Author Archives: pappp

KiCad and Wayland Support

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I've been daily driving a Plasma/Wayland session for some time, but "These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight." really rings true. It's still missing shit that is expected for practical desktops for decades, and the ideological fights, fake security arguments, and bikeshedding about it seems endless.
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Retrobootstrapping Rust for some reason

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's an interesting effort for any toolchain, but especially so for rust that is frequently self-incompatible. Also, reinforces something I notice ever more in computing: Debian is forever. Need to set up a box doing some job that you only lay hands on for a couple hours a year for decades? Debian. Need to spin a VM matching the state of a mainline OS 15 years ago? Debian. Need to bring up old hardware with a modern-ish environment? Debian.
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Reddit user surprised when 1960s computer panel emerged from collapsed family garage

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: What a neat barn find.

Recently, a Reddit user discovered a rare RCA Spectra 70/35 computer control panel from 1966 in their family's old collapsed garage, posting photos of the pre-moon landing mainframe component to the "retrobattlestations" subreddit that celebrates vintage computers. After cleaning the panel and fixing most keyswitches, the original poster noted that actually running it would require "1,500lbs of mainframe"—the rest of the computer system that's missing.

As it turns out, the panel had been sitting in the garage for decades without the poster's knowledge. "In short my house is a two-family, my dad used to rent out the other half before I was born," explained SonOfADeadMeme in the thread on Friday. "One of the people who rented out the apartment worked at IBM (apparently the RCA Spectra 70's were compatible with IBM sets from the time) and shortly before he left he shown up with a forklift and left something in the garage."

A view of the RCA Spectra 70/35 computer control panel before (right) and after (left) its owner cleaned it up. A view of the RCA Spectra 70/35 computer control panel before (right) and after (left) its owner cleaned it up. Credit: SonOfaDeadMeme / Reddit

The equipment remained hidden for decades due to the deteriorating condition of the structure. "The garage was very dilapidated and has since collapsed so no one bothered going in. Fast forward a few decades and I found the RCA terminal and a crate labeled 'Return to IBM San Jose,'" SonOfADeadMeme wrote. They speculated the unidentified IBM component in the crate was "something power supply related" but noted they hadn't examined it closely due to their basement being "jam-packed with stuff."

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CP/M 2.2, CP/M 3.0, CP/M-86, Concurrent CP/M-86 listings by Digital Research

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat! It'd, of course, be nice if they were source not scanned PDFs, and included MP/M and various other details, but published original source of historically significant software is always a good thing.
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Windows 7: a 2025 perspective (rose-tinted or not)

Source: OSNews

Article note: I did the OOTB experience with a new consumer-class (Ideapad) laptop running Windows 11 in the last few days. It's _unimaginably_ bad. The "Welcome" process is a series of updates, followed by clicking through a fire-hose of unwanted features like "No, No, What?! No! No. Never. No. Gotta fix that. Where did they hide? No." followed by another series of updates that happen partially in the background and make the computer wonky during fist use. Some of the preinstalled crapware or updates or a bad vendor image or something on this example self-destructed so badly after a few hours it required a reinstall. Repair attempts involved repeatedly typing out a long encryption unlock key that can be extracted from Microsoft online so does little against a real adversary, somehow capturing most of the downsides of FDE and no encryption at once, after which it would do nothing (because somehow it corrupted its ESP?) and repeat. Windows media is now apparently twitchy about how it is imaged and you get _bootable but buggy_ media if you just image an iso to a flash drive like we've done for decades, so you have to make your Windows media with a piece of Windows-only media creation software. I had to inject drivers (randomly downloaded from the internet, albeit at least from Lenovo) from an extra flash drive by bringing up a command prompt with a magic key combination to run an installer during install to get it online so it could finish the install... I haven't had to do that shit with a Linux installer in like 20 years. Unless you're _very_ attentive, once installed your user storage is on OneDrive in a way that will unexpectedly upload everything you touch to Microsoft then start breaking the instant you use any meaningful amount of storage in your user folder. It's not rose-tinted glasses, Windows 7 was peak Windows. Windows 8 was a flail toward things the rapidly expanding mobile market were doing, trying to catch the already departed bus by copying it, Windows 10 was just-tolerable because they hadn't figured out how to maximally enshittify, and 11 is an aggressive enshittification engine that happens to boot on top of an NT kernel. For compatibility and not-being-instantly-added-to-a-botnet reasons, you probably shouldn't try to daily Windows 7... but you shouldn't try to daily Windows 11 either. No wonder my students' machines are always fucked up.

Quite often, I wonder how much nostalgia plays part in our perception of past events. Luckily, with software, you can go “back” and retest it, and so there’s no need for any illusions and misconceptions. To wit, I decided to reinstall and try Windows 7 again (as a virtual machine, but still), to see whether my impressions of the dross we call “modern” software today are justified.

↫ Igor Ljubuncic

The conclusion is that, yes, you can still get quite far today with Windows 7, and I honestly don’t fault anyone for longing for those days. Windows 7 sits dead smack in the middle between the dreadfulness of Windows XP and pre-patches Vista on one extreme, and the ad-infested, “AI”-slop that are Windows 10 and 11. Its Aero look also happens to be experiencing somewhat of a revival, with both Apple and Google borrowing heavily from it for their latest software releases. Transparent blurred glass is making a comeback, but I doubt the current crop of designers at Apple and Google will be able to top just how nice Aero Glass looked in Windows 7.

Still, I don’t think you should be using an out-of-support version of Windows for anything more than retrocomputing and as a curiosity, for obvious reasons we’re all aware of. With the end of support for Windows 10 – still used by two-thirds of Window users – approaching quickly, a lot of people are going to have to make the same choice that fans of Windows 7 made years ago: keep using what I like, risks and all, or move on to what I don’t like, but is at least maintained and supported? That is, assuming you can even make that choice in the first place, since in the current economic uncertainty, most definitely cannot.

Maybe the Windows world will dodge a bullet, and the circumstances force Microsoft to extend support for Windows 10, like they did with Office applications. Let’s see if they blink, again.

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Bill Atkinson has died

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Aw, sad. He's _way_ up there in the list of influential folks for microcomputers, and was by all reports generally a neat dude.
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Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The rustled bro-jimmies in the HN thread are pretty funny.
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Switch 2 rooted on day 1

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Shown exploit isn't root (or even arbitrary code execution), but they did cobble a little drawing-a-user-controlled-graphic PoC by doing ROP in the userspace... less than 5 hours after release.
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New book uncovers radical networks that existed before the internet

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: I'm so excited for this to drop. Reading Writing Interfaces was delightful, I've read (and once or twice left notes on) her Internet postings preparing this one, and the content is right up my alley.
Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook by Lori Emerson

Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, by Lori Emerson, is a new book that looks at alternative communication systems that existed outside mainstream channels. The illustrated book has examples like messages bounced off the moon's surface and telegraph signals sent through barbed wire telegraph. — Read the rest

The post New book uncovers radical networks that existed before the internet appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Endangered classic Mac plastic color returns as 3D-printer filament

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Neat! There's a substantial demand for small-volume retro replacement parts that 3D printing is perfect for, nice to see us being served. ...I wonder how it looks with RAL 7044 that people sometimes use as a paint match.
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