Showing posts from November, 2020


 I cheated. My MacBook project was doing well but I had to go too far.  My £200 experiment in updating an 11 year old Mac ended with me using a version of MacOS Catalina . Until a week ago this was the latest one. You could use a website run by a developer to "hack" a copy that would work on my ancient Mac. However, it was unsupported. The IT lesson is always that "unsupported" is not the same as "doesn't work". Supported means, in this context, that Apple will update the OS with a variety of ongoing security updates and maybe even a feature update. This latter possibility being unlikely.  The supported OS was High Sierra . This is the 2017 MacOs. To be fair none of this is important to me specifically. Getting a really cheap 11 year Mac working was the exercise, not what OS was installed. The fact is that I got quite a few browser crashes and, from what I could see, a considerable performance hit from trying to get it all working. I am off work and lo

Macbook Air M1

  The Apple M1 is the first Apple Silicon on a PC . Back in 2005 Apple moved to Intel chips. This year they announced they were going to make their own PC chips based on ARM (Advanced Risc Machines) .  ARM is a design. A reference. It is a reduced instruction set. The world of the PC has been dominated by Intel and AMD. They have developed powerful chips that have been put in PCs and servers by default. The instruction set is the way in which the silicon chips process data. Intel have used complex instructions that have allowed increasing speed. ARM designed reduced instruction sets. The idea being that an action that occurs with an Intel chip may take one instruction can happen on ARM with multiple instructions. This isn't a new thing. ARM has been around since the 1980s.  Over the years Intel has relied on computers tethered to mains electrical power. Their processors have required more power to execute complex instructions and the higher wattage has created heat. So Intel based

Everything X

There was a time when everything was "X" at Microsoft. Internet Explorer had "ActiveX" and PC graphics were "DirectX" in Windows. Thus the "XBox" used "DirectX" and was a box of "X". A PC that could do games. It was so PC that people bought the first XBox and installed Linux on it. This month was my big choice. Move to the Sony Playstation Five from my Xbox One or go for the Xbox Series X . I chose Xbox again. Primarily for the software. When Microsoft launched the Xbox One the "One" bit was about being the one device for the living room under the TV. Conceptually the Xbox One would be your cable replacement, your movie watching device, your music device and you could even play games. It would use the Kinect sensor to recognise you and log you into your Microsoft account. This had some consequences. Sony advertised Playstation as "for the players". A serious games console. As a result it sold more than twic