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Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

howtogeek.com

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Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#131

Post by minerjoe »

wink wrote: post #121

> Predictably, I’ve found that having a dedicated, internet-free laptop has helped me become more productive. > Old Mac Games Still Run, Too Spot the error. I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP. It's been airgapped for roughly 10 years (wifi broke and at some point there were no updates for XP) but it's getting occasional use as a portable DVD player. I don't get why you'd will…

Innovation through limitation. It can work wonders as the author is suggesting.

Working with old technology also gives you valuable insight into the worlds current latency-poor bloated software. You might be able to run the latest but with latency that is hidden on modern machines now painfully visible, you might think otherwise. This leads to choosing software that is fast, minimal, and effective.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#132

Post by nix23 »

wink wrote: post #121

> Predictably, I’ve found that having a dedicated, internet-free laptop has helped me become more productive. > Old Mac Games Still Run, Too Spot the error. I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP. It's been airgapped for roughly 10 years (wifi broke and at some point there were no updates for XP) but it's getting occasional use as a portable DVD player. I don't get why you'd will…

>I still have a small-ish Centrino laptop from 2004 that's running Windows XP

Upgrade it to Vista, have fun ;)

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#133

Post by david422 »

unixhero wrote: post #90
war1025 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a job interview a year and a half ago where part of the interview was to give a walkthrough of my solution to short "homework" problem. Got there and tried to connect my laptop to their wifi network. No dice. My laptop (2014-15 era) doesn't do 5ghz and they had no 2.4ghz access points. Ended up having to use a cellular wifi hotspot they had lying around to get anything to work.

Couldn't you just use your phone as a mobile hotspot? I do that all the t I'll me instead of relying on whichever local it department coming up with solutions for me.

I did this until I switched phones. On my old phone the hotspot worked fine. My new phone- exact same plan, nothing changed there- prompts me to buy the hotspot plan addition. No thanks...

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#134

Post by JD557 »

verytrivial wrote: post #126

Old games, old productivity software. If they were good when they were new, I've never understood how they become "bad" just because time passes. It's a weird marketing and social undermining of comfort and control. Sure there is the 'security' argument, and an accretion of various quirks, but people were often happy dealing with these quirks in the day, and as OP says, making interoperability frictionful has an defi…

I'm not going to argue about old productivity software, but some games do indeed "age badly".

Obviously the game stays the same, but game designed has advanced and, if you are used to play modern games, some problems that are mostly fixed on all games from the last decade become annoyingly obvious.

For me, the main one is controls:

* Once you are used to WASD+mouse for FPS, going back to ctrl+arrow-keys (with some awkward keys to strafe and look up/down) is awful. If you are able to patch the controls to WASD+mouse, some games then become much easier than intended (since they were not designed with circle strafing in mind).

* Controlling the camera in old 3D platforming games is also a pain. It's amazing how long it took to move the camera controls from the bumpers to right the analog stick. The limited ability to control the camera is also partially responsible for it to get stuck in corners a lot.

There are also some level design choices that are arguably bad, but were required at the time, such as loading tunnels or abusing backtracking/repeated assets (e.g. fight all bosses again) to make the game longer.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#136

Post by MayeulC »

toyg wrote: post #109
unixhero wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you just use your phone as a mobile hotspot? I do that all the t I'll me instead of relying on whichever local it department coming up with solutions for me.

a lot of phones have this sort of tethering disabled by carriers, who then sell "internet access dongles" as an add-on.

This sounds like 2012 to me... And even then, with a rooted phone, you could tether as you pleased. I recall using barnacle wifi tether back when my phone didn't offer it natively.

Another way of using it on Android, is to use USB tethering, while your mobile phone is connected to a Wi-Fi access point. That has worked pretty well for me, I sometimes even use that together with a computer to create a wired network from an access point. It could have worked in GP's case.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#137

Post by KozmoNau7 »

Causality1 wrote: post #14
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be better off with a CF to IDE adapter. SD really isn't well suited to be a main OS volume. Or just get a SATA to IDE adapter.

Aside from being pin-compatible is there a reason CF is more suitable for an OS volume than SD?

CF cards do wear leveling, which makes them much better suited as hard drive replacements than SD cards or USB sticks.

It's the solution for people who want to play around with old computers without having to rely on old and probably flaky hard drives.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#138

Post by vaxman »

I used to run YellowDogLinux (now famous for “yum”) on my last (17”) PowerBook G3 and had triple boot with ClassicMac emulation along with MacOS X Lompoc. F’ing mainboards blew several times on all of my non-plastic PowerBooks and MacBookPros, except for the latest, which just had its keyboard and screen replaced (and its second keyboard is going out again). Some of the machines had broken DVD injectors, memory sockets that would come short (the real reason they solder it now), lots of them have had power supply issues. They always want us to buy the next one which is supposed to fix the thermal or mechanical or whatever.. My favorite was the MBP+LG UltraFine 5K that would reboot when a shortwave operator keyed up the mic. The guy from HP who specializes in Chinese supply chains and runs Apple now is an iPad Pro power user and it shows. Just buy iPad Pro —if you develop for them, then switch to Flutter and add an Xcode-server to your network.

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#139

Post by UncleSlacky »

mmphosis wrote: post #8

new web browser for PowerPC Mac: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ new OS for PowerPC Mac: https://voidlinux-ppc.org/ or, a new PowerPC computer: https://www.talospace.com/

Haven't tried Void yet but MintPPC (based on Debian) is nicely done (note: not associated with Linux Mint): http://mintppc.nl/

Re: Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

#140

Post by vaxman »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #17

It's nice to see old laptops get a new lease on life this way, but it's hard to deny the compromises that come with such an approach. As nice as the old 12-inch Powerbooks/iBooks, T60s, etc were, they leave a lot to be desired by modern standards. This brings me to wonder how difficult it would be to develop a notebook that is specifically designed to be a focused offline ultraportable, using the most power efficient…

You mean like a NexDock with an rPi or RockPi or Pre-p0wnd Galaxy?

Or are you suggesting the matte 17” screen, keyboard and I/O ports on the last PowerBook “leave a lot to be desired by modern standards”?

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