A Geek Goes Flying

For the Listening Station™, intentionally constrained by the dimensions of the IKEA Knarrevik ($10 when I got it), I needed to put the Schiit stack on top of the 2014 Mac mini I’m using as an audio source. Unable to find a ready made solution that did what I wanted, I hacked this together Parts / tools: 6061 T651 Aluminum Sheet Metal 10 x 10 x 1/8(0.125") Inch Flat Plain Aluminum Plate ($15) Sign Standoff Screws Advertising Screws Stainless Steel Wall Standoff Mounts Glass Acrylic Nail, 8 Pieces (0.75 x 1.96 Inch) ($9) DEWALT Drill Bit Set, 14-Piece, 135 Degree Split Point, For Plastic, Wood and Metal (DWA1184) ($10) A 7.2V Black & Decker cordless drill I already had ( $27 at Walmart? Edit: Found the original receipt; it was $19.88 in 2007); roughly equivalent to this I think ($29), but if I was doing it again I’d get something like the beefier 20V MAX Cordless Drill (BCD702C1) . Shooting glasses I had lying around ( equivalent to these ) ($11). The stand-offs being .75...

Playing around with my P4460 Kill-A-Watt ; picked up a couple of short cables that let me insert it into the AC circuit just before it goes into the computer (monitor, whatever), for much more convenient measuring: IEC 320 C14 to NEMA 5-15R NEMA 5-15P to IEC-320-C13 Ancient iMac Core i3 My first test subject was a 2010 iMac 21.5" (Core i3, 12GB RAM, 500GB SSD, Ethernet networking, Bluetooth running for a wireless mouse). At first boot, waiting for login, it’s drawing about 80W. Immediately after login, when Activity Monitor shows 4 “CPU” units all spiked to 100%, it draws a maximum of about 120W. Not too shabby. Back to mostly idle (~2% System, ~4% User, ~94% Idle, with 1424 threads and 313 processes), it’s back to drawing about 80W (bouncing between about 78 and 82 watts). If I left it online 24/7 but mostly idle (which I used to do), it would consume 1 kWh over about 12.5 hours of operation. Over a 720 hour month, that would be about 58 kWh, which SCE charges from $.27–$.47 for...

It’s that time of year again: The weather is so nice, you just kinda have to work out on the balcony. Except, the sun can be an issue. Sometimes the heat. Solutions (or at least mitigations) have been found. The balcony “workstation” and my ever vigilant rescue mutt The computer is the “ not-an-iMac ,” with the matte screen. I added an inexpensive headset hanger to the back to hold the “used - like new” SHP-9600MB , and picked up a carrying case (meant for an actual 27" iMac, but works perfectly) to make it easy to move the whole setup (including keyboard and mouse) inside. The umbrella works quite well at holding back the worst of the direct sunlight, and was cheap. (I had to make a small wood wedge for under the table, for the clamp to hold well - there’s a bit of a “lip” around the bottom edge.) The little rechargeable ‡ Holmes fan ( Target ) works better than I expected. (Same is true of the USB-powered fan I have indoors – though I doubt it’s actually made of beskar .) ...

The circa-2011 Crucial M4 SSD in the 2012 Core i5 Mac mini I picked up used (and cheap!) for the office failed. It was running really slowly the night before, the next morning no application would open (the icons would just bounce in the dock, forever), and when I finally lost patience and power-cycled it, I got the dreaded blinking question-mark folder. Oh well. Picked up a Crucial MX500 ; 1TB seems to be the price-capacity sweet spot ($90). (Side note, the 256GB drive I was replacing was $299.99!) Swapping the same drive into the 2012 Mac mini server was a non-event, I could slip the old 500GB spinning rust mechanism right out. But the base model desktop was another story . Turns out I needed a simple, inexpensive, Mac Mini Logic Board Removal Tool to scoot the motherboard aside just enough for me to get the dead drive out. As long as I was ordering tools, I finally broke down and got a Wiha set . That, plus a set of cheap Chinese spudgers etc. I picked up a while ago ( Kaisi Profes...

My not-an-iMac wasn’t going to sleep, despite the power settings being properly configured under the Control Panel. Activity Monitor to the rescue; right-click the column names row in the interface and add “Preventing Sleep” to find the culprit: In this case, Firefox had a tab open with video, and Mail was running some interminable search. Closing the offending tab, and quitting Mail, allowed the machine to nap when it wasn’t being used.

My “mid-2010” iMac is getting flaky, and with its HD 4760 GPU, wasn’t a great contender for a Big Sur update, even with OpenCore Patcher. The 2012 Mac Mini occupies a sweet spot on eBay, selling for around $100-150 (depending on configuration), and can run Big Sur quite well, patched. The GPU in the iMac can be upgraded, but it’s still an old, underpowered machine witth splotches on the screen, etc. Newer iMacs aren’t that expensive by themselves, but once you factor in shipping, they’re spendy. Still, for dragging out onto the balcony to enjoy our reliably nice SoCal weather, you can’t beat the form factor. I decided to hack together a machine that met my specifications (including relatively low cost). I started with the highest spec inexpensive Mac Mini I could find, a late-2012 Core i7 2.3 GHz with 16GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive ($150). I swapped the hard drive for a Crucial MX500 1TB SSD ($90). I got a VESA mount ($15) so I could bolt it to the back of a monitor; for that I we...

  2012 2014 2018 Architecture Ivy Bridge, 2 or 4 cores Haswell, 2 cores Coffee Lake, 4 or 6 cores GPU Intel HD Graphics 4000 Intel HD Graphics 5000 Intel Iris 5100 Intel UHD Graphics 630 RAM Socketed, 16GB max Soldered, 16GB max Socketed, 64GB max Storage 2x SATAIII 2.5" 6 Gb/s 1x SATAIII 2.5" 6 Gb/s 1x Proprietary PCIe Soldered, 128GB or 256GB WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n 802.11ac 802.11ac USB 4x 3.0 Haswell 2x 3.1; 3x USB-C Bluetooth 4.0 4.0 5.0 Firewire 1x 800 — — Thunderbolt 1x 1.0 2x 2.0 4x 3.0 HDMI 1.3 1.4 2.0 Designation 6,1; 6,2 7,1 8,1   The 2012, which, patched , runs Big Sur acceptably well, seems to be the best bang for the buck. A 16GB Core i7 machine can be sourced for under $200 as of this writing. The 2014 and 2018 models are officially supported under at least macOS 11 (Big Sur), and a 64GB 2018 is tempting, but they’re still selling for $500...