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One of the things I’ve been wondering for a while now is how the performance of macOS’s EXFAT driver is representative of its peers. It’s notably slower than what you would see in NT, but not so bad until you go from the sequential 1M to random 4K part of my choice benchmarks. Once you hit the randoms, it goes form “I wonder if that’s lack of optimization in the driver, or the I/O system design” to abysmal. But to be fair that is the worst performing metric anywhere, and I’m more interested in the sequential performance. 

Well, having a nice shiny (or should I say, mat?) Samsung T7 Shield that was on sale, I decided to do a little test cycle. EXFAT, FAT32, HFS+, and APFS. This drive is designated for Time Machine duty, so I have no need for it to remain on a interoperable file system.

Using AmorphousDiskMark 4.0.

EXFAT as formatted out of the box:
  Test            - Read MB/s     Write MB/s
  SEQ1MQD8        - 586.42        691.32
  SEQ1MQD1        - 594.45        690.05
  RND4KQD64       - 21.75         13.68
  RND4KQD1        - 21.70         13.48
FAT32 as formatted MS-DOS (FAT32) from Disk Utility:
  Test            - Read MB/s     Write MB/s
  SEQ1MQD8        - 516.03        690.32
  SEQ1MQD1        - 596.97        691.80
  RND4KQD64       - 21.56         13.64
  RND4KQD1        - 21.50         13.51
HFS+ as formatted Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) from Disk Utility
  Test            - Read MB/s     Write MB/s
  SEQ1MQD8        - 612.39        820.77
  SEQ1MQD1        - 578.25        691.00
  RND4KQD64       - 120.48        55.44
  RND4KQD1        - 18.33         14.70
APFS as formatted APFS (Case-sensitive), after converting from MBR to GPT from Disk Utility.
  Test            - Read MB/s     Write MB/s
  SEQ1MQD8        - 733.22        818.84
  SEQ1MQD1        - 617.40        684.06
  RND4KQD64       - 121.67        55.13
  RND4KQD1        - 21.27         13.83

This makes me suspect the performance lossage is more to do with how optimized the FAT drivers are. I should really repeat this with one of my USB flash drives where the performance sucks to begin with, but I don’t want to spend all day on this :^o).

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When I heard about Hocus Pocus 2, I was some what skeptical but also hopeful. As a kid, I greatly enjoyed the original as far as halloween family friendly films go.

The sequel, in a great many ways rehashes bits but also comes into its own. I’m glad that the three reprised their roles, as the antics just wouldn’t be the same. I also love that moments after being resurrected for the second time that they break out a musical number, “The witches are back”.
In the original, the Sanderson sisters are always portrayed as villains. Silly and slapstick in moments, but villains never the less. Needless to say the old formula of fools bring witches back from the dead and they run amuck in Salem is still integral to the story. But it’s also nice to see the different directions taken by the new group of young fools, and look back at what made the sisters into villains in the first place.
And then there’s the ending. It was beautiful and awesome sauce, and in light of how the Sanderson sisters and the young fools get along, I think it was a great finish. Not to mention the book got a bigger role and after running amuck in ’93, it seems that they were incorporated into the local festivities, lol.
I really loved the ending. The film as a whole was enjoyable enough, having grown up watching the original. But the finale is what really made the movie, IMHO.
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Watching The First Avenger for the first time in a while, I can’t help but suspect the blonde that goes, “Hi” during the war bonds sequence; in light of She-Hulk’s recent end-cap comment about his time with the USO.

I also can’t help but think about the classic style shield fitting into the story. Just how much would a guy have to be tossing that thing around between shows to end up carting it along on his daring rescue mission. That, and that in context it would have likely been a slab of wood. The only reason I can imagine it being made of metal, as seen when Red Skull punches an indent in it, is consideration for the Italian campaign being far more at risk than state side.

I.e., I have a rather hard time imagining someone making such a fine metal “Stage prop” given the extent of war time rationing and prioritization. The only thing I can imagine is someone deciding, “Yeah, if artillery shells start bursting or something, let’s try and avoid shrapnel going through it like a hot knife through butter.” Somehow, I doubt Roger’s would have appreciated that treatment.

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Migration to macOS has been relatively successful so far. Juggling work and dogs and the need to occasionally vegetate, it took a couple weeks to get Shion properly setup.

For me one of the key problems with switching between Mac and PC has been the great modifier shift. The annoying kind of things when I come home and start using Mac shortcuts on my PC, or go to work and start using PC shortcuts on my Mac.

As a work device, my issued MBP has mostly been a case of IDGAF in terms of PC vs Mac. Contemporary OS X and its successors-thus-far, are suitable BSD under the hood with GNU sprinkled on top that it’s basically a non-issue. On Windows, I would be using Windows Subsystem for Linux and SSH. On Mac, well it’s native enough unless it needs to be Linux ELFs. Like NT, it comes with some nice to have GUI software but most of what I care about can be found in the Terminal.

As a home device, I’m finding it fits quite nicely. It does the desktop things that better maintained Linux distributions and Windows systems do, and it provides most of the goodness I’d get out of running FreeBSD or Debian. More importantly I don’t find myself !@#$%ing mixing up the command and control keys ^_^.

Outside of Direct3D based games the majority of software that I care about is cross platform, often with GNU/Linux as the primary platform if one could be defined. So, basically everything I want to run either runs on unix, NT, and Mac systems already; or it’s tied to POSIX APIs longer than Linux and OS X have been around, or it’s unlikely to run on anything that doesn’t do Big Honking DirectX GPUs.

Thus: Rimuru’s intended mission profile is what it was chiefly built for. Playing video games, converting videos, and cursing those times when compiling on NT is a thing. Meanwhile Shion takes over the more secretarial domain of general productivity and desktop computing.

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To say that the dogs’ expressions were sad and concerned when I went out the door, would be a fair statement.

To say that the dogs’ were angry when I came home with two dozen donuts, would be an understatement.

Mischief managed….

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So far, one of the unexpectedly nice things about macOS: I can use my Bluetooth keyboard to wake my MacBook Air. No putzing required. I’d like to assume my desktop could pull that off with fiddling with the power management options for the front ports or motherboard root controller, and/or the Bluetooth USB dongle. But my relationship with NT and things USB/BT is one of pain and suffering, so I’m less inclined to putz with that.

Further iterating my Gateway Station concept, I’ve tossed the Anker 555 in the closet and hooked up a TS4 from CalDigit. Under macOS, I’m finding that this works flawlessly and resolves the “Well, if I just use a second cable for power” issue I observed with the hub.

And then there’s windows (>_<).

One reason that I opted to get the newer TS4 is its love for 10 Gbit/s ports versus the older TS3 Plus. Basically the ports are either rated for 10 Gbit/s USB or 40 Gbit/s TB. Another reason is because of the Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4 capability made me wonder if it would be both backwards and forwards compatible with my desktop.

Migrating All The Things ™ to the CalDigit appears to work well enough for my purposes. I’ve no need for the DisplayPort or Ethernet port on the desktop side. All the USB ports appear to function when plugged into my ASMedia controller, and the only issue observed is that USB drives won’t work. I am unsure if this is due to power negotiation, or drivers. Under macOS, I can basically plug any damn thing in  without issue. Part of me is tempted to swap out the USB 3.1 10 Gbit/s card for a Thunderbolt card, and part of me just does not want to know what the fuck Intel’s NT drivers for that are like ^_^.

When I decided to consider a dock, I decided if I was going to spend the big bucks, which my previous solution was meant to avoid, that I was going to make sure it was cable of being the heart of my desk setup. Such that it could be the Single Point of Truth in connectivity instead of just the break out. That way if the desktop side of the coin proved sufficient I could do that, and if not, I could retain the previous configuration for Gateway Station. Compared to the Windows issues my previous arrangement had, it’s been a bigger issue finding room for the dock on my desk.

Considering that I can use Rimuru’s front panel USB ports when storage drives are required, and have USB-C extension cables that could be routed to the spare port on the ASMedia card, I’m not particularly concerned about my observations so far. My goal with this transition was to have my laptop become the core for the non gaming stuff and relegate my desktop to being focused on gaming. Thus far that’s working. The test that remains is to determine how reliable this turns out on the NT side.

And to remember to turn off my speakers so they don’t fallback to Bluetooth pairing mode, if I leave it connected to Rimuru instead of Shion.

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Thus far, as Gateway Station has continued to evolve, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Anker 555 hub needs to die. I posted an earlier entry on it’s troubles with Rimuru, and the process of elimination from the NT side of my setup.

Now that Shion the MacBook Air is at the center point, and Stark is officially retired to /dev/closet, the issues of course continue.

What I’m finding is that the hub works great with macOS when connected to Apple’s Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4.0 controller. Except when you use the Power Delivery port, in which case it doesn’t do jack shit. But otherwise seems to function provided I leave the USB-PD port clear and power Shion directly.

Now part of this may owe to the fact that I’m now using one of Anker’s new GaNPrime chargers to drive everything. A downside of Anker’s new fancy chargers is they expect intelligent negotiation of power that sometimes causes issues, Anker chargers being heavily marked for compatibility, aside the point ^_^. To eliminate the possibility that my nearest Apple C-to-C cable might not be rated for enough power draw to charge a laptop rather than an iPad, I also opted to try the same configuration using one of Anker’s 100W rated PD cables with the exact same result.

Thus, I am reminded that the hub cost about as much as retrofitting Rimuru from my USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbit/s card to a Titan Ridge based Thunderbolt 4 card, which also has a pair of USB-C connections. For now, I think a Thunderbolt dock will be replacing the Anker hub. The question will be whether or not my one cable swap approach remains, using the dock in place of the hub, or move everything through the dock and dare to suffer whatever the state of Thunderbolt drivers are for Windows 11….

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 Random things I blame on Bill and Ted: being able to spell Socrates from memory.

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 A second experiment: 44 grams of coffee (about 6 spoons of beans) to 800 ml of coffee for 4 minutes. A nice bold coffee, but without that kite flying value of the previous stump water experiment.