krpalmer | Entries tagged with apple

Nudged by a mere indirect reference, I turned back to a particular “first-person shooter” from the mid-1990s. Although I’d played Bungie’s Marathon for quite a while, I know it’s been some time too since I last really dove into its action. Replacing both the “Aleph One” open-source engine now used with the old game files and the all-in-one bundles of the original games also available, I noticed the date stamps on the old programs were from before I’d got my current computer, and it’s been around for a while itself. I suppose that disconnection had to do with starting to use wireless keyboards without numeric keypads, which had provided me Marathon’s movement keys. Intent on at least trying “the way everyone says they’re playing these sorts of games these days,” I tried out the default setup of the game bundle, which moved ahead, backed up, and sidestepped with keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard and turned left and right and looked up and down with your “pointing device.” My trackpad, though, did seem a bit too sensitive that way.

( somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting )

The news Microsoft was buying Activision for a fabulous sum did show up where I couldn’t miss it, but also had me supposing that not owning a video game console or even being able to play “PC games” (from this side of the millennium, anyway) detached me a bit from the moment. There’s a danger in looking too askew at “video game narratives,” though, or at least in making too big a deal of that. A few weeks later, there was an announcement Sony was buying Bungie, and with the games Bungie made on the far side of the millennium a few more thoughts drifted through my mind (although I’m at least aware Activision wound up owning Infocom.)

( A few Bungie games brought up )

Upgrading my computer’s operating system can take a considerable accumulation of resolve for me. As macOS 12 “Monterey” showed up, though, the “never upgrade under any circumstances whatsoever” fulminations didn’t seem quite as severe, and I only waited for its first major revision before really buckling down to the process. It did take a while to download the installer, and yet perhaps not quite as long as I’d though it might. The actual process of surrending my computer to that installer didn’t seem all that stretched out either.

( Trying things out again )

On the weekend I installed a security update in advance of a full system upgrade. It took some time and several restarts, but once my computer was running again I got back to work on revising a lengthy post. In the midst of my work, though, my computer started beeping at me, and I realised the document window was greying out as if it was moving into the background. For a while I had to click in the window after just a few more words typed, which got in the way of revisions. One of my first thoughts was that I had a second document open in the same application for the sake of getting a better look at what I was revising, but closing it didn’t seem to stop the problem. Then, I started noticing the same greying-out problem with the windows of other programs. For a little while I wondered if restarting would solve the problem, and then if I’d have to try the full system upgrade sooner than I’d imagined.

To try something a little less extravagant, I decided to look in the official Apple support forums despite worries I’d just find unsolved complaints and fulminations. Settling on “window lost focus” as the most official alternative for “greyed out,” I hit on a thread that referred to an external discussion with an assortment of Python scripts to report on what program had grabbed focus. It took installing components with pip (I do get concerned about adding too many things to my computer without a clear sense of how to remove them later if necessary), but I did get a recommended script running in Terminal, and at last when a window greyed out I saw a menu bar icon for a “cleaning program” was grabbing focus. The icon was easy enough to shut down, and the problem hasn’t recurred.

I have seen insistences “cleaning programs” are more trouble than they’re worth, and the program did have a tendency to remind me to run it just when I was intent on doing other things. I’d never quite taken it up on its offer to clear out every cache and remove the foreign language modules from programs. Recalling the recommendation for it had come from the direction of TidBITS remains my one balance against sorting out how to uninstall it.

Two days ago I happened to get pointed to a commemorative video about Steve Jobs on Apple’s home page. A day afterwards I was wondering whether I could organize my thoughts about it, but on going back to the page the video was already gone and I wound up too busy to write a post then anyway. Today I was still trying to get my thoughts together, but I did happen on another link to the video.

So far as “remembering where you were” goes, being at a meeting of a (now shut down for years) local Apple user group when someone announced Steve Jobs had died seems to make the moment stick harder. I also remember certain “strike the tent; the show’s over” warnings before and after that moment. For all that Apple hasn’t gone away in the ten years since, it’s easy enough to think “don’t get too attached to tech companies, even one that makes a show of not making its money from selling ads.” At the same time, today the omnipresent “any day now...” threat, warning, and anticipation seems more “the company’s software will finish rotting out from within.” When it comes to “plan out alternatives in advance, just in case,” I did notice not that long ago a just-starting-out Linux variant striving to have a “universal menu bar at the top of the screen,” if one introduced with a certain amount of sanctimoniousness. It almost tempts me to just contemplate the video again; for all that the later footage of Jobs involved one product introduction after another, glimpses of the “G4 iMac” and “G4 PowerBooks” included among them brought a thought or two of “the past’s not altogether selected.”

The programmer of “MacFlim,” a “1-bit video player” for the black-and-white “compact Macintosh,” has made multiple revisions to his code, an encouraging sign so far as small-scale open-source programming goes. It might remain a matter of “that it can be done at all is perhaps more interesting than what can be done with it,” but I haven’t quite moved on to some other novelty of antique personal computing yet. When I do encode a video clip it’s easy enough to use the Mini vMac emulator to copy that file into a disk image and view it that way. However, having gone to slight lengths to get some actual antique hardware working in part because of the thought I could also play the clips that way left me wondering just how to move the files between computers. I had bothered to get a “SCSI2SD” card with a mounting that left its SD cards swappable without prying the computer open and risking electric shock, but once I’d initialized an SD card with a disk image loaded with files through the MAME emulator I wasn’t quite sure how to access that disk image from anything else but SCSI2SD again. The SE/30 only works with the “floppy mode” of my “Floppy Emu,” and any MacFlim file with more than a few seconds of video is bigger than 1.4 megabytes.

For a while I wondered about getting a serial cable with the right plugs to connect the round ports on the back of a compact Mac with the USB-to-serial adapter I’ve used with my Color Computer and DriveWire; it would mean copying files to one of my older portables as an in-between step and I didn’t know how long the transfers would take but it did seem possible. Then, though, I got to considering how the oldest portable I have, a PowerBook G4 (bought used before leaving on my first ocean cruise, as the “12-inch model” was sliding from “a supremely ideal form factor Apple just isn’t bothering with any more” to “not able to run modern software”), still runs a version of OS X that can write to “HFS” files of the sort an old-fashioned Macintosh uses. Getting out my multi-card reader, I tested the first SD card I’d formatted for SCSI2SD, and I was indeed able to write files straight to it from a computer I can put files on using modern USB memory keys. I suppose it all depends on “a second old computer still working,” but as I have to admit it’s all an idle pastime anyway.

Happening on news of a video player for the black-and-white “early Macs,” with the comment it ran best on the speedier SE/30, nudged me at last to bring up from my basement the moldering example of that particular computer I’d once been fortunate enough to have been given and sort out how to send its logic board away for repairs. Once I’d played some of “MacFlim’s” example videos on actual hardware, though, I was left pondering what more to do with the machine and the program. An encoder had been provided as source code; by looking up the show-stopping error produced when I tried to compile it in Terminal, I was even able to add one statement that got the command-line tool to encode. After stepping through the number of preprocessing tasks that had to be done with the more established command-line tool ffmpeg set out in the readme, however, I had files of my own that I could import into the emulator Mini vMac but which just sprayed 1-bit static onto the screen and locked up the whole virtual system.

( An animated example within )

Not that long after getting an old Macintosh SE/30 working I ran the recently programmed full-screen video player “MacFlim” on it, and with that I was left with a bit of a “so now what do I do with this computer?” feeling. Table space is a limited resource for me to be managed with some care, and even if I’ve had worn-out parts on the main circuit board replaced it’s a question how many hours are left in the rest of the hardware.

( Wallpaper experiments )

People who were able to use Macintosh SE/30 computers have wound up to this day ready to praise them as the most powerful (stock) machines squeezed into “the original Mac form factor.” In a theoretical way I might have wound up among them; around the beginning of the 1990s my father was able to get one of those computers through his work, and he carried it home every so often. When years later, though, someone at the Apple users group that used to be set up in my area offered me a well-worn SE/30 CPU (with the red stripe alone all but worn off its Apple logo), I accepted the generous gift but was left wondering if I’d just welcomed trouble. I’d already seen a good many comments online about the modern necessity of replacing the surface-mount capacitors on the “logic board.” When I tried to start up the computer (with the “Floppy Emu” I ordered to use with a working Macintosh Plus I’d got my hands on some years earlier) to note a bare trickle of sound out of the headphone jack and a hard drive that didn’t respond to the basic formatting software, I could accept the truth of those comments. While I did buy a “learn to solder” kit and poked away at it for a while, the thought of doing that with anything valuable did continue to feel intimidating.

( Efforts at length and the help of others )

When perusing images I’ve saved, I can be struck by random moods. To escape the order the Finder imposes on QuickLook browsing, I’ve turned to utility programs. Some time ago I happened on a program called Xee, which let you jump among the images in a folder by hitting one key. However, this handiness began to seem at threat with the approach of “support for 32-bit applications will be removed.” I went so far as to move up from the free version of Xee to a paid-for revision, and carried on for a while longer.

( Far from the end, though )

In juggling a few idle pastimes, I’ve found my interest in “fooling around with old computers” waxes and wanes. New-to-me programs, bits of information, or even gadgets do keep catching my attention, but quite often I seem satisfied with more limited exploration than some people make a point of managing. (I suppose there’s an echo here of the people who bought “home computers” around the end of 1983 because it had become the latest fad, only to lose interest with the limited end-user capabilities of the time and wind up triggering a crash in the market.)

Playing with getting images on emulated or actual screens, though, has kept up my interest long enough over the past few months to start standing out a bit. Perhaps there are enough ways to try it that I can skip among them to the point of indulging a short attention span. After starting off with discovering some of the earliest “GIF viewers” for computers already a bit old when that format was introduced, then pushing on to managing to do a little with an even earlier cross-platform format, I started happening on ways to push some old envelopes.

( Looking in the right place at the right time )

I’m pretty blithe about upgrading my “iDevices” to the latest versions of their operating systems, but caution seems to kick in when it comes to my Macintosh computers. Waiting for the second “point revision” or so, though, sometimes means a critical mass of negative reactions accumulating such that I cling to the previous version, and having done that with macOS 10.15 after having skipped versions 10.7 and 10.10 did get to feel intimidating. The “so help me I will switch to Windows!” threats that turn up every so often started sticking in my mind more; a “bleah” reaction to the system font of Windows at work only carries so far. There’s also, of course, the passive-aggressive accomplishment of getting some version of Linux running. I did do that on a black plastic MacBook some years ago, but found no particular joy in its look either and didn’t push far enough to master “building from source.”

Acquaintances upgraded to Big Sur, though. So did family members, friends at work, and a few people I keep some track of online. Its name did not get abbreviated and turned into a cruel jab, at least so far as I’ve seen. With the second “point revision” approaching, I did get to the point of thinking I could consider making the leap myself, and ordered a solid-state drive for my bootable backup and a new hard drive for Time Machine. Then, system 11.2 showed up, and I pushed myself to get around to the upgrade.

( The drawn-out details )

Making some GIF files constrained to the graphics capabilities of the Tandy Color Computer 3 was an amusing diversion, if in the hard-to-articulate way that can accompany “fooling around with old computers” for me. As with the Apple II images I’ve generated before, I suppose the grainy, pixelated look of graphics boiled down from far more colourful originals left me contemplating and appreciating the work that went into the much cleaner “pixel art” of the past. A bit of searching (and wondering if modern pixel art tends towards canvases as small as possible, perhaps influenced more by the “sprites” of video game systems) turned up a gallery of screen-sized pictures, but so far I’ve only daydreamed about trying to get the Atari ST graphics among them onto Color Computer disk images to try out other image viewers run across (with a smattering of assuredly antique pictures on old disk images).

( Moving along, but making more discoveries )

For the moment I can still at least contemplate leaping at some point from macOS 10.14 “Mojave” to Big Sur (although a grandiose thought has been wandering through my mind to wait for the iMac to be upgraded to an “Apple Silicon” processor and make an expensive upgrade). In the meantime, though, some applications have begun being updated. The only problem there is that over the past several days I’d been unable to upgrade from the “App Store,” receiving an uninformative error message every time I tried clicking the upgrade button.

This problem had been showing up intermittently for a while, and at one point I tried deleting old versions altogether from “Launchpad” and then installing them from scratch. When I tried that this time, though, I got the same error message again, which was now ominous. After a first search for information, I formed the idea to try checking my App Store account from the bottom left-land corner of the program’s main window, and then clicked on “View Information” in the upper right-hand corner. After entering my Apple ID password, all of a sudden I could reinstall the deleted application, and upgrade the ones I hadn’t deleted to boot. Managing to resolve a hitherto inexplicable problem has improved my mood, and I suppose there’s the slightest chance trying to explain my solution here might help someone else.

I have a pretty good handle now on how to not just order online but also receive manga from an area comics shop. The shipping notice arrives in my email not that long before the parcel does, but it doesn’t take too long before leaving for work to print out the “please leave the box on my doorstep” form and tape it to my front door.

( But you do need paper to receive paper... )

While I’ve known that some web sites are getting more vocal about looking at them with an adblocker active (and have been quieting some of them by turning off Javascript before I head there), just this week most of the comic strip pages I look at every day started pretty much not loading at all. That did nudge me to follow up at last on an article that had turned up in my RSS reader about a “shortcut” to open multiple comics pages at once, but my first discovery was that “shortcuts” only work on my iPad, and my second was that my iPad, using the same adblocker as my desktop Safari, had the same not-displaying problem. With a different adblocker enabled in Firefox, though, the issue became a bit less acute, and I was inclined to reflect on keeping multiple software options open.

Aware in advance “32-bit Macintosh applications” wouldn’t run under a future revision of their operating system, I sought out alternatives for some, bought upgrades for others, and just sort of stopped using some neither option seemed possible for. As it turned out, the more or less simply amusing application I’d spent the most time getting running command-line-driven and Python-powered alternatives of a sort for received a substantial upgrade in the end. When system 10.15 did arrive, though, the “never upgrade under any circumstances ever” crowd had bugs to feast on and I lapsed into supposing that while I hadn’t installed systems 10.7 or 10.10 on my computers, I’d gathered the courage to move on to their successors (even if this would keep me from titling a post about upgrading “Catalina Caper.”)

( Jumping numbers )

Now that I can read the books that have to be “signed out” from the Internet Archive, I’m delving into that considerable collection. In the context of reading off a computer screen, having to get through a volume in a two-week loan can seem to feel like pushing a bit, but so far I’ve been able to handle that. Nor am I defeated by “the tyranny of choice.” A Wikipedia link happened to lead me back to Peter Nichols’ A Voyage For Madmen, about a nonstop round-the-world sailing race for solo mariners in the late 1960s (which might even so seem to have a few unfortunate resonances with “cooped up in isolation”). After that, the old computer magazines I skim through to feed the queue on Tumblr reminded me of a particular book, and it turned out the Archive did offer Frank Rose’s West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer (along with a different book with the same title, a science fiction novel I happened to have read years ago).

( More than the familiar anecdotes )

To work a bit more with “RSS feeds” and perhaps cut down a little on “idly revisiting sites just to see if they’ve updated,” I installed the program NetNewsWire, which started up already checking a number of “Apple-centric” sites. That might have made a bit more aware over the past several days the iPad was introduced ten years ago this month.

( An entirely personal history )

Over multiple updates of iOS, I’ve gathered the wallpaper designs get replaced after two or so versions, and as iOS 13 approached with its promises of the “Apple Arcade” I did get to wondering about the backgrounds introduced back with iOS 11 with rainbow stripes jumbled into the specific order of the old “six colour” Apple logo. I have found some sites that archive old wallpapers, and suppose it ought to be possible to store those images in Photos and use them for backdrops, but haven’t quite got around to trying that yet.

( From one screen to another )

Profile

krpalmer

Multi-Purpose Home Page

Navigation

August 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Night Sea for Tranquility III by branchandroot

Expand Cut Tags

Page generated Aug. 21st, 2025 04:36 pm

Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Entries tagged with apple

A Spazeroid's Return

A Pace or Two Back on Marathon

Moving on to Monterey

Back in Focus

Two Days After Ten Years Later

(Mac)Flim-Flam(boyance)

New Adventures in 1-bit Video

The Fourth Emulation Option

A Major Hardware Restoration

Now I Can Xee

Pushing Some Old Envelopes

Making the Big (Sur) Jump

On the Monochrome Edge

Updating at Last

The Manga Chase

The (Comic) Party's (Not) Over

The Big (Sur) (Upgrade) Questions

From the (Archive e-)Bookshelf: West of Eden

An iPad Catchup

Still Striped