Reading Time: 4 minutesThis is a post in the Project Maya series. To see all related posts go to the index page here. As the 2023 PPC Challenge is well underway, it was time for Maya to make an appearance again. As we’re used to from these machines (once the power supply has been fixed), it fired right up. This year I want to play with some of the cool projects out there such as Arctic Fox, Message Bridge, Discord Lite, and others….
Reading Time: 7 minutesThis is a question I receive daily now, and it’s not for the reason you may think. The Mac Pro (4,1-5,1), when properly specced out, is more than capable to hold its own even next to an M1 Mac Studio. In some regards, it even beats the Studio (yes, Apple’s performance exaggerations were quickly debunked). So why do Mac Pro owners want to consider trading their beast for something else? They’re expensive to run. One area the Mac Pro has…
Reading Time: 11 minutesEarlier this year (2022), Karen Haslam wrote an article for MacWorld UK, titled “Why you shouldn’t buy a second hand Mac“. I don’t follow Karen’s writings or MacWorld so this article did not pop up on my radar until just two days ago (mid-March 2022 at the time of writing). When this article was linked on Facebook, I read it and obviously disagreed with its contents. It wasn’t until I scrolled back up I saw the author’s name. That name…
Reading Time: 4 minutes“Coming this fall” is what the macOS Monterey product page states. Well, fall is here, and Monterey is expected to be released soon. Once it is released, you do not want to be caught off guard like Karen Haslam did last year. This MacWorld editor “lives and breathes Apple” yet has no clue how to prepare for a macOS upgrade. Don’t be like Karen, be adequately prepared. This article aims to help you be just that! macOS Monterey system requirements…
Reading Time: 5 minutesThis is a project, one of many, that I have been working on. As this project has now ended, I thought it would be fun to recap the journey. July 3rd, Steve from Mac84 receives an email. The email asks him for help to track down version 9 of outSPOKEN, a screen reader for Mac OS 9 that lets visually impaired or blind use the system. Version 8 is available on Macintosh Garden but does not work on Mac OS…
Reading Time: 9 minutesOpenCore is, for lack of a better word, amazing. If you don’t know what OpenCore is, read about some of its benefits here. I have no experience (yet) with other versions of OpenCore, such as the Legacy patcher, but I fully intend to explore that as well at some point. This post is the quick and easy guide that should have anyone up and running with OpenCore on the cMac Pros in minutes. This guide may have steps in it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesLast year I wrote the piece “Check your backups” which focused on optical media backups. Backing up and checking those backups is an ever-evolving process, we always look for faster, easier and more reliable ways to backup our data but checking backups has always been pretty much the same tedious, time-consuming process. Today I want to tell you about a little utility that I’ve had for years but never used; IntegrityChecker by diglloydTools. Part of a suite that I’ve been…
Reading Time: 22 minutesWhen you’ve been servicing computers in one way or another for 23 years, sometimes it can get a little boring. Something I’ve run into several times over the years and I usually take a break for a week or two and do something completely different. Gardening, playing darts, console games, movies, tv shows, and stuff like that can kill some time but it’s more of a small break than a complete get-away-from-computers, you know? 2020 has been a good year…
Reading Time: 7 minutesNOTE: The below mentioned procedures may no longer work. I intend to look into it and update this article at some point but this can take many months. Proceed if you want, it might work, it might fail. Check the comments for possible workarounds and solutions found by others. Hanging out in the various Facebook groups and other communities, I rarely run into anyone anymore that has a 2009 4,1 Mac Pro that still runs the stock firmware. But there…
Reading Time: 6 minutesIn the last week of 2020, I took up a new hobby; 3D Printing. Prior to receiving the printer, a good two weeks of non-stop research was done looking into almost all aspects of 3D printing and I learned a lot. This research definitely saved me a good amount of time once I received the printer and apart from some calibration issues, I was printing good-looking stuff after about a week. One of the things I researched was the potential…