Sometime in 1994 me and my father went to a small computer show in the UC Berkeley Student Union building (which appears to now be named The MLK Jr. Building). It was probably a Macintosh oriented event, and among the various tables there was a Power Macintosh 6100 on display. The first Macintosh computers used Motorola 68000 series chips, and in 1994 Apple was making a transition to PowerPC chips. The 6100 was the first Mac to use a PowerPC chip, and seeing one in person was exciting. PowerPC chips promised a leap in performance, and I wanted one very badly. I had to wait at least a year to enter the PowerPC world when my father bought a PowerMac 8500.

Some time ago a Mac enthusiast released a website, Infinte Mac, that allows you to run old Mac operating systems in your browser. It starts with System 1.0, and has many releases all the way up to MacOS 9, the last version of the original Macintosh OS before they made the switch to the Unix-based OS that's still in use today. I suggest you try it out, it's really fun! I like playing with the various options because it reminds me of using and playing with computers from my childhood. The machines include quite a bit of pre-installed software. Many of the games I played actually work, which is impressive. It also shows how interfaces have evolved and mostly improved over the last 30-40 years.

The website uses various software emulators (including Basilisk II and SheepShaver) to simulate specific CPUs. To rephrase, what's happening is that the classic Macintosh system is running inside of a bit of software that, on the fly, translates old CPU instructions so that they run on a different CPU type. This is naturally less efficient than running instructions directly on a real CPU.

Recently I tried running a benchmark program (Macbench) in the emulator. Below is what I got on my M1 Max MacBook Pro. As you can see, the processor score is nearly five times faster than the PowerMac 6100 I wanted so long ago. Considering that my laptop has ten cores, my laptop is roughly 50 times faster than the PowerMac 6100 while running in emulated mode. It's been 30 years and of course progress progresses, but I still find it super impressive how much faster my laptop is using software emulation. Sitting here on my lap is a machine that's orders of magnitude better than what my 14 year old self wanted so badly. Huzzah!

Earlier this month I bought a Mac Mini M4 to replace our six year old Mac Mini i3. As you can see, the M4 is over seven times faster than the PowerMac 6100. Being three generations newer than my laptop, it naturally gets a better score.

As an aside, I think that the floating point functions must be emulated in a less efficient way than the main processor functions. I don't think that the relatively low floating point scores are representative of the actual M1/M4 CPU performance.

Just a few days ago, I replaced my four year old white 500 Mhz G3 iBook with a shiny widescreen white 1.83 Ghz Intel Core Duo MacBook (the black one seemed altogether silly to spend extra money on). The laptop is a very nice machine. My home machine is a 20" iMac G5 with a widescreen, and I've gotten used to the extra real estate, so I like the fact that the MacBook has one too. Really, the main reason I bought it is because my iBook had decayed to the point that it was only good for websurfing. I wanted a machine I could use at school, and the iBook just couldn't cut it (I definitely tried to make the iBook work!).

Since Apple is switching to Intel chips, the world of Windows is now available using either Boot Camp or Parallels. I have a copy of Windows 2000, and since I believe that Boot Camp only works with Windows XP, I am not going to try that out. Also, Boot Camp makes your machine dual-boot, which means only one OS at a time and no interaction between the two. Parallels is the more attractive option, it allows you to run Windows along with Mac OS X. The Windows world lives inside of an application that runs on Mac OS X. Choosing to interact with Windows is no more difficult that switching applications. Also, Parallels works with basically any Intel-compatible operating system, so I could use my Win2000 install disk.

After much trial and tribulation (mainly related to the fact that my Win2000 is an upgrade version, not full install) I got Win2000 installed using Parallels on my MacBook. After installing the myriad of security updates, I installed the softwares for my Garmin Forerunner 301. You see, Garmin (right now) only makes software for their gadgets for Windows. They've promised to make a Mac OS X verison of the software I use by Spring 2006 (they have two and a half weeks). Obviously, waiting around for that to be relased will just waste my time, so I was hoping that I could use this whole setup to run the Windows software on my MacBook to talk to my GPS. However, sadly, it doesn't work. It's clear it almost works, since Win2000 notices when I plug in the GPS, but the Garmin stuff can't quite talk to the GPS. The situation seems exactly the same as when I tried using Virtual PC on my G5 over a year ago.

All in all, I like the laptop, I like Parallels, and I'm displeased with Garmin. I'm using a beta 30-day activation key with Parallels, and I'm unsure if I'll buy the full version ($40 for pre-ordering). I really try to stay away from Windows applications. Right now the only app I do want to run is the Garmin stuff, and it doesn't look like that's going to work.

Although it is still a work in progress (see forward parenthetical note), the "Phratry Nexus" has been greatly improved today. (I don't know about you, but I remember some years ago when "Work In Progress" or "Under Construction" images were common on webpages. I don't see them so much anymore because I figure people finally figured out that all web pages are always "Under Construction" by definition.)

Back to my main point. If you look at the Phratry Nexus you'll see thumbnail sized screenshots of the various Phratry.net webpages (four as of this writing). Due to the already mentioned fluid nature of the web, keeping those thumbnails current would be pretty tedious if done by hand. That's where Applescript comes in. Ideally, I would have liked to write some kind of script and put it in crontab on the webserver, but doing screenshots is difficult from the command line. The Applescript I wrote (along with some help from my father, Mike) uses four apps, which either come with Mac OS X or are free: Cyberduck (for FTPing to the server), Freesnap (screencapture utility), Applescript Image Events (image editing) and OmniWeb (web browsing). OmniWeb isn't free, actually. Firefox would work too, but I got the script to work better with OmniWeb.

The specifics of the script aren't important, but the cool thing is Applescript allows me to do a 15-minute process of screenshot editing and uploading with just one double-click. It still takes about a minute for the whole thing to work (most of the time is from built-in delays in case of slow webpage loads), but that's still fifteen times better than before, and it's done right every time.

I recently bought a Garmin 301 Forerunner, a nifty wrist-sized GPS unit with a heart rate monitor. The premise is pretty cool -- I can see my heart rate next to the elevation profile of my route, along with an interactive map showing exactly where I went (once I upload the data to a computer, of course). I've been without any kind heart rate or cyclometer for almost 6 months since my old Polar S510 decided to croak. Apparently my sweat is so caustic that I rusted one of the buttons stuck and I lost some functionality. Then the battery died. A perfect excuse to upgrade, right?

Even before I bought the 301, I knew that it would have some problems. Specifically, Garmin is one of those block-headed companies that refuses to acknowledge Mac owners as more powerful than their market share suggests. We spend more money and buy more gadgets than Windozes people; see the iPod. I purchased the 301 anyway; I have an unconditional satisfaction guarantee with REI in case I give up on this project.

My hope was to to be able to use the 301 with a Windows Virtualization Software. This is one of the first GPSes to use USB, rather than the antiquated serial that manufacturers still cling to. So I figured it may just work with VPC. However, no luck. It seems like it almost works -- when I plug the GPS in Win XP recognizes the device and loads the Garmin USB GPS driver. The GPS shows up correctly in the device profile. I can install the Garmin software perfectly too. However, the Garmin software refuses to connect to the GPS. Very frustrating.

I verifed how it should work by using a regular PC, and I had no problems. Both the Garmin and MotionBased software works.

MotionBased is also annoying. The upload program is only Windows. The main interface is entirely web-based, but has poor Mac support. It makes Safari crash and I have had middling success using IE or Firefox. They have a free account option with limited functionality, and for $100/year the full suite of analyses. It's unlikely I'll be shelling out any money to them until they improve Mac support.

Right now I'm leaning to keeping the 301. I have enough access to Windoze machines to be able to use it. But I'll keep it begrudingly. Garmin is a big enough company to put some time into Mac OS X.