Final Thoughts for March - Apple M1

I've been looking at the new like of Apple equipment, now I'm not an Apple guy... I only recently acquiesced to buying a second hand Mac Mini (Core i5, very old) not really to play with the old version of Mac OS it could run, but to use it as a Linux box.... Of course I took a look at the Mac OS and the hardware.

It is very neat tidy design, but awfully bespoke, terribly difficult to repair, but not impossible, I actually was able to fit new SSD's, upgrade the memory and fix a failed fan.

That's the bare minimum I'd ask of a piece of kit, to be able to change the storage, upgrade the RAM... fix a fan... Hard drives, be they mechanical or solid state fail over time, they literally wear out.

Hearing that some Apple models have their only storage literally soldered onto the main board was a real turn off, how can such a thing be upgraded or repaired?  Well it can't.

And this ability to repair something is pretty key to me, and I presume a lot of other people.

Soldered on, fixed in position, storage is just a no-go... And as I understand it this is how the new M1 Mac's all work, they have a fixed amount of storage, no additional storage interfaces (SATA etc) sure you could use an external USB drive, but that's... that's not going to stop the main boot drive taking a battering.

Worse still I've anecdotally heard about the massive swap usage on the M1 Mac's, which prematurely ages the storage.

It is the perfect storm to leave a lot of electronics in ruins and the waste of resources and environmental impact of all this just has be aghast.

Perlin Noise Terrain Chat #0

No ship diorama update.?!?!??!!?  Yes, thank you for the six messages (a record for messages in just a few hours - I'm writing this one Monday night) there will be an update later this week.

So what have I been up to?... Well, I've been rewiring the conservatory, so I can work in it, and this space is to become a second office space for me, a different place to let my creative code juices flow.

The first thing I've been doing is playing about with my raw graphics engine and building terrains within the 3D space.

Now, I did a bunch of terrain generation for a Hex-bases wargame that never made it to market; many years ago, and I still have one of the early prototype screenshots here:

 

Its that underlying mesh I was looking at getting to, some cell by cell generated terrain that I could undulate and stitch together with seamless edges.

 But before all that my graphics project needs a generator, and I decided to build the height map for this mesh with perlin noise.

This is my perlin implementation, I'll go a head and play about with generating a mesh from this, luckily I only have to generate the y value for a given x and z axis distance, so I could parallelise this quite well across my many core machines.

More to follow I guess...