Monthly Archives: February 2021

Christine

Photographs

Better than the movie.

The 1983 movie Christine may well have the most asinine plot of any movie yet made. It’s about a car that eats people ….

I was reminded of that horror when chancing on this 1965 Chrysler New Yorker at the local tire place. The owner/mechanic came over to regale me with the upgrades which see the 454 cubic inch motor (that’s a whopping 7.4 liters) put out some 450 horsepower. It’s a testament to American craftsmanship and paintwork if I tell you the car is but 56 years old, and appears completely shot.


454, four on the floor.

The owner assured me he regularly gets offers for it. Uh huh.

iPhone 12 Pro Max, UWA lens, processed in Nik Silver Efex 2.

Fields of Wheat

Motorcycles

An egregious marketing error repeated.

In the 1980s Toyota and Nissan decided that the last bastion of the car market – Germany’s luxury brands – was ready to be conquered. Both spent immense amounts of money developing and perfecting their 5 seater sedans with new V8 engines, a first for the Japanese. And both came out with magnificent vehicles of which a BMW engineer remarked “What are they trying to do? Kill us?”. And indeed the Japanese sedans, marketed under premium names, Lexus for the Toyota maker with the LS400 and Infinity’s Q45 for Nissan’s offering, were superior to the German high end offerings in every way. Performance was equal or better, the interiors were severe just like the Germans’ but, crucially, the Japanese vehicles were reliable, which could not be said for Mercedes’s S Class or BMW’s 7 series. They were also $10-20,000 cheaper.

Yet of these two great machines the more modestly spec’d LS400 wiped the salesroom floor with Infinity, and has maintained that lead since 1989 by a large margin. The cause was the now famous ‘Fields of Wheat’ advertising campaign waged by Infinity and its disastrous US marketing advisers. To emphasize the zen perfection of their car they showed waving fields of wheat with a pretentious voiceover, but omitted to show the vehicle. The LS 400 sold by the dozen as its prosaic ads actually deigned to show the rather staid looking vehicle. The Q45 was disregarded. No one knew what it looked like.

Now let’s jump forward 30 years and we see a variation of this marketing disaster rolled out by none other than Harley Davidson, one of the savviest marketers out there. After all when you saturate the US and much of the rest of the world where roads exists with antiquated, poorly engineered and premium priced motorcycles you must be doing something right and Harley has been doing that for a very long time. But some marketing whiz at HD decided that the time was ripe to introduce an electric Hog and here it is in all its glory:


Probably worth $5,000 or so.

What brought this to my attention was a recent reality TV show named ‘Wrong Way Up’ where two famous long distance riders decided to ride their electric Harleys from the southernmost point of South America to Los Angeles. Those riders – Ewan McGregor of Star Wars fame and Charley Boorman whose dad is a famous Hollywood director – are as likable as they get. Grown men who never outlived their boyhoods, they are fun to watch and are great motorcyclists. So they decided to ride their electric bikes, supported by a large staff driving Rivian electric trucks, seemingly amazed that in cold temperatures the Hog had a range of maybe 70 miles, provided you could even find a charging point with sufficient current to ‘fill up the tank’.

Now it is true there are many unfortunate souls reading this journal who have never thrown a leg over a motorcycle saddle and regard powered two wheels as the work of the devil. Their loss. But even these poor folk know that the one thing above all which Harley sells is noise. So much so that the company tried – and failed – to patent the noise of the Harley’s exhaust a few years ago, a noise which results from the uneven firing intervals of the two cylinders in the gas bikes. This approach to ‘engineering’ also ensures the bike vibrates as if infected with St. Vitus’s Dance. Next time you pull up to one idling at a red light check it out for yourself. A silent Harley is anathema to its white trash buyers and, boy, is the electric Harley silent or what? It does not rumble. It whines. All those jokes about aficionados of other brands riding washing machines will come back to haunt Harley as they look down the barrel of the worst marketing idea since that Infinity Q45 of yore. Comical. Then check the price ….

As for the LS400, mine is a 2000, last of breed before the engines started growing. At 140,000 miles it is like new and it’s some testament to its reliability if I disclose that failure of a stop bulb a couple of years ago saw me angered. But temperate mien returned quickly when I reminded myself that repairs on the predecessor Mercedes S Class were pretty much a monthly occurrence. Switch gear, gearboxes, motor mounts, disastrous air conditioning, awful radio, you name it. All failed regularly.

Got $30,000? Buy a nice BMW classic airhead and bank the $23,000 left over.

AMD Radeon GPUs

Mac Pro

An element of future proofing.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

Apple simply cannot leave OS X alone. An OS that was perfectly solid with the Snow Leopard iteration back in 2009 continues to see annual ‘upgrades’ which add nothing but useless bells and whistles. And with OS X High Sierra (10.13 – 2017) Apple made the last version of OS X which worked with Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia and Apple had parted company a while back and Nvidia decided that the small user base no longer justified coding of drivers for later versions of OS X despite having some of the best GPUs made. Then Apple insisted on adding its Metal GPU technology meaning that from OS X Mojave (10.14) no Nvidia GPUs would work. A solution looking for, and finding, a problem.

So why care when OS X High Sierra works well? Because increasingly app makers are coding for Metal, and if your app is one of those and is in need of an upgrade, you are stuck with migrating to a recent model GPU from AMD/ATI.

I have not researched this in great depth but the AMD HD7950 is known to work well as are later versions. I bought a used 3gB HD7950 on eBay – it was fraudulently advertised as a later R9 280, so what else is new with eBay – and it works well in High Sierra. Here are the comparisons from HWCompare:


Nvidia GTX980 4gB vs. AMD HD7950 3gB.

My tests on my Mac Pro 2010 confirm that the AMD card – it ran me $220 – is marginally slower than the Nvidia/EVGA GTX980 in use, but as I do not do heavy video processing that does not concern me.


Unigine video tests. The upgrade to a faster CPU is irrelevant here.

Nova returns similar performance comparisons:


The GTX980 returns 2640.

Static power consumption, measured using a Kill-A-Watt meter, is 225 watts, compared with 252 watts for the Nvidia card. That rises to 460 watts with a BENQ 32″ 1080p display while running Unigine Heaven. That is well within the power handling of the Mac Pro and, more importantly, the 200 watt maximum power draw of the AMD GPU is below the 225 watts available to the card via the PCIe slot (75 watts) and the two motherboard cable feeds, one 6 and the other 8 pin. Those provide 75 watts each for a maximum of 225 watts. The AMD card is very quiet and there is no start up whirr, unlike with the Nvidia card. While the seller stated the boot screen works (my MacVidCards modified GTX980 provides a boot screen on its DVI and DP ports, not on the HDMI one) that is not the case. I could not get boot screens on any of the MDP, DVI or HDMI ports. Oh! well ….

Should you ‘upgrade’ to an AMD card? Well, if your latest apps insist on Metal and you want/have to install OS X Mojave (10.14) or Catalina (10.15), you have no choice. Only AMD GPUs will work. Does the AMD card work with the latest OS X, Big Sur (10.16)? It’s too early to say.

Adding 4K to the movie Mac Pro:

My motivation was different. Having added a big screen LG OLED TV a couple of years ago to the home theater, I wanted to deliver 4K video to the display which is mostly driven from a single CPU 2009 Mac Pro which is a robust and reliable file server as well as offering internet access to streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. But the HDMI card in that Mac Pro is an ancient GTX520, limited to 1080p. Thus I have been using an Apple TV4K to deliver 4K streams, but that’s not an especially elegant solution as you have to switch between sources. That machine is running OS X Yosemite (10.10 – 2014) and has no need of Metal technology. So it occurred to me I could both future proof my 2010 Mac Pro by installing an AMD card and at the same time switch the GTX980 over to the 2009 movie Mac Pro where it will happily deliver 4K definition (3840 x 2160 in the 16:9 aspect ratio, compared with 1920 x 1080 in 1080p). That would allow sale of the AppleTV4K as all movies would be streamed through the Mac Pro and no input switching would be required. The home screen looks like this:


The Mac Pro movie server home screen – all icon driven. DVDPedia – at top left – catalogs movies on the server.

I use a small app named Img2Icns to generate icons from images found on the web.

HiDPI

When Apple migrated its screens to the Retina Display icons shrank to a quarter of their original size, making them very hard to see and click. Most external monitors, like a 4K TV, do not recognize the HiDPI tech built into the displays on Macs, so HiDPI has to be enabled to show icons in a decent size while not affecting 4K definition in 4K movies. HiDPI scaling can be enabled by starting Terminal (in Applications->Utilities) and typing the following (works with OS X Mavericks 10.9 or later):

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool true

Hit enter, type your password, hit enter again and reboot. HiDPI is now enabled. Go to System Preferences->Displays, click on ‘Scaled’ (you may have to hold down the Alt key on your keyboard) and HiDPI options will now be shown. Click on 3840 x 2160 (HiDPI) and your icons will revert to regular size. You can verify that you’re getting the right resolution by clicking the Apple Menu in the top-left, selecting “About This Mac”, then the “System Report” button, then clicking “Graphics/Displays” in the list on the left. You will see something like this:

Displays:

AV Receiver:
Resolution: 3840×2160 (2160p 4K UHD – Ultra High Definition)
UI Looks like: 1920×1080 (1080p FHD – Full High Definition)

If you decide you want to revert the change above, just use this terminal command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool false

SwitchResX:

If you struggle with getting the right definition and frame rate in System Preferences->Displays, install SwitchResX, a small, inexpensive utility which allows you to set both. I find 24fps is inadequate for some movies and with HDMI on a Mac Pro (which supports HDMI 1.4, not the faster 2.0) you can increase the framing rated from 24fps to 30fps, which works well. I have it set at 3840×2160 which is 4K and 30fps.

Conclusion:

So if you need to add Metal/Mojave et al compatibility to your Mac Pro a late model AMD card works well and needs no special drivers. An older Nvidia card (GTX680 or later, but no later than GTX980) can be used to stream movies in 4K definition, a definition also supported by the AMD card. However, the Nvidia card is limited to OS X High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.

No more identity theft

Hall of Shame, iPad, iPhone, Ramblings

Hasta la vista, Zuck.


No more theft.

iOS 14.5 for the iPhone and iPad will be released shortly. Unlike previous versions of the operating system, apps which would require the user to opt-out of tracking their activity now will require the user to consciously agree to be tracked. The opt-in screen appears above.

Why is this a big deal?

Let me flashback to to my son’s 6th grade year in California. That was in 2014. As we were walking home I noticed that all the kids in the playground were busy staring at their smartphone screens.

“What are they doing, Winnie?” I asked in all innocence.

“Facebook, Dad”.

This set me off on a process of discovery and disclosed what has to be the greatest evil of our time. Not only was Facebook absorbing and wasting huge amounts of time for these fertile young brains, it transpired that it was tracking everything these kids did even if they were not on Facebook. And unless you have been in a nuclear blast-proof bunker the last few weeks with no access to any sort of connectivity, you will also know that Facebook extended its evil ways as an organizing vehicles for traitors, seditionists and insurrectionists. Censorship of hate speech be damned, thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg. The people who stormed the Capitol on their Pig’s orders on January 6, 2021 had organized their meetings on Facebook and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter.

But it gets even worse. 4 years ago a very close US presidential election awarded that same Pig the Oval Office thanks to the Russkies’ massive campaign of disinformation on …. yup, you guessed it, Facebook. And every time those seditionists clicked on the site of their local guns and ammo supplier, Facebook was there making money off their clicks. Zuckerberg was, simply stated, being paid by the makers of deadly weapons.

Now Zuckerberg is up in arms about Tim Cook’s privacy decision. He argues that the requirement to opt-in to being tracked will make your “….advertising experience worse.” Excuse me? Is there something like a good advertising experience?

Come to think of it, while you are at it, you might as well install an ad blocker on all your devices to cut the noise and disruption ads cause in the reading experience.

So when iOS 14.5 is announced, I advise all iOS users to upgrade immediately and refuse to opt-in to tracking of their activity. If you prefer to be watched, sold, tracked, filed and numbered while enhancing Mr. Zuckerberg’s bloated net worth, then stick with your Samsung cell phone. iOS 14.5 works on iPhone 6S or later.

As for my son, he gave up Facebook shortly after the experience explained above, and has never been happier or more productive.