Mr Trashman, bring me a... mac mini?
Tue, 06 Feb 2024
Environmentalism, Technology
====================================

Just the other day, I took a trip (less than 15 meters) to the
local e-waste disposal site. Unfortunately, the screen of my
ereader broke a while back. After letting my old friend collect
dust for a month or so, I decided to finally put him to rest and
commit him to the recycling bin.

While I was there however, something caught my attention from the
corner of my eye: an Apple mac mini. It looked in pretty good
condition, so I decided to take it home to see if I could repair
it, or otherwise strip it for parts. Luckily, the previous owner
had thrown away the power cord as well, so i took that too.

Upon getting home, I hooked the mac up to the only HDMI display
in my house: The living room TV and pressed the power button.
Much to my surprise, the machine started up straight away and I
was greeted by Mac OSX snow leopard. Yea... This thing was pretty
old, but I'll get back to that later.

The system logged in automatically, and I was greeted by the
classic purple galaxy background and a desktop filled with
someone else's personal files. I set my sights on factory
resetting the mac, as I felt it rather unethical to dig through
the other person's accounts and files. Resting the mac proved
rather difficult, as I had no password, and the recovery
partition was missing.

No matter, I happen to know a little trick for breaking in to
macs from the time when I used to have a macbook (which, much
like this mac mini, was also from 2010). Simply enter the shell
during startup by holding command+S, mount the disk and remove
the file /var/db/.applesetupdone. This allows you to make a new
administrator account on the next startup. Which, may I just say,
is a stupidly easy way of bypassing password protections,
especially on a product made by a company which prides itself on
security. I will just assume that this exploit is fixed in later
versions of OSX.

Anyway, now that I had an admin account, I could start exploring
the OS. The first thing I noticed was that basically the entire
internet was not working. Or rather https was not working. Safari
gave me very helpful error messages such as ``failed to
establish a connection to ...'' while Chrome told me the clock
was set wrong (it wasn't). The problem was of course that the
certificates expired, since the OS was not updated in over a
decade.

I managed to get the certificates from curl, and add to the
keycain using a little shell script. At this point I did realize
why the original owner thew the thing away though. This is not a
problem that is easy to diagnose for a non-tech-savvy person, let
alone fix.

Next, I started looking for a more up-to-date browser. The
version of safari on this thing could not render most modern web
pages (though of course my website and many other small-web
pages loaded just fine). I found a number of discontinued
projects before settling on Interweb. This one was also
discontinued, though it was the most recently updated one.

After all of that the OS works... Not great exactly. It is
remarkably snappy given how many animations and shaders the
desktop environment has, but the software stack from 2010 is just
not usable, at this point it is just a DVD player.

I will probably try to get Linux running, and I did see an some
DDR3 ram sticks for sale second hand for only around 10 euros, so
I might see if this could be a capable enough little media
server.  If not, a media server, I might set it up with ssh and
just run the thing headless. Having a non-cloud based wireless
backup for my thesis and other important documents would be nice,
even if it is on spinning rust. Now that I think about it, that
would be very simple to do, even under OSX.