Installing Mojave on a 12-year-old iMac

Let’s take a trip, shall we? I used to use this 2010 iMac at my office before it became hopelessly outdated. It’s spent close to the last half decade in storage at the shop (just off the left side of the screen in videos, actually). I’m gonna try to repurpose it

I forgot the account password, so I’m going to reinstall the OS

Silly me! Despite the wallpaper, it already has Mavericks on it

I wiped the hard drive to perform a fresh install of Mavericks. For some reason, I *really* hate entering my Apple ID. Probably because there’s always about 8 hoops I have to jump through (yay multi-layered security?) because I refuse to carry the Fruit Fone.

I actually have 2 of these lumbering beasts. Maybe I’ll put some flavor of Linux on the other for funsies.

Actually, thinking about it. It’ll probably be more useful running a newer version of Ubuntu than trying to force a newer version of OS X.

Still, I’M GONNA HAVE FUN TRYING!!!

Well, THAT took forever….

Well, there’s no big ? over the icon. Let’s see if we can just run the app

Poop. That would’ve been TOO easy.

Gonna try DOSDude’s patcher and see what happens. dosdude1.com

Basically, this application patches the installers for newer versions of OS X so they’ll work on older Mac hardware. I’ll have to do this for every incremental update through Mojave.

This is promising….

Thinking aloud: If I do end up putting Linux on one of these, will it still have the chime? I don’t think it will, but I don’t recall ever trying to find out.

I came to really enjoy the chime. I was *mad* when Apple silenced it with the High Sierra “upgrade”.

Pretty sure the chime, then, is part of the OS and not, say, a bootloader? That would take some research.

MUAHAHAHAHA!!!

Seriously, though: I relish when something that *shouldn’t* work does. I feel like Alan Cumming in GoldenEye (even if I am just using a publicly available tool written by someone else)

Another half an hour waiting for the OS to install. I’m going to put this aside for the night and get some sleep.

Got up this morning and went to check on the Sierra install, but instead I got a big ?. Something obviously went wrong, now to see if I can recover.

“Success! Success! They’ve done it! They’ve done it!”

The trick is that you have to use a very specific version of the installer app with the patch–otherwise it will not install correctly. I managed to find a copy of 12.6.06 on archive.org and it worked a charm!

Let’s see how far we can ride this train. Hold on to your butts!

Aww yiss

LET IT RIDE!!!

It is done! I present to you, in sheer defiance of Cupertino, a 12-year-old iMac running the last version of OSX to support 32-bit apps! As much as I’d like to try, I’m going to hold off on upgrading to Catalina–this will serve my needs just fine.

Pretending To Be A TV Mogul (or: Why I Built An Automated Broadcasting Rig)

Hey, remember that iMac I was working on last week? The one that I was putting Mojave on just ’cause? Well, I told you I had a project in mind for it!

Also: For the record, it’s an early ’09 model, not a ’10.

Anyway, I’ve always been a bit of a broadcasting nut. I always loved/hated the politics, the business, and the technology of commercial broadcasting.

In fact, in high school/early college, I wanted to make a career of it.

Even before then, I was recording “radio shows” and “TV programs” with friends. Much of it was parody–inspired by Dan Aykroyd sketches, Tiny Toon Adventures, that “Stay Tuned” movie, and Wayne’s World–but I played it seriously (which was part of the fun)

More than the programming, though, I was fascinated by the technological infrastructure. How radio equipment works, how signals are converted, but especially how that can be exploited.

When I was 14, the school band went on a trip to Panama City. My best friend brought a small FM transmitter like you would plug into a CD player to listen over a car stereo, and I hatched a BRILLIANT scheme.

After a covert mission to Radio Shack during a lunch break, we had exactly what we needed to build that elusive dream of all Gen X kids (and some of us Xennials): an unlicensed radio station.

It didn’t take long for us to get into a LOT of trouble with the adults ?

Anyway, I’ve always romanticized broadcasting. Fortunately, after a wave of consolidation and format changes in the late 90s (as well as the unfiltered reality related to me by industry vets), I saw where the industry was going and got out before I grew to hate it. That’s why I gravitated toward YouTube early on, but it’s very noisy and just doesn’t feel the same. YouTube is more like an old VHS exchange while running a production, aesthetically, feels different?

So, this bit of personal history brings me back around to the project at hand. I know that with today’s technology, literally anyone can broadcast. There’s really no gatekeeping anymore (which is a good thing), but I still love the idea of “curated” content. I love the idea of having a “channel” that plays constantly changing content, and I love the idea of being able to produce that content without necessarily “going live”. It’s not just making videos, but creating an experience beyond the video.

So I wanted to build a little homage to analog broadcasting. I wanted to capture some of the essence and the nostalgia of the old ways without getting caught up in the whole “content mill” mindset. Something that people could drop in, have something unique served to them, then stay and chat or just move on without commitment. Something that could run itself, automatically generating that curated content without my input.

So to start off, I built what might be the epitome of mid-90s automated analog TV:

The Weather Channel

It’s simple, but it’s proof-of-concept for a little side art project that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time. Eventually, I want to add more concepts like simulated EBS, station ID, sign-offs, and other goodies.

And, of course, programming.

The biggest thing is that I want it to be fun. I want there to be interesting little surprises for people who watch, and–really–I want people to take part in it in some way.

There’s no other goal here than to have fun, so expect puzzles, Easter eggs, and plenty of irreverence. Eventually, I want to position this concept kinda like a zine-meets-public-access where people can submit content and share without the disparate nature of something like YouTube. I’d love to see this become a sort of discovery engine for other like-minded artists where real humans are finding oddities and curiosities and presenting them. I’d even love to see communities spin off and thrive on their own.

For now, though, just enjoy the wallpaper.

twitch.tv/airbornesurfer