In the previous article, I went over the gist of how I fixed a small problem with my “new” PowerMac G5 – the lack of a boot chime. After a few days of really working with the machine and trying to figure out the reason, I would find out it was really something as simple […]
As I’ve been slowly documenting, I’ve had quite a few Macintosh computers enter my digital life recently, and naturally I want to incorporate these machines into my workflow. Sure, I’m a blogger primarily, and you can do that on damn near any machine that can manage to run the WordPress back end, but I feel […]
Speed. It’s the main thing we all want in computers, be it desktop machines, smartphones, even game consoles, it all boils down to speed. In the computer world, speed equals power, or so it would seem. While the reality is far more complex and nuanced, when it’s all said and done faster components are generally […]
At this point in our story I had a Power Mac G5, the last of the Power PC based Macintosh computers, in my possession. It worked but with a quirk in that it didn’t make the traditional “boot chime” that (until recently) all Macintosh computers had. This bugged me enough that I set out to […]
As mentioned previously, as much as I am a Windows guy I’ve always had a fondness for the Macintosh computer family. A combination of having them in school as well as seeing the awesomeness to be found in the Power Mac G5 and the Mac Pro really made me want to get some of these […]
I thought I’d take a bit before we get into Season 3 of Angry Video Game Nerd episodes to express just why I’m reviewing all of these episodes, as well as touch on a few other points on James and the Nerd series that are worth me saying here. The very short answer to the […]
In what can only be described as an example of insanity, I mentioned previously my intentions to cover the BBC archive of television programming from the BBC Computer Literacy Project of the early and mid 80’s, and at this stage I think I’m ready to begin tackling this mighty challenge. The BBC archive of programing […]
As you may have noticed, things look a little different around here. I felt like the site needed a bit of an update, so I spent some time Saturday morning changing a few things around with quite the surprising result. I really like this new look, and the simple shift to a nearly-black background I […]
Here we have the third video I wanted to share today regarding the Parker Solar Probe. This video is titled “It’s Surprisingly Hard to Go to the Sun” and covers, in pretty simple terms, the actual difficult faced in going to the Sun from Earth. Orbital mechanics is a funny thing – to go higher […]
Next up in my pre-launch sharing of content related to the Parker Solar Probe mission is this United Launch Alliance video on the launch vehicle for this mission – the Delta IV Heavy – and the flight plan that will put the Parker Solar Probe on a course for the Sun. Delta IV Heavy is […]
It’s time for another historic NASA mission to begin. This time, it isn’t to another world – this isn’t a Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, or even a Pluto probe. Oh no, this is something much more intense. Tonight or, more correctly, early this Saturday Morning, August 11th 2018 a Delta IV Heavy booster will launch […]
I shot several hours of video last August during the 2017 Solar Eclipse. While most of it just shows the sun slowly getting more and more covered by the Moon (we had, I believe, 94% totality in my area) until it’s nothing but a crescent, a few frames from the video proved better than normal, […]
I swear this website has become at least 30% updates about the website itself, but I enjoy sharing updates as I work to make Xadara something better than it has been, and today I made some progress towards that cleanup which I mentioned in a previous update. I cleaned out all of the old articles […]
As I said I wanted to do in a previous update, comments here on Xadara are now open to whomever – no registration required, unlike how things had been for the past, oh, 5 years or more. It is my hope that this will spawn healthy discussion and fun conversation about the subject of the […]
Oh boy, finally getting around to these. Now, I know I normally try to get these out in the last week of the previous month, when they get announced officially by Microsoft, and a few times I’ve been late to getting these articles written. Well, in this case, Microsoft themselves dropped the ball, and didn’t […]