well really handy. What has sort of surprised me is the ecosystem of slick apps that allow for improving macOS in ways that I think Apple "should" do, but doesn't. I've been making use of a number of them. Some examples... Rectangle provides window snapping like you would expect, coming from a Windows or Linux system. Drag a window to the left edge to snap it on the left half of the screen. Things like that. LinearMouse allows you to adjust the behavior of a mouse scroll wheel, which is messed up on macOS. On Windows and Linux, scrolling the scroll wheel one "notch" scrolls by a fixed amount. On macOS, they want it to have "acceleration" so the scroll starts out slow but picks up speed the more you go. I usually scroll by discrete "clicks" of the wheel so I prefer the non-accelerated behavior. LinearMouse allows you to set it to work this way, reverse the scroll direction if you like, and even control the scroll amount on a per-app basis if you like. Bartender lets you clean up the "menu bar" (sort of "system tray" in the top right that fills up with icons reflecting background apps that are running). It doesn't seem like its possible to set up "custom resolutions" for the laptop display anymore, but BetterDisplay will allow you to set up a dummy "external" display at any resolution that you like. You can then set the laptop built-in display mirror the dummy display to force a certain resolution or aspect ratio. (I've seen at least one game, StarCraft Remastered, that will stretch a 16:9 image to fill the display and mess up the aspect ratio. This can force the display to stay in 16:9. It could also be handy for screen recording a video for YouTube or whatever.) Almost everything seems to be available through Homebrew so I get a Linux-like package install/upgrade experience. A lot of utility apps include the "install through Homebrew" command right on their web site. Homebrew also allows installing Linux-ish terminal tools (i.e. a proper current version of rsync). I also found terminal utilities through Homebrew to do things like set the display brightness and change the display resolution. Microsoft Office for Mac is not as "good" as I thought it would be. It's a step down from the Windows version. Outlook is very stripped down. It doesn't support "Tasks" in the same way that the Windows version does (it just wants me to use Microsoft To Do, basically), and not all of the rules for junk mail handling are exposed (ability to mange the "safe recipients" list is missing for example). Also, it will prefer to "copy" mail instead of "move" it if you drag-and-drop a piece of mail to a folder that belongs to a different account, unless you hold down the "Command" key while doing the drag-and-drop. I actually ended up dumping Outlook for Apple's built-in "Mail" app, and I'll use the Windows version of Outlook when I need to do some specific tasks. I'm also trying the Apple Calendar for my personal calendar, which offers better syncing with my phone and watch anyway. Excel seems to have its zoom level set too low by default; everything seems a bit small. OneNote is OK, I have been using it over the Windows version most of the time, but I do wish there was an option to put tabs "on top" like the Windows version has. Publisher and Visio are completely missing, I have to use the Windows versions for those. I was a little bit pleasantly surprised to find that Microsoft does now ship an ARM64 version of Office for Windows, so it is able to run in my Windows/ARM VM without x64 translation needed. That's it for now. Still happily moving forward with the discovery and setup.

Oh, apparently Microsoft also trademarked "X" a few years back and "social networking" is on the list of uses. https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch (I saw this on a news article stating that Facebook/Meta owns this trademark, but the documents all point to Microsoft ...?)

The police stopped this sign demolition, leaving the letters "er" in place for now ... https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23140317/twitter-sign-sf-hq-removal-demolition-police Saw that a Japanese band has a local trademark on "X". https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189902006/what-will-twitter-be-named-in-japan-since-x-japan-is-already-taken-by-a-rock-ban

Twitter is rebranding to "X". Tweets are to be called "x's". The logo change has happened already but it looks like the transition will be gradual and not all at once. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23804973/twitter-x-logo-brand-replacement How much of Twitter's remaining value is the "brand" which is now getting tossed out?

Suspend BitLocker. Disable the TPM device in Device Manager. Reboot to BIOS setup. Clear the TPM. (You check the box in BIOS setup but it won’t prompt to clear until you boot up normally.) Boot back to Windows and try to update the TPM. I’m not sure if you have to enable the TPM device in device manager first, but only do it if it makes you, because Windows might “claim” it right away. If it works, enable the TPM device and then resume BitLocker and you should be all set. Have your BitLocker recovery keys handy just in case.

This wouldn't be on the Windows 2000 side, but rather on the side of whatever system you are trying to talk to from your Win2K box. You need to enable SMB 1.0 on the newer system in order to talk to it from Windows 2000. (If I search "Turn Windows features" on my Windows 10 system, it pops right up. You need to enable SMB 1.0 client and/or server, depending on which way you want traffic to go, but not the one about SMB 1.0 automatic removal.)

Windows 2000 supports SMB out of the box, but it is SMB 1.0 which is not compatible with newer versions of Windows unless you go out of your way to enable SMB 1.0 on the new systems. It's available in the "Turn Windows features on and off" control panel and disabled by default because of unfixable security vulnerabilities with that protocol.

Yeah, from their post on the power supply and they explained that they were shipping the system with 180W, I took that to mean that we can expect specs that will fit within 180W. The 240W capability is there for future-proofing. They were also cagey on future GPU plans other than to say that basically "we built this thing to be modular so of course we are looking to deliver more modules in the future". Nothing about what maximum power envelope they might be looking at, whether they would offer GPUs from anyone other than AMD, or really anything else. Though, technically the specs are public / open source, so "anyone" could produce and sell a GPU module that would work. I think that they're sort of hoping that, if it takes off somewhat, companies that normally produce desktop gaming GPUs (Inno3D, PNY, etc.) will maybe look to sell laptop (Framework) GPU modules as well.

Just saw this. The Verge got their hands on a Framework Laptop 16. https://www.theverge.com/22665800/framework-laptop-16-hands-on-preview-modular-gaming-laptop [Edit] Framework 16 preorders are open, so we can finally see specs!! ...If the site wasn't broken from heavy load, anyway. Can for now confirm that it only has options for AMD CPUs and GPUs, no Intel or NVIDIA. (Interestingly, the AMD guy that they are working with was actually previously at Dell and involved with the Alienware Area-51m "upgradeable laptop that flopped".) It looks like the CPU options are Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS, and the optional dGPU is a Radeon RX 7700S. The Verge article mentions support for up to 96GB of RAMM (two DIMMs), and also that there is liquid metal under the CPU heatspreader? Very interesting development even if this isn't a laptop that I would actually want (lacking a full 4K display and NVIDIA dGPU). Definitely watching to see how things go forward, though. I hope that this thing is successful and that they are able to offer even more options in the next few years. The Verge also has a video. [Edit 2] Framework post. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-pre-orders-are-now-open

Does it have to be SCP? I use FileZilla for SFTP (I think most servers that support SCP would also support SFTP) and it is free / open source, and works fine on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Easy enough for a dummy to use if if they have basic understanding of files and folders, and you get a server connection bookmark set up for them. You can drag and drop from Finder to the "server" side of FileZilla as well (or vice versa) and it will work. A note -- When going to install it, if you click the download link on this page you will get a "sponsored" version which includes optional bundled software (at least on Windows). Use this page instead for the clean version. For a text editor, BBEdit has a free version that is working well enough so far for me. You can grab it from the App Store and ignore the "30 days evaluation" thing that pops up. It will revert to "free" mode when the evaluation ends. (If you need a hex editor, "Hex Fiend" seems decent and it is also free.)

Eh. Forget third-party apps. You can do some terminal magic. This fully disables sleep. The system will not sleep when the lid is shut or under any other circumstance. sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1 If you do this, you will notice that the "Sleep" command is even greyed out in the top-left Apple menu. Get it back by doing: sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0 The change is immediate, no need to reboot or anything. While sleep is disabled, a script like this can be used to put the system to sleep. sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0 pmset sleepnow sleep 3 sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1 I noticed that while sleep is disabled, the screen will not turn off if you shut the lid. You can lock the system and then the screen will power off after a few moments, so no big deal really. Fortunately, macOS will not activate the screen in this case if you happen to move the mouse. You have to actually interact with the keyboard or touchpad. I added "pmset" to the sudoers config so I can script all of this stuff and it won't ask me for a password or fingerprint scan when I put the system to sleep. I'm also using pmset scripts to switch the system between "low power", "high power", and "automatic" performance modes. One minor annoyance is that the system automatically powers on or wakes up if you open the lid of press any button on the keyboard. (The dedicated power button is kind of pointless.) There doesn't seem to be a way to disable this. There was an NVRAM "AutoBoot" variable you could tweak to disable this behavior for Intel Macs, but the same method doesn't work for Apple Silicon Macs. I ran the system with the screen off (but not sleeping) for nine hours today and the battery level was reported at 89% afterwards. I wasn't really using it for much, but there were about a dozen apps open, and a Windows VM.

Yeah, like I mentioned in another thread, the fact that GPTK is a thing at all baffles me and I'm not sure where Apple is going with it. Putting all of that work in for an emulation environment that devs aren't even allowed to use to ship games doesn't make sense, unless they have some other future plans for it? I am wondering if they will use it to offer a tool to allow ordinary users to run Windows games at some point, but that doesn't fully make sense either, as Apple would definitely rather that devs make proper ports so that their hardware can be used at its full potential. I do think that GPTK being a thing means that Apple intends to keep Rosetta 2 around for a good long while. (Otherwise, again, why would they put in this effort if it is just going to be thrown away in a couple of years...?) I did see that there was an updated 1.0.2 version (I think that the original version would work in Ventura but the new one will not), and I also saw that people have worked out how to get it working within CrossOver, though that currently seems a bit hacky to me (even though it "works"). I am hoping that between now and the release of Sonoma, some tooling will build up around it or maybe CrossOver will offer official support. CrossOver is due to release version 23 in "late summer" and they are clearly paying attention to GPTK. There's another new project called Whisky that seems to be getting some attention. (It is basically a Wine/GPTK GUI frontend.) What would be amazing is if Valve would wake up and offer something similar to what they have going on Linux to allow Windows versions of games to be fired off through Wine right from the native Steam client; I'm not holding my breath for that, though, as the Mac Steam client seems to be an afterthought for them at this point.

Gaming first impressions. No issues connecting a PS5 DualSense controller. I had to toggle support on in Steam before it would work with Steam games. I do find it a bit obnoxious that gamepad input causes the keyboard backlight to illuminate, if you have it set to time out on inactivity. I'll have to do something to disable the keyboard backlight while gaming. First off, I started Shadow of the Tomb Raider which is a few years old at this point, but a reasonably high-end game (graphically speaking) and has a Mac version. At 2336x1510 resolution, and graphics settings at the "highest" preset, it runs fluidly at ≈70-90 FPS in all scenes. Not bad, considering that the system doesn't even have a "discrete GPU" and it is also running through the Rosetta 2 x64->ARM emulator. "ProMotion" (VRR) seems to work fine and the game looks great with this setup. I did find that loading times seem a bit longer than I would have expected, though. Some games use the "modern" full-screen API introduced in Mac OS X 10.7 and they get launched isolated on a separate "virtual desktop", but some games use older APIs and behave more like Windows games, taking over the main desktop for the duration of the run. (You can still Command+Tab out in most cases to get to the desktop while the game is running.) Games that want to run using the entire display (rather than at 16:9 ratio) can blow up into the camera "notch" area, and to avoid this you can set a compatibility flag on those games to "scale the app to below the camera area". When you do this, the entire desktop is shrunk down a little bit while the game is running so that it can fit below the camera notch. The effective resolution and aspect ratio do not change when this happens, so this also means that some black border is added to the left and right side of the display in addition to the top. (It looks pretty black with the mini-LED system in place so it is hard to notice unless the game is running a dark scene and the backlight bleeds out into the cropped black area a little bit.) I ran a number of Steam games that have Mac ports and didn't have any issues firing them up. I also installed the Battle.net app and StarCraft and StarCraft II, those work fine. I have not tried running Windows games through CrossOver or Apple GPTK yet. I will probably hold off on that until macOS Sonoma is out, since it looks like that is a requirement for the current version of GPTK. I did try running Switch games through Ryujinx. Compatibility is a bit lower than it was for me with yuzu on Windows, but it looks like macOS support has been improving rapidly over the past few months so hopefully that trend will continue. There are a number of games that work fine ... once the shader cache is built up a bit. Shader stutter is much more apparent than it was on Windows with either Ryujinx or yuzu. That probably can't be avoided unless they add a proper Metal renderer, which I would not expect any time soon, but maybe it will improve as MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross mature. One nifty thing is that as the Switch also has an ARM CPU, Ryujinx can run some games in "hypervisor" mode, so the game's ARM instructions run natively on the Apple CPU without a CPU emulator/interpreter/JIT thing in between.

Yes, you have to boot into safe mode once for the system to “realize” that the disk controller has changed and thus not BSOD at boot with “inaccessible boot device”.

If it is set to RAID mode, are you able to switch to AHCI/NVMe mode and see if you can boot install media? This is in BIOS setup in the storage section. If it works, to switch your existing Windows install, you will need to take some steps. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7560-7760-owners-thread.836381/page-64.html#post-11112315

There is no display whitelist. You can install any display that will fit and is electronically compatible. (M6800 has limited eDP bandwidth, 20 lanes instead of 40 or something, so high res displays like 4K are out.) PanelLook is a good place to see what options are, but sourcing one would be through aftermarket parts sites or eBay. I believe that you can install “any” PCIe device in the WWAN slot, including an NVMe drive if you can fit it in with an adapter, but the BIOS won’t look there for a bootable drive. So, using that drive as the system drive would require the boot loader to be on a different drive.

Yes. The same options are available in the “Dell Power Manager” app, and in the BIOS setup on some models. (My names for each mode might be a little bit abbreviated.)

"Optimized" is factory default.

Try an external monitor first. Your display might be dead. …Odd that you got a BSOD to set that off though. AMD or NVIDIA GPU? If NVIDIA, and you had Optimus disabled, enable Optimus and see if it works. You can do that by removing the bottom panel and unplugging the coin cell battery to reset the BIOS settings.

There is a Windows “reset” feature that you can access from Settings that basically does this. There is an option to keep your files. You won’t be able to keep installed programs and achieve the “fresh reset” that you are looking for. You might have to install some drivers but just one run of Windows Update should take care of that. (If the WiFi driver is required first, you can get that from the Dell support site.)

I’m sort of confused about the target audience and purpose for Apple Game Porting Toolkit. It might leave “some performance to be desired” but think about what it is doing. Converting x86 to ARM, and converting DX11/12 to Metal, obviously there is going to be significant overhead. And it works. They fact that it makes games playable at all is pretty amazing. They slapped this together in a seemingly short time and it is something that the CrossOver/Wine/MoltenVK/etc guys have been working on for a few years with limited success. So, clearly they have put in some substantial effort. But for what? Not for ordinary users to play Windows versions of games. It is officially so that game devs can “test” how their games “might” work on macOS. But that only sort of makes sense, because obviously they will work “worse” under AGPT than they would native. And devs can’t even use it to ship games (running in the “emulator”), according to the license terms, they would still have to proceed with a full port. I guess it they also have tools to convert shaders to Metal which could speed that up. So, yeah. Will Apple eventually open this up more in some way? Especially after seeing what the community reaction is like? I think they’d really prefer people to be using optimized game ports, so I don’t know. Anyway, not complaining too much. It opens up a whole new set of games to macOS users even if that was not Apple’s intent.

@Sandy Bridge I tried Amphetamine and it did work, but it had another issue which was causing the screen saver to trigger when it shouldn’t (like while watching a long video). The preferred solution these days seems to be an app called “NoSleep” which I am trying next. There is also a built-in terminal command called “caffeinate” whose job is to prevent various idle/sleep conditions from triggering which might do the trick. The new “scissor switch” keyboard is a step up from “butterfly” for sure. I wish it had more “depth” but otherwise don’t have a complaint with it yet. ….Other than that I basically have to learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts. And that I’d still like a numeric keypad. The headphone buzz issue did not occur when running on battery. It also disappeared when I hooked up the grounded power cable. So, easily solved for an extra $20 😕 I’m now traveling so I don’t have time to mess with it much but I will eventually be back with more observations.