This is totally unscientific, but somewhat interesting (to me) as far as how people ‘search’ their way to this uh ‘exciting’ blog…
People actually use Bing? (Because it’s not google?)… And yes, I know the video is fake, but it is still funny.
Is it Friday yet? Somewhere?
I don’t think it was me specifically but my hosting company got hit hard.
Needless to say I’m finally up right now. Â I had a monthly backup scheme going, clearly I’ve got to get something going daily ….
I’ve also found a company down the road from me that can colo for ~ $100 a month which I may jump on as I’d like to host a bunch of stuff in a semi reliable manner, and having an 8 core / 16GB machine to do it would be nice.
I have no idea how it will react to mods that try to correct this rush job of a game, but it is nice that it finally got pushed out..
Anyways its $10 USD, and sadly Windows only. Â I will have to try it under emulation sometime.
There! Done!
Trust me if you’ve ever attempted this, then you know not only just how difficult this whole process is, but to not only get it working was a major accomplishment!
And I only lost ONE of the screws.. Sigh they are just too small, I finally broke down and got an eye glass repair kit after losing one of them (no idea where it went to, I shook the case like crazy then it stopped rattling, so its either wedged somewhere good, or I’ve thrown it somewhere around here….). Â The trick was to use a small plastic sleeve to jam the screw almost all the way in, with enough of the stem showing so I could carefully get a few twists of the tread into the hole…
But of course I didn’t start it out that way, instead I thought it’d be easier to clip on the antennas to the wifi card (BCM94311MCAG) first, then slip it into its slot, then screw it down, but since it goes in at an angle, it forces itself up & out so you end up fighting it. Â This is where I lost the one screw during installation. Â The ‘trick’ was to use my iphone’s camera light so I could see what I was doing, then try to press down on the wifi card while trying to screw in the board using one of the plastic sleeve things from the repair kit. Â Surprisingly after enough false starts I got it to thread and was able to finish screwing it in with the driver.
The Bluetooth module (A1115) was much easier, as it is just a simple daughter card, that you just push onto the board, then screw in. Â Because its not actively resisting you, it was much easier to get into place, and screw in…. I just hope mine lasts ok as its only got the one screw.
As always have a clean work area, and take your time. Â Working with stuff this insanely small is going to take longer than you expect..
I was looking around for a new backup solution for my blog, now that EZPZ stopped working and seems to have disappeared from the world, and hit this excellent post.
Its a nice bash script that uses curl to upload files into your dropbox account!
Totally easy to setup, and totally neat!
CRAY-1A and a bazillion tapes!!
I came across this tumblr, System/360 that has all kinds of great retro iron pictures!
So on the heels of my prior post, someone was asking me, where do you exactly plug in an RJ-45 style cable to something like an Etherlink II?  It had never occured to me that many people today would have no idea what thicknet/thinnet were, or what the magical world of the AUI port is.. Sure there are transceivers still in use, but typically in larger networking equipment, and more so to choose what king of fiber optics to use (single mode? multimode? etc..).
So looking at the back of the card, we see this:
It’s not a joystick port!
Sorry for the poor quality but.. thems the breaks.  So anyways back in the day ethernet revolved around this big bulky cabling lovingly called Thicknet.  And you had to use these ‘vampire’ taps to plug into the cable, and the cable had markings that you could only tap into it a certain points.  So luckily for us, the transceiver component of Thicknet was external, letting us in the future plug in different transceivers for different media types.
Say something like this:
3Com rj45Â transceiver
And that is how you can plug a cable into a card that is older than the rj45 ethernet standard!
I had to lookup the mkdisttap.pl script, and luckily they were back in action.
phew.
No, really!
You can get an account, just sign up here!
Sander Reiche has setup a MicroPDP-11/83 with the following specs:
So far there are FOUR users.. which means you can get in on the action for sure!
For those of you who want a sandboxed version at home, you can download my install here, which of course I touched on a while back.
For those unfamiliar, here is what retrochallenge is all about!
Sadly I don’t have anything physical around here that really qualifies. Â A G5 mac is too new, and I recently picked up a Pentium 150 based IBM Aptiva, but its too new apparently….
It looks almost religious doesn’t it?
I just received this note from the HECnet mailing list, and I thought I’d broadcast it out..
This is a shameless plug for something I and the Update Computer Club have been working on this spring and opened yesterday. The exhibition "Three Tons of Minicomputers" at Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala, Sweden. http://www.gustavianum.uu.se/node13 We have collected computers primarily used by the university at some point in time. Highlights include a Linc-8 and a DECSYSTEM-2060 with peripherals. Here are some pictures from the opening: http://www.update.uu.se/~jeppe/tmp/vernissage/ I strongly recommend anyone nearby Uppsala this summer to take a swing by Gustavianum. If you want a guided tour, let me know and we'll figure something out. It's only open for a few months, so don't wait to long. Regards, Pontus.
I don’t know when I’ll be in Europe next, but now I really want to go to Sweden!