After my last post about OpenStep 4.2 on my ThinkPad 560E, one of the dangling TODO items was figuring out why the network setup that was made of all known-working parts didn’t work. I’ve now figured it out.
[TL:DR: The OpenStep 4.2 Etherlink III driver does a bad job with PnP and Media Autodetect on 3C589 cards. To make one work you will probably need to use 3Com’s DOS configuration utility to configure the EEPROM in the card.]
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I’ve now tried out a few of the things I bought the Thinkpad 506E I posted about a while ago to try, and there are some interesting notes to share before the semester gets underway and I run out of energy again.
I decided amid some resultant discussions (Hi HN!) from my last post on this machine to give myself a conduct of not physically opening the hardware while I play with it, unless the HDD dies or the like. Doing so is making me exercise some long-dormant skills, which has been extremely fun.
So far I’ve amassed a pile of compatible accessories, booted into NetBSD and imaged off the original HDD contents, installed OpenStep 4.2, fixed the drivers, updated to Patch4, and very briefly taken it online before an irritating networking problem arose. I’ve also run into a problem getting RhapsodyDR2 on, which will likely be the next time-sink.
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I’ve been running a TP-Link Archer C7 flashed with OpenWRT at home since early 2016 (and a TP-Link 1043ND with OpenWRT for years before that), but since I moved into my current place over the summer it has been falling over every couple weeks. It hasn’t been logging anything (I have a flash drive mounted that it persistent logs to) but goes down until hard reset, most likely just because of the load of two heavy stream/video-conference/file-sync users (…and probably not because of my kitten chewing on the antennas. Probably.) Rather than updating/diagnosing I decided that was a good excuse for a new faster router.
TL;DR: The Asus RT-ACRH13 is an excellent current-production OpenWRT host for ~$65 with only minor install challenges, and represents a significant upgrade over the Archer C7.
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A not long ago there was some noise in places I follow about Zynq FPGA boards surplussed from their role as controllers in retired cryptocurrency mining rigs, for way less than the price of even the bare FPGA SoC. I impulse bought one EBAZ4205 from “College Shop Store” on Aliexpress for $19.08 shipped to try them out, since it seems to to be the most common and documented flavor, and it showed up yesterday. Short version: they look awesome for the price.
Continue readingI got one of the free-with-YouTube-Premium Stadia Premiere kit + Pro trials just out of curiosity (since I’m waiting to cancel until Play Music actually stops working, and why say no to $100 of free toys), and after playing for it for an evening, while I’m very technically impressed … I’m completely baffled as to why anyone would pay for this thing, or especially “buy” individual games on it.
It is fast and surprisingly responsive, and the (insane) distributed “phone or computer + controller + Chomecast all talk to the internet and also to Bluetooth and manage to stay in sync” wizardry is an amazing technical achievement, as is the low-latency, reasonably low-artifact streaming.
…but the subscription/rental library is tiny, expensive, and non-portable. It sucks a massive amount of bandwidth (it seemed to be holding at about 20-25Mbit/s down during my AAA test). The fact that I need a minimum of three independent devices (since you can’t do most of the configuration or library management with the controller + Chromecast) to play on the TV is awkward, and the layers of account management and device syncing are pretty wonky for a single user, I can’t imagine dealing with it in a multi-user household.
I played a little bit of Celeste (as an input lag test; it was not half bad, though playing it on a controller is not my preference), a little bit of Hitman (To see how heavy duty graphical games would do), and a little The Gardens Between (hadn’t played it, in my Pro trial, looked neat) – and they worked, but nothing about the experience was particularly compelling.
The whole free-kit-for-Premium-subscribers thing feels like a desperate attempt to dump their hardware stock to build enough user base to recoup the back-end costs for another doomed Google product that will die as soon as the current back end ages out and the workforce moves on to career-advancing shiny new things – after Buzz, Reader, Plus, Play Music, the steady churn of ever-worse chat tools, and half a dozen other products that were useful enough to take all the air out of a market before being unceremoniously dumped Google has lost all credibility for paid rentals or ecosystem investment.
All the freebie premiere kits are going to be Goodwill gold in a couple years though – the controllers are decent (Not $70 decent, but decent) and seem to work as normal HID devices, and there are two nice USB power bricks with cables in there.
I ran into a delightful irony trying to help a student get set up for the embedded systems lab I’m running this semester: Neither Keil MDK ARM (a first-class ARM development environment) nor the Stellaris ICDI Drivers (TI’s programming/debug interface … Continue reading
I’ve been idly looking for one of the mid-90s ThinkPads known to have perfect OpenStep/Rhapsody support for years as a fun collector piece, but been unwilling to pay eBay prices. The other week I scored a pristine IBM ThinkPad 560E for $20 in a Shopgoodwill auction, below is notes on getting it up and running, plus some relevant history and plans.
Continue readingThis post is a retro post on a retro topic – a repair I did in 2017 on a monitor made in 1991. I got a question about (probably) the same problem in another venue and realized I never put it online. I managed to dig up my pictures and notes, so there is useful information to be shared.
The end of my (2016) post about Recapping my Macintosh LC I discovered that my matching Apple 12″ Macintosh RGB Monitor ( M1296 ) was going pear-shaped, and speculated that I’d need to recap it.
Continue readingI have a machine with SSH exposed on one high-numbered nonstandard port forwarded through a NAT. A few days ago I noticed some log noise about failed SSH logins and turned on fail2ban with sane defaults. It banned almost 300 … Continue reading
I had my dear old Macintosh SE out for a health check as I slowly extract my vintage computer collection from the (unconditioned) place I’ve been keeping it at my parents house to the basement of the place I’m renting. It had a couple interesting findings that seem worth putting online, including another floppy drive rebuild and a slightly elaborate fan replacement.
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