Gratitude

I am sure most of you have heard about the news regarding TenFourFox and Classilla. If you have not here is a link to what I am talking about,
https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox-and-what-ive.html.

Reading this has made me look back over my PowerPC Mac experience. I am left feeling extremely grateful. Prior to my experiences with post Leopard PowerPC Masc I had only dabbled with Ubuntu on x86 and amd64 machines here and there. Running Debian Jessie and Wheezy on PowerPC Macs is what really gave my GNU/Linux skills a solid foundation. Having the ability to hop over to Tiger and/or Leopard and run TenFourFox at any given moment throughout all these years has been nothing short of amazing. One of, if not my most favorite periods of time in my technical journey has been the time spent on PowerPC Macs. TenFourFox was an absolutely integral part of this time.

Feel free to join me in the comments as I close by thanking Cameron Kaiser. We really appreciate the tireless, amazing work you have done for our community. Thank you for everything!

Still A Place For OS9

For years I've used my Macs to produce and write music - generally favouring Propellerhead Reason for purely electronic pieces, Garageband where real instruments need to be recorded and often using both in combination.

The final step to a recording after mixing down is mastering to give it that extra zing and dynamics - for this I use SonicWORX which is an OS9 application.

Initially this would mean copying files to a thumbdrive, moving to an OS9 machine, processing then copying back but now I complete the process with VNC over Ethernet.

My OS9 machine for this task is my 800Mhz G4 iMac which sits in my desk corner keyboardless and mouseless.

I activate sharing between it and my Mac Pro, copy the files to be processed across, then use Chicken of the VNC to open up a remote session on the iMac.

The audio files are processed and copied back in the same manner they were sent.
So, there's still a place for OS9 and it's easy to include it in an OSX workflow.

Updating VLC To Play Youtube

When VLC was last updated for PowerPC it was possible to play Youtube links copied into it - alas that ability has long since expired but you can bring it back with a few updated components.

This only applies to the last PPC iteration of VLC, version 2.0.10 and also requires the ever wonderful PPCMC (for latest security certificates and curl.)

The following code copied into Terminal will do the following:

Make a directory in VLC preferences for the latest security certificates

Delete the old Youtube lua script from VLC

Create a symlink in VLC preferences of the security certificates in PPCMC (this will update when PPCMC is updated)

Finally, using curl, copy the latest Youtube lua script into VLC

mkdir -p ~/Library/Preferences/org.videolan.vlc/ssl/certs

rm -f /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/playlist/youtube.luac

ln -s /Applications/PPCMC.app/certs/cacert.pem ~/Library/Preferences/org.videolan.vlc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

/Applications/PPCMC.app/bin/curl --insecure https://raw.githubusercontent.com/videolan/vlc/master/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua -o /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua

From the download here extract the compact Youtube browser, Choob and the VLC scripts, VLSEE and VLLISTEN into Applications and create shortcuts in the dock (right hand side for VLSEE/VLLISTEN as they are scripts.) Open VLC and in Preferences - /Input/Codecs change the Preferred video resolution to Standard and close.

Opening Choob, browse to your chosen video, right click to copy the link then click the VLSEE dock shortcut - VLC will open and quickly stream the video - quit VLC when finished.If you want to stream audio only then do the same but with VLLISTEN.