Mike PJ's Words

Years ago, I had a SPARC workstation running SunOS that used John Conway’s Game of Life as the screensaver. I loved watching it, and it’s one of the biggest things I’ve missed about using that workstation and OS. In 2018, I decided to write a screensaver for macOS that simulated the Game of Life. I’ve used it for the past couple of years on my own Macs, but never released it publicly. When I learned that Dr. Conway passed away earlier this week, on April 11, 2020, I decided to release this screensaver to the general public as a tribute.

The project is available on GitHub: 
https://github.com/mikepj/GauchoLife

You can download the screensaver itself here:
https://download.gauchosoft.com/gaucholife/GauchoLife-1.0.0.zip

I wonder how many people will buy the set of Mac Pro wheels and just install 2 of them…picking up just one side of the Mac Pro when they want to move it.

Screw you, Apple Watch. I just got back from a 45 minute outside walk, which you counted as only 5 exercise minutes even though I started a “workout”.

I pushed XRG 2.8 out the door this evening. This update fixes the stock graph and fixes the battery display on some MacBook Pros when fully charged. I also added a reset graph option to each graph’s contextual menu.

https://gauchosoft.com/xrg/

We found this at the bottom of our grocery shopping list. Apparently our youngest thought we were running dangerously low on cereal.

Tonight I had the privilege of photographing Gina McCarthy, a former head of the EPA. Her talk on communicating climate change was excellent.

Neil Peart was one of the finest drummers I’ve ever heard. If you haven’t heard his solo of O Baterista, you’re missing out. Such an amazing talent lost…

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-rush-drummer-neil-peart-dead-at-67/

I recorded this a couple months back, but just getting around to posting it today. Check out an unboxing of a new PowerEdge R6515 server that I’ll be using to serve weather data to Seasonality users.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjO7XDnlnaE

Spending time tonight learning Final Cut Pro. I’ve been meaning to try it out for years now, but never had a chance. I downloaded the trial version a couple days ago to give it a go.  Loving it so far…

A “reasonable” configuration that I would configure if I was speccing my own desktop (16 core / 96GB / 2TB) comes in at just under $10k.

The $64000 question of how much a fully specced-out Mac Pro costs is actually not far from the truth. It’s $52,748. ($500 more for the rackmount)

It’s not everyday you see 1.8 GB/s long enough to grab a screenshot.  Copying 122 GB of files from a Thunderbolt SSD RAID to the internal NVMe.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, both inside and out.

Apparently four and a half hours of yard work burns a lot of calories. Feeling pretty sore already, but on the plus side I think the leaves are finally taken care of for the season.

While I’m disappointed in the stability issues plaguing macOS Catalina and iOS 13, it’s impressive to see how rapidly Apple is pushing bug fixes recently.

Winter came a little bit early this year.

Spent the last two days at The Ohio Linux Fest. The last time I attended had maybe 150 attendees back in 2005. Now they have over 700 people registered and several conference tracks. Great to see the growth.

Seems that 32GB is no longer enough RAM for an iOS development box. I do have a 4GB virtual machine running that is “extra”, but I’m 11GB into swap even after closing some stuff out.  Xcode alone is using over 6GB of RAM.