Ad Astra per Aspera
I have been using a 144Hz monitor for gaming for a while now, but I recently replaced the monitor I was using with the M1 Mac Mini with a 120Hz, 1ms G2G one.
Wow! With that monitor, Mac OS is as smooth as an iPad Pro. Ok, I get it. The ProMotion display on the iPad Pro is 120Hz, so of course it’s that smooth. The thing is, I’m not used to seeing that while working on a desktop. The difference is *immediately* obvious.
I hadn’t gotten around to writing about my newest Mac, even though I’ve had it for a while now. Unfortunately, now that I am finding the time, it’s because of an unexpected problem with it. Oh well, that’s life.
A few months before the new M1 Macs were announced, my mom’s iMac (20-inch, Early 2009) started to fail for her. This machine had already had its HD replaced once and, from the symptoms I was seeing, it looked like it was on the verge of happening again.
Since I had stopped using my iMac to host GCW, and I had a gaming PC with enough horsepower that I could use it as a backup to make music, I wasn’t really doing anything mission critical on the Mac, so decided to wipe it and give it to my mom as an upgrade. That machine was incredibly badass for its day, and is still running fine. Between the processor upgrade (Core2Duo to i7), the Fusion Drive, the top (at the time) Mac graphics chip (780M), and the increased system RAM (4Gig to 24Gig), the new machine behaves easily >10x faster than what she had. Woot!
Of course, my secret plan in all this was to replace my iMac with a new M1 Mac when they became available. 😉
What I ended up getting was this…
Of course, this wasn’t my first Mac mini, and I had lots of peripherals lying around, so “downgrading” from the iMac wasn’t a big deal, but I have to say I was not prepared for how much faster this new machine is.
I can honestly, say that this is the most responsive Macintosh I have ever worked on, and that includes my (almost) current gen, max spec, work MBP, which cost four times as much.
Starting up an application? Instant. Starting an Intel-based application via Rosetta 2? Almost as fast (after the first startup). Gaming performance? Everything is faster, even comparing against the dedicated 780M in the iMac, and that includes games written for the Intel architecture.
Wow! To say I’m pleased with the performance would be a massive understatement.
Like any first generation product, there have been growing pains — Blutooth dropouts, USB issues, etc. Generally, these have been minor and new releases of macOS 11 are bringing improvements.
At this point though, there are two issues which are pretty serious:
Lack of support for M1
Because of Rosetta 2, most applications you run work fine on M1. However, the closer you get to things that are at the edges, like printer drivers and music software, the more likely you will be to see problems. I’m still nowhere close to having all of my music software running on the new machine, but at least my mainstay, Reason, works as does Logic Pro (of course).
The display flickering bug
This is a reasonably wide-spread issue that causes certain combinations of content being displayed to flicker in brightness and have faint vertical lines. The problem is quite bad, when it happens, but I usually only see it when watching videos with dark backgrounds.
Here is an example:
It’s hard to get a good demonstration of the problem, because it usually only occurs when the display is in flux, but at one point I did manage to capture a video of a static case. Here’s a close up:
At this point, there’s no fix for the problem. Anecdotally, there’s some evidence that this is a software bug, which hopefully means it will eventually get fixed, but who knows.
Also, in case you think it’s just me, here are some links from around the net:
I have a case open with Apple, of course, but they weren’t able to provide any useful suggestions, and fell back to the old standbys:
I did try running in safe mode (with no effect), but the other two are particularly sad because neither of those are possible on an M1. Argh.
I guess we’ll see. Hopefully, this gets fixed at some point. I’ll update this post when something changes.
As you can tell from my Raspberry Pi addiction, I’ve always been fascinated by “mini” PCs (i.e. very inexpensive computers in tiny packages). My latest foray into this world was triggered by the hope that I could set up my living room TV as a Zoom/Webex/Skype/Hangouts space for family get togethers.
I tried using a Pi for this, but it was a struggle, with a mix of failures from missing features to inability to recognize the camera to performance problems, etc. I think if I was only using one service, I probably could have fought to make it work, but it felt like it was going to be too hard to get all of the services going.
This led me to wonder whether I could find a cheap “actual” PC to do the job and coincidentally (or at least I hope it was a coincidence), Amazon decided to point me at a sale on these…
In typical Amazon fashion, this is called
On sale, I was able to pick one up for less than 200 $CDN. This is a surprisingly powerful little beast at that price point. It’s about 13cm on a side, making it only a bit larger than a Pi in an Argon ONE case. It’s quiet, it drives my 4K TV fine, it even has an internal slot to add a SATA drive that I filled with a 1TB SSD I had lying around.
Now, I will say it’s not fast. It just barely has enough horsepower to display 4K video, but that did work for the YouTube and Netflix examples I tried.
As to the reason why I bought the box, since it’s running Windows, all of the standard teleconferencing services worked OOTB using a Logitech C920 video camera. I was even able to do a video call through my home NextCloud instance, which surprised me.
Overall I’m quite happy.
Just for grins, I took my Raspberry Pi in the Argon ONE M.2 case upstairs and plugged it into the living room home theatre. I have a small wireless keyboard/trackpad device (that I got with an old QNAP NAS, of all things), which I could use to talk to it. This worked, but the range was terrible — basically, I had to be within 50cm of the Pi for it to work. I have ordered a “real” Bluetooth wireless keyboard/trackpad from Logitech. I’ll let you know how well it works once it shows up.
I also have a Harmony remote, that I’ve been using with the living room gear, and I have to say this has been the best universal remote that I’ve ever had. For grins, I added the Pi as a “Computer” in the app for the remote, and was surprised to find out that the remote wanted to pair with the Pi over Bluetooth. After doing this I am now able to move the cursor and type text on the Pi from the remote app on my iPhone. This despite the fact that the Pi isn’t running Mac OS or Windows. Very cool!
Using the remote, I was able (from my couch) to run Kodi and VLC (both of which worked well) and was able to do some light web browsing. Typing text into the remote app isn’t a good enough experience to want to do anything serious there, but the Logitech keyboard should fix that.
Looks like “argonPi” has a new home.
Yes, my little temperature sensor app works with the real Sense Hat hardware. Here’s a picture.
Note: that picture is taken in low light so the shutter speed is long enough to catch all of the pixels. You don’t notice the LED scanning with the naked eye, but the camera really shows it (see picture below).
When that picture was taken, it was still in a case with a fan, but it was hard to see the display and the fan noise bothered me. I took it out of the case and added a right angle extender to the GPIO connector on the Pi, so the display stands up, which keeps everything cool enough that no fan is required. I then added four risers and the lid off another old Pi case with some rubber feet, which keeps the board off the ground (and also increases the airflow).
It actually reads a couple of degrees too high, but the accuracy of the readings isn’t all that important as long as it tracks relative temperature values. I tested it by taking it out into my garage (in January), where the temperature dropped, the display turned red, and email was sent. Yay!
(See part 1 for more details about the app.)
Wow. I have to say I never thought I was going to end up writing Python programs for fun and (no) profit. That is until I got a Raspberry Pi Sense Hat, at least.
The specific project I’m working on is a remote temperature monitor for an unoccupied site that I’m responsible for, to allow us to react if the furnace goes out there before the pipes burst.
Given the Python library for the Sense Hat, it was basically trivial to build a program that would watch for the temperature to go outside a given range, and send email to me if it did. It took a couple of hours longer than I expected it would to write, but my excuse is that it really was my first Python program. 🙂 (Also, it seems there are quirks around getting accurate temperature readings from the SH, so I’m still tweaking the program, but it’s basically working.)
Given the 8×8 display on the Hat, I even managed to provide a continuous temperature display. 8×8 is not enough pixels to make something look good, so you end up with something like this (as drawn by the Sense Hat Emulator developer tool):
Ugly but readable. For the inquisitive, here’s the “McQ’s First Python Program” version of a function to display the digits:
########################################################### # Display two digits on the sense hat. # Digit patterns digits0_9 = [   [2, 9, 11, 17, 19, 25, 27, 33, 35, 42], # 0   [2, 9, 10, 18, 26, 34, 41, 42, 43],   # 1   [2, 9, 11, 19, 26, 33, 41, 42, 43],   # 2   [1, 2, 11, 18, 27, 35, 41, 42],     # 3   [3, 10, 11, 17, 19, 25, 26, 27, 35, 43], # 4   [1, 2, 3, 9, 17, 18, 27, 35, 41, 42],  # 5   [2, 3, 9, 17, 18, 25, 27, 33, 35, 42],  # 6   [1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 19, 26, 34, 42],    # 7   [2, 9, 11, 18, 25, 27, 33, 35, 42],   # 8   [2, 9, 11, 17, 19, 26, 27, 35, 43]    # 9 ]    def display_two_digits (a_number, color):   global digits0_9   black = (0, 0, 0)      if a_number < 0:     negative = True     a_number = abs(a_number)   else:     negative = False        first_digit = int(int(a_number / 10) % 10)   second_digit = int(a_number % 10)  # set pixels for the two digits  pixels = [black for i in range(64)]  digit_glyph = digits0_9[first_digit]  for i in range(0, len(digit_glyph)):    pixels[digit_glyph[i]] = color  digit_glyph = digits0_9[second_digit]  for i in range(0, len(digit_glyph)):    pixels[digit_glyph[i]+4] = color     # set pixels for a minus sign for negatives  if negative:    pixels[56] = color    pixels[57] = color    pixels[58] = color     # set bottom right pixel if number is more than 2 digits  if a_number > 99:    pixels[63] = color     # display the result  sense.set_pixels(pixels)
Of course, you pass in a color for the digits to show, so when the temperature is outside the range, you can show it in red. 😉
Anyway, feel free to point out all the noob Python programming mistakes. I’m always happy to improve.
So, I realized my last post was probably a bit confusing. The reason I was seeing issues with my older posts was that I had moved them to a new WordPress install because, as it happens, I have once again moved GCW to a new machine. This time, it’s another Raspberry Pi, but this new install has a few nice things going for it:
This time around, I’ve only got 500Gig of storage for the whole install including the website, but I’m no where near hitting that limit yet, so I’m very happy.
Most of my older posts seem to have extended entries for the titles. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I suspect it’s a side-effect of one too many export/imports. Something to figure out eventually.
Update: I managed to turn it off by hiding post abstracts. I’m not sure why this suddenly started happening however. Hm…
So take a look at this…
I apparently have joined the big leagues, although it’s a bit too early to say for sure. The ping time isn’t great, but I guess it will be good enough. For comparison, here’s what I had before the upgrade:
Ping: 4ms Down 47.5 Up: 10.4
I’ve tried GeForce Now and it’s like night and day. The game looks basically like it’s running locally now.
As you can see from this post, GCW transferred over seamlessly too.
Now, let’s try some MMOs… 🙂
There have been a number of interesting things happening in the Raspberry Pi community lately.
One new hotness is the RPi 4 with 8Gig of RAM, which in addition to having more RAM than you will likely ever need on a machine like this, also has a slightly updated power module that improves the behavior with some USB-C power supplies. It does mean that you can now open too many Chromium tabs to keep track of on this platform too. 😛
Another interesting update is the support for booting off of USB drives, instead of the MicroSD card. This lets you use an SSD over USB3 as your main drive, which is both much faster than the built-in MicroSD, and will have a significantly longer lifespan.
Finally, there is the 64-bit version of Raspian (now renamed as Raspberry Pi OS), which actually matters given you can get a Pi with more than 32bits of address space, but it will likely also improve performance for many tasks once the beta kinks are ironed out.
Anyway, being the RPi geek that I am, here is my latest desktop…
An 8Gig RPi4 with a 500Gig Samsung SSD, in the awesome Argon ONE Pi 4 case, which has both a temperature controlled fan (that is almost always off under normal workloads) and, believe it or not, a working power button that does a safe shutdown! This is definitely the slickest Pi case I’ve used, even if moving all the ports to the back meant making it nearly 50% larger than the Flirc case, which was my previous favorite.
Anyway, even with an SSD that cost more than the Pi and the Argon ONE case together, and the Pi overclocked to 2GHz, it’s still too slow to be a great desktop experience, but it works well enough that I was able to write this post, while watching youtube videos, with several other apps open, including LibreOffice and Gimp, so it’s definitely real.