Happy New Year & Adblock

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I’ve got some new mini-projects for my G5 on the horizon, including a shiny new SSD with a Sandforce controller that should work quite well compared to the PNY Optima (with a Silicon Motion controller).

But in the meanwhile, I posted some comments over at the TenFourFox blog to this effect – do Ad Block options really make a difference memory/speed wise for our G5s? Since some of us do not have quad core machines, we need to worry about squeezing every little bit of performance. While ad block extensions for Firefox sure remove a lot of annoyances that the web offers, do they also slow down our browsing?

I tried with an eyeball test this morning, nothing scientific. With Ad Block Edge, which I have preferred in the past, my RAM usage was around 355 MB on average. From what I have heard, Edge maintains lists of urls of known ad servers to block images/content from, but they do this after the page has already loaded, going through the urls one by one. There is some overhead to this process.

Another option mentioned to me was Bluhell Firewall which takes some of the overhead out of it. In their not very satisfying words, they explain that:

How this is achieved is thanks to just seven hard-coded blocking rules covering about 8400 .com and .net domains, these were auto-generated from Easylist. That means, every time a certain resource wants to be loaded we will have to iterate through a list of seven compiled patterns, rather than for each entry from a common Easylist which contains hundreds of different items to check.

An eyeball test suggests that the memory hovers now around 250 MB in regular usage. That is probably not significant for someone with 2 GB or more of RAM, but for a Mac Mini or some other machine limited in RAM, it could be a helpful avenue to explore.

I want to stress that this was just a quick test, and there are likely other factors that influence RAM usage and the overall feel of the browser. I am switching over to Bluhell on my G5 for the time being. I can always jump back to Ad Block Edge if I feel it isn’t doing an adequate job.

Enjoy your day and year!

— Nathan

Learning things the hard way

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Sometimes, we G5 owners have to learn things the hard way.

In the midst of holiday sales, I ended up with a $10 off coupon to Best Buy in my inbox. I also noted that a decent PNY Optima SSD, 240Gb in size, was on sale. With an extra $10 off, this was a solid deal to upgrade my G5. I ordered online and picked it up from the local Best Buy. So excited to get this thing going, I almost ended up being late to an event I had that evening.

Here’s the bad news – it didn’t work. In my haste to grab this solid deal, I neglected my own research on SATA III devices and Power Mac G5s. While I assume there might be 1 or 2 out there that work, SATA III drives often cause funny, bizarre symptoms on our older Macs. Yes, the drives might say they are compatible with older SATA I or II standards, but that doesn’t always mean what it’s supposed to mean. (I even note this on my Hardware page about how some SSD drives have jumpers to make them run in a safer compatibility mode.) This PNY Optima did not have any jumpers, but I had hoped I would be lucky. I figured it would magically work for me.

What were some of the symptoms? It acted like it was having motherboard issues, power management issues, or even a dead PRAM battery. I was certain it was these problems, so I tried everything in the book. I reseated the RAM. I pressed the CUDA switch on the motherboard. I reset the PRAM. The Mac would not boot from anything, including the Leopard install DVD on an external Firewire drive. At worst, it froze. At best, it flashed the dreaded System Folder question mark.

Some have found that SSDs work better in a different bay on your G5, so I even tried that. No luck.

But when I took out that new SSD and plopped in the old Corsair F60, the G5 booted up just like normal. No motherboard issues. All that work for naught. I ended up returning the SSD and decided to wait for another decent deal on a more compatible SSD down the road.

Is there a lesson to be learned? One: G5 owners are slowly (and sometimes rapidly) getting left behind. Two: always do some googling, read some reviews, and rely on some of the experience of the PPC community. Three: SSDs are awesome and finicky creatures.

In other news, you can grab an updated build of TenFourFoxG5 that promises to work a little bit better on dual core machines. I know they’d love your feedback over there. Also, a security hole in the NTPD server/process, although you may not be technically affected.

— Nathan

Security

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Dan at PPC Luddite is a good dude.

He posted a great resource which links to all of the latest security fixes revealed in recent weeks. It’s handy to go through and make sure your Mac is secure. Find it here.

Here’s a few thoughts from me –

I no longer do any online banking or shopping in Leopard. I have other more updated computers, including my iPhone 6 Plus that work better at that anyway. Granted, I am pretty trusting of TenFourFox, but still, it’s good to be cautious.

If your G5 isn’t on the internet, then you don’t have to be too worried. Hackers can’t get to your Mac if it isn’t plugged in (shocker, I know). At the end of the day though, the simplest security breaches happen when someone has physical access to a computer. You can be locked down behind the world’s greatest firewall, but if the thief can get to your machine by hand, you’re in trouble.

When you do get on the net, be careful and thoughtful. Most routers have a decent set of default security features that prevent an outside source from accessing your machine remotely. If you do open up your firewall for remote access to your G5, make regular password changes to be on the safe side. Consider limiting access to only a certain ip range. Turn off any extra file sharing services that you do not use regularly. Consider using one of the AppleScripts linked to in the article mentioned above to lock your Mac down even further.

A slim positive for us PPC users these days is a sense of obscurity. Hackers are not going to spend a ton of time targeting what few machines of ours exist out there. They are going for the big fish, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t get in trouble via a universal type app built in Java or a good old fashioned fishing website. Leopard’s BSD underpinnings also means there might be openings in common programs like bash, apache, etc. to be aware of. Stay connected to your broader PPC community to see what has been discovered and what workarounds exist, if any.

Be thankful you have a Mac. Everybody has upped their game in recent years, making even recent versions of Windows far less of a target. Macs still have a stellar security record. I’ve only had a single experience in over 20+ years of using Macs (starting with a Mac Classic) of dealing with a virus, and it was a Microsoft Word macro bug that got cross-pollinated to my lab machines from some Windows computers. I know others have had worse experiences – others have had even better. Your mileage may vary, but be glad you still use a damn good computer with a damn good OS.

— Happy holidays ya’all, Nathan

Markdown: Case Closed (For Now)

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Hey, I promise I will stop posting about MarkDown.

In final news, the most obvious of solution presented itself – online MarkDown editors.

You will need a Power Mac G5 (or other PowerPC machine) with enough oomph to run TenFourFox. Once you have that though, you are good to go.

The first site I recommend is Dillinger.io. It is sleek, elegant, and quick. I have no problem writing in TenFourFox, and the web app lets you export to html, pdf, or even native markdown format. In the column on the left, you write our your code, story, or journal, and the left showcases your work with the appropriate formatting. I like it a lot. The PDF export looks particularly good. You can even integrate it with DropBox and other online repositories. I’m also curious about how you might save sessions across computers.

Another option is Markable, which is also pretty slick and fast. It might even be faster than Dillinger, but there is one downside – no PDF export. You can however export to html. It has a login system, so you can presumably setup a static sort of work environment across different computers.

StackEdit is another nice option that produces really pretty looking documents. On TenFourFox, it is a bit more sluggish though. It seems to have some nice options to create a persistent writing environment, but PDF export is a paid feature ($5/year).

One more – MarkDown Editor is the fastest in browser one I have found so far. It runs very smooth in TenFourFox and would probably run just as smooth on older G4s as well. It’s pretty simple too. There is only a single option to export to HTML, the look of the app is nowhere near as slick, but the thing flies.

There are appear to be others, so if you come across one that works great on your Mac, post it here in the comments so we can share the wealth.

For now, the case is closed. PowerPC machines do have options for MarkDown, offline or online. Now get to writing that great novel and/or code.

— Nathan

Another MarkDown option

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My MarkDown search has led to one more possibility, until I can port or develop a more full-featured “Byword” type editor. It’s called TextMate, and it’s pretty decent.

If you need a good free text editor for coding projects, you can’t go wrong with TextWrangler as I suggest on this site. But TextMate is another great option, except that it is shareware. You can still purchase a license for it, maybe even get one free if you work in the academic field. I ended up with a license from an old MacHeist contest sometime ago, so I was excited to be able to give it another go.

The good news is that when you download version 1.5.10 for Tiger or Leopard, it comes with a MarkDown bundle pre-installed. As you write your MarkDown, you can pull up a nifty preview window with a few different styling options to see how your writing looks. You can then export it to html or possibly use other TextMate features to send it to a blogging engine of choice.

Text Mate Screenshot

There appears to be a newer version of the MarkDown bundle, but I am guessing it is only compatible for the newer beta version of TextMate, which is intel only. However, we at least have two legitimate options for writing using MarkDown for the time being. That’s better than nothing.

My mythical search is really for something more like Byword, less a text editor and more of a distraction free writing tool. Stay tuned.

— Nathan