linker3000

I was a systems engineer and also taught NetWare admin classes. I also worked with Novell to update their training material.

I remember the first release of NetWare 386 very well; it was a breeze to install, but the early version had a bug and if you unplugged the 10Base2 coax from the server it would crash. Apparently, the routine to display a warning message on the console had an issue. Novell issued a patch NLM.

I had one site that experienced random crashes, but it was not the aforementioned bug. Long story short: After about two months of sleuthing, working with Novell and Compaq, camping on site and driving to/from the office to site (about 2hr each way), I found that it was a mains spike caused by a dishwasher right up against the server room wall in the next room.

The fix was to move the Compaq server, which was actually a large desktop model, on its table to the opposite end of the server room.

The biggest mistake is not ringfencing this update in a test environment before sign-off for general deployment.

I bumped into this ageing hippy (grey hair, cheesecloth shirt, pony tail, shorts and sandals), in Frys (East Brokaw Road) during one of my trips from the UK to the USA.

He was a really nice guy and wanted help choosing some kind of adapter for his mac laptop.

We got chatting about why I was in San Jose, Western Digital being in the old IBM buildings, what I did for work etc., and then he mentioned that he was one of the early day SV computer crew and hung out with other members of the The Homebrew Computer Club. He also said his brother played Spanish guitar at a restaurant in Mountain View and recommended the food!

He finished off with "...yeah, I knew Steve Jobs quite well - boy, he could be a dick at times!"

Following on from my story elsewhere about working for HGST (Western Digital), visiting HQ in San Jose from the UK and making it to Halted a couple of times...

...then WD acquired Sandisk and I found myself in Utah for tech training, and made a trip to Raelco.

Boy was that place a tight squeeze to navigate!

I'm from the UK and used to work for HGST (Owned, then assimilated, by Western Digital) and used to travel to SJ 2-3 times a year for specialist tech training and business briefings.

I made it to Halted a couple of times and would spend a good few hours hunting around for bits and pieces. I saw some lovely test gear and other things that were just not compatible (logistics and cash-wise) with air travel.

I did however pick up a pristine TS1000 (Sinclair ZX81) with 16K RAM cartridge that was hiding in a plan box, for $15.

It was sad when Halted closed - we've nothing like that in the UK, at least in my region.

Try the free VPN built into Opera Browser.

Best add 'solder' to your shopping list unless you already have some, or the new iron you buy comes with a starter amount.

Had to look it up...

The Rabbit r1 is a ChatGPT based personal assistant device developed by tech startup Rabbit Inc,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_r1

So not an adult toy (Rule 34 excepting)

Used MB ejection seats were re-used in flight sims.

When I worked in the industry (electronics eng), I saw one in either a Jaguar or Tornado sim under construction and it had a brass plaque on the side naming the pilot and day of activation, along the lines of "On [DATE], [PILOT], ejected safely from their aircraft in this seat."

Actually, I think it was me asking "Show me an example of a major systems outage at Microsoft."

/Bets on "If it's not DNS, they'll be rolling back a poorly-tested patch they just installed."?

Looking forward to iAI, eh!?

That article seemed to be mostly about hand-wavy workarounds for subscription-based services.

I presume the author hasn't heard of the well-established, Open Source Zoneminder project, which has excellent camera and data management functionality in a self-hostable Linux environment.

https://zoneminder.com/

> I've even been banned for posting in an unrelated subreddit.

This is against the mod rules and deserves reporting.

I found some old Turbo Pascal code I wrote in the late 1980s - early 1990s and managed to compile and run it under a DOS emulator a few years back.

The code is a map editor for the Rockford ('Boulderdash') PC game. Unfortunately, the versions of Rockford in the wild, for download and online play, seem to be based on a later game engine and the map format has changed so the editor no longer works.

The code was designed to produce registered and un-registered versions, but I never released it into the wild.

If anyone has a copy of the original Rockford game version I'd love to know about it.

https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...

Print out the current time in words.

A DOS .COM program ~390 bytes.

https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...

I have an MPS-801 dot matrix printer for my Commodore 64. The biggest challenge is buying listing paper at a sensible price.

/Also have a Panasonic KX-P1124, but it weighs a ton and I've no room to keep it out so it lives in a cupboard for now.

Yeah, but lots of denim dungarees - all you'd see is Felicity's head and hands.

Chuckles hysterically and twiddles mustach...er..full symmetrical gigabit fibre to the home from a regional provider.

Moved from Plusnet (BT owned) 65/20Mbit (I think?) FTTC

OK on my Watch4 Classic FWIW.

We're of a similar age. I had to make do with 1152 bytes on the school's Acorn System Ones - until the CBM (PET) 3016 arrived.

If you want to see some candle flicker code based on a PIC12F508 or 9 see below.

The flicker effect is based on a linear feedback shift register function to provide a pseudo random effect.

https://github.com/linker3000/CandleFlameSim

I was looking for some context between bottled and tap water and found this. Any better sources?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9103198/

Happens to (potential) castle designers too.

This structure was built as a showpiece. It's about 5 miles from where I live and sits alone atop a tall hill. It's a very atmospheric place.

https://www.lovethesouthdowns.org.uk/places/hiorne-tower

There's also a Z80 build.

https://rc2014.co.uk/1865/crayzee-eighty/

First thing that came to mind was how much rf noise as does this thing generate, and might it be an issue for comms?

Nothing I could see in the docs or FAQ.

It's the 'Supermarket bacon' method of enshittification. The normal product heads towards lower quality until the vendor can then sell one that's closer to the original, but call it a premium item, and charge more for it.

May I interest you in a game of Snake for that.

https://github.com/linker3000/Z80-Board/blob/master/snake.pa...

Well, if that's their rules, it's a choice.

If you pick up a free newspaper on a commmute, or, say, a community "What's on" sponsored by ads, does someone look over your shoulder and insist you read every ad before they let you turn the page?

My initial reaction is that this is yet another place in a growing list for retro stuff, and many of the very active retro people are already sharing news and interesting links on Reddit, Xitter, Bluesky and the Fediverse; for example, I see Ken Shirriff is well represented on OP's site, but I am following him and others, and converse directly with them, on the socials anyway.

The saving grace is that, as an aggregator, there's an rss feed so the site contents can come my way rather than needing to go have a looksee, however I am more likely to comment elsewhere where I have an established account rather than create yet another one to use and manage for yet another site to visit.