Hey fellow G5ers.
This point of this post is that I don’t foresee many updates to the website moving forward.
While my PowerMac G5 traveled with me from the east coast to west coast during a recent move, I have yet to fire it up and decide how to proceed. Some of the information on the pages has begun to become out of date. In some ways, our G5s are less viable as ever as a daily computing platform, but with a Mac Mini M1/M2 under $500, we are really in a golden age of affordable, super fast computing.
I love PowerPCs. This G5 is a beautiful machine. It has served me well.
But times change. Technologies march on.
We’ll see what lies ahead, but for now, this website is “frozen”.
Peace, Nathan.
Thanks for all the years, posts and information provided!
Much appreciated, really.
I’ve also not been posting much, lately. My long tenure at big corp ended up in an awful way, so now I work at a startup, which means that my 8 hours per day of work are all used writing code. There’s not much of brain left after that.
Also, photography became my main hobby, meaning that I can’t really drive my Canon Pro-1000 with legacy machines.
However… I found out my calling. Interacting with legacy systems and meeting all the wonderful folks online made me realise that my quest is against forced obsolescence. Yes, newer computers sip electricity, but you would need to run a new computer for many many years to account for all the pollution that manufacturing a computer produces. Most of what drives processing power needs forward is basically Internet bloat. Besides specific needs, such as high-end gaming, ultra-high-def video streaming or ultra-high resolution imagery, most people use computers to process and transmit data. Send emails and pictures, read news, fill their taxes, etc.. So I decided to take control back of my digital life, and took a few friends along with me.
I’ve been hosting my own email and file store at home (with backup still at AWS unfortunately, so far) using Ivy Bridge low wattage Xeons and a carefully installed software stack. My phone is now a Librem 5 and I am very keen to see the powerpc laptop finally see the light of the day and, guess what… I am daily driving a HP 712/60 with nextstep 3.3!
My productivity is way higher – there’s not much on the way of syntax highlighting or auto-type, so I must be careful with my code. I can log into a VM in my home rack to do GIT and host the code in a NFS mount. I managed to modify the PostScript Description File of my printer to work with nextstep, meaning I can change parameters such as resolution, paper tray or color. Markdown to PostScript is trivial to get working. The machine is quiet, doesn’t overload me with information and, by making me slow down 15%, I make way less mistakes and end the day less tired. Teams? Remote X into Chrome. =)
And my 2009 Mac Pro with a Vega 64 still runs Flight Simulator 2020 very well, with my G5 performing some server duties and serving as cross-platform coding test bed.
So, as you wind down your wonderful page, I hope you don’t forget WHY we retro-compute. We shouldn’t be forced to pay multiple times for no improvement and to generate trash. Our computers are tuned for our needs, serve them well and we should not be forced to throw them away.
Good luck in your future endeavours!