The time came to upgrade my trusty MacPro3,1 to macOS Sierra. As many know, El Cap is the latest build of OS X macOS that supports this platform. How to a MacPro3,1 on Sierra is well-documented, nevertheless this blog is half just a diary that I use to re-trace my steps later.
It was time to upgrade my secondary video card on my trusty MacPro3,1. I first goofed considerably with a Radeon 5250. I even went so far as to bust out my old firmware editing tools to change the vendor id in a feeble attempt to get OS X to use it without needing to modify kexts. Then I heard that more recent nvidia cards are supported by NVIDIA’s “web” OS X drivers. I swapped the 5250 (with its firmware restored) for a GeForce GT 720.
I often find myself banging my head against a wall watching tar compress with a single execution thread. PBZIP2 is the solution to that problem.
Here’s my few recipes for using this:
Compress: tar cf archive.tar.bz2 --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 archive/Uncompress: pbzip2 -dvc archive.tar.bz2 | tar x
Enjoy!
In my quest to keep my 2008 era Mac Pro (MacPro3,1) reasonably well suited to my needs, I recently decided to attempt to add USB 3.0 support.
I recently bought myself one of these babies, Inateck KT4004. I like that it has 4 ports and no external power required.
Here’s the tale of getting USB 3.0 working in a tolerable regard on my 17″ MacBook Pro.
In short, it cost me about $10 and I had to install a custom, but generic kext to enable USB 3.0. Thankfully, all the heavy lifting was done for me by people with far more free time (lucky freaks).
Here’s a visual of my final result:
So come along with me on my tale of computery enhancement.