A quick journey: The Compaq Deskpro PD1005

This is one of those posts I'm writing down more for my reference, but hey, you might get some enjoyment out of it, too.

I wanted to make note of this because, well, Compaq wasn't super great at differentiating their Deskpro line, at least from the front. There were so. many. computers. that only said "Compaq Deskpro" if you looked at the front. The only time you'd get a model number is if you looked at the bottom, or the back, and oftentimes photos didn't have this information.

But before we go on, why do this? 

Because the PD1005 was my first "real" computer, so to speak. It was the family computer we had as I was starting the journey into becoming a computer nerd. Sure, I had an old Macintosh LC as my "personal" computer, but that machine couldn't go on the internet or do anything modern by early 00's standards. Or play any "modern" games.

I cut my teeth on it in a LOT of ways. I learned a lot on it. I played a lot of old games I cherish to this day on it. I wouldn't necessarily call it a grail machine (mostly because I'm not actively seeking it out, it's a behemoth of a machine), but it's one I've been wanting to know the exact identity of for a minute due to the aforementioned thing about Compaq being not-so-great at labeling their machines in an easily identifiable way. 

I set out to Google, knowing only the CPU's specs: It was a 450-500MHz Pentium III, Slot I. Desktop form factor (so it lays horizontally, such that a monitor can sit on the chassis). After scrolling through a bunch of models that definitely weren't it (have I mentioned that Compaq called a LOT of computers "Deskpro"?) I eventually landed on something that looked like an exact match on eBay. And there, on the underside, barely readable was the model number I was after: PD1005. 

With that number in hand, I refined my search, and found more pictures. This was it. Everything matched. Including the motherboard, which had a really interesting layout (and the slot 1...slot laid on its side rather than vertically like most motherboards I've seen). 

You might ask why I care so damn much, and yeah, this really is a personal thing. Like I said, this is more for me, not for you. But this Deskpro in particular seems to be one of the less common ones at least, because if you try to look for a Deskpro you're either going to get the tower model, or the SFF model that seems to be extremely common. The big-ass desktop model doesn't seem to come up super often.

The only missing piece of this puzzle was what video card mine had: These Deskpros don't have onboard video, and used this weirdly proprietary AGP slot for video. It used this oddball double-wide half-height slot that I think is very proprietary to these Deskpros: 

 

(Once again, thanks eBay for having this info, somehow!)

And given the timeframe and seemingly relatively few cards made this way, I think this is it: It was this very card, a 3D Rage Pro Turbo.

Interestingly enough, the card still seems standards compliant otherwise, as I've seen (whilst searching) other cards with the same PCB dimensions and Compaq markings but with a standard bracket on them. I do wonder if it would be possible to finagle a standard AGP card in here some way, some how. 

Maybe if I ever stumble into one of these systems. And, y'know, if I had the room for it.

But with all that, I now know the identity of the computer that really got me started out on, well, everything. The computer that saw me through many, many, MANY hours of Diablo II, UT99, The Sims, and Planescape: Torment. That damn Compaq Deskpro PD1005.

A Quick thought on the Switch 2 pricing thing

To be up front about this: I have no horse in this race. I'm not buying a Switch 2. Not because I hate what it is (I actually like it from a hardware point of view) but because I am entirely priced out of it. In fact, this is why I sold my original Switch, primarily because I couldn't afford to keep it fed with games anymore.

 

Thinking back, I can't help but feel like the original Switch led us into this. Sure, it was cheaper than its contemporaries (kind of, it wouldn't beat the Xbox One S on price until the launch of the Lite) but the game pricing would present an issue later on: They'd never, ever, ever go on sale. Breath of the Wild would never see anything resembling a significant discount over its lifespan, unless you bought used from some kid on Craigslist who just wanted the game gone and to recoup something from it.

 

All of Nintendo's 1st party titles were like this. The only significant discount you could find from authorized retailers and Nintendo themselves was on the DLC (because I remember paying damn near nothing for the BotW DLCs). I'm sure if you really knew where to look you could find discounts, but my main point is that sales on 1st party Nintendo games were harder than usual to find, if they were even able to be found.

 

(To be fair, this does present an advantage, in that you could buy in at launch and know you're not going to miss a sale and regret what you paid. But for the lower income folks like myself who didn't mind waiting for a sale, this sucked.)

 

The Switch, though, was a novel concept, so we just nodded and went along with this. 

 

Until Nintendo decided to join everyone else and Tears of the Kingdom launched at $70. Normally, this would be no big deal! But coupled with what we now know about Switch game pricing, this was a nasty surprise. Because again: the prices never go down significantly.

 

But, hey, the Switch was still cheaper than a full fledged console, right? (Even though the system was very much past its prime at this point.)

 

It was...until the Switch 2.

 

The Switch 2 feels like a full on betrayal to those who felt like Nintendo always held up the low end of the market. Consoles typically (again) ran cheaper than the competition, and up until the Switch, games did actually depreciate and could be found in, say, GameStop for pennies on the dollar compared to full MSRP. (Hell, back when Hollywood Video was around and they had their in-house game store, I remember buying Metroid Prime in damn near perfect condition for like, $5!)

 

The Switch 2's MSRP (before tariffs, potentially) is $449. That's more expensive than a PS5 slim digital (which as of this writing has a bundle deal where you get Astro Bot for free). To make matters worse, the Switch 2 doesn't even come with a pack-in game like the PS5 does. Yeah, there are free-to-play games on console storefronts, but  none of those show off what the console can do like, say, Wii Sports or Astro's Playroom did.

 

The Switch 2 does have a game intended to be something you'd pack in...but they want you to pay an extra $10 for it.

 

It gets better, believe it or not: Nintendo has raised the prices of their games! They used to say $70 was only going to be for exceptional titles like Tears of the Kingdom, but now $70 is the base price for everything, with $80 being the normal price for the "big" games. They'll also graciously let you upgrade Switch games to Switch 2 versions for $10 (which is in line with what Sony charges, so not bad).

 

But the best part: Say you don't own Breath of the Wild yet. Say you wanted to jump in with the Switch 2, because hey, better performance means you won't go into slideshow mode in the Korok Forest! You'd think Nintendo would be nice like, say, Sony and since BotW is eight years old just include the DLC with the Switch 2 edition right? Ha. NOPE.

 

So if you don't own BotW and want the DLC and you want it all on Switch 2, you're paying $90 for the full game. Unbelievable.

But again, none of this would be an issue if Switch games depreciated like games do on all other platforms! Both Sony and Microsoft's digital storefronts have frequent sales with significant discounts on even their big games. That's really the crux of the pricing issue here. When Nintendo puts up a game for $80, we know from the Switch that $80 is pretty much going to be the normal price for the foreseeable future and it might see a $5 discount rarely but that's it.

 

Given how well voting with your wallet works I fully expect enough people to just roll over and take this that it'll soon become the norm. But I really hope that the Switch 2 has a 3DS moment where the pricing pushes so many people away that Nintendo has to respond. Especially since the handheld gaming console market actually has competition, now. Nintendo no longer solely owns this space.

 

If you asked me, I don't even mind paying the $450 for the console itself! It's the games. The games are where it hurts. The lack of depreciation is where it hurts. Indies exist, but why would I buy a Switch for that when I could just buy a Steam Deck and enjoy the frequent sales + have a full-fledged Linux handheld console that can run anything I want on it, too? (I realize the Linux bit is really a nerd thing, but you could avoid all that and just stay within the Steam walled garden and still have a better experience pricing wise than a Switch 2!)

 

(Hey, Nintendo? You could also bring back Player's Choice/Nintendo Selects! That'd be cool too.)

Google be Googlin'

This is one of those admittedly minor things that just reaffirm that while I tolerate Apple at best these days, good lord Google just makes me want to slam my head into a desk ad nauseam.

What happened? Well, I have a positively ancient Moto G3 that has a busted up display that's barely adhered on (not due to battery swelling, the screen was replaced and not put back on properly) and this phone is so ridiculously slow that it has only one purpose: To run DroidCam so that I can keep an eye on my 3D printers.

Now, I have a paid license for DroidCam, and I want to use it on this phone. This means I have to sign into my Google account on this phone. Doesn't seem so bad, right? Except some time ago, Google in their everlasting wisdom decided that every phone signed into your Google account WILL become an authenticator for any sign in attempts via a prompt. This is ironclad; if you have 2-factor authentication turned on and you have more than one device on your Google account, sign-in prompts will always be on. You cannot turn them off.

Previously upon signing in it would ask you if you wanted to use this phone as an authenticator and you could say no, I don't want to use this phone to approve sign ins.

Now, obviously, there's a huge security flaw in having an always on and unlocked phone acting as an IP camera that can authorize sign ins for your Google account. Would be trivial for someone to grab it and use it for Bad Things. The more pressing problem in my case is that on Android devices, the sign-in prompt takes over the entire phone. Any app that was running gets shoved into the foreground and the prompt must be answered. Even if you respond to it on another device.

(iOS, sadly, does the same thing. But there's a way around it. Kind of.)

As you can imagine, if you perch an Android phone up somewhere and have DroidCam running 24/7, you have to now take it down and dismiss that prompt for DroidCam to work again. Good stuff.

I mentioned iOS does this too, and it does. iOS, however, offers you an out: If you need to access a paid app in the App Store, you can just sign into the App Store/iTunes Store without signing into iCloud as a whole. That means I can dust off my old iPhone 6, just sign into the App Store, grab my paid up copy of DroidCam, and be done without binding the phone to my account.

Google in their all knowing wisdom will not allow this. If you want to even do so much as touch your Google account you have to fully commit to it and give everything access to it.

As is typical with situations like this, the solution was obvious albeit difficult: Just sign out everything on the Moto G3, sail the high seas for a patched APK, and use Android Debug Bridge to install it over USB. (And yes, I did make sure to vet the APK before installing it to make sure it wasn't something nasty.)

Bam, no more license checks, app will work fine without an account signed in, no more worrying if a prompt is going to knock it offline again. (And before you go "OMGZ PIRACY", settle down. I've paid for the app twice over at this point.)

What I wouldn't give for Google to do like Apple and just let us sign into individual apps rather than committing our whole accounts like this. Even Microsoft does this right with Windows, you can just sign into the Store without letting Windows as a whole get taken over by your account.

But nah. Google's gonna Google, I guess.

The Inevitable Coming Of Monetization

Say what you will about Bluesky thus far, but I quite like it and it brings back those Old Twitter memories that faded with time as Twitter became more and more enshittified over time, finally peaking with Elon's takeover of the platform.

 

Unfortunately, I think most of us know that no good thing lasts forever, and the ad-free Bluesky feed at some point will start to feature ads of some sort. The best we could hope for would be something akin to the way Daring Fireball did ads: Visible, but out of the way, not intrusive at all. But this is the 2020s. We know it won't be that simple.

 

I know Bluesky have said they have monetization ideas on the table, but here's what I'd like to see/some lines I want to define whenever the time does come:

 

Subscriptions should be fairly priced and not be compromised: No "you'll see less ads". If I'm paying you money, there needs to be NO ads. The "monthly cost plus ads" is a scam perpetuated by the streaming services and sadly rather than getting punished for them they saw massive profits, so everyone wants to jump on that bandwagon. You're better than that, Bluesky.

 

As for fairly priced, the cost should be at most--for normal users who just want ad free--no more than $10. Preferably less. 

 

Maybe a little congratulatory badge on their profile or something but critical functionality should not and never be locked behind this subscription like Twitter did.

 

Monetization does not come at the cost of the moderation tools Bluesky has. Blocklists/labeling services/so on and so forth. These are some of the most powerful tools Bluesky has going for it, don't cripple them in the name of making money.

 

Monetization does not come in the form of a forced algorithm. Bluesky has algorithmic feeds, but you have to specifically seek them out and use them, your timeline defaults to chronological and stays there unless you specify otherwise. For the love of all that is holy, do not pull a Meta and make it so algorithmic feeds are the only apparent option and you have to crawl on broken glass to get to the chronological feeds.

Advertiser blocking must be allowed. One of my main issues with TikTok for example is that I constantly get ads for religious garbage and I'm about as far from religious as you can be. Yet no matter how many times I say that no, this advertising does NOT apply to me, it keeps coming up. Let me block them from ever appearing in my feed again. I don't care if the advertiser really, really, mega wants to get in front of my eyeballs in particular.

Ads must be clearly defined, and also not obnoxious: No autoplaying video with sound, ads must be clearly labeled (unlike Twitter where they try to look like real posts as much as they can), and cannot be engineered in such a way that would fool a user into tapping on them.

This list kinda also serves as a nice line in the sand that if crossed will likely mean the return to Mastodon for myself. Really, I really define the line as "pre-Elon Twitter". I know advertising is probably going to show up. I know the chuds and fash are going to show up (and already have). So long as Bluesky continues to give me the tools to make sure I never know of these people existing, I'm okay with it. But the minute they begin crippling our ability to lock those people out is when I begin looking to go back to Mastodon.

The only thing that could be added to help things in this regard is private accounts. That'd be nice.

Apple Music Radicalized Me

EDIT, 5/20/25: Decided to just remove the section trashing on Spotify because when I came in here to change something it just felt out of place with the rest of this piece. Spotify sucks for different reasons, it'll get its time in the limelight. But not now.

I will tell anyone with ears that I vehemently, intensely carry a deep seated hatred for Apple Music. Same goes for Spotify, don't worry. But Apple Music, that one specifically pissed me off on such a deep level that maybe it'd be good to put it in one place why I hate it oh so very much.

Apple's music pedigree is no joke; while they weren't the first to market with an MP3 player, the iPod and iTunes Music Store brought this then-new concept to the masses and convinced the dinosaurs at the record labels to hop on board with the idea of digital music sales. While some might consider the iPod a relic in this day of paying a subscription for a limitless collection of music, it did become such an iconic staple of the 00s that it is revered much like the Walkman is.

Apple has even done well to preserve the legacy they created to this day: Modern macOS releases (and Apple Devices/Music for Windows) still support iPods all the way back to the first gen (provided you have the proper adapters for FireWire). Compare and contrast to the Zune, which Microsoft wasted no time in trying to wash its hands of once Windows Phone 8 released (and no longer depended on the Zune syncing protocol that WP7 used).

Apple's music chops is what makes the handling of Apple Music even more puzzling and infuriating to me. Given how much Spotify was taking off and Apple's legacy in digital music, in hindsight it would have been surprising to not see them hop on the streaming bandwagon at some point.

The implementation is where I have an issue with it. Rather than making Apple Music its own app, Apple did that thing it does and just decided to helpfully integrate it with the original Music app (formerly just named "iPod" in old versions of iOS) that handled your local library and iTunes Match, if you bothered to use that. (And unlike Apple Music, if you never interacted with iTunes Match or iCloud Music Library, it for the most part stayed completely out of your way and never showed its face.)

This was fine and not at all unprecedented: Google Play Music (RIP) did this to great effect: Google rolled out a streaming service called Google Play Music All Access (that's a mouthful) and it too integrated with Play Music, but it never came at a cost to those who opted to use Play Music to play local files. It never got in the way, it never obscured anything (as far as I know, I am 100% recalling this from memory), it just stayed helpfully in the corner, ready to spring to life if you went out of your way to invoke it.

Apple Music did not do this. Apple really, really wanted you to know that they launched a new streaming service, and that they were offering a three month free trial to really sell you on it. So on June 30th, 2015, after we finished installing iOS 8.4 on our devices, we went to Music and got barred off from accessing our library because we had to clear an ad for Apple Music before we could actually use the app as we did prior.

Worse yet, even if you didn't accept the free trial, Apple Music left all sorts of detritus all over the UI, begging you to interact with it, which would proc another ad for that free trial. Some would say this is whatever, just dance around the new junk littered throughout and keep on keepin' on, but this angered me deeply, because Apple took a previously decent app (and in fact, the only app you could use for local files synced from iTunes, at the time) and crapped it up to push their streaming service I had no interest in.

Let's pause this tirade for a second. Let's assume you were, in fact, curious, and decided to try this whole thing out. The crappy implementation of Apple Music doesn't even stop at the ads it used to throw at you! No, Apple Music also included iCloud Music Library, and to properly use Apple Music (as in, to be able to cache songs for offline, and to be able to save music rather than going on a search for it every time you wanted to play it) you had to have iCloud Music Library on.

iCloud Music Library in my experience was (and maybe still is, I'm not trusting it again) an unmitigated disaster. On the surface, it seems great! It'll mirror your library to Apple's servers and keep it in sync with all your devices and computers automatically. Great! The problem is--to save on server-side storage--it'll match music to files Apple already has on hand, as to not have a million discrete copies of God Bless Tiny Tim for everyone that has that album in their library. Quelle surprise, this function would very frequently misstep.

In my case, it would either flag files I actually own as "unplayable in your region", it would replace them with the wrong versions (or if I had the original masters of some albums and the artist later revised that album with changes, the original album would be lost, replaced with the new version), or explicit songs would be replaced with clean versions. If I didn't have a full backup of my local library, this would have been catastrophic.

Worse, the only way to solve a mismatch or an unplayable file? Delete and re-add it from the main computer's library. Which doesn't do me a whole lot of good if I'm on the road and my computer's at home.

This wouldn't be an issue if iCloud Music Library wasn't essentially a condition of using Apple Music. But it is. Paying monthly for music isn't bad enough as it is, now you have to cede control of the files you already own to use the service.

Major point for Spotify and literally every other service here that doesn't do that.

Back to trashing on Apple Music's invasion of the Music app: It wasn't enough for Apple that there was streaming cruft littered throughout the Music app and and you had to dismiss an ad to get back into your library after 8.4 was installed. No, that ad would reappear at random and had to be dismissed every few launches of Music. This was immensely infuriating as I lived in an area with subpar cellular service at the time, and the ad would have to be fetched from Apple's servers every time it popped up.  If I wasn't on Wi-Fi, the ad wouldn't finish loading sometimes, and I'd be effectively locked out of the Music app until the ad could finish loading. Great.

Thankfully, at the time a lot of us were still doing local files and our voices were loud enough that Apple heard us and gave us a toggle in settings to kill Apple Music once and for all. Unfortunately, this didn't clean up all the streaming cruft from the Music app. There were still things like trending searches and whatnot. But boy howdy, it was a big improvement. Even though Apple would slyly toggle Apple Music back on at random after an iOS update.

But has it gotten better?

Fast forward a few years. Do you think Apple got any better about being total dicks about Apple Music? Ha. Haha. No.

The Music app in modern iOS versions still has a huge lot of Apple Music cruft in the search tab, where it will show you a tile of genres and seasonal crap. Even if Apple Music is turned off. As you might guess, all of this requires a subscription and WILL proc an ad if tapped.

It feels dark patterned (if that's the right term for this) to hell, a bunch of elements screaming "touch me!" to give Apple the opportunity to cram another ad down your gullet.

(And in iOS 18, Apple has gotten worse about this, though I am unsure if it's a bug or intentional: If you tap the text box in the Music app's search tab, on iOS 17 the two tabs--if Apple Music is turned off--will be Radio (which doesn't require a subscription, necessarily, so it gets a pass) and Your Library, and Music will remember whichever one you previously had selected. On iOS 18, Radio is replaced with Apple Music regardless of if it is turned on or off, and the search will always default to searching Apple Music. It does not remember your last selection.)

Not even traditional computer operating systems are immune! On macOS Monterey, Apple had completely nuked the Apple Music toggle until it was added back in 12.3. On Windows, since Apple Music's dedicated app has replaced iTunes, now, there is no longer a toggle. You get the streaming detritus all up in your grill (along with the aforementioned search behavior seen in iOS 18, above) with no way to turn it off. Wonderful. I'll stay on iTunes until it dies, thanks.

I've always carried this hatred, this disappointment, because it felt like I bought into the Apple ecosystem specifically to avoid hubris like this. Apple was (and still is, in some respects) the company that seemingly was the best about respecting you when you said no, and obeying your boundaries. (This is the same company that--in the sea of all the AI bullshit--has their implementation of it be completely opt-in whilst everyone else is forcing it on you no matter what your preference. The duality of Apple, I guess. Well that didn't last too long, did it? Apple really must hate nice things in their endless pursuit of pleasing their shareholders. Sigh.)

Apple Music wasn't that. Apple Music wouldn't take no for an answer, it would operate under the assumption that every no is a thinly-veiled yes, and that it'll get you at some point. To me, it marked when Apple started down the road of effectively becoming no better than the rest of the tech industry after years of feeling like a bastion of hope against the worst parts of it.

Even more infuriating were the people who would punch down on people like me and claim we're overreacting, and to just "deal with it". This only made my irritation with everything worse, and arguably is the reason this bullshit keeps fucking happening. Because no one is willing to put their foot down and say no, the buck stops right here, right now.

Thankfully there are people out there doing exactly that, like Ed Zitron (whose piece inspired me to write this because a lot of what he talks about in the first half of Never Forgive Them really does a good job of summing up my feelings about, well, Apple being a little shit). After so many years of people telling you that you're overreacting and to just roll over and deal, it's nice to see someone on the same page telling you that no, nothing is actually wrong with you. The tech industry has failed you. This is not your fault.

As such, I'm hoping that in writing this, someone else in my shoes gets some validation and feels that no, they're not alone, and their feelings are valid.