my parents came by around 10:45am for another supply run. while in the car i told them about the $100 ipad i scored last night, and how i needed to go pick it up in the early afternoon. first stop was bianco & sons, to get 3 boxes of chinese sausages. the smell of garlic was pungent, i actually like that odor. next we went to OSJL, where my mother picked up some more yarn, my father some wines, and me a few packets of quick growing seeds (arugula and micro greens). the final stop was on our way back, to market basket to get some cafe supplies for the week. they dropped me off at my place around 12:30pm, i grabbed my things and took the motorcycle to belmont.

i contacted my imac seller and told him i'd be leaving around 1pm. he sent me his address. soon after my parents returned from dropping off the supplies at the cafe, my father and i drove down to roslindale via the jamaica way. i've only ever passed through roslindale, don't remember ever stopping there. if i thought jamaica plain was far, at least it's got the forest hill orange line station. roslindale is even further south of that. once we got beyond the arboretum, it was like being in a different country, i didn't recognize anything there.

we got there by 1:30pm, i was anxious to meet my seller. the address he gave was to his house. he showed me the imac and i was ready to accept it as-is, but he volunteered to turn it on so i could see it was working. there was a lot of baby stuff strewn throughout the house, no wonder he was trying to declutter by getting rid of this old imac. i noticed he had solar panels on his roof, i asked how much power they produced, he actually didn't know, but said the solar company said it was enough for their needs, and also for a possible electric car in the future. he did ask me to put on a mask if i had one, so i stood close to the doorway to put some social distance between us as i didn't have a facemask. the imac booted, but displayed a flashing a folder with a question mark. he told me he erased the drive, not just reset the OS, but completely erased the whole drive so there was nothing on it. he said i could install the default OS via recovery if i connect to wifi first, all of which i already knew, this wasn't my first mac rodeo, but it was nice talking with someone who knew just as much about macs as i did.

my father and i put the imac in the backseat, wrapped in a pink dog towel and blue moving blanket. we then set a google maps course back home. initially it told us to go back the way we came via hyde park avenue, but then it recalculated and took us across cummins highway heading northwest. after that we were left to google maps' mercy, as we had no idea where we were. it would've been more straight-forward to return the original route, but these back road shortcuts google was taking us through was probably just as fast, even many times more confusing. it was a route no human could possibly take, invented purely by some machine. there was no rhyme or reason, other than a north-northwestern bearing at all cost, no matter if it disregarded a more logical path when it could take the most direct or shortest. it did however gave us a tour of this part of boston we'd never been, then later into unknown regions of brookline and newton. brookline, which i've always thought as thickly settled, has some very nice and expensive areas, old mansions on big properties. we cut through chestnut hill, through boston college, towards the charles river, finally onto familiar arsenal street in watertown, where we could finally breathe a sigh of relief after making it all the way back. we didn't return to the house until 2pm.

i went about setting up the new imac after first cleaning the screen with a paper towel and some alcohol. i booted into recovery mode, entered my wifi credentials, then allowed it to download OSX el capitan (11). everything seemed to be going well, it told me the system installation would take nearly 1-1/2 hours so i set the imac on the floor. it then displayed some message on the screen that i only read a short time later, said it couldn't install OSX on the computer because "no packages were eligible for install". this was obviously an apple issue, they failed to properly update these old system files on their servers, which results in people being unable to install them via the easy recovery method. i tried a few more times, it gave me the error each time. the only other solution was to create a boot drive with the OSX installer and install the system that way.

i ate a portion of an italian sub my mother had bought from market basket earlier. i spent the rest of the afternoon into the evening either attempting to create a boot drive or doing some cyber monday shopping. i was showing my father some 12v tire inflators on amazon (he was going to buy one from harbor freight this morning until i told him there were better options online), but he decided we didn't need one. he also said we didn't need to upgrade our electric drill.

as for the boot drive, i had enough memory cards on hand to cobble together something i could boot up. the problem was downloading an el capitan installer. i first tried with my chrome browser, but apparently you need to use safari to do that. once i got the disc image, i had to mount it and run the .pkg file to create the actual installer. i did it twice, both times it failed because i didn't have enough memory on my macbook pro. i ended up tossing 11GB worth of xcode software to make room. i ran the .pkg one more time, it finally managed to successfully create the installer. after that, i ran a command line script to reformat the boot drive, make it bootable, and copy over the installer.

once i had the boot drive, i popped it onto the new imac. it wouldn't recognize it from the menu, so i had to reboot in option mode, and manually choose the boot drive to boot up from. that seemed to do the trick and it installed a fresh copy of the OSX in a matter of minutes. the imac was now up and running.

i had to pause for dinner. my father made hot and sour soup, my mother made chinese rice cake noodles. both were very delicious, but neither of my parents finished their food. i went back to setting up the imac afterwards, now back onto the dining table so i could work on it properly.

i looked up "about this mac" on the imac. yes, it was indeed a retina 5K (5120 x 2880), 27-inch, late 2015 imac. 4GHz intel core i7, 40GB memory (8-8-16-16), with a 1TB SSD flash drive. before i started taking the imac for a test run, i downloaded OSX sierra and installed it. i first tried the app store but it failed to download completely. i had to manually grab the disc image from apple's server and run the .pkg file from the .dmg image to create and run the installer.

the sound on this imac is pretty amazing. very deep bass, very loud. the screen is big enough that i can run two browser windows side-to-side. the screen is also super bright, i had it set at maximum brightness initially, but put it back to auto-brightness because it was hurting my eyes. my father and i watched some 4K taiwanese travel videos (from youtube) and they looked pretty amazing on the 5K display. it did tax the imac just a little bit, and we heard the fan kick it, but it was faint (nowhere as loud as the 2007 imac) and stopped immediately after we paused the video. we also used the wider screen to properly surf temu.com and ended up buying another $60 worth of cheap merchandise. only then did we finally give the imac to my mother. she liked that there was an annoyingly loud fan noise, and said the 27-inch screen was much clearer than her old 24-inch screen.

my aunt called my father in the evening. judging from what my father was saying, i could already guess what happened: my aunt had contracted covid. so far matthew has tested negative. my aunt thinks she contracted it when she went to the waltham mulan for dinner over the weekend.

i finally returned to cambridge around 8:30pm. temperature was right around 40 degrees but it wasn't too bad, it'd been warmer earlier (in the 50's) and only now was the temperature dropping. after a shower, i did some more cyber monday shopping. i got a roku streaming stick for my sister ($25), a levoit 300s air purifier for my mother ($105, the same one i have), and two levoit 200s humidifiers ($48 each), one for my 2nd aunt, one for my father. originally i got the levoit 300s humidifier ($70) but cancelled it when i realized there was a different version in blue instead of grey ($72), so i got that instead. but then i did some more research, and found about the 200s series humidifier. it's very similar to the 300s in functionality (wifi app, humidistat, humidity level display screen), just has a smaller tank, which is actually good, because we don't need a 6L tank. the only thing i don't like about it is the tank is semi-transparent, not clear like in the 300s. but $24 less expensive, it was cheap enough to get two, which is what i did.

i finished the evening getting a corner shelf countertop organizer ($15) for the cafe work table, and some TOCOL-brand glass screen protectors ($8) for the pixel 7, to go with the discounted ZAGG crystal palace clear pixel 7 case ($10) i bought last night. i'm afraid to look at my credit card account, i think in total i must've spent $1500 over the past few days.