Pinky & Brain

They've arrived.

This year has been terrible for hardware - first my elderly iPhone took to going dark at inopportune moments, then there was the Scraptop, and finally my trusty HP Z420 went tango uniform in the middle of a busy workday. But then I experienced Relief After Struggles in the form of an offer of a pair of four year old M1 Apple laptops. Today, after transit misadventures, and 11,000+ steps in the blazing heat, ladies and gentlemen, I give you …

Pinky & Brain

Pinky is an 8GB A2337 with the default 250GB drive and Brain is a 16GB A2442 with the 1TB drive. Both machines have Retina displays, Pinky’s is 2560x1600 and Brain has something new to me, a 3024x1964 Liquid Retina XDR.

Pinky is fine, I fear Brain may be due for a replace SSD. Their predecessor, a sleek, carbon fiber wrapped 2014 Mac Air, will be getting a new battery, and it’s been handed down to someone who just needs something physically light for travel.

Other Good News & Puzzles:

I put a 240GB Seagate Nytro and a consumer grade PCIe NVMe carrier into a box and sent them off for installation in a Dell PowerEdge R430 we picked up for half the typical price. This one has a fourteen core E5-2690v4 and 256GB of ram, so basically double the cores, overall performance, and memory of the most capable R420 in the fleet.

This leaves me with a bit of a conundrum. There are a couple people lurking who are much smarter than me when it comes to AI things and I’ve been told the translation stuff that needs doing could run on the Nvidia GTX 1060, with its 6GB of memory, in my desktop. Brain’s 16GB and M1 chip will make it dramatically more capable in this area. Both cases require an ssh TCP port tunnel to the GPU free R430.

I am eyeing the HDMI port on Brain and the 4k monitor on my desk. The plan this year was to get free of heavy workstations in exchange for Xeon based laptops that are only half the performance, but one sixth the weight. These Macs are just a bit more than a third the weight of the Scraptop, so a 16x improvement in terms of mobility, but this means everything I do has to stay on remote servers. The Dell Xeon laptops have four internal NVMe slots and can mount ZFS spindles in external cases, which would afford me a luggable version of my workstation.

Conclusion:

Sharp eyes will note that the white folding table with a buff wall behind it has given way to a black corner desk with a green wall. There’s a pleasant Bay breeze coming in the window instead of the Delta convection oven I’ve had for years. All things are impermanent, that’s foundation Buddhist epistemology, but the causes and conditions that created this pleasing domicile came with an expiration date. Summer break for college kids only lasts just so long, so I’m going to luxuriate in easy BART access while I have it. This is a bit like the summer of 2018, which I got to spend in SoMa.

I’ve wanted a new laptop for years, but there’s nothing wrong with the 2014 MacAir other than a really weak battery. This is the year I needed a new laptop and the Scraptop debacle really got me down. I’m not sure what to do here, maybe I am going all Mac for my home/mobile environment. There are other things afoot that make that a possibility, which was not the case prior to the MIOS: Iran’s PressTV story breaking.

Recognizing that I’ve started to ramble, I’m gonna call this one complete …