Agathae the Cream Legbar under a tree.

July 3rd, 2024

Rain, Fakes, and Macs.

It really did rain.

Rain.

The last few days, I’ve been having a lot of rain over here. The chickens are happy, I am happy, but I’m not certain the computers are exactly happy. They said they’d like it if I didn’t take any of them outside due to “risk of flash flood”. I am perfectly happy with that arrangement as all those computers do is hog real-life storage space.

Agathae the Cream Legbar under a tree.

Agathae under The Tree

Chickens under a tree with slight mud on ground.

The Chickens under The Tree. Ground is slightly muddy.

Raindrops falling from sky unto roof.

Yesterday's rain falling onto The Roof.

Fakes, fakes, fakes.

No, really.

I had made a post about being given another big tower thing, along with a GTX 750 Ti. Well, I was having a ton of driver issues with it on Windows 7. I ended up putting the 460 back in there and reinstalling the driver after giving up. Well, I decided to stick that card back in there one more time just to see what happened. I turned the thing on, and Windows 7 booted in like normal, with Windows Aero working and everything. Odd.

So I ran GPU-Z on it. It reported that the card was a fake. I looked it up, and as a matter of fact, it used a GF116 used in cards like the GTS 450 Rev. 2. So much for “750 Ti”. From a little more research it turns out they use the exact same boards for scams that claim to be newer cards. At least the thing works “good enough” to get the system to turn on. I’m not going to get rid of the card either as I think it’s a fairly interesting thing to have. I ended up leaving the 460 in the Oversized Tower anyways.

Front of phony Nvidia GTX 750 Ti.

Front of that phony card.

Backside of phony Nvidia GTX 750 Ti.

Backside of that phony card.

Port selection on phony Nvidia GTX 750 Ti. HDMI, VGA, and DVI are available ports.

Ports on that phony card. I do like the port selection, but there aren't enough ports for dual display.

GPU-Z report. It says it is fake, and it isn't lying.

GPU-Z report from that fake card. Yep, it's fake alright.

2010 Mac vs. 2023 macOS.

Earlier this year, I ended up with a 2010 Mac mini. The poor thing had been living with a super-slow 5400 RPM hard drive of some kind in it, and I didn’t want to deal with zillion-hour startup times. I ended up replacing it with a 500GB Samsung SSD I had, and upgraded it to macOS High Sierra. That wasn’t good enough for me. I decided to try (insert link here)OpenCore Legacy Patcher on the Mac, as I figured it’d be a fun thing to do with it. After waiting hours for macOS Sonoma’s installer to finally download, I installed OpenCore and the installer to a USB, and installed it as fast as I could. The Mac crashed several times during its restarts during install, and it seemed that shutting it off and turning it back on did the trick to get it functioning. After that was a painfully slow macOS desktop that practically didn’t even work. I opened OpenCore’s patching tool again, installed the OpenCore bootloader to the actual SSD, and then did the “Post Install Root Patches”. It took it some time, but after a while it restarted with the patches for the graphics, wifi, and USB stuff (Sonoma doesn’t take USB 1 stuff properly anymore). After it loaded, I got into macOS, complete with video wallpaper. Which ran horribly. It struggled to even unlock. I did manage to get basic youtube playback to work in Pale Moon (only browser I bothered with that didn’t bog the whole thing down into unusable states). Despite that working, even without a browser the poor Intel Core 2 Duo was being pegged constantly by the system.

I ended up deciding Linux might work better. Oh, no. I installed Kubuntu 22.04 earlier this year, hoping it’d run just fine. NOPE. I noticed the thing had somewhat sluggish animations, and seemed to struggle with KDE. I decided to open System Monitor. The thing promptly crashed. Turns out that KDE really hates the Nouveau drivers. So I went to install the Nvidia drivers. It didn’t find any. Turns out, the Nvidia 340 drivers no longer receive official updates or anything on Linux, and this card is (I believe) a 320M inside this Mac. No wonder. I did find some unofficial PPA for drivers, and that seemed to vastly improve the experience, making it a usable device. Youtube playback even worked fine (with the use of uBlock Origin. Highly recommended). I did install 24.04 recently but have not bothered installing the Nvidia drivers. Last device I put the 340 drivers on that had 24 on it just ended up breaking the install of Ubuntu. I still want to mess around with it a bit more.

That's the end of today's blog.

JM.