News

Our G5s Are Getting Older Everyday

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My G5 is nearing its 11th birthday (or thereabouts), and perhaps to celebrate, Apple announced that it was finally introducing a new file system to its line of Macs and devices. (Haha!) HFS+ has lived a long life, and it was about time. But with a new file system in the works, it points to yet another distancing of our old Macs with the inevitable future.

The question will be – how long will we on Leopard (or Tiger) have some interoperability with newer Macs? HFS+ support will be ongoing on newer Macs, so it’s not something that will be imminent. Someday, HFS+ support will go away. Then, for those of us who may use those newer machines on a regular basis, we may have to make difficult choices or find workarounds to keep all of our Macs working in beautiful harmony.

I was also struck by other developments. TenFourFox, our beloved hero of the PPC community, will continue to face hurdles to get later versions of Firefox (and the security fixes and features that go with them) working. Cameron’s work is amazing nonetheless.

I was excited to see Leopard Webkit with a new version out, but it’s likely less secure than TenFourFox and potentially will always be.

The Dropbox hack is also likely facing its end of life – pretty soon, I won’t be able to sync my various files between devices quite so easily. *sigh*

At some point, we will all face the difficult reality that our Macs are not going to get any younger. Already, on some websites, my G5 sputters and chokes a bit, taking its sweet time to catch up on html, images, videos, and javascript that my iPhone 6+ renders in seconds. It makes you appreciate simpler webpages and simpler times.

Already, my G5 longs to play newer versions of Minecraft instead of the old outdated version someone shared on MacRumors sometime ago.

While a 11 year old may seem quite young compared to some old mainframes chugging along after all these years, I do expect that someday I will come downstairs, press the power button, and hear a final sad whirl as my G5 shuffles off into restful sleep. Until then, I’ll continue to marvel at the noisy behemoth and enjoy the many productive hours it has given me creating cool things and interacting with the world.

— Nathan

Updates & Links

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It’s a nice, wet spring afternoon up here in the lower northeast, so I got a bit of updates done on the website that have been brewing for a while. I continue to want to improve the readability and accessibility of this website. If you have suggestions or feel like something is missing, please let me know in the comments below.

Meanwhile, one subtle change to the website is that I am trying to include notice of when each page was last updated. Below the introduction text on each page, you’ll see a new line:

last updated screenshot

I hope it is helpful as you make return visits, looking for new links and other updated information.

Meanwhile, around the PowerPC world:

  • TenFourFox is now at 38.8.0.
  • I came across Hack5190’s pretty solid beginning to hardening your G5 to hackers and other potential attacks. Read it here. He lists more information in the posts that follow, if you are so inclined.
  • lotvai77, another MacRumors poster, managed to hack CorePlayer and keep it working on Power Macs. I don’t use CorePlayer, but it may interest you.
  • Updates are coming to SimpleMarkPCC… soon.

Enjoy the rest of your Saturday!

— Nathan

Celebrating a Birthday

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No, not my birthday… but the fact that our little hack to keep Dropbox operational on Power Macs is still going strong, one year later.

Read the thread for the full scoop if you missed it the first time. Fun little story of tinkering and experimenting. I sort of got the ball rolling with a nagging idea that Dropbox was only checking for the system version, which prevented the client from loading and syncing. It worked! Forums hero Czo did the real heavy lifting, packaging it together in a much more elegant solution. His most recent update, getting rid of an annoying timer, was also super clever.

Just a fun reminder of the PowerPC community at work, keeping our machines going.

— Nathan

All things must come to an end, even Diablo II…

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Blizzard Software was one of those rare companies back in the day that seemed to love and support the Mac as an equal citizen in the gaming world. I’ve spent many hours playing Diablo I and II, Warcraft I & II, and Starcraft. So, it was kind of funny to read about their latest update for Diablo II, 16 years ago or so since the game went down.

From Battle.Net:

It’s been a long time coming, but today we’re releasing 1.14a for Diablo II. This update focuses on system glitches introduced by modern operating systems. In related news, you can finally retire those old Mac PowerPCs. Included with the update is a shiny new installer for OSX.

The title is being a little melodramatic, because it sounds like you can probably still enjoy Diablo II on your PowerPC machine. The newest update won’t work, and I bet this means the end of PowerPC on Battle.net. Oh well!

Thanks to Blizzard for keeping PowerPC Macs supported for as long as they have.

— Nathan

Check the obvious solutions first

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Several years ago, I grabbed a Seagate Free Agent external drive for a song in some refurb sale. It came in at 1.5 TB, matching my internal drive in my G5 and the aluminum look of my setup. Great stuff.

Except… it would do weird things. During normal operation, though getting a bit hot from time to time, it was reliable enough to serve as a backup drive, but when I would turn my G5 off, the Free Agent would keep running. At first, I thought, maybe it just takes a bit to spin down and cool off, but it would stay on, hard drive spinning, for hours. Doing nothing.

Here’s a reason why I bought the drive – it had Firewire 800, making it a doubly great deal at the time. I wanted to maximum every ounce of speed from my G5, so why not use FW800 over USB 2.0? So, I did, stubbornly.

I got into the habit of physically unplugging the drive after use.

Ultimately, I decided, after a series of different kinds of troubleshooting, that my G5 probably had a less updated version of Firewire 800 that didn’t play quite nicely with this drive or its controller, failing to give it a “go to sleep” function or something or the other.

Fast forward to years of living with his annoying issue, I misplaced my Firewire 800 cable during a recent move to a new home, and so I plugged in the USB cable that came with the drive. Guess what? As soon as I shut the G5 off, the whole unit goes to sleep on command (and seems a whole lot less hot too).

In other words, after all these years of trying to maximize speed, I failed to give it even one test with a USB cable to compare performance and quirks. It wasn’t my G5 after all, likely a poorly designed controller board in the external drive that couldn’t play nicely. No wonder I got it for so cheap.

It just goes to show – don’t be stubborn. Check the most basic solutions first before making do with bugs and quirks. Next time, I’ll tell you about living with quirky RAM issues.

— Nathan