iMac is home

CSS finished replacing the display assembly in my iMac. The report indicated “hundreds” of stuck pixels, so I guess I got lucky with the warranty.

My dad figures maybe one in ten people who experience this problem actually have it dealt with, while the rest either put up with it and don’t bother to take it into the shop, or don’t even notice it.

ESXi in the home

On the 10th of March or so, I set about installing VMware ESXi 6.5 on my PC tower, and using the divided resources to replace my previous bare metal Windows installation. The machine is now divided up into:

Four CPU cores in two sockets, with 16GB of the RAM, 120GB of the SSD space, and with my RX 480 8GB and two internal USB 2.0 adapters via PCIe passthrough, to my primary Windows 10 Pro installation, which hosts Steam, some games, and is purposed for regular use.

Four CPU cores in two sockets, 4GB of the RAM, and 86GB of disk space, to another Windows 10 Pro VM purposed for development and debugging. I use a VM for this due to debugging issues when running bare metal that result in deadlocks that can only be escaped by stabbing the three finger salute and logging out.

Two CPU cores (yes, I over provisioned) and 8GB of RAM, 16GB of disk space, and the three (previously four, need to buy a replacement and let it resilver) hard drives (2x4TB WD Red, 1x6TB Toshiba) passed directly into a NAS4Free VM, which is hosting a ZFS array, RAID10 style: The 6TB drives were in a mirror, and the 4TB drives in another mirror, and the two mirrors were joined. I now need to replace the 6TB drive with another, and wait while it resilvers, before my data will be slightly more secure again.

Back to the primary VM: Since I sent my iMac into the shop, I’ve been running it as my primary desktop. With the video card passed in, and enough USB ports to plug in my usual array of input and accessory devices, I can use a VM in a hypervisor as my primary desktop. Living the dream, or at least it’s flying like a dream after the initial nightmare was over, getting it to work in the first place.

Situation update

It came to my attention some months after I put it back into service, that my Retina 5k iMac had some stuck pixels. And by stuck pixels, I mean a whole shitload of them:

Stuck pixels galore

See those faint glowing expanses in the far right corner of the screen? That’s not dust, this screen is sealed to the glass panel. It’s a mess of stuck bright pixels.

I took it into the shop Thursday, and the next day, the shop called and said they couldn’t find anything wrong. I told Gregg to run a black screen and look again, but he called later to report he still could not find anything.

So I sent him that picture again, with the pixels circled, and he said he could see them in the picture, but not on the monitor. Then it occurred to him to clean my apparent fingerprint smudges off the glass, probably left when I was packaging it up. He spotted the mess of pixels with a magnifying glass, and was blown away by how many of them there were.

So, he’s set about ordering a replacement screen and installing it, then will get back to me as early as Monday with the results.

Meanwhile, I am on my Windows machine, which is different now, but I’ll outline that in another post.

Hello and welcome to modern dental care

I went to the dentist for my twice yearly checkup again, and this time, I had a popped filling, possibly one from my previous dentist from over 10 years ago. And after the checkup, and the report of watching the same teeth as last time, no new full cavities, but I do have to wait over a month until I can go back in and get this missing filling taken care of. Oh, and a chipped tooth as well, joy!