In the SLR days (i.e the 80s and 90s) third party lenses were primarily focused on reducing cost. Lenses from Sigma, Tamron, Tokina, and others lowered the barrier to entry in exchange for a lower level of performance than Nikon, Canon, and Pentax. In recent years those Japanese third parties have significantly upped their game …
Net MD vs Classic MD – Which is Faster?
When it comes to MiniDisc devices you’ve often got to get something recorded on one before you can enjoy it. It’s true that there were some albums released natively in the format, but there weren’t many (and they're obnoxiously expensive), so recording to a blank disc is often necessary. You’d think that the USB-based NetMD …
What’s Been Happening in the Mac Museum
I have a growing collection of retrocomputing equipment – desktops, laptops, displays, disk drives, storage media, PDAs, music players, phones, tablets, CPUs, memory, books, marketing materials, magazines, and more. I go through phases of acquiring , phases of experiencing, and phases of sharing. I’ve been acquiring and experiencing recently, and now it's time for sharing. This …
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My MiniDisc Hardware Collection
I recently got into Sony MiniDiscs based on a couple of great videos about the format and its hardware by This Does Not Compute. I recall the MiniDisc as a competitor to the iPod during the MP3 era, but never knew much about it. It was always on the periphery as yet another “proprietary Sony …
Well That Was Fast
A couple months ago I posted about my 2013 Mac Pro serving dual purpose as a museum item and my cloud backup machine. It’s done that job extremely well but it’s already being replaced by another Mac mini, one with an M4 chip, in fact. It's like an Apple TV... but wider... and taller... and …
M4 MacBook Pro Max Benchmarks
A note about the image above: this image was generated using WordPress's AI features. It "read" my post and generated an image to go with it. I have to say I'm impressed. At a glance, it looks very much like my MacBook Pro. The shape of the hardware, the layout of the interface on the …
My MacBook Pro M4 Max
I bought my MacBook Pro with a M2 Pro chip less than 2 years ago and I'm replacing it with a new one. Why? I'm trying out a new service called Upgraded, which is essentially the iPhone Upgrade program, but for Mac hardware. Upgraded isn't run by Apple, but it might as well be. It …
Auroras
So this thing started happening late summer and early fall: auroras started appearing across the U.S. in places that rarely see them. I'm not a great planner and missed most of them, but happened to catch one in our neighborhood in early October. Since I'm late with everything, now seems like the right time to …
My 2013 Mac Pro
There are times when items in my Mac Museum cross over and provide function in my real life. One example is the Mac mini I bought as a backup server – I didn't have the 2010 design in my collection yet and I actually use it for regular tasks. It runs the Backblaze client on macOS …
BlueSCSI
I've had success installing both CF-to-IDE adapters and 2.5" SSD-to-IDE drives in my older computers, but those only cover about â…” of my collection. The rest of my machines, Macs from the late '80s and early '90s, don't use IDE at all; they use SCSI – an older and more expensive interface. Replacing SCSI drives …
Relatively Ambitious 