What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[Certificate of Excellence]

Sorry. I was backing up/supporting what you wrote.

By “dedicated”, I meant “dedicated, discrete” ports for audio input and output.

I’ve always used dedicated FireWire and usb2/3 interfaces to record live instrumentation. For me it was latency issues & limitations in real time sound modeling in software that led to that choice. More than anything I was curious if op ever ran into that or maybe he’s tracking and then adding modeling after the fact& it sounds like it’s just one instrument vs a slew of 10+ tracks going on.

I am a fan of GarageBand. It is a fun & intuitive app to use for tracking a quick idea.

 

[firelighter487]

What does the 06 MBP have or do that makes it superior for connecting your guitar?

separate line and headphone ports, so i can plug the guitar into the line in and headphones into the audio out. for the Retina i need either a 4-pole splitter or a usb audio interface to do the same, which is annoying.

 

[firelighter487]

I’ve always used dedicated FireWire and usb2/3 interfaces to record live instrumentation. For me it was latency issues & limitations in real time sound modeling in software that led to that choice. More than anything I was curious if op ever ran into that or maybe he’s tracking and then adding modeling after the fact& it sounds like it’s just one instrument vs a slew of 10+ tracks going on.

I am a fan of GarageBand. It is a fun & intuitive app to use for tracking a quick idea.

i'm a beginner at it, i don't play live or anything like that. i'm still learning chords.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Thanks for the thoughtful answer. I appreciate it & totally get the ease & immediacy of just plugging in and off you go. We are all beginners at some point & although I’ve been playing guitar/bass for 30+ years, I am always learning new theory. That never stops. I remember buying my first Mac (came loaded with Tiger and GB and being completely floored with how intuitive and awesome it was.


Have a great Easter

 

[firelighter487]

Thanks for the thoughtful answer. I appreciate it & totally get the ease & immediacy of just plugging in and off you go. We are all beginners at some point & although I’ve been playing guitar/bass for 30+ years, I am always learning new chords. That never stops. I remember buying my first Mac (came loaded with Tiger and GB and being completely floored with how intuitive and awesome it was.


Have a great Easter

i meant i'm learning the beginner chords lmao. on a guitar i bought for €50 somewhere but hey we all have to start somewhere.

and yes garageband is awesome

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

i meant i'm learning the beginner chords lmao. on a guitar i bought for €50 somewhere but hey we all have to start somewhere.

and yes garageband is awesome

You were clear. I understood where you’re at. First and second position chords are the most fun IMO. Have fun playing/learning.

 

[eyoungren]

Nothing big today. Just thought I'd go back to having a RAM disk like I used to have with my Quad G5. RAM Disk Creator made a 10GB ram disk for me just fine. Added it to my scratch drives for Photoshop.

 

[B S Magnet]

Lots.

Been busy writing a proposal on my recently purchased late 2011 A1278 (running the same build of Snow Leopard 10.6.0 which shipped with my mid-2009 A1278 I bought at the Apple Store in early September 2009), involving the usual writing tools I use and then flowing the content into QuarkXPress, as one does.

View attachment 2183524


But today, and for probably the entire coming week, I’ve dragged in my A1418 (not quite early Intel yet, but close) to take on the duty of playing my entire catalogue of projects and collaborations, in chronological order, involving my singular favourite composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and artist of the last fifty years, Ryuichi Sakamoto. I was privileged, incredibly privileged, to bear witness from the front row his 2010 piano concert performance, on which he played and controlled, remotely, a second baby grand Yamaha piano (for his pieces requiring two pianists).

View attachment 2183520

On this, the end of my week in mourning for my favourite musician/keyboardist/pianist/composer/conductor/songwriter, I’m sharing how my quick-and-dirty avatar for the past week was thrown together on Photoshop CS4 on my A1278 (below is my pulling it up from my A1418).

It took less than three minutes from idea, to layout, to saving it. I credit the lack of Adobe or macOS overhead guff involved to let me just get it done fast.

Enjoy.

 

[mortlocli]

Dang...I wouldn't know where to start to create that.

Got distracted looking at the photoshop tool icons in your pic.
There's a discussion in the Haiku web site over the tool icons used in their 'Wonderbrush' and another paint program.. especially the 'Blend' tool. The simplisty of the icons in your pic still works rather well.

 

[B S Magnet]

Dang...I wouldn't know where to start to create that.

Got distracted looking at the photoshop tool icons in your pic.
There's a discussion in the Haiku web site over the tool icons used in their 'Wonderbrush' and another paint program.. especially the 'Blend' tool. The simplisty of the icons in your pic still works rather well.

IF you ever come across a copy of Photoshop CS4, you can grab the attached zip I posted and then pull open the .psd file to have a look at its components. It’s a lot simpler than it might look at first glance!

 

[B S Magnet]

Lots.

Been busy writing a proposal on my recently purchased late 2011 A1278 (running the same build of Snow Leopard 10.6.0 which shipped with my mid-2009 A1278 I bought at the Apple Store in early September 2009), involving the usual writing tools I use and then flowing the content into QuarkXPress, as one does.

View attachment 2183524

The scope of that proposal above is just about done and reaching a point where it will be sent out soon.

Now, for some battery nerding…

To provide some perspective on how integral the fixing/replacing of my early 2011 A1278 with the late 2011 A1278 (which arrived at my home just a hair over four weeks ago!) has been for getting this proposal done: minding how most charges/depletions of its original, OEM battery (since receiving it) has been a matter of keeping it between 20–25 per cent and 80–85 per cent charge (with the occasional putting it to sleep when I go to sleep, waking the next morning to 100 per cent charge, then running from battery once waking it), I‘ve added 52 battery loadcycles on a battery which now has 342 total loadcycles.

So… yeah.

With all that intensive use, I’ve seen the current capacity float between 92–93 per cent when I received it, to now hovering in the 90–91 per cent range. Not thrilled about seeing it go down in just a month, but again, I just tacked something like 17 per cent more loadcycles atop what it accumulated in the previous 11 or 12 years.

My lordt, I spend too much time on these forums…

 

[dandeco]

May be drawing it a little close to the line, but recently I swapped the 512 GB SSD in my mid-2012 unibody 13" MacBook Pro with a 1 TB one...

I had to download a compatible older trial version of Carbon Copy Cloner to make this possible, but it did the trick. (I purchased a license for the current version, but that won't work with Mac OS X El Capitan systems!)

This would especially be useful once I begin using this to burn DVDs with the built-in SuperDrive. I might even teach myself to use DVD Studio Pro on this for certain discs, though for simple home movies (like digitizing old home movies for others), iDVD would still nicely do the job, or Roxio Toast Pro on modern Macs.

 

[B S Magnet]

May be drawing it a little close to the line, but recently I swapped the 512 GB SSD in my mid-2012 retina 13" MacBook Pro with a 1 TB one...

Hold up, this is a non-retina MBP, which means it’s definitely OK on here.

Only downside: it won’t run Snow Leopard natively (it can, but kludgily, after heavily modifying the install). This form factor is what I’ve been spending my days of late, with my late 2011 13-inch MBP, and it has been a valuable reminder of just how good this balance of HID, UI, mass distribution, and overall solidness is.

I’ve never been fortunate to own a larger unibody model, but for whatever it lacks with the 1280x800 display, there’s so, so much else going for it — the FireWire, the Thunderbolt, the SD slot, the Ethernet port, a SuperDrive (if you want it!), USB3, a distinct power button which can’t be confused with the keyboard, the infrared port, the sleep indicator light, and the multi-touch trackpad without that haptic silliness.

In hindsight, whatever my misgivings toward Ivy Bridge not playing nicely with Snow Leopard, it surprises me none why Apple quietly allowed this model to remain on sale until late 2016 (and probably even later on their refurb store): there remained demand for a modular, portable Mac and a Mac with some or many of the aforementioned features (many of them to have disappeared on the retina replacement).

 

[Amethyst1]

Just discovered that SwitchResX lets me step down to 256 colours in Snow Leopard on my 2010 MBA. Dithering galore And it's a bit weird too (possibly has to do with Quartz Extreme being disabled), screenshots are totally black, Sublime Text shows a plain white window yet Pages '09 documents display fine, but the window where you select the document type is black with garbled colours on the right edge.

 

[dandeco]

Hold up, this is a non-retina MBP, which means it’s definitely OK on here.

Only downside: it won’t run Snow Leopard natively (it can, but kludgily, after heavily modifying the install). This form factor is what I’ve been spending my days of late, with my late 2011 13-inch MBP, and it has been a valuable reminder of just how good this balance of HID, UI, mass distribution, and overall solidness is.

I’ve never been fortunate to own a larger unibody model, but for whatever it lacks with the 1280x800 display, there’s so, so much else going for it — the FireWire, the Thunderbolt, the SD slot, the Ethernet port, a SuperDrive (if you want it!), USB3, a distinct power button which can’t be confused with the keyboard, the infrared port, the sleep indicator light, and the multi-touch trackpad without that haptic silliness.

In hindsight, whatever my misgivings toward Ivy Bridge not playing nicely with Snow Leopard, it surprises me none why Apple quietly allowed this model to remain on sale until late 2016 (and probably even later on their refurb store): there remained demand for a modular, portable Mac and a Mac with some or many of the aforementioned features (many of them to have disappeared on the retina replacement).

Yeah, that was a typo at the start. Hearing modern rap music so much at my workplace can sometimes turn my brain to mush for a bit.
At my workplace we get a bunch of those 2012 unibody 13" MacBook Pros, as they were a popular seller, especially those who wanted more power than a MacBook Air but didn't want to spring for a pricier Retina MacBook Pro.
For my services for converting old home movies from tape to DVD, I can still edit the footage and export it using Final Cut or something on my M1 MacBook Air to an external hard drive, hook it up to that 2012 MacBook Pro running El Capitan and make the DVD using iDVD. Or as a fun throwback I could use iMovie HD 6 or iMovie '11, though they aren't as fast as the current iMovie and Final Cut (and certainly nowhere as feature-packed as the latter, though Final Cut Pro does have several of the old iMovie effects as part of it).

 

[B S Magnet]

Yeah, that was a typo at the start. Hearing modern rap music so much at my workplace can sometimes turn my brain to mush for a bit.

Here’s some soothing, ante-millennial rap music:

(That whole album still holds up well 31 years on.)

At my workplace we get a bunch of those 2012 unibody 13" MacBook Pros, as they were a popular seller, especially those who wanted more power than a MacBook Air but didn't want to spring for a pricier Retina MacBook Pro.

They did what they did and, as with their predecessors going back to 2009, did their job well: compact, versatile, repairable, semi-modular, and packing a punch — especially once the iX-series processors arrived in them.

…I can still edit the footage and export it using Final Cut or something on my fnord MacBook Air to an external hard drive…

 

[firelighter487]

but that won't work with Mac OS X El Capitan systems!)

i have my 2012 Unibody running Ventura with OCLP, it works. Monterey too btw, is even better than Ventura. little less buggy. why are you running such an ancient version on yours?

 

[firelighter487]

but for whatever it lacks with the 1280x800 display

there used to be a tool called RDM that lets you force it to 1440x900 or 1680x1050. it makes text a little blurry since it's scaling a higher res on that 800p screen, but it's a good compromise to get a usable resolution.

that tool has been taken down because the developer stopped maintaining it, but it can be downloaded still thanks to the internet archive's wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20220824124725/http://avi.alkalay.net/software/RDM/

it's a must have tool on a 1280x800 MBP to get a usable screen resolution imo

 

[B S Magnet]

there used to be a tool called RDM that lets you force it to 1440x900 or 1680x1050. it makes text a little blurry since it's scaling a higher res on that 800p screen, but it's a good compromise to get a usable resolution.

I know another way to make the text a little more blurry on my 1280x800 display: take off my glasses. 😎

After spending much of my MBP time these last 18 months on a 1900x1200 LED 17-inch display on my A1261 (which I still use, but the bloating battery prevents it from being very portable right now), I thought I would struggle jumping back to 1280x800, as was the case when my early 2011 A1278 was still my daily driver (prior to when I got the 13-inch rMBP whose display failed, making it effectively as good as dead as a portable).

But after a few hours of adjustment with the late 2011 (arrived to replace the ailing early 2011, which has lived a powerfully good, faithful life), I realized I still do just fine in 1280x800 for the work, including layout work in QuarkXPress and film photo processing work in Photoshop CS4 (and CS6). And if I want, I can get a Thunderbolt cable and turn my A1418 iMac into a target display for said late 2011 MBP.

I used to write papers in MacWrite and ClarisWorks on 512x384 and, later, work in Illustrator, Photoshop, and QuarkXPress on 800x600. Somehow, I still managed to produce good work, because as display tools, they did their job.

We are way more spoilt than we allow ourselves to admit.

that tool has been taken down because the developer stopped maintaining it, but it can be downloaded still thanks to the internet archive's wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20220824124725/http://avi.alkalay.net/software/RDM/

Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to look into that.

it's a must have tool on a 1280x800 MBP to get a usable screen resolution imo

Opinions are like, well, cloacas: every bird has one! 🥚🐣🕊️🦉🐧🦆🐓🦅🦩🪶

 

[GMShadow]

Marco Arment did an article on the 2012 in 2016 (and how it was still on sale).

I'm not sure the caption is that harsh. 😄

EDIT: Despite what the pic might indicate, the article isn't negative: https://marco.org/2016/01/04/md101ll-a

 

[B S Magnet]

Marco Arment did an article on the 2012 in 2016 (and how it was still on sale).

View attachment 2187665

I'm not sure the caption is that harsh. 😄

Could you edit your post to include a link to the article? Thank you.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I know another way to make the text a little more blurry on my 1280x800 display: take off my glasses. 😎

Or in my case, put my glasses on.

I used to write papers in MacWrite and ClarisWorks on 512x384 and, later, work in Illustrator, Photoshop, and QuarkXPress on 800x600. Somehow, I still managed to produce good work, because as display tools, they did their job.

We are way more spoilt than we allow ourselves to admit.

Couldn't agree more. In the early 2000s I wrote stuff on a 486 laptop with a mono LCD at 640x480 using WordPerfect and the quality of those documents was just as good as anything that I could've put together with the latest and greatest hardware.

Opinions are like, well, cloacas: every bird has one! 🥚🐣🕊️🦉🐧🦆🐓🦅🦩🪶

There's a profane version of that proverb but I'll be a good boy and refrain from quoting it/linking to it. I'm sure that the imaginative among us will be able to make a very good guess anyway...

 

[B S Magnet]

Or in my case, put my glasses on.

HA!

Couldn't agree more. In the early 2000s I wrote stuff on a 486 laptop with a mono LCD at 640x480 using WordPerfect and the quality of those documents was just as good as anything that I could've put together with the latest and greatest hardware.

This right here. Juxtapose this against dime-a-dozen threads like “Should I trade in my old M1 MacBook Pro for a new M2 MacBook Pro?” nonsense over on the Disposable Appliance Macs forum(s).

There's a profane version of that proverb but I'll be a good boy and refrain from quoting it/linking to it. I'm sure that the imaginative among us will be able to make a very good guess anyway...

Let me go unearth the origin of that old saying, the one which I made a bit more silly by implicating the avian branch of life. Heck, reptiles and amphibians, too, and here I was, leaving them out! :O

 

[B S Magnet]

The scope of that proposal above is just about done and reaching a point where it will be sent out soon.

Now, for some battery nerding…

To provide some perspective on how integral the fixing/replacing of my early 2011 A1278 with the late 2011 A1278 (which arrived at my home just a hair over four weeks ago!) has been for getting this proposal done: minding how most charges/depletions of its original, OEM battery (since receiving it) has been a matter of keeping it between 20–25 per cent and 80–85 per cent charge (with the occasional putting it to sleep when I go to sleep, waking the next morning to 100 per cent charge, then running from battery once waking it), I‘ve added 52 battery loadcycles on a battery which now has 342 total loadcycles.

So… yeah.

With all that intensive use, I’ve seen the current capacity float between 92–93 per cent when I received it, to now hovering in the 90–91 per cent range. Not thrilled about seeing it go down in just a month, but again, I just tacked something like 17 per cent more loadcycles atop what it accumulated in the previous 11 or 12 years.

My lordt, I spend too much time on these forums…

Winding down from all of the above, wrapping up final addenda to the proposal and about ready to call it a day, I decided to pull up my web site to pull up an old live set from a few years ago because I needed to listen to something familiar, but not something recently listened to.

(I deliberately don’t promote said web site, and at this point, I only use it for, basically, a digital repository of my own garbage… and no, nobody gets to ask if they can have a look at it.)

I run a still-supported branch of Wordpress as the site engine, but a branch which is now a solid ten years old, with select plug-ins very much out of date (but also, free of monetizing garbage and useless overhead added in later). In that sense, the site’s a bit like my A1278 running 10.6.8. In fact, the 10.6.8 I use on my A1278 is the exact same 10.6.8 I used to assemble, design, and prep all the contents in that web site. Heck, it’s the same 10.6.8 I used to make that live set.

Anyway, playing now in the live set: “Trommeltanz” by George Kranz, because sure, why not?

 

[Amethyst1]

there used to be a tool called RDM that lets you force it to 1440x900 or 1680x1050.

Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to look into that.

It can do way better. Not on Snow Leopard though: higher-than-native modes were introduced in Lion (for HiDPI modes on retina MBPs), and on the HD 3000 they were only enabled beginning in Mountain Lion (10.8.3+).

it's a must have tool on a 1280x800 MBP to get a usable screen resolution imo

If you can live with the blurriness, that is.

that tool has been taken down because the developer stopped maintaining it […]

Thanks for the link. I’m using the last version on Monterey. Works fine but has never been adopted to HiDPI modes: its menus are blurry.

In hindsight, whatever my misgivings toward Ivy Bridge not playing nicely with Snow Leopard, it surprises me none why Apple quietly allowed this model to remain on sale until late 2016 (and probably even later on their refurb store): there remained demand for a modular, portable Mac and a Mac with some or many of the aforementioned features (many of them to have disappeared on the retina replacement).

You have to keep in mind it was significantly cheaper than the retina model, so it was the choice for those who simply wanted the cheapest new MacBook out there, without possibly caring for repairability or features that the retinas dropped.