The Purge

Nope, not the series of movies/TV Show about a solution that only America could come up with…. No I’m talking about MacOS and the purging of deleted files.

Having finished Tomb Raider, I decided that with my current bent on D&D that I might try a D&D computer game. The most current (it’s still in pre-release) is Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ve not played any of the others but it’s based on 5th Edition, that I play regularly. So I handed over my money and as TR was finishing, I started a download.

INSERT SPONGEBOB “A FEW HOURS LATER”

I started it in the afternoon – 75GB. It took a long time, and having 3 people in the house streaming video probably didn’t help much. By morning it was downloaded, but Steam spent 90 minutes verifying the download.

It was a couple more days before I actually sat down to play. I had gone off on a couple of side missions in TR before I played through the last act and finished it off.

Clicked play.

(Oh I should add, that I had been playing TR on the PC and had downloaded BG3 onto the Mac).

And an hour later MacOS Security was still “verifying”. This is something it does for any newly installed program. But over an hour later it wasn’t working. I messed about with a few settings and in the end, decided to download it again.

But now there was no space on my HDD. Fair enough… it’s only 1TB, and you need 100GB. Sure there is only about 140GB spare. So I deleted the old copy of BG3, and while I was at it, took off WoW, Battletech and a few other bits and pieces that I wasn’t using. This freed up almost 300GB. (YIKES). In the end it was reporting over 500GB free – over half the drive was free. Awesome.

Nope, not enough space according to Steam. It was reporting about 25GB free. This was not making much sense and was obviously frustrating.

At this point I actually tried downloading it on the PC as well. Again, many hours of downloading and verifying it (twice) before I got the game to boot, but it crashed. Haven’t investigated further at this stage. I really want it on the Mac as the PC is often in use by the family.

MacOS runs things a little differently and basically keeps the stuff until someone needs it and then releases the purgeable space. So Free Space is reported as 535GB (515GB purgeable). Disk space used was 1.3TB (interesting, it’s only a 1.03TB drive).

Ok Mac, go and purge.

It turns out that there isn’t a way to easily do this. In fact I’m not even sure there is actually a way to manually do this at all. A bunch of research suggested several third party programs (ranging in levels of trust and price). Clearing out caches, running a Time Machine backup, and some reboots weren’t getting anywhere.

It was time for something drastic. Something that was probably overdue anyway. I mean it’s been three full OS upgrades and I’ve not done it.

I started backing things up. I always have Time Machine running, and it’s awesome, but I spent several hours ensuring that photos, pictures, documents etc were stashed on an additional disk.

And then into Recovery Mode – Erase the entire volume. Reinstall MacOS (Monterey in this case). Got that going and did some gardening for about 90 minutes as it installed.

And before too long, maybe 90 mins, I’m back to a fresh Mac.

I installed a few things first…. MS Office, Chrome, Edge (I have reasons), then I downloaded BG3 again.

A lot of time later and the download had finished. Then Steam did its verify thing for another hour.

Of course when I started it, MacOS security had to do its verify thing. For another hour.

Nothing. Reboot, tried starting again.

Verifying for another hour. I wandered off to feed dinner to the family and stuff.

Came back to this screen…

So SUCCESS.

I’ll put another post up with my initial thoughts of the game etc. I’ve played for about 6 hours so far.

Mouse Trouble

For a long time I have used the Razer Naga Molten as my mouse. It’s been excellent. Recently though it’s had a little trouble moving about on the desk. It turns out that the slick plastic sliders on the bottom of the mouse have worn right down to the hard plastic shell. It was becoming awkward to use. And I can’t seem to find a way to just replace those parts.

I started investigating replacements and of course the first place to look was Razer. Here, the Naga was now in several versions, with the fanciest being the Naga Pro. This had the three swappable side plates (so normal configuration, 6 buttons and the 12 button like my Naga). It added wireless, including Bluetooth.

But the Razer software no longer supports OSX. Though I’ve never used the Razer software on my existing Naga. With my birthday coming up, I put in my request.

Success! Birthday came along and so did the Naga. It connected fairly simply to the iMac. Obviously the software wasn’t working but I didn’t think much of that until I tried to play WoW.

Here I came across the problem I didn’t face with the older one. The Naga Molten has a switch on the bottom. This manually selects the 12 side buttons as either the top number row on the keyboard or the number pad. Now I had always had it as the number pad. This worked great as I used the number row on the keyboard for my attack rotation, then the Numpad on the Naga as my interrupts and other more situational actions.

Well, that’s what the software does in the newer ones. That software that doesn’t work on OSX. Mapping the keys in WoW didn’t help because the mouse thinks its the number row. I did manage a work around as I made them all bound to SHIFT-number.

I was kind of disappointed, so I handed the Naga over to the Surface to work with. I do like that I can actually use it for multiple computers. I have the USB cable connected to the iMac, which works. And when I switch the BT on, the Surface connects to it.

Anyway, after some more research, I picked up a Logitech G604 for the iMac.

This is also a Bluetooth mouse (that was one of the criteria for my choice) and it has 6 side buttons. The Logitech software also works on OSX.

So this arrived and connected. It was really slow to move across my desktop (I have the 27” iMac and another 27” screen slaved to it). Then I got into the software and messed about with the settings. This helped.

I’ve also set up the keys when outside WoW as a bunch of short cuts.. cut, copy, paste, screenshot. Works well for that.

I have struggled a little with it in WoW, but I’ve also not played much so I reserve judgement on that side of things. I can’t quite seem to get the Logitech software to automatically switch profile as I thought it did. Again, I haven’t played with it much to be sure.

However, I have been having trouble with it even working. It will often lose the BT connection and simply stop. I’ve had to go through the reconnection steps several times. Switching it off, clearing it from the iMac’s BT list etc have eventually got it up and running.

The other trouble is that, well as I said, without the G-Suite application running, it’s really slow across the screen. At the OSX login screen (there are profiles for each family member on my iMac) its slow. And it remains slow even after login (or wake up from sleep) until the G-Suite kicks in. This can be several seconds. Or it isn’t until I actually open it. Or it just doesn’t.

This has all been quite frustrating. Sometimes it all gets back together, or I have to switch on the Apple Magic Mouse that I have, or I’ve resorted to plugging the Naga in (via its USB) cable. On one recent afternoon I had to dig out an old Apple Trackpad to get some response from the cursor on screen.

So in summary. Naga Pro isn’t great for OSX (well it’s not supposed to be). G604 seems really flakey. Apple Magic Mouse is good for general stuff, but not games, make sure you keep a trackpad around…

Anyone got an older working Naga they want to let go?

Oh and my old reliable Logitech M555 that I kept for travel seems to have died.

One word

and it’s not Avengers, it’s Battletech.

The new Battletech from Paradox (also available through Steam) is excellent.

And personally the best news, its ON THE IMAC as well. So I can play it.

And its really interesting and really well done.

 

I’ll do a longer review with pics in a bit. But if you’ve ever been a table top player, then I think you’ll enjoy it.

Deed is done.

The decision was made, the transaction complete.

The iMac has been replaced with….

…..

….

 

…

..

 

another 27″ iMac.

Well I bet that was a surprise.

Can you tell which is which???  (ok the default wallpaper and the smaller keyboard give it away)

Went out yesterday and bought it from the Apple Store. Using education prices I got a discount and also a set of wireless Beats headphones. JB Hifi could beat the Apple Store prices, but not by much (about $50) but couldn’t throw in the headphones. I didn’t particularly want the headphones but since they are free and worth $400 (retail), why miss out on it. I figure I could use them with the iMac when trying to ignore the Mrs watching her shows on the PC next to me……

I picked up the base 27″ which means a 1TB Hybrid HDD and a basic i5, with a Radeon 570 card. A massive step up in performance when compared to my late 2009 iMac. Not going to win any races, but fine for me. Heck, now I have the first 4K (well 5K) display in the house (our TVs are full HD, not 4K). As long as I can study and I can run videos at full screen, I will be happy (actually I haven’t tested that yet).

First impression was – it’s lighter – I discovered as I picked it up to walk out of the store. Eventually, when getting it home my first impression was the screen is really nice. Initially the brightness was right up, but it was actually the fineness of text and lines of dialog and windows that made the biggest impression on me. When I eventually connected the Dell 27″ 1440 monitor I had with the older iMac, yes, the screen is much nicer in the new iMac.

Here it is, all set up as dual screen. The Beats are on the desk to the left of the iMac. This shot really hides the difference between the Dell and the iMac.

The next impression is speed. It’s certainly quicker than the older model. I have decided that once its all up and running and I can confirm that everything I want is either moved or backed up, I am intending to wipe and restore the older one. I’m sure it used to be quicker than it is these days.

I decided not to do a restore from the Time Machine. I thought, its time for a bit of a spring clean. So I’ve moved email and photo archives and my current study over and very little else. The rest is available either from backup, NAS or the cloud.

Several hours later I realised that I forgot to copy the iTunes folder and set that up on the to connect to the store on the NAS. Of course, this is after I packed away the old iMac. So now I have all my music downloaded from Apple Music and stored on this iMac, and a big folder on the NAS with nothing pointing to it. Might have to work through that in the next few days. However, I did learn about browsing my Team Machine backup so the old iMac can sit away getting dust as everything I would need is here on the backup disk…. Time Machine scores YET again (really, its one of THE BEST THINGS about OSX).

Of course, in the middle of all of this, one of the NAS drives has died, so I don’t want to do too much copying and working on the NAS until I replace the drive. Got a couple inbound at the moment. Half think I bought an extra last time, but can’t think where I stored it if I did.

Overall, its like the old one has just been refreshed. I don’t think Mrs has even realised, and probably won’t, until she spots the box from the new one under the stairs.

 

Not the right colour :(

My iMac has been showing symptoms that I think may be terminal, or at least probably very expensive.

In the past couple of weeks there has been the occasional flashes of pink/orange/green squares appearing randomly on the screen. This Sunday, when I returned from Sydney, the screen was covered in them. And the iMac seemed to be running slowly.

I am fairly confident in diagnosing a graphics cards in its last days. There are always other possibilities, but that is the most likely. The iMac is about 5 years old and the card is pretty tight in there. Yes the aluminium unibody would act as a heat sink, but it still gets warm. Running a second screen (also 1440 27″) may have hastened it’s demise.

So I’m struggling to export and back up. That’s to add to the 2 other backups I have of course. Perhaps I am being a little paranoid, but there is the possibility that I won’t return to a Mac at the end of this. So stuff has be available in a format that Windows can also use.

A couple of hiccups in the copy have me doing some direct shell work on my NAS. Seems the most reliable way to delete things from the server (there are some duplicates of the iPhoto Library I’m trying to get rid of).

It is also screwing up my study. I have an essay due this week and I’m not looking forward to having to sort it out without a computer!

Apple why you don’t like NAS??????

Argh, Apple, what have you got against NAS? Many may be aware that Apple has released its latest version of OSX, called Mavericks. As part of the update they have given iMovie and iPhoto a makeover.

While the upgrade to Mavericks went without any trouble, the iMovie update has not gone so well. The previous iMovie didn’t support NAS, though eventually with some searching across the internet I found this

defaults write -app iMovie allowNV -bool true

which when typed into Terminal (OSX command line interface – very powerful) fixed it.

The new iMovie broke the link again. The command hasn’t worked on it, so now I’m stuck (like many other people) with a load of iMovie projects that I can’t load into iMovie without copying back onto my iMac’s HDD. Now we’re talking about gigabytes of stuff and you might recall I have had a disk space issue with just my iTunes Library. There’s no way I can keep all my iMovie projects on the HDD!

My frustration is increased as I did spend a little bit of money (not a big amount, but about $500-$800)  on setting up the NAS. It’s still working fine as my iTunes Library by the way. Anyway I spent the money and it isn’t able to be used as much as I had hoped because of strange limitations that are in other applications.

So I considered moving up to Final Cut, Apple’s higher specification video editing program (aimed at professionals), but some brief research tells me it has exactly the same limitation. I wonder if iPhoto and Aperture (Apple’s photo programs) do as well – though I’ve kept the iPhoto Library on the iMac. Come on, even lowly little me has gigabytes of video, imagine a pro! And they want it all to fit on the 1TB HDD that comes standard. Someone commented that they might want us to move to Thunderbolt instead of Ethernet, but I read that Thunderbolt solutions don’t work either!

Now I’m looking into totally avoiding the problem and moving to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I’m just doing some research about costs and whether it can use a NAS when on OSX.

The advantages are that I would be able to use all of Adobe’s Creative programs (Photoshop, Premiere and Dreamweaver and many others) on two computers even different OS, and get lifetime upgrades. For a cost that would save me money for a few years. It looks promising.

NAS. Hiccup

Discovered a problem with my setup. Not really the NAS fault as far as I can tell either.

When I download a rental from iTunes, it won’t play. The AppleTV says the computer isn’t authourised, iTunes says the file is quicktime and iTunes doesn’t support that. It won’t move it to an iOS device and there is no picture displayed, just the blank, I don’t have any cover art, image.

Now remember, the whole rest of the library works, and I’m not trying to play some ancient file I dug up somewhere, this is a rental I downloaded maybe two days ago.

Net research suggests its not limited to my setup, but that most who use NAS have this problem and there were varied suggestions to fix it.

The first suggestions I didn’t like as it mostly involved moving my library. Deleting files seemed problematic for a rental as then I would have to rent it again.

Let me describe the delete solution to show you, and it will show how ridiculous the error is

1. Find the file on you hard disk

2. Copy it somewhere else – like the Desktop

3. Delete the original

4. Reimport the copy (easy as dragging it from the desktop into iTunes)

5. Wait a minute or so for the copy to complete (and behind the scenes its being copied to exactly where you copied it from!)

6. Play movie and enjoy.

Wait what! You didn’t do anything to the file!

Nope. And I found out you don’t even need to do step three. So it works for rentals.

So its some stupid iTunes quirk with using a NAS. Or rather some stupid iTunes Store quirk with using a NAS.

There’s nothing wrong with my NAS – its iTunes.

NAS. Life is Good.

Success. I have moved my iTunes library onto the NAS and Time Machine is happily backing up to it as well. I’m not sure that the PC has access to anything, but to be honest, not sure that’s a problem – the PC isn’t used for much apart from keeping the rest of the family happy with facebook, streaming TV etc. I’ve never bothered doing a backup of it as there’s nothing on it that can be reinstalled or redownloaded. A hassle yes, but not going to lose family photos or anything.

Moving iTunes has cleared about 550G off the iMac, correspondingly the backup is significantly smaller. I’ve also freed up a USB port, which is always helpful.

The only drawback I’ve noticed is that the NAS isn’t as quiet as the iMac, must be the fans, and it does create a noticeable lag in my system. I suspect that is the trade off, noise reduction and sleeping drives in the NAS vs instant response in iTunes. I’ll fiddle with the settings as I use it to find the sweet spot for me.

Overall I’m happy with what’s happened. I’m not 100% sure I know why it started to work yesterday and that worries me a little. But I backups that I can restore to if required.

And later if I wanted to I could turn the server in a cloud, an ftp, a web server or whatever as well. But not at the moment.

NAS. I am.

Started work on the NAS yesterday. I started by adding the two new HDDs and ripping the other two out of the PC (I will have to go back and make sure the RAID is properly deactivated there).

Then using the downloaded CD I booted the PC (not the NAS as it doesn’t have an optical drive) into the NAS4Free. This allowed me to use the CD to install the OS onto the USB that would act as the system drive. Done.

Next step was to attach the NAS to a screen, ethernet and keyboard so I could boot. Actually, the next step was to fire up the PC and make sure it was still working properly with 2 HDD missing and having been NAS4Free temporarily!

The NAS booted without any problem and I ensured the IP was configured and static. From now on, I should only need to use the web interface (just like you can with your modem router).

Got the NAS into its permanent abode, and logged in. Created the RAID pool, and started on getting the shares set up.

This is where I’m up to. I can get the PC to find one of the shares, the iMac will find it if I explicitly tell it the share. And they can both write to the share. So it’s almost working right. I’d like to able to browse to the share on the Mac. That will make it easier when using the drive in applications (like iTunes). Neither can see the other share though.

Well the dawn of another day, and I hope to get some chances to work on it today or tomorrow.

NAS is coming

My iMac hard drive is rapidly filling up, a combination of ripping the DVDs I have around the house and the raw footage for my YouTube videos seems to be the culprit.

So it’s time to move ahead with the plans I made when I upgraded my PC. At the time I bought a couple of extra HDD with the idea that when I eventually needed a more storage I could use them as the base.

After looking about at the options (like buying a off the shelf one, building one from scratch) a good option seemed to be this little beauty. HP Proliant N54L Microserver. The Proliant series are HP (nee Compaq) range of servers, usually large and often rack mounted. This is a little 20 x 20 x 30 cm 4 bay server, running a little AMD Turion II. Not going to win any award for processing power, but its small and quiet. Perfect to be a NAS and sit quietly in the room getting about its business.

And for me that business will be storage. Using NAS4Free running off an internal USB stick, I have 4 2TB HDD to give me about 6TB of storage (running RAID 5 on ZFS). NAS4Free is an open source BSD based OS tailored for NAS. While you can add a bunch of other services to it, I plan to simply use it as storage. And I would hope that 6TB lasts me a few years.

Running over the Gb Ethernet, I think that it should be responsive enough.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to get it set up this weekend.