mac: OLCP stuck on boot after root patching and MBP 2014

OK, I’ve been using Opencore Legacy Patcher for a few months now and it has been working well, but the big issue has been updating it and rebooting. There is a step called root patching where the boot drive gets kernel extensions in /Library/Extensions and on reboot these can fail. I had in the past had to rebuild the entire thing, but thanks to the Discord channel, I discovered this fix which…

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sec: Passkeys are everywhere how do I add to 1Password and Apple Keychain

The new passkey thing is pretty confusing, suddenly applications are asking for passkeys, what’s the right way to do this? Here I’m assuming you have two useful tools, 1Password which allows cross-client passkeys, so you do them once and it appears across all your machines. The main ones I’m using them for are Google, GitHub, Amazon, Microsoft 365, Google Passkey strangness The other place is…

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net: Argh Google Workspace Price increases keep coming

Wow, they’ve been jacking up prices by 20% in their latest round, we started with Business Standard which was $12 and now it is $14.40, so they keep ratcheting the price up. It gives you 2TB/user and Shared Drives and many other things I’ve forgotten (150 vs 100 participants in a video meeting). Personally, for a small company, I find shared drives (and workspaces pretty confusing), but it makes…

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av: MOONDROP littlewhite and Variations do rock

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, I took a trip with the MOONDROP Variations hooked up to the Qudelix 5K, and the auto equalization and other features are great. The only thing that is a little tricky is the I had forgotten how having a cord to a little dongle on the belt can be a bit of pain. There are two problems: The Moondrop Variations are just held with a .75mm pin set and losing one…

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Tech: Review list and need for Gateron Melodics

Well, I told you what I bought (Keychron Q2 Max, Alpaca V2, and GMK Muted Retro but not why I bought them). Here are all the reviews stuck on my iPhone fro that: GMK Keycaps. Of all the crazy things about this hobby. The crazy premise of these ABS keycaps is ridiculous yet I love typing on them! They are German and the founders are Gunther, Meinhardt, and Kredler so that sounds good. Normally…

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AV: Truly great Qudelix 5K with MOONDROP Variations Auto-eq (and Schitt Magni Soundsource shutoff)

Well on our first flight in months and it was the first time to try the MOONDROP Variations with the highly rated Qudelix 5K and they are a pretty amazing combination. I can see why. First of all , use them with the recommended ear tips not stock, the noise isolation is tremendous. This is a huge 10mm barrel so you need big ear holes to fit but that’s not a problem for a frog face like me 🙂 The…

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tech: Synology NAS performance is 200 MBps and 500/700 IOPS good?

OK, now that we have our disk arrays in order, I was curious to see what performance is like. First some basics, with hard disks, performance is a little hard to understand. The short answer is that two things are going on, The first is, that you have the data under the disk head and you are blazing away reading it, how fast can it go? So when I’m using my disks, I’m seeing speeds on the order of…

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tech: Crazy Keyboards Keychron Q2 Max, GMK Retro and Violet V2

OK, since my Anne Pro keyboards are all in some sort of Bluetooth hell, I realized that I only have one wireless keyboard, a Keychron K6 with U4T and YMDK Shinethrough Pudding Keys. This has been a great keyboard and I really like the thocky sound somewhere between a click and a silent linear. So what to choose next, well there are a lot of choices, but I ended up going through my favorite…

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mac: More OCLP MacBook 2014 Graphics Issues no All Photos

OK, I’ve already documented a bunch of issues with the graphics support in my slightly strange Crystal Well MacBook Pro 2014 with an Iris Pro and discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M processor, but as we found out the graphics display doesn’t work for things like Safari, Apple Maps and things that I think are using the Metal interface. Another strange one is Apple Photos, if it does not see Metal,…

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tech: Synology reset, LACP move to ordinary port

If you are unlucky like me and you have 2FA on and then you swap disks, suddenly you are unable to use 2FA. So the solution is to do a Mode 1 reset. That means you find the reset at the back of the NAS and then press it for four seconds, it will beep. And then reset the user accounts and also the network. The user account will be admin with no password, but the other trick is that a network…

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tech: Wait for Synology rebuild, SHR2 > RAID6 and Drive Order matters

OK, we finally have things in place and we’ve been copying files from an older SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) system to a newly created SHR2 (this allows two levels of redundancy). The problem is that for the first week, I was only seeing 100MBps transfer rates, but the underlying disks were running at 600MBps. Well, the “optimizing” disks finally stopped and the next copy is 600MBps. Lesson: When…

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Mac: Anne Pro 2 Bluetooth broken and new Keyboard Guide

Well, I have three of these Anne Pro keyboards and they are inexpensive keyboards with Jade Box White, Gateron Blue, and Gateron Brown keys. I’ve liked how small they are as 60% keyboards, but recently on my M1 Mac, they are having Bluetooth trouble. They are greyed out on the Mac Bluetooth menu which I’ve never seen before. When they start they sometimes work, but other times, I have to connect…

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net: Jumbo frames for all!

OK, as I’ve been moving terabytes of data around with the NAS rearrangement, I remembered that I haven’t optimized the network itself. We have a nice UniFi network switch and the NASes are on either dual 1GBe with LACP or 10GBe. So with these things, one of the things you can do is to move from the standard data frame size of 1500 bytes to a so-called Jumbo frame, typically 9,000 bytes. You…

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Pod. Well cool, making your own Video Page

I spent too much time getting my YouTube playlists in order, but its useful to have booked marked tutorials and things since so much content is there now. The basic WordPress supports in the Guttenberg Block Editor, just the embedding of a single YouTube Video. You just copy a link in and it appears which is great! The name of this Block is called YouTube or if you want your entire channel, then…

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pod: Microphone overload clicks, Magni sudden shutdown

We’ve made about 5 hours of YouTube videos this week and I discovered a few glitches: Overdriving the Scarlett i2I The audio is great except for the last one. I was trying to get the levels louder and instead, I got dropouts and clicks. The Scarlett focus was turned very high to 3 o’clock and the light was going red so I think I was overdriving the microphone amplifier. Lesson turn down the…

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tech: Broken Apple Photos, HomePod Hang, Bash Arrays, Reverse Image Search, Homebridge

Ok, it’s fix things Sunday, so here are the small things that I’ve been trying to fix and their status: Apple Photos. On my OLCPed MacBook Pro 2014, when I run Apple Photos, I don’t see the first entry which is “All Photos”. It’s bizarre it started with Photos > For Your Shared Library, Memories, and the usual stuff, but there is no All Photos entry. I’ve tried to start a new Photo Library three…

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pod: rt3. AI Hardware Introduction

This is another sort of nerdy side note. If anyone is still watching, this section is just to give intuition on the basics of the hardware. There are lots of assumptions about GPUs and CPUs that I wanted to make sure people understood. But the basics are that CPUs are tuned for lots of branches and different workflows, while GPUs are tuned for lots of the same things like matric math. And…

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