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  • Remembering Fry’s Electronics: Phoenix Arizona

    Fry's Phoenix Trip

    I was recently contacted by a reporter who was writing a story on the history of Fry’s Electronics and asked about publishing a photo or two he found on my old Flickr account. I hadn’t looked through my Flickr account in ages, and clicking over there brought back a rush of mid-2000s memories.

    During that time most of my work-days were occupied doing Systems Engineering gigs in the field for Macprofessionals or Apple Professional Services. It was not uncommon to run into a problem that called for a critical, uncommon, IT component to finish a job. Since many of my gigs involved server or storage migrations, an extra backup drive was a common need. Nowadays, you can walk into any Target, Walmart, or Best Buy and get a relatively cheap SSD or HDD. Back then this was far less common, and Fry’s and Micro Center filled a critical gap for me. It’s hard to describe exactly how it felt walking in to a great computer store in the 1990s and early 2000s. For me- I felt a contagious excitement, particularly when I was away from home and trying to problem-solve. Their inventory held unlimited potential- basically there was no need you had that couldn’t be fixed with what they had in stock.

    Micro Center is still the only national chain I know of that I can walk into and find LC, SC, and ST terminated Fibre Optic cables in-stock and on a shelf at 8:30 at night on a random Tuesday. This saved me multiple times during SAN deployments where we came up a patch cable short, or in some cases, cables were damaged. While Fibre Channel had lots of strengths, most pro workflows can operate just fine over 10GB ethernet using far more robust twisted pair cabling. No surprise in 2024 our Micro Center still stocks Multi-Mode and Single-Mode Fibre, alongside Cat8 Ethernet, which can do 40GB Ethernet on throws up to 30M. When I started deploying Xsan 1.0, Fibre Optic cable was used with 2GBps transceivers, connecting to Xserve RAIDs with 180GB PATA drives. 😅

    At any rate, this post is more about Fry’s, how special it was, and how it’s missed. After I transitioned out of my role at Macpros and had fewer pressing technical needs, I would still make a point to visit their stores if I was passing by one when traveling. I have a similar tradition with Micro Center now.

    Every Fry’s had a theme to their store, and the Phoenix store had an “At the Movies” theme, with a prominent marquee sign, and a large matrix of TV’s to mimic a movie theatre screen. It seems quaint looking back at a flat gallery like this, but walking in with the high ceilings and rows upon rows of specialty parts; it felt like an amusement park for geeks.

    But a big part of Fry’s charm laid in the variety of stock they had in the store. On the opposite corner from the Computer parts, they had appliances. As you can see in the gallery, the first three bargain bins when I walked in contained a foot-callous shaver, what was at the time a world record cheap price on HDMI cables in a retail store, and pepper spray in that order. It would go on like this for what felt like dozens of rows. Most of the locations had a cafe, many with fresh popped popcorn (even if they weren’t movie-theater themed). Each one had a huge Mac specialty section, where you could feel and inspect hundred of third party accessories. Our specialty Apple retail section at Macpros would have five to ten custom-fit laptop bags, Fry’s had over a hundred in stock. I still carry an InCase backpack I picked up at a Fry’s.

    Anyways, support your local Micro Center and may your the Fibre-Optic link lights be ever in your favor. I know that Amazon has replaced the role as supplier for cheap, accessible tech in much of the US. Honestly, I don’t have the time to drive from Ann Arbor to Sterling Heights just for a cheap flash drive like I used to, but nothing will compare to the feeling of hitting up Fry’s or Micro Center back in the day. I’m not sure how well Prime Delivery would have worked for those types of gigs. I’d often leave Fry’s, grab a late dinner, and head back to the station to put whatever special parts I needed to use immediately. When you needed it now, there was no substitute.

    Post-Script: Looking back at the metadata; I took this particular trip during the final game of the 2008 NBA Finals, as Boston was winning the title. I’m speculating, but if I had to guess, I’d bet I watched the first half, saw it was going to be a blowout, and headed over to avoid the end of the game. Thankfully, their Matrix TV was in terrible shape, and I was more concerned with documenting the quality of the screen than the outcome of the game.

  • 3D Google Maps not available in Chrome Windows 10

    I was working on a presentation the other day using a screenshot from the 3D view of Apple Maps.   This involved falling back to my Macbook Pro, something I’ve tried to do as little as possible since jumping to Windows as my primary work machine a few months back.

    My co-worker, who is a die-hard Android user, said he preferred the 3D view in Google Maps.  He claimed it was better than the Apple Maps.app rendering I was using.   I’d looked in Google Maps before and I hadn’t even seen a 3D option.  But I had my Macbook Pro out, so I went to http://maps.google.com/  

    I was shocked- there was a 3D button- I hadn’t even seen a 3D version of Google Maps outside of the old Google Earth standalone app.

    Anyways I went to re-create this on my Thinkpad, and as I started clicking through I realized why I didn’t use Google Maps initially- there was no 3D button on my interface.

    Screenshot of Google Maps interface missing the 3D button

    Unsure what could have caused that, I did a little googling, and a little thinking, and remembered my old disappearing mouse pointer problem from earlier this year.

    Lo and behold, going back into chrome://settings  -> Advanced -> System -> Use hardware acceleration when available, followed by a re-launch, fixed it.

    Hopefully my mouse pointer hangs around this time!

  • Chrome ate my mouse pointer! (Includes fix)

    After 15+ years as a professional macOS (and Mac OS X, and Mac OS X Server) advocate, I’ve switched industries entirely.  One big change; I now carry a Windows 10 laptop as a daily driver.  There will be a whole ‘nother post about that soon.  In the interim I wanted to pass along a fix for a particularly odd problem I found in Chrome.

    Disappearing Mouse Pointer in Chrome

    Chrome 60+ (I am on 65) has a nasty habit of making your mouse pointer disappear entirely at launch.  This has affected Windows 10 machines for a couple years now, and while looking for answers I found a Google Product Forum thread that recommended disabling hardware acceleration.

    This worked!

    So if you’re having the same problem, launch chrome and go to the URL bar if you can’t find your mouse to click it, either read the bonus tip below or hit the “Tab” key until the URL bar is highlighted.

    Type:

    chrome://settings

    And you’ll get a long list, scroll to the bottom and click advanced.

    Wayyy down the page you’ll see a slider to “Enable hardware acceleration when available”.

    That’s on by default.  Turn it off and you’ll get a prompt to “relaunch”.  Do that too.

    After the relaunch you’ll have your pointer back.

    Bonus tip:

    Before I realized this was a chrome problem, I enabled a mouse property that has been really helpful for me moving across multiple screens, and really helped me find my invisible mouse pointer to disable hardware acceleration in chrome.

    Go to settings -> Mouse Properties.

    Click the checkbox for “Show location of mouse when I press the CTRL key”, and hit ok:

    I was basically jamming the Ctrl key like a madman during the Chrome settings fix above.  I also use it when I get the mouse pointer lost moving between multiple displays.  One of my work displays is 4K and its easy to lose track floating between them all.

  • Raspberry Pi SSH borked after RetroPie install


    There was something very odd going on with my Raspberry Pi 3 after a fairly clean install of RetroPie- I spent way too much time looking at AP isolation, firewall settings, etc before I figured it out, so I thought I’d document it here for the next poor schlub.

     

    Every time I’d try to connect, I’d get this error:

    woodmanp-mbp:~ peter$ ssh pi@192.168.1.21
    Connection closed by 192.168.1.21 port 22

    I tried to launch raspi-config from the GUI and it exited too quickly. I quit emulation station and ran raspi-config again, and turning on SSH launched into apt-get install, and that seemed a lot better. After confirming that install, I still couldn’t get it. I ran a systemctl status sshd, and got back a bunch of complaints about keys (should have harvested these, whoops).  At any rate, if you’re seeing these kinds of errors, the quickest way to regenerate those keys:

    sudo rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
     sudo dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

    After this, I was able to ssh in no problem.