October 6, 2023

Ready to Go; A Discovery

Well, the second session began on Wednesday, and I’m pretty much ready. I have grad students already registering for accounts and freshmen trickling in to Packback. I feel pretty good about the new courses, though designing them took me a while. Hopefully, I’ll be able to use them again. So far, I have had a couple of questions from my grad students, but nothing that shows my absolute ineptitude in course design. Hopefully, all will go well. I now have five online classes to manage. Today might be my last little bit of free time.

I have written a lot of new content for both classes—most of it linked from the CompFAQ. I have the making of a textbook for ENGL 1101 and textbook supplements for ENGL 5106. For the latter, I include some exercises that help teach the concepts which my students will be completing this semester. We’ll see how it goes.

On a different matter: I managed to get MacOS Ventura (13.6) installed on my Mac Pro from 2009! Thanks to Mr. Macintosh for the tutorial. I highly recommend OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I wouldn’t say Ventura runs flawlessly on the Mac Pro, but things I thought would never work—like AirDrop, Messages, and Continuity—work flawlessly. My Apple Watch is even able to unlock it most of the time. The only features that don’t work well are Stage Manger (not at all) and being able to group two apps on a full-screen layout (works OK, but is fiddly). I have a metal-capable graphics card that I’m hoping will fix these issues as soon as I can get it from my office.

My 15-year-old Mac Pro runs almost like a new machine. It’s nicely upgraded, too, with 48GBs RAM, four 2TB HDs in a RAID, and a boot NVMe drive of 1TB. This thing is a tank. Color me impressed. Sonoma will even work, but they have a few kinks to work out before I upgrade.