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MS Flight Simulator 2024: Around the World update 3: East Coast US heading West

I haven’t posted any updates since my last post in December when I arrived in on the East coast of Canada since there was a few hours of not too much to report, at least in the way of interesting screen shots, so this post is a catch up.

I had terrible scenery streaming experience across most of East coast of Canada, so unfortunately most of the scenery was not particularly interesting and was rendered with low detail:

I’m flying with live weather though, so there was lots of snow:

I did take a detour to fly over the Niagara Falls, but I’m not sure where my screenshots at that time saved to, so I might have to do a followup post from my flight over that area.

Flying towards Cleveland around the edge of Lake Erie was a highlight, with some spectacular weather:

“Hello Cleveland!” :

Of course I had to stop and get some pics of the Rock and Roll Museum:

On reaching Chicago I had to take slight detour to see Meigs Field, which in MSFS 2024 is apparently under some water right now:

From Chicago I decided if I was heading West, I might as well follow the path of Route 66. Unfortunately from the air, I had a few hours of very flat scenery:

It wasn’t until getting close to Albuquerque that I started to see anything other than completely flat landscape for miles:

At least from this point continuing West the scenery should start to get more interesting. The current plan is to continue to LA, then I’ll fly North up the West coast, and will head across to Russia from Alaska.

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Mac Pro 3,1 with OpenCore Legacy Patcher – not much success

I previously shared that I was attempting to upgrade my 2008 Mac Pro to a later version of MacOS using OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Unfortunately I had zero success. I tried initially with Big Sur, but I couldn’t get it to boot OpenCore from the USB stick, so at the point from Recovery when I tried to install it said it wasn’t supported on this Mac. Tried following multiple guides but no luck.

I tried stepping backwards through previous versions – Catalina installed but core dumped on booting. Mojave core dumped when booting the installer.

I don’t have a tremendous urgency to upgrade this Mac, it’s getting a bit slow with Chrome on current websites, so I went to eBay and this happened instead:

I picked up a rather well spec’d Mac Pro 2013 for £270, and other than it took a week for it to arrive, it seems to be running pretty well so far.

So now the question is do I try and use OpenCore again to install something beyond Monterey? I think I’ll enjoy Monterey for a while and maybe play around with some different versions in VMs instead 🙂

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Upgrading 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 from El Capitan to Big Sur with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

I’ve been running El Capitan, the last officially supported MacOS version on my 2008 Mac Pro for several years. A couple of years back I dipped a toe into using OpenCore Legacy Patcher‘s boot picker to dual boot Proxmox from a separate drive, which has worked well.

It hasn’t been without some GPU related stress though, as at some point between changing monitors (I no longer have the previous monitor to go back to), it was outputting a resolution that wasn’t supported by my new 4k monitor and I couldn’t get a boot screen to appear to be able to select between MacOS or Proxmox, so it was stuck booting Proxmox by default and I ran it headless. This wasn’t too much of an issue as I mainly use the machine for running dev/test VMs and use it as my locally hosted GitLab server.

I did manage to get the resolution issue fixed by remote VNC’ing into the machine while there was no monitor output and change the resolution. Note to self, make sure you have ssh and VNC installed when working with temperamental old hardware.

The only other issue that’s been bothering me for a while is the discontinued support for Chrome updates on old MacOS versions:

10.13 is High Sierra. If I’m going to do something drastic and go for a major unsupported upgrade, I might as well go for the latest version I can install with it still be usable. Opinions vary for the Mac Pro 3,1 but I decided to go with 11, Big Sur:

Fingers crossed. I do have 2 bootable drives with MacOS in this Mac, so if the OpenCore boot picker doesn’t get hosed, I should be at least able to boot El Cap from a second drive and recover from there if needed:

  • ssd 1: El Cap: this is the one I’ll reinstall with OpenCore Legacy Patcher and Big Sur
  • ssd 2: Proxmox
  • hdd 1: El Cap

Hopefully the next update I’ll be able to comment on how successful the install went …

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Importing a Hetzner VM into a new Terraform template

I’m creating a new VM on Hetzner that I want to manage with Terraform, but this is the first time I’ve used the Hetzner Provider. Rather than stumble through the required options for a new VM, I used the -generate-config-out option with terraform plan to generate the Terraform config for me based on the currrent config.

Here’s my starting point for my main.tf:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    hcloud = {
      source  = "hetznercloud/hcloud"
      version = "~> 1.45"
    }
  }
}


# Set the variable value in *.tfvars file
# or using the -var="hcloud_token=..." CLI option
variable "hcloud_token" {
  sensitive = true
}

# Configure the Hetzner Cloud Provider
provider "hcloud" {
  token = var.hcloud_token
}

import {
  id = "name-of-my-hertzner-vm"
  to = hcloud_server.name-of-my-new-terraform-resource
}

On running:

terraform plan -generate-config-out=generated.tf

I now have the equivalent Terraform config for my VM, in generated.tf, and now I can include this in my main.tf and manage it incrementally via Terraform from this point onwards.

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