TechDistortion

Retro Mac Pro

After an extended forced work-from-home mandated due to COVID19, I’ve had a lot of time to think about how best to optimise my work environment at home for optimal efficiency. I started with a sit/stand desk and found that connecting my MacBook Pro 13" via a CalDigit TS3+ allowed me to drive two 4K UHD displays at 60Hz and give me a huge amount of screen real-estate that was very useful for my job.

I retained the ability to disconnect and move into the office should I wish to, though in reality I only spent a total of 37 days physically in the office (not continuously, between various lockdown orders) in the past 12 months. When I was outside the office, I used my laptop occasionally but found the iPad Pro was good enough for most things I wanted to do and its battery life was better, plus I could sign documents - which is a common thing in my line of work.

It all wasn’t smooth sailing though. I found that the MBP was actually quite sluggish in the user interface when connected to the 4K screens, and that the internal fans would spin up to maximum all the time, many times without any obvious cause. I started to remove applications that were running in the background like iStat Menus, Dropbox, and a few others and that helped, but I still noticed that it was also spinning up now during Time Machine backups and Skype, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

This was a problem since I spent most of my workday on Teams calls and the microphone was picking up the annoying background grind of the cooling fans in the MBP. For this reason I started thinking about how to resolve the two issues: sluggish graphics and running the laptop hot all of the time, without sacrificing screen real-estate in HiDPi (of which I’d become rather dependent).

So I got to thinking: why am I still using a laptop when I’m spending 90% of my time at my home office desk? I wanted to keep using a Mac, and whilst I missed my 2009 Nehalem Mac Pro, I didn’t miss how noisy it also was, it’s power drain, the fact it was an effective space-heater all year round and frankly wasn’t currently officially supported by Apple¹ anyway.

There are only a few currently supported Macs that can drive the amount of screen real-estate I wanted: the Mac Pros (2013, 2019), the iMac 5K (with discrete graphics) and the iMac Pro. There are, as yet, no M1 (Apple Silicon) Macs that can drive more than one external display. Buying a new Mac was out of the question with my budget strictly set at $1,400 AUD (about $1K USD at time of writing) it was down to used Macs. The goal was to get a powerful Mac that I could extend and upgrade as funds permitted. The more recent iMacs weren’t as upgradable and even a used iMac Pro was out of my budget and I won’t find a 2019 Mac Pro used since they’re too new and would also be too expensive (even used).

So call me crazy if you like, but I invested in a used 2013 Mac Pro - a Retro-Mac Pro if you like. It had spent its life in an office environment and for the past two years lay unused in a corner with its previous user leaving the company and they’d long since switched to Mac Minis. It had a damaged power cable, no box and no manuals and apart from some dust was in excellent condition.

I’ve now had a it for just under a week and I’m loving it! It’s the original entry-level model with twin FirePro D300s, 3.7GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon E5 with 16GB DDR3 RAM and a basic 256GB SSD. I can upgrade the SSD with a Sintech adaptor and a 2TB NVMe stick for $340 AUD, and go to 64GB RAM for about $390 AUD, but I’m in no hurry for the moment.

Admittedly the Mac Pro can only drive two of the 4k UHD screens at 60Hz with the third only at 30Hz but that amount of high-DPI screen real-estate is exactly what I’m looking for. Dragging a window between the 60Hz and 30Hz screens is a bit weird, but I have my oldest, cheapest 4K monitor as my static/cross-reference/parking screen anyway so that’s a limitation I can live with.

Yes, I could have built a Hackintosh.

Yes, I could run Windows on any old PC.

I wanted a currently supported Mac.

For those thinking, “But John, there’s Apple Silicon Macs with multi-display support just around the corner” well yes, that’s probably true. But I know Apple. They will leave multi-UHD monitor support only for their highest-end products which will still cost the Earth. So you might ALSO say, “But John, Intel Macs are about to die, melt, burn and become the neglected step-son that was once the golden-haired-child of the Apple family” and that’s true too, but I can still run Linux/Windows/ANYTHING on this thing, for a decade to come long after macOS ceases to be officially supported. That said, the fact you can still apply hacks to the 2009 Mac Pro and run Big Sur, it’s likely the 2013 Mac Pro will be running a slightly crippled but functional macOS for a long time yet, or at least until Apple give up on Intel support for Apple Silicon features, but that’s another story.

And you might also think, “John, why the hell would you buy a Mac that’s had so many reliability problems?” Well I did a lot of research given the Mac Pro 2013’s reputation, and based on what I found the original D300 model was relatively fine with very few issues. The D500 and D700 models had significantly worse reliability as they ran hotter (they were more powerful) and due to the thermal corner Apple built themselves into with the Mac Pro design at that point, ended up being unreliable with prolonged usage, due to excessive heat.

I can report the Mac Pro runs the two primary screens buttery smooth, it is effectively silent and doesn’t ever break a sweat. Being a geek however subjective measurements aren’t enough. The following GeekBench 5 scores for comparison:

Metric	Mac Pro Score	MacBook Pro Score	% Difference
CPU Single-Core	837	1,026	- 22.5%
CPU Multi-Core	3,374	3,862	- 14.4%
OpenCL	20,482 / 21,366	8,539	+ 239%
Metal	23,165 / 23,758	7,883	+ 293%
Disk Read (MB/s)	926	2,412	- 260%
Disk Write (MB/s)	775	2,039	- 263%

By all measurements above my Macbook Pro should be the better machine, and you’d hope so being 5 years newer than the Mac Pro 2013. My usage to date however hasn’t shown that - almost the opposite, which begs the question - for my use case where screen real-estate matters the most, the graphics power from a discrete FirePro is far more valuable than a significantly faster SSD. Not only that but with the same amount of RAM you’d think the Macbook Pro would perform as well, however it’s using an integrated graphics chipset, hence sharing that RAM and driving two 4K screens was killing its performance, whereas the Mac Pro doesn’t sacrifice any of its RAM and maintains full performance even when driving those screens.

I don’t often encode video in Handbrake anymore or audio but when I do the Mac Pro isn’t quite as fast but it’s pretty close to the Macbook Pro or certainly good enough for me. The interesting and surprising thing to note is that a 7 year old desktop machine was a better fit for my needs at the price than any current model on offer by Apple.

I’m looking forward to many years of use out of a stable desktop machine, noting that whilst my use-case was a bit niche, it’s been an effective choice for me.

Podcasting 2.0 Phase 3 Tags

I’ve been keeping a close eye on Podcasting 2.0 and a few weeks ago they finalised their Phase 3 tags. As I last wrote about this in December 2020, I thought I’d quickly update on thoughts on each of the Phase 3 tags:

• < podcast:trailer > Is a compact and more flexible version of the existing iTunes < itunes:episodeType >trailer< /itunes:episodeType > tag. The Apple-spec isn’t supported outside of Apple, however more importantly you can only have one trailer per podcast, whereas the PC2.0 tag allows multiple trailers and trailers per season if desired. It also is more economical than the Apple equivalent, as it acts as an enclosure tag, rather than requiring an entire RSS Item in the Apple Spec.
• < podcast:license > Used to specify the licence terms of the podcast content, either by show or by episode, relative to the SPDX definitions.
• < podcast:alternateEnclosure > With this it’s possible to have more than one audio/video enclosure specified for each episode. You could use this for different audio encoding bitrates and video if you want to.
• < podcast:guid > Rather than the using the Apple GUID guideline, the PC2.0 suggests using UUIDv5 using the RSS feed as the seed value.

In terms of TEN, I’m intending to add Trailer in future and I’m considering Licence as well, but beyond that probably not much else for the moment. I don’t see that GUID adds much for my use case over my existing setup (using the CDATA URL at time of publishing) and since my publicly available MP3s are already 64kbps Mono, Alternate Enclosure for low bitrate isn’t going to add any value to anyone in the world. I did consider linking to the YouTube videos of episodes where they exist however I don’t see this as beneficial in my use case either. In future I could explore an IPFS stored MP3 audio option for resiliency, however this would only make sense if this became more widely supported by client applications.

It’s good to see things moving forward and whilst I’m aware that the Value tag is being enhanced iteratively, I’m hopeful that this can incorporate client-value and extend the current lightning keysend protocol options to include details where supporters can flag “who” the streamed sats came from (if they choose to). It’s true that customKey/Value exist however they’re intentionally generic for the moment.

Of course, it’s a work in progress and it’s amazing that it works so well already, but I’m also aware that KeySend as it exists today, might be deprecated by the AMP aka Atomic-Multipath Payment protocol, so there may be some potential tweaks yet to come.

It’s great to see the namespace incorporating more tags over time and I’m hopeful that more client applications can start supporting them as well in future.

Pushover and PodPing from RSS

In my efforts to support the Podcasting 2.0 initiative, I thought I should see how easy it was to incorporate their new PodPing concept, which is effectively a distributed RSS notification system specifically tailored for Podcasts. The idea is that when a new episode goes live, you notify the PodPing server and it then adds that notification to the distributed Hive blockchain system and then any apps can simply watch the blockchain and this can trigger the download of the new episode in the podcast client.

This has come predominantly from their attempts to leverage existing technology in WebSub, however when I tried the WebSub angle a few months ago, the results were very disappointing with many minutes, hours passing before a notification was seen and in some cases it wasn’t seen at all.

I leveraged parts of an existing Python script I’ve been using for years for my RSS social media poster, but stripped it down to the bare minimum. It consists of two files, checkfeeds.py (which just creates an instance of the RssChecker class) and then the actual code is in rss.py.

This beauty of this approach is that it will work on ANY site’s RSS target. Ideally if you have a dynamic system you could trigger the GET request on an episode posting event, however since my sites are statically generated and the posts are created ahead of time (and hence don’t appear until the site builder coincides with a point in time after that post is set to go live) it’s problematic to create a trigger from the static site generator.

Whilst I’m an Electrical Engineer, I consider myself a software developer of many different languages and platforms, but for Python I see myself more of a hacker and a slasher. Yes, there are better ways of doing this. Yes, I know already. Thanks in advance for keeping that to yourself.

Both are below for your interest/re-use or otherwise:

from rss import RssChecker

rssobject=RssChecker()

checkfeeds.py

CACHE_FILE = '<Cache File Here>'
CACHE_FILE_LENGTH = 10000
POPULATE_CACHE = 0
RSS_URLS = ["https://RSS FEED URL 1/index.xml", "https://RSS FEED URL 2/index.xml"]
TEST_MODE = 0
PUSHOVER_ENABLE = 0
PUSHOVER_USER_TOKEN = "<TOKEN HERE>"
PUSHOVER_API_TOKEN = "<TOKEN HERE>"
PODPING_ENABLE = 0
PODPING_AUTH_TOKEN = "<TOKEN HERE>"
PODPING_USER_AGENT = "<USER AGENT HERE>"

from collections import deque
import feedparser
import os
import os.path
import pycurl
import json
from io import BytesIO

class RssChecker():
    feedurl = ""

    def __init__(self):
        '''Initialise'''
        self.feedurl = RSS_URLS
        self.main()
        self.parse()
        self.close()

    def getdeque(self):
        '''return the deque'''
        return self.dbfeed

    def main(self):
        '''Main of the FeedCache class'''
        if os.path.exists(CACHE_FILE):
            with open(CACHE_FILE) as dbdsc:
                dbfromfile = dbdsc.readlines()
            dblist = [i.strip() for i in dbfromfile]
            self.dbfeed = deque(dblist, CACHE_FILE_LENGTH)
        else:
            self.dbfeed = deque([], CACHE_FILE_LENGTH)

    def append(self, rssid):
        '''Append a rss id to the cache'''
        self.dbfeed.append(rssid)

    def clear(self):
        '''Append a rss id to the cache'''
        self.dbfeed.clear()

    def close(self):
        '''Close the cache'''
        with open(CACHE_FILE, 'w') as dbdsc:
            dbdsc.writelines((''.join([i, os.linesep]) for i in self.dbfeed))

    def parse(self):
        '''Parse the Feed(s)'''
        if POPULATE_CACHE:
            self.clear()
        for currentfeedurl in self.feedurl:
            currentfeed = feedparser.parse(currentfeedurl)

            if POPULATE_CACHE:
                for thefeedentry in currentfeed.entries:
                    self.append(thefeedentry.get("guid", ""))
            else:
                for thefeedentry in currentfeed.entries:
                    if thefeedentry.get("guid", "") not in self.getdeque():
#                        print("Not Found in Cache: " + thefeedentry.get("title", ""))
                        if PUSHOVER_ENABLE:
                            crl = pycurl.Curl()
                            crl.setopt(crl.URL, 'https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json')
                            crl.setopt(pycurl.HTTPHEADER, ['Content-Type: application/json' , 'Accept: application/json'])
                            data = json.dumps({"token": PUSHOVER_API_TOKEN, "user": PUSHOVER_USER_TOKEN, "title": "RSS Notifier", "message": thefeedentry.get("title", "") + " Now Live"})
                            crl.setopt(pycurl.POST, 1)
                            crl.setopt(pycurl.POSTFIELDS, data)
                            crl.perform()
                            crl.close()

                        if PODPING_ENABLE:
                            crl2 = pycurl.Curl()
                            crl2.setopt(crl2.URL, 'https://podping.cloud/?url=' + currentfeedurl)
                            crl2.setopt(pycurl.HTTPHEADER, ['Authorization: ' + PODPING_AUTH_TOKEN, 'User-Agent: ' + PODPING_USER_AGENT])
                            crl2.perform()
                            crl2.close()

                        if not TEST_MODE:
                            self.append(thefeedentry.get("guid", ""))

rss.py

The basic idea is:

1. Create a cache file that keeps a list of all of the RSS entries you already have and are already live
2. Connect up PushOver (if you want push notifications, or you could add your own if you like)
3. Connect up PodPing (ask @[email protected] or @[email protected] for a posting API TOKEN)
4. Set it up as a repeating task on your device of choice (preferably a server, but should work on a Synology, a Raspberry Pi or a VPS)

VPS

I built this initially on my Macbook Pro using the Homebrew installed Python 3 development environment, then installed the same on a CentOS7 VPS I have running as my Origin web server. Assuming you already have Python 3 installed, I added the following so I could use pycurl:

yum install -y openssl-devel
yum install python3-devel
yum group install "Development Tools"
yum install libcurl-devel
python3 -m pip install wheel
python3 -m pip install --compile --install-option="--with-openssl" pycurl

Whether you like “pycurl” or not, obviously there are other options but I stick with what works. Rather than refactor for a different library I just jumped through some extra hoops to get pycurl running.

Finally I bridge the checkfeeds.py with a simply bash script wrapper and call it from a CRON Job every 10 minutes.

Job done.

Enjoy.

Fun With Apple Podcasts Connect

Apple Podcasts will shortly open to the public but for podcasters like me, we’ve been having fun with Apple’s first major update to their podcasting backend in several years, and it hasn’t really been that much fun. Before talking about why I’m putting so much time and effort into this at all, I’ll go through the highlights of my experiences to date.

Fun Times at the Podcasts Connect Mk2

Previously I’d used the Patreon/Breaker integration but that fell apart when Breaker was acquired by Twitter and the truth was that very, very few Patrons utilised the feature and the Breaker app was never big enough to attract any new subscribers. The Breaker audio integration and content has since been removed even though the company had the service taken over (to an extent) as it was one less thing for me to upload content to. In a way…this has been a bit déjà-vu and “here we go again…” ¹

The back-catalogue of ad-free episodes as well as bonus content between Sleep, Pragmatic, Analytical and Causality adds up to 144 individual episodes.

For practically every one I had the original project files which I restored and re-exported in WAV format then uploaded them via the Apple Podcasts updated interface. (The format must be WAV or FLAC and Stereo, which is funny for a Mono podcast like mine and added up to about 50GB of audio) It’s straight-forward enough although there were a few annoying glitches that after using it for 10 days were still unresolved. Each of the key issues I encountered: (there were others but some were resolved at time of writing this so I’ve excluded those)

1. Ratings and Reviews made a brief appearance then disappeared and still haven’t come back (I’m sure they will at some point)
2. Not all show analytics time spans work (Past 60 days still doesn’t work, everything is blank)
3. Archived shows in the Podcast-drop-down list appear but don’t in the main overview even when displaying ‘All’
4. The order you save and upload audio files, changes the episode date such that if you create the episode meta-data, set the date, then upload the audio the episode date defaults to todays date. It does this AFTER you leave the page though, so it’s not obvious, but if you upload the audio THEN set the date it’s fine.
5. The audio upload hit/miss ratio for me was about 8 out of 10, meaning for every 10 episodes I uploaded, 2 got stuck. What do I mean? The episode WAV file uploads, completes and then the page shows the following:

…and the “Processing Audio” never actually finishes. Hoping this was just a back-log issue with high end user demand I uploaded everything and came back minutes, hours then days later and finally after waiting five days I set about to try to unstick it.

Five Days of Waiting and seeing this I gave up waiting for it to resolve itself…

The obvious thing to try: select “Edit” and delete then re-upload the audio. Simple enough, keeps the meta-data intact (except the date I had to re-save after every audio re-upload) then I waited another few days. Same result. Okay, so that didn’t work at all.

Next thing to try, re-create the entire episode again from scratch! So I did that for the 30 episodes that were stuck. Finally I see this (in some cases up to an hour later):

And sure enough…

Of course, that only worked for 25 episodes out of the 30 I uploaded a second time. I then had to wash-rinse-repeat for the 5 that had failed for a second time and repeated until they all worked. I’d hate to think about doing this on a low-bandwidth connection like I had a decade ago. Even at 40Mbps up it took a long time for the 2GB+ episodes of Pragmatic. The entire exercise has probably taken me 4 work-days of effort end to end, or about 32 hours of my life. There’s no way to delete the stuck episodes either so I now have a small collection of “Archived” non-episodes. Oh well…

Why John…Why?

I’ve read a lot of differing opinions from podcasters about Apples latest move and frankly I think the people most dismissive are those with significant existing revenue streams for their shows, or those that have already made their money and don’t need/want income for their show(s). Saying that you can reduce fees by using Stripe and your own website integration, by using Memberful, Patreon, or more recently by streaming Satoshis (very cool BTW), all have barriers to entry for the Podcast creator that can not be ignored.

For me, I’m a geek and I love that stuff so sure, I’ll have a crack at that (looks over at the Raspberry Pi Lightning Node on desk with a nod) but not everyone is like me (probably a good thing on balance).

So far as I can tell, Apple Podcasts is currently the most fee-expensive way for podcasters to get support from listeners. It’s also a walled garden², but then so is Patreon, Spotify/Anchor (if you’re eligible and I’m not…for now), Breaker, and building your own system with Memberful or Stripe website integration requires developer chops most don’t have so isn’t an option. By far the easiest (once you figure out BitCoin/Lightning and set up your own Node) is actually streaming Sats, but that knowledge ramp is tough and lots of people HATE BitCoin. (That’s another, more controversial story).

Apple Podcasts has one thing going for it: It’s going to be the quickest, easiest way for someone to support your show coupled with the biggest audience in a single Podcasting ecosystem. You can’t and shouldn’t ignore that, and that’s why I’m giving this a chance. The same risks apply to Apple as to all the other walled gardens (Patreon, Breaker, Spotify/Anchor etc): you could be kicked-off the platform, they could stop supporting their platform slowly, sell it off or shut it down entirely and if any of that happens, your supporters will mostly disappear with it. That’s why no-one should rely on it as the sole pathway for support.

It’s about being present and assessing after 6-12 months. If you’re not in it, then you might miss out on supporters that love your work and want to support it and this is the only way they’re comfortable doing that. So I’m giving this a shot and when it launches for Beta testing will be looking for any fans that want to give it a try so I can tweak anything that needs tweaking, and will post publicly when it goes live for all. Hopefully all of my efforts (and Apples) are worth it for all concerned.

Time will tell. (It always does)