deskthority

Just a few Round 5 tests…
Yep, you never know how it'll look until you try. There will be more.
All right, I think that last one works. Finally! But I'm sure this one won't:
Always shoot with dark stuff on the left!

third one from the second lot is my pick Mu. Vintage blacks on my NCR (provisional seebarting)...
Madhias SSK:

Hot damn! That sultry SSK looks mighty up there. Better than I imagined! It's a cert.

I caught up with the header backlog last night. And I picked the same Round 5 shot as you. Works nicely beside the Honeywell original I shot two years ago. It's live, along with A500's svelte little numpad and a couple of others. Long rotation! I probably need to retire some oldies.

Muirium wrote: Hot damn! That sultry SSK looks mighty up there. Better than I imagined! It's a cert.

I caught up with the header backlog last night. And I picked the same Round 5 shot as you. Works nicely beside the Honeywell original I shot two years ago. It's live, along with A500's svelte little numpad and a couple of others. Long rotation! I probably need to retire some oldies.

Argeed. Straight crop of Madhias shot works well for some reason. Blew me away too.

Madhias' SSK looks like it was made for the header! Good crop seebart!

Madhias pic is really nice!


PS:Three of my pics on the rotation!!!
I'm honored Mu!

Shoot good headers, and if they tickle my fancy, they will prevail. Even if you're Mr_A500! In other words: well done mate.

From today's Round 5 shoot, some provisional experiments.
Hmm. Number 2 works best. I still can't quite ever tell beforehand! I like the last one best, though. So I'll try again.
I think I like that last one. The soft shadows between the pearly white alphas remind me a lot of this one, of the original Honeywell:

idollar wrote: It is difficult to crop ...

A bit late, but I love it!

Apparently, I have a theme of late…
A brighter version of the first: I think I like all of these. Uh uh, I sense Round 5 bias!

Ah, now I'm happy…
Desktop Retina!

What you see here is a nice new 4k IPS display, and a shitey 20 inch 1050p one from a decade or so ago, both running from my freshly restored Mac Pro, nice and smoothly at full hardware acceleration. The 2006 Mac rules again!

Both screens are plugged into a Radeon 7850 that works on OS X 10.10 but nothing earlier:
And the first thing Yosemite does when it sees my new 24 inch Dell is run it at 4k, with 2x UI scaling, aka Retina, exactly as I want!
Of course, you can also run it at 1x if you really want to. I haven't tried gaming, but everything that I normally do is working well. I'll hoist the new display up to my standing desk in a while and get back to work.

Very nice. That is one of my fav chassis by far. And my fav era for Macs as a whole.

Is that a hacked mac pro then ? To get 10.10 on it ? I am guessing you are using display port so you can get it to run at 60htz right ?

Correct. You can see the wee black Mini DisplayPort cable in my Radeon. The big old DVI cable is for the 1050p display, that I'll likely shove into storage just in case I need it for the old beasts.

The "hack" consists of using an alternate boot.efi file that "thunks" 64 bit EFI calls into 32 bit equivalents. So I'm told. It's a bit of bastard to install, and I had it go wrong some way I didn't understand until yesterday. See, that Radeon there isn't compatible with the old Mac Pro's 32 bit EFI so I see nothing on it until OS X reaches the desktop. But I wasn't reaching the desktop. Cue the fun!

I fixed it by putting in the original graphics card (some ancient thing with a couple of DVI ports on it and no fan) which ran super slow (missing parts of the UI entirely) and super hot! But that got me into Disk Utility where I repaired permissions etc. until the damn thing would boot again. For some reason this didn't work when I tried doing it over FireWire target mode before. Huh.

So yeah, it works. But don't try it on your mum's machine! (Although, come to think of it, I guess if she has a Mac Pro she might be up for it…)

Nice setup you got there Mu! No more whining then.

NIce setup indeed!
I got a Dell U2515H to replace my aging Eizo S1910 and I LOVE it. Not 4K (it is 2560x1440) but that means I can use Windows with no scaling and insane real estate!

Thanks guys. Now I can whinge about Photoshop instead of my hardware again. Happy times.

Scaling on Windows: yeah, I perhaps wouldn't go 4k on that platform either. I've seen the horrors! No such trouble on this side of the divide. What with Apple pushing high PPI screens every which way for a few years now.

Nice but old setup you have there, Muirium! We have at work about 10 old Mac Pros, mostly 2007 and 2008 models, which we don't use anymore. You know, throwaway society... They got replaced by Minis! I am not a fan of the high resolution movement though, and always use my 'normal resolution' screens for image editing. But the iPad is then a nice proofing device! 1000px got replaced by 2048px today for me.

If they're 64 bit EFI (can run 10.8+ natively) they're better than what I've got. But I guess shipping one or two of those up here would be quite costly…

Anywho, the one old school PC user bit that is still strong in my DNA, after all these years on the Mac, is my preference for a great big huge desktop machine I can throw hard drives inside and upgrade from time to time. I tried hard drive caddies and a Mac Mini back in the early Intel days, but it was a kludge. Better to have one box that can take everything. Even if you are a laptop and mobile guy like me with a digital pack rat problem! Always best to have a base.

The iMac is nice and all. But I'm not a good enough Buddhist.

Madhias wrote: Nice but old setup you have there, Muirium! We have at work about 10 old Mac Pros, mostly 2007 and 2008 models, which we don't use anymore. You know, throwaway society... They got replaced by Minis! I am not a fan of the high resolution movement though, and always use my 'normal resolution' screens for image editing. But the iPad is then a nice proofing device! 1000px got replaced by 2048px today for me.

Oooh nice! Take one home. I've always wanted to get one, and use it as a giant stacker box full of hard drives and a secondary desktop. Maybe even build a custom PC into it!

Muirium wrote: If they're 64 bit EFI (can run 10.8+ natively) they're better than what I've got. But I guess shipping one or two of those up here would be quite costly…

I think so, I have to look tomorrow which models those are. The oldest one is a G5, but only one, the rest are all Xenons, some of them dual CPU setups if I remember correctly! I think two or three are dual cores, and other ones are quad cores, and were really expensive.

Madhias wrote:

Muirium wrote: If they're 64 bit EFI (can run 10.8+ natively) they're better than what I've got. But I guess shipping one or two of those up here would be quite costly…

I think so, I have to look tomorrow which models those are. The oldest one is a G5, but only one, the rest are all Xenons, some of them dual CPU setups if I remember correctly! I think two or three are dual cores, and other ones are quad cores, and were really expensive.

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro. It can run 10.10 natively. No hacking required. The various Apple rumour sites say it should also run 10.11 which is due out in the autumn.

Yup. I hope to run El Capitan with the same hacked boot.efi that I'm using now. If not, then I'm fine staying back on Yosemite: the Helvetica edition. Well, until everyone drops support for it in their browsers etc. Should be a few years yet in either case.

My 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 is a quad: dual 2.6 GHz dual core Xeons. With an SSD and 11 gigs of memory, it's still very capable. And with that Radeon 7850, it's 4k and no looking back!

Big tower Mac Pros are the quietest desktops I've ever used. The cooling system is absolutely insanely overpowered, so you barely ever hear a twitch out of it. They're great for video work with overnight video encodes and such. Gaming too, I expect. Speaking of which: next on my list is a second SSD so I can try that out. I've got all 4 hard drive bays packed already, so I put SSDs up front instead of shitty old optical drives. These guys have 6 SATA channels, sneakily enough.

Muirium wrote:

Red & White.jpg

Red & White Island.jpg

Three Colours-2.jpg

I think I like all of these. Uh uh, I sense Round 5 bias!

What board and keys are those red and white ? I want to see more of it.

It's just a humble Cherry G80-3000. The magic is in the caps. It's wearing Round 5, of course!

http://deskthority.net/post237048.html#p237048

Those bring out the vintage in anything.

In light of MMcM's "80s keyboard party" thread I got so excited that I had to whip out a Micro Switch header even though we already have one in rotation.

MICRO SWITCH SW-10591:

Wow, the MICRO SWITCH SW-10591 is great, a perfect header!

Nice one. In rotation as of now. (Ah, it's good to have my workstation back again!)

You should see how much I compress these files by the way. Here's the final version DT will serve countless thousand times for as long as it's in the active stack:



54k vs your original 260k. See any difference?

No I don't see any difference. Glad to see this one made the cut.

Nice header, seebart.

And Muirium's new keycap shots are great. It's hard to believe those keycaps aren't vintage.

mr_a500 wrote: Nice header, seebart.

And Muirium's new keycap shots are great. It's hard to believe those keycaps aren't vintage.

Heh heh! That's what I like about them. Think of all the boards you'd have to ransack to get a collection of colours to play with like that.