A Geek Goes Flying

The centerpiece of my home LAN is an HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 , that replaced an old N36L back in 2014. (The N36L was a great starter server, but the 2TB limit on drives and the lack of support for jumbo frames were ultimately pretty limiting.) According to the specs , it has: A Celeron G1610T (2.3 GHz/2-core/2MB/35 W) processor 2GB RAM (HPE Smart Memory, DDR3 Unbuffered, PC3L-12800E Dual Data Rate (DDR3) UDIMM) 3x 3GB/s SATA ports, two connected to non-hot-swap externally accessible drive bays, one that’s intended for an optical drive 2x 6GB/s SATA ports, connected to non-hot-swap externally accessible drive bays An on-board (internal) USB 2.0 port An on-board (internal) microSD socket A PCIe 2.0 x16 slot 2x rear, 2x front USB 2.0 ports 2x rear USB 3.0 ports (requires an OS to be running) 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports 1x Ethernet port for iLO Like many others, I’ve repurposed the optical drive bay to hold a boot drive. This used to be a 120GB SanDisk that served admirably, but since

Shuffled things around a bit. Took the Kailh Box Pale Blue switches out of the GMMK and swapped in a new set of Box Navy switches. Jury’s still out on that combo. It’s objectively a better keyboard than the GK705 (heavier metal construction, black with a metal trim ring, matte keycaps with a bit of texture, just overall feels more solid), but I’m just not sure I like the Navy switches in this as much as I do in the Keychron K2. Can’t put my finger on it. Whipped up a quick JSON file for Karabiner that maps the meta keys in the bottom row to something sensible for the Mac (a lot left to do in that set of complex modifications, but what’s there works for now). Anyway. Stripped the Box White (and a ... Box Blue?) switches out of the GK705 and moved the Pale Blue switches over (except for the PtrSc/ScrLk/Pause keys that I never use, which stayed on White switches, and the space bar, which got a left over Navy switch, ‘cause I might have bent a couple of pins :/). The GK705 is a lighte

Updated January 9, 2023. The previous version of 1010.6 has been updated effective 1/1/2023, through Assembly Bill no. 2961 . The current text . The first sentence of subdivision (e)(1) has been relocated verbatim to (b)(2): “A person represented by counsel, who has appeared in an action or proceeding, shall accept electronic service of a notice or document that may be served by mail, express mail, overnight delivery, or facsimile transmission.” The second sentence of (e)(1) is now subd. (b)(3), with some tweaks: “Before first serving a represented person electronically, the person effecting service the serving party shall confirm by telephone or email the appropriate electronic service address for the counsel being served.” Finally, subd. (e)(2) has been moved to subd. (b)(4) with light edits: “A party person represented by counsel shall, upon the request of any party person who has appeared in an action or proceeding and who provides an electronic service address, electroni

I love fonts. (Typefaces. Whatever. The terms are interchangeable in common parlance, at this point.) My templates have been using Matthew Butterick’s Equity for years. (Though that makes it something of a PITA to exchange documents with opposing counsel. For those situations, Garamond, I guess.) I love Typography for Lawyers ; I have both a physical copy and the eBook; much of the content is also available on his website . If you don’t want to spend upwards of $100 on a font, there are free versions of Baskerville available (it’s also a Macintosh system font , and should be installed with Microsoft Office on Windows ): Libre Baskerville  (optimized for screen reading; many courts are now making uploaded PDFs available to jurists on tablets and large screens) Open Baskerville ( direct link to ZIP file on archive.org ) ( Font Library page ) For more information on why fonts matter, I recommend reading The Baskerville Experiment: Font and its influence on our perception of truth . For

I elected to go the cheaper, fast-enough-for-now route with my Big Sur volume in my mid-2010 Mac Pro. I mounted the 2.5" SSD to an  OWC Mount Pro Drive Sled ($15) instead of taking up my last free PCIe slot with another Accelsior S card . I may revisit that decision at some point, but for right now it’s not a priority. The fit and finish appear to be spot on, and the whole process was painless. In the box are the sled itself and four small screws to mount the SSD to the sled; the sled itself slides into place just like the OEM 3.5" units. Super easy, and I feel a lot better with the drive mounted, vs. hanging from the SATA connector (which worked very temporarily - SSDs are very light weight - but obviously wasn’t a durable solution).

I picked up the “ HEXGEARS GK705 104 Keys Waterproof Kailh BOX Switch Mechanical Keyboard Hot Swap LOL Mechanical Gaming Keyboard ” from AliExpress to see what a cheap hot swap mechanical keyboard would be like. I opted for the white backlight and Kailh Box White switches, which are essentially the Kailh Pale Blue switches (thinner click bar) with a lighter spring. The keyboard itself is about $60; with shipping it came to about $77. For a full-sized hot swappable keyboard that ships with Kailh switches, that’s a heck of a deal. The AliExpress website kinda sucks; tracking the order was a PITA, and required this weird verification process that tended to be hit-or-miss. I was stoked when the package got handed off to USPS and I could track it through their system. AliExpress initially said the keyboard would arrive sometime around April 10th (I ordered it on February 24th), but it was ultimately delivered on March 15th, just shy of three weeks.   I hooked it up to an old MacBook I had

Just wanted to give a shout out where due. I’ve been using an iPad since 2010 (started with the original) and an iPhone since 2011 ( when the iPhone 4S became available for Sprint ). I’ve used a  lot  of different terminal programs. iSSH was an early favorite; I can’t remember all the others. None were as feature-complete and easy to use as  Termius . And while I rarely need to rely on support, I got caught a bit by surprise by a new restriction in iOS 14 and padOS 14 that, in retrospect, I knew about (from ForeFlight support ), but when it impacted Termius it slipped my mind. I filled out their support form late on Sunday and by the time I woke up this morning they’d provided the answer (going into (iOS) Settings → Termius and enabling access to “Local Network”).

Working. I successfully installed Big Sur on a “mid-2010” “classic” Mac Pro ( MacPro5,1 ). This required upgrading the video card (I went with a relatively inexpensive GTX680 I flashed with an Apple ROM) , but was otherwise pretty painless and a lot less involved than I’d been reading - which has me wondering if I’ve missed something? Obtaining the Installer Used a great script to obtain the Big Sur installation app directly from Apple, even though the computer I was using (Late 2013 iMac) isn’t supported: $ curl -o ~/installinstallmacos.py https://raw.githubusercontent.com/munki/macadmin-scripts/main/installinstallmacos.py $ chmod +x ~/ installinstallmacos.py $ sudo ./installinstallmacos.py  ...  #      ProductID    Version    Build   Post Date  Title  1      071-14766     11.2.3    20D91  2021-03-08  macOS Big Sur  2      001-68446    10.15.7    19H15  2020-11-11  macOS Catalina  3      041-91741    10.13.6  17G2208  2019-10-13  macOS High Sierra  4      001-04366    10.15.4  19E226

This is part of my multi-step project to get Big Sur running on a mid-2010 Mac Pro (6 core Xeon, 32GB RAM, SSD storage, beast of a machine). Picking the GTX680 The GTX680, a Kepler card, is still supported in Big Sur (apparently because Apple’s still supporting some “ late 2013 (DG) ” and “ mid-2014 ” MacBook Pro models with the GeForce GT 750M). Already flashed 680s are selling for about $200 on eBay, but non-flashed cards can be had for around $100. I decided to see if I could do it myself. Make Sure the Card can be Flashed I found a list of confirmed flashable cards in a MacRumors forum thread , and verified the card I was looking at on eBay, 02G-P4-2682-KR, was flashable. Confirm Power Requirements Some cards have an 8-pin power connector and will need an adapter ; the card I got plugged directly into the two 6-pin leads already present in the Mac Pro (it was running an ATI Radeon HD 5870, stock). Booting with Linux I downloaded the latest Fedora Live image ( Fedora-Workstation-Li