This blog post will serve as my long-term build log for the Power Mac G4 MDD I started restoring in the video Retro Computing Enthusiasts are Masochists in early 2024. See also: Build log: Macintosh PowerBook 3400c.

The G4's swan song

Apple's Blue-and-White G3 brought a bit of fun into the industrial design of Apple's pro desktop line of Macs. The four-handle polycarbonate design language progressed through a few generations of G3 and G4, culminating in the 'Mirrored Drive Door' model.

This blog post will serve as my long-term build log for the Macintosh PowerBook 3400c I started restoring in the video Retro Computing Enthusiasts are Masochists in early 2024. See also: Build log: Power Mac G4 MDD.

The fastest laptop period

It's 1997. Apple just re-acquired Steve Jobs, but he hasn't been around long enough to materially impact the next few months of product launches.

Gil Amelio, seeing a gap in Apple's laptop offerings, decides to throw the kitchen sink at the market, in the form of the PowerBook 3400c. It works.

...and it's not just for Pi Day.

After posting my deep-dive into the Pi 5's new BCM2712 and RP1 silicon this morning, someone linked me to this GitHub issue: Raspberry Pi 5 cannot overclock beyond 3.0GHz due to firmware limit(?).

For the past few weeks, a few blog readers (most notably, tkaiser—thanks!) commented on PLLs, OPP tables, and DVFS and how something seemed a little off with the 3.0 GHz CPU limit—which was apparently recommended by Broadcom, according to that GitHub issue.

Ever since I X-rayed the Raspberry Pi 5 to see inside the BCM2712 and RP1 chip packages, I've wanted die shots of both chips. Why? Mostly out of curiosity, since I'm not a silicon expert by any means.

I also ran into some weird overclocking issues after writing about my experience overclocking and underclocking the Raspberry Pi 5, and probably spent an unhealthy amount of time (and money) to learn about the clocks, PLLs, and chips on the latest version of everyone's favorite Single Board Computer.

Silicon lottery.

Now that the Raspberry Pi 5s been readily available (at least in most regions) for a few months, more people started messing with clocks, trying to get the most speed possible out of their Pi 5s.

Unlike the Pi 4, the Pi 5 is typically comfortable at 2.6 or even 2.8 GHz, and some Pi 5s can hit 3.0 GHz (but no higher—more on why tomorrow well... this limit may be able to be lifted).

I install a lot of Drupal sites day to day, especially when I'm doing dev work.

In the course of doing that, sometimes I'll be working on infrastructure—whether that's an Ansible playbook to configure a Docker container, or testing something on a fresh server or VM.

In any case, I run into the following error every so often in my Nginx error.log:

"php-fpm" nginx Error: Undefined constant PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY

The funny thing is, I don't have that error when I'm running CLI commands, like vendor/bin/drush, and can even install and manage the Drupal site and database on the CLI.