Finally got the video card up for a workout under Win7 via Bootcamp on the Mac Pro. Still some major issues, like apparently there’s a long-standing no-audio-out bug associated with correctly installed Win7 under Bootcamp, for example. I was able to work around that by using an external USB audio module I had to hand, but come on.

I still don’t think my objective of a true single-box dual boot device is gonna work out here. With the stock card installed, the new card won’t work at all in Windows. With the stock card removed, there’s no boot screen, so you can’t option-key at startup to select the boot volume. With both cards seated, Mac OS 10.9 won’t boot at all, so even if I commit to a dual-boot machine, I have lost my standardized local OS setup, and will likely cave and go to 10.10 on all the machines, inevitably compromising performance and breaking software.

Anyway, so next week will be more banging on the actual Windows machine to try to bring the card up. The conventional opinion seems to be that the card and machine combo needs a 750w power supply. I’m gonna have to do the math myself, because the card actually seems to be designed and marketed with a lower power draw than the card it will replace on the Dell. If it’s not power, the next most favored choice is the BIOS, which is both only editable in limited ways on the Dell and quite possibly the source of the issue. I don’t have a definitive answer from either Dell or the card manufacturer about the compatibility of the devices, so I need to initiate that again.

I have been posting here and there about this and have a long narrative document written which I used to clarify the issues I was addressing. I should add more explicit technical detail to the doc and round up all the links to post here so I can refer back to it, including, one hopes a calendar and hour-budget timeline. That way, the next time I want to buy hardware, I can remind myself TO NOT DO IT.

I use a drawing and painting app called procreate on the ipad that is really by far the best in its class in terms of offering brush config and reasonable layering and media effects on the tablet. one of the reasons the app is the best is that it doesn’t waste time trying to emulate non-digital tools, which is great.

unfortunately, the dev team also uses this digital-centric design orientation to exclude crucial digital image-work features, such as crop, and to consistently rely on a user-interface philosophy which is grounded in minimalism, in removing discoverability wherever possible. combine the two tendencies, exclusion of standard digital graphics features and hiding access to others, and it produces a near-canonical user-punishment experience. the end result? i hate the developers and designers of the app, and opening it to do some work is an experience i dread and loathe.

It’s been historically hot here the past few weeks, most days easily topping ninety, and it’s miserable. I have a skin allergy that worsens in sustained direct sun, so as you might imagine I have been doing my best to ignore the weather, impossible though that is.

In mid-June I bought a new PCIe video card naively assuming that it, as a PCIe card, would work with the PCIe systems I have in house, and since then I have been engaged in a delightful (well, no, that’s more or less the opposite) self-education odyssey.

The upshot is that *probably* if I roughly double the potential power output of my actual-built-that-way PC I might be able to get the card to boot, or maybe, *maybe*, I can get it to work under Bootcamp Windows on a Mac Pro. Today, after being quite directly informed by the manufacturer that the card is unsupported on a Bootcamp Mac Pro, I was able to bring it up on that system.

This is probably good news as it likely means I can dump the actual built-that-way PC. I still have a few days of tinkering to satisfy my curiosity but that does appear to be the resolution.

As I was going through this research process I was constantly running into end-of-life support issues directly tied to my determined insistence on doubling the active service life of my hardware. With luck, every unit in the house will see at least ten years of use and I don’t anticipate a main-unit refresh on any single device for another four years, cell phones possibly excepted.

One aspect of the rollover to shorter-life hardware in the industry is the shift away from flat-fee software to subscription-fee software. I’m just not gonna do that. Even seeing the pricing model makes me kind of angry at the business offering the terms. I suppose that one could make a case for per-use pricing but this in essence is nothing more than the traditional variable-pricing model, a model that actually actively locks out certain classes of buyer including the profoundly parsimonious and the low-information low-income buyer. It’s classist and exclusivist and I hate it with a bitter rage.

I suppose in the long run this shifts me completely off computer use. Not by any means a negative outcome.

An article in the New Yorker makes me think, sadly, of my late friend Caleb.