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Did a little more research of what the RTL SDR receivers can actually do. I could have saved myself the $500 i spent on my new Uniden scanner. All i wanted was to be able to receive our local police/fire/ems that went digital apco-25 a few years back. Turns out, with the proper software, my $15 SDR dongles can do that!

Set up was relatively easy, but i had to build the “decoder” library (.jar file) on linux and copy it over to MacOS in order for it to decode the signals. Guess now i can take my Uniden BCD536HP and mount it in the truck. No longer need it in the house now that my iMac is handling the indoor scanning duties.

To do yet: Add in frequencies for local Ham along with fire/ems/police for other nearby areas.

View attachment 2336146
Screenshot shows scanning and decoding of my local police/fire/ems
Cheers
BTW. everybody be very careful when you buy the SDR dongles, there are loads of chinese fake ones around which for sure do not work like the real ones. So, I recommend googling and researching the matter before you order anything. And additionally you will need a good antenna and probably some adaptors, software etc. too. Its fun but requires some studying. I am a novice on the matter but will give it some more thought and practice at some point when I have time from my other weird things. ;)

This is a good site to start: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/
And this book might be helpful to a beginner: https://www.amazon.de/dp/1514716690/
 
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BTW. everybody be very careful when you buy the SDR dongles, there are loads of chinese fake ones around which for sure do not work like the real ones.

Not to worry. I think the couple of us here who’ve tinkered a bit with RTL-SDR (wicknix and myself) knew to do our basic homework by starting with the good resource below you posted. I bought one of the USB adapter kits from the RTL-SDR site you cited, and it’s worked out well for me.

The worst outcome one might expect from buying a counterfeit or knock-off USB SDR from the PRC is the quality of performance will be subpar — particularly for reception capability at the extremes (and capability in direct sample mode).

Other basic testing components, meanwhile, such as a Youloop antenna kit, are not terribly complicated and not, usually, an area where the quality is going to vary terribly. Ultimately, I did buy a Youloop-styled kit from Aliexpress, instead of the official kit via RTL-SDR (whose construction and components come from the same place). For here in Canada, this totalled about CAD$20 less. Its performance has been, consistently, solid - even as I’ve kept it outdoors, on a south-facing wall (boreal talk for “sun-facing”) for well more than a year and across six seasons.


So, I recommend googling and researching the matter before you order anything. And additionally you will need a good antenna and probably some adaptors, software etc. too. Its fun but requires some studying. I am a novice on the matter but will give it some more thought and practice at some point when I have time from my other weird things. ;)

This is a good site to start: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/

Doing one’s homework is always good praxis. :)
 
Given that Paramount+, the self-professed "Home of Star Trek", has taken down all of the TOS and TNG movies, it's a clear signifier that owning physical media will never be truly replaced by streaming services.

I agree. Many films and versions of films aren't even available via streaming services (likewise with music content, as I saw the other day when a friend asked me for suggestions and then couldn't find the tracks/versions on Spotify). Continuing within the context of Star Trek, there's a good example of this with The Wrath of Khan. I was curious to see whether Nicholas Meyer's preferred cut is available via VOD and this November 2023 article confirms that it's difficult to obtain.

Thankfully I have that version on DVD (although I should upgrade to the Blu-ray):

F671pNQ.jpg


...and the first two Blu-Rays of the Chris Pine timeline.

I got as far as the DVD for the first film in the Kelvin timeline...

DlwPJST.jpg


In fairness, Chris Pine and J.J. Abrams aren’t canon. :p

...I watched the first two films in the cinema and felt that the 2009 film wasn't great but nonetheless offered potential for further instalments (similar to how TWOK surpassed TMP) but this was dashed by Into Darkness. It was so mindless that I lost interest in that aspect of the franchise and didn't bother going to see Beyond. Later I caught it on TV and was unimpressed.

For a while I used to go with an eBay seller local to me (parts4apple), but this time around I decided to try "Dr. Battery" on Amazon, since their prices are better and I've had good experiences with their batteries with other laptop restoration projects I've done. So far so good - the battery actually feels like it has weight to it, unlike some third-party A1185 batteries I've dealt with that have felt suspiciously light (but for all I know maybe this battery just has lead weights in it).

Thanks for the info. :)

I write lyric non-fiction essays, which sometimes requres complicated formatting. For anything involving images, I'll (reluctantly) trot out Word, but for the most part I wind up using Nisus Writer Pro. But I have built up a tidy little collection of odd and obscure word processing/text editing and creative writing software that still runs on Lion.

For several years I used a couple of A1181's with Snow Leopard and later, El Capitan as dedicated machines for working on academic chapters that were produced with a combination of Pages and Word. I found them quite robust for going on the road and more space-saving for this purpose than my 15" MBPs. Nowadays, I use a C2D MacBook Air for this stuff and over the past three weeks, I put together the better part of 37k words in notes via Word 16. Its ultra-portability makes it an excellent choice for writing especially if I'm away from home and need to lug around other items. :)
 
...I watched the first two films in the cinema and felt that the 2009 film wasn't great but nonetheless offered potential for further instalments (similar to how TWOK surpassed TMP) but this was dashed by Into Darkness. It was so mindless that I lost interest in that aspect of the franchise and didn't bother going to see Beyond. Later I caught it on TV and was unimpressed.

Aside from J.J. Abrams being way out of his element (as with Star Wars Episode IX: I Ran Out of Fresh Ideas So Let’s Necromance Palpatine), the real bee in my bonnet about his whole Star Trek fork is the casting of Chris Pine as Kirk.

That ruined any allowances I granted Abrams (and this is coming from a fan of Fringe, arguably the best work he’s ever done). I’m aware some people really liked his trio of Star Trek flicks, but I could never shake off Pine’s “I’m a middling frat bro who aced one whole thing in life: making a beer bong” vibe — not the guy who would outsmart both the Kobayashi Maru and Khan Noonien Singh. Pine is the Kirk who would look at a comms display vector rendering of a gravitational singularity and manage to only think about how to use a funnel for his next cheap beer contraption.
 
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What have you done with an early Intel recently?​

Praised it for being there and doing my daily driver stuff. Why? Because for the first time in, oh, decades, I've been the victim of a Windows PC bricking itself with an update. Now, this is a below-spec machine patched to run Win 11, so it may be that this is Microsoft applying more limits, as I can find no obvious news that this update is a wrong 'un. So decisions about binning Windows altogether will arise if I cannot resolve this easily. If it takes a full wipe rather than a reset, Windows is history.
Thanks you for being there, Early Intel Mac!
 

What have you done with an early Intel recently?​

Praised it for being there and doing my daily driver stuff. Why? Because for the first time in, oh, decades, I've been the victim of a Windows PC bricking itself with an update. Now, this is a below-spec machine patched to run Win 11, so it may be that this is Microsoft applying more limits, as I can find no obvious news that this update is a wrong 'un. So decisions about binning Windows altogether will arise if I cannot resolve this easily. If it takes a full wipe rather than a reset, Windows is history.
Thanks you for being there, Early Intel Mac!

Microsoft bricking Windows tends to leave a mess of shards littered with .dll extensions.
 
:D
OK. Got two 5.1's as self-gift for my birthday (24.12). Macs both have identical specs (2x5650 CPUs, 64Gb RAM, NO STORAGE DEVICES, video was GeForce980Ti Asus, no GOP no Bootscreen obviously). Now they have 5690 as CPUs, RX6600 for video (2 different cards, XFX & MSI). Still not ready for everyday use. BTW, got 2 GT120 apple edition for bootscreen and operations which requires it (system install & others), still need to find a way to transfer some cash for EFI ROM reconstruction. Also it is hard to transfer data\OSes from 16 drives in main PC to 6 ports in MAcPro :D (my main home OS is Gentoo Linux). THinking about NVME storage, waiting for some cash for all needed purchases (calculations result in quite unpleasant numbers :D ).
 
:D
OK. Got two 5.1's as self-gift for my birthday (24.12). Macs both have identical specs (2x5650 CPUs, 64Gb RAM, NO STORAGE DEVICES, video was GeForce980Ti Asus, no GOP no Bootscreen obviously). Now they have 5690 as CPUs, RX6600 for video (2 different cards, XFX & MSI). Still not ready for everyday use. BTW, got 2 GT120 apple edition for bootscreen and operations which requires it (system install & others), still need to find a way to transfer some cash for EFI ROM reconstruction. Also it is hard to transfer data\OSes from 16 drives in main PC to 6 ports in MAcPro :D (my main home OS is Gentoo Linux). THinking about NVME storage, waiting for some cash for all needed purchases (calculations result in quite unpleasant numbers :D ).

Congrats! Please update us as and when you progress with bringing them up to your desired level of specification. :)

That reminds me, I really need to sort out the CPU and RAM upgrades on my 1,1 - among a few other things...
 
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I have a late 2009 white unibody MacBook, which back in the day came from Apple’s Refurbished Store arriving with better than advertised specs. Apple Store effectively rebuilt it sometime around 2012 to remedy cracking case but found the motherboard also and an issue. I basically got a new laptop back...

Recently dusted it off as I find myself without a Mac (iPad does 95% of my commuting now) so I bumped RAM up to 8GB and using OCLP brought it up to Catalina. It's parked in a vertical rack of stuff on my desk and hooked up to a 24 inch monitor. Runs surprisingly ok but prone to lag at times and battery is Ker-borked. Case is again suffering from the polycarbonate cracking despite super careful usage over the years.

How much of a difference will an SSD make to a laptop pushing 15 years? Worth pushing RAM beyond 8GB? Is it worth going further than Catalina with patchers?
 
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I have a late 2009 white unibody MacBook, which back in the day came from Apple’s Refurbished Store arriving with better than advertised specs. Apple Store effectively rebuilt it sometime around 2012 to remedy cracking case but found the motherboard also and an issue. I basically got a new laptop back...

Recently dusted it off as I find myself without a Mac (iPad does 95% of my commuting now) so I bumped RAM up to 8GB and using OCLP brought it up to Catalina. It's parked in a vertical rack of stuff on my desk and hooked up to a 24 inch monitor. Runs surprisingly ok but prone to lag at times and battery is Ker-borked. Case is again suffering from the polycarbonate cracking despite super careful usage over the years.

How much of a difference will an SSD make to a laptop pushing 15 years? Worth pushing RAM beyond 8GB? Is it worth going further than Catalina with patchers?

Bumping up from HDD to SSD in that MacBook will be one of the bigger leaps forward in overall performance you can make for it, especially when running any of the macOS builds reliant on (or designed for, principally) APFS. Catalina would be one of those. Fortunately, with the white MacBook, that swap-out will be a cinch.

One note: look for SSDs with a built-in DRAM cache. Most of the branded models use a DRAM cache (some don’t, especially entry-level models in their line, though, so double-check specs). That cache helps significantly with read-write management and will give you the most of performance for your SATA bus). You do pay a little extra for DRAM cache on board, but it’s well worth it.
 
Yes, I agree - swapping to SSD in early Intels is a clearly noticeable improvement.

I have bought many second hand Intel Server SSD's for my old Intel Macs. They seem to be very compatible with Macs and they also have much longer designed use life than basic consumer drives. And they (120, 128, 250 and 256 GB drives) can be found very cheaply as companies replace their critical server drives to new ones every nn months regardless of how much they have been used. Many of my drives still have 95+% of life left (per DriveDx report).
 
I have a late 2009 white unibody MacBook, which back in the day came from Apple’s Refurbished Store arriving with better than advertised specs. Apple Store effectively rebuilt it sometime around 2012 to remedy cracking case but found the motherboard also and an issue. I basically got a new laptop back...

Recently dusted it off as I find myself without a Mac (iPad does 95% of my commuting now) so I bumped RAM up to 8GB and using OCLP brought it up to Catalina. It's parked in a vertical rack of stuff on my desk and hooked up to a 24 inch monitor. Runs surprisingly ok but prone to lag at times and battery is Ker-borked. Case is again suffering from the polycarbonate cracking despite super careful usage over the years.

How much of a difference will an SSD make to a laptop pushing 15 years? Worth pushing RAM beyond 8GB? Is it worth going further than Catalina with patchers?
I have the 2010 version of that laptop, the last white MacBook ever made. Running as SSD makes a noticeable difference. I have 16 GB of RAM in mine which is completely superfluous, but since I was upgrading from the stock 2 GB I just went all in (it was cheap anyhow). 8 GB should be more than enough for anything most people would do with such an old MacBook in 2024. I have Sonoma running on mine and it works surprisingly well as long as you give it about 5 minutes to settle down after booting it up. I even still use it for work from time to time.

The case on mine is nearly perfect still, which I'm very happy with. :)
 
If it takes a full wipe rather than a reset, Windows is history.

Eventually I reached the stage where I would create a Norton Ghost or Acronis image of my fresh Windows installations and then simply restore those whenever I (or people around me) ran into problems. It took the pain out of the hassle involved with reinstalling Windows from scratch and then obtaining the drivers etc.

Yes, I agree - swapping to SSD in early Intels is a clearly noticeable improvement.

Also on PPC Macs too! :D

Aside from J.J. Abrams being way out of his element (as with Star Wars Episode IX: I Ran Out of Fresh Ideas So Let’s Necromance Palpatine), the real bee in my bonnet about his whole Star Trek fork is the casting of Chris Pine as Kirk.

That ruined any allowances I granted Abrams (and this is coming from a fan of Fringe, arguably the best work he’s ever done). I’m aware some people really liked his trio of Star Trek flicks, but I could never shake off Pine’s “I’m a middling frat bro who aced one whole thing in life: making a beer bong” vibe — not the guy who would outsmart both the Kobayashi Maru and Khan Noonien Singh. Pine is the Kirk who would look at a comms display vector rendering of a gravitational singularity and manage to only think about how to use a funnel for his next cheap beer contraption.

In fairness, I think that much of that stems from the appalling scripting that Kirk's character received in those films. The same problem that afflicted Nemesis also plagued the new entries - they were helmed by people who didn't understand/care about what actually makes the concept of Star Trek so appealing in the first place and merely identified it as a lucrative IP that could be milked.

Sticking with sci-fi franchises, physical media and early Intel Macs, I revisited this box set with the assistance of my 2011 MBP, High Sierra and the Blu-ray drive that I salvaged last year.

Pb3JsKI.jpeg


It's a guilty pleasure that was totally eclipsed by Ronald D. Moore's re-imagining. There's at best, a handful of outstanding episodes but I still have a soft spot for Glen A. Larson's original incarnation.

2jg6Bjq.jpeg


When I tried to play Disc One, I was met with region blocking...

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Let's change the region code from A to B. ;)

VJhnuSL.png


Hurrah! :D

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ydptVCz.png


m5ONltC.png


Now it's time to enjoy Saga of a Star World in glorious HD. :)

03j2V6H.png
 
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Wow, didn't know there are Blu-ray drives that work with Macs. Need to find one for myself too! 👍

They all do. It's just that Apple undermined Blu-ray playback to prevent it from competing with iTunes as an HD content platform. Didn't seem to occur to them that both options could co-exist... Anyway, if you follow the instructions in my linked post, you'll be all set. ;)
 
They all do. It's just that Apple undermined Blu-ray playback to prevent it from competing with iTunes as an HD content platform. Didn't seem to occur to them that both options could co-exist... Anyway, if you follow the instructions in my linked post, you'll be all set. ;)
I didn't even think of trying if one would work. I always just assumed they would not work, as I never heard of Apple shipping any machines with one.

Every day I learn something new and useful! 👍 Then I guess I could rip the Blu-rays like I used to rip DVD's in them olden days? I mostly have DVD's so ripping my way smaller collection of Blu-rays to my "media Mac Mini" would not be that large of a job.
 
I mostly have DVD's so ripping my way smaller collection of Blu-rays to my "media Mac Mini" would not be that large of a job.
If you had gone for HD DVD, it would have possibly been an even smaller job ;)

How much of a difference will an SSD make to a laptop pushing 15 years?
All the difference. I have SSDs in 23-year-old laptops. Much faster, more reliable — and silent. Triple win.
 
If you had gone for HD DVD, it would have possibly been an even smaller job ;)
Well, I "knew" almost from the start that the HD DVD would be a failure vs. Blu-ray. The Beta vs. VHS thing all over again. But, this time Sony won and surprisingly produced another failure again (the Blu-ray pretty much has failed too). ;)

Why I was so anti Blu-ray back then? Because I bought the top of the line Oppo DVD-player with Anchor Bay upscaling chips (also fixes other things in DVD pic). So, the DVD's looked really good with it. It might come as a surprise to some that DVD pic quality depends a lot of the player hardware, they are not created equal.

And IMHO the Blu-ray were too expensive at the time for the smallish improvement over good quality scaled DVD's. So, I continued buying DVD's and ignored Blu-ray until maybe 3 years ago when Blu-ray prices started to collapse and you could get them really cheaply from discount baskets quite quickly after release. After that I've bought maybe 30 Blu-rays (but I still add more DVD's). I still have my maybe 500+ old DVD's and have no plans to upgrade them to Blu-rays.

Back then I was really active in ripping my DVD's to disk so I could transfer them to my Popcorn Hour -media player. And nowadays all those files are in my media Mac Mini's external NVME -drive.

I still today run the Oppo to view my DVD's. And I use a DVDO Edge scaler to improve my other sources.
 
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I still have my maybe 500+ old DVD's and have no plans to upgrade them to Blu-rays.
wow
where do you store these?
are they in a specific order?

since 2006 I ripped dvds from libraries or friends.
I felt guilty until the prices and quality of movies turned sour.
im glad I did that then.

my neighbor had 2 dressers draws full of dvds, and yesterday I extracted "master and commander"
on the MacBook Air 2010 using handbrake which did the job in an hour,
37 more minutes than using the Mac mini M1.
 
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In fairness, I think that much of that stems from the appalling scripting that Kirk's character received in those films.

In part, yes, but Chris Pine. Oh my g-d Chris Pine, no. Chris Porter (Speed Racer, 2008, as Rex Racer) would have been a much better casting pick, even if the script and producers were still the same train wreck. I still can’t believe Leonard Nimoy agreed to reprise Spock in the first of the Kelvin trilogy).


The same problem that afflicted Nemesis also plagued the new entries - they were helmed by people who didn't understand/care about what actually makes the concept of Star Trek so appealing in the first place and merely identified it as a lucrative IP that could be milked.

Nerd alert:

Aside from Star Trek: Generations, I wasn’t a giant fan of any TNG-based motion pictures (a fair bit of those felt more like fan service, as there was no TNG-equivalent among them with, say, the impact of, II–IV, as a trilogy).

For one, TNG films have always jarred my senses, especially around in-bridge lighting. Yah, Enterprise-E was a different vessel, but what didn’t translate well was the transition from the television series lighting (and pacing) of TNG and the “big screen” rendering.

Also, the span of time between the last TNG episode and Generations was only, at most, a couple of years, so why lighting would be so dramatically different on Enterprise-D always made the films seem a bit off (as did the sudden, second revision of uniforms by no later than Insurrection First Contact, at a time when the first revision of uniforms, premiering on Deep Space Nine, were in use for both it and Voyager; both of those took place during the same window of narrative time as every TNG-based film.)

[The reason why I didn’t hold details as these against the original six, TOS-based films is: A) several years had passed between the end of TOS time line and the motion pictures; and B) advances in film emulsion and lighting tech needed to accommodate those advancements underscored the technological and budgetary limits of cine film geared for colour television prevalent during the late ’60s. (As for TOS film uniforms, The Motion Picture uniforms were both a bit of a fluke and also dated even when they premiered, so I sort of just let that one slide.) Indeed, that direct-glare lighting prevalent in TOS episodes — and countless other Hollywood TV series of the period — could still be seen in TV series filmed as late as the mid 1980s (a really good example: season 1 of Miami Vice.]

But otherwise, I agree: Paramount saw these less as quasi-living stories and more as IP teats from which they could… mooove their way to box office profit. /me ducks at all the rotten tomatoes now being thrown in my direction

Sticking with sci-fi franchises, physical media and early Intel Macs, I revisited this box set with the assistance of my 2011 MBP, High Sierra and the Blu-ray drive that I salvaged last year.

Now it's time to enjoy Saga of a Star World in glorious HD. :)

Oh my. I hadn’t realized the original series was restored and made to HD release. I will have to look out for that — especially whichever episode was filmed almost entirely in colour infrared film. :)
 
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where do you store these?
are they in a specific order?
We have thousands of books and many hundreds of CD's too so we have lots of bookcases. But the movies do not actually take that much space. I sometimes take bad or meh movies and sell them at flea market to get rid of them. So, i am maintaining a balance where I don't need more space when I buy new ones. Should do same to books as all do not fit in the bookcases anymore.

The DVD's used to be the random order of good scifi and action movies there, comedies there, dramas there but as more and more movies came in it became more random. Well, the basic premise is still valid but now I also have shelves with latest purchases in random order. I basically have a good feeling where to look to find some specific movie. ;)

I have ripped maybe only half of them. Maybe I should activate again but lack motivation as its a slow process. And I kind of enjoy handling the physical media (CD, MD, vinyl, cassettes too).

Ps. got interested about the actual quantity and counted them. Found 449 DVD-movies and additionally some movie and tv-series boxes (Aliens, Galactica, Farscape, Brisco County Jr, Big Bang, Buffy, Dexter, Allo Allo. Absolutely fabulous, The Office, Smack the Pony etc). Only 32 Blu-rays.
 
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Decided to try ripping some DVD's with the Handbrake. Installed Handbrake, Homebrew and the necessary libraries to MBP 2010 i5 (2-core) 17" and iMac 2011 i5 (4-core) 27". Uuuhhh.... Blade Runner 2049: 1st pass ETA >3h on the MBP. Deadpool 2 on iMac the 1st pass was quite quick like 25mins but 2nd pass ETA >2h. :(

Not sure about the correct settings yet, need to experiment. Maybe the "SuperHQ 576p25 Surround" was too much? OK, dropping the preset from SuperHQ to HQ reduced 1st pass ETA by 50%. Wonder if the difference is visible?

I think I used Mac the Ripper earlier when I used to rip DVD's.

Meanwhile, I updated the OS on my main iMac to 12.7.3 and OCLP also.
 
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Decided to try ripping some DVD's with the Handbrake. Installed Handbrake, Homebrew and the necessary libraries to MBP 2010 i7 17" and iMac 2011 i5 27". Uuuhhh.... Blade Runner 2049: 1st pass ETA >3h on the MBP. Deadpool 2 on iMac the 1st pass was quite quick like 25mins but 2nd pass ETA >2h. :(

Not sure about the correct settings yet, need to experiment. Maybe the "SuperHQ 576p25 Surround" was too much? OK, dropping the preset from SuperHQ to HQ reduced 1st pass ETA by 50%. Wonder if the difference is visible?

I think I used Mac the Ripper earlier when I used to rip DVD's.

Meanwhile, I updated the OS on my main iMac to 12.7.3 and OCLP also.
I only use 1080 in handbrake which is good enough visual quality and sound.
this process takes 28 minutes for a 2 hour movie with a M1 mini.

hope this helped!
 
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