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| This photo provided by the U.S. Secret Service, in New York, Monday, Sept. 22,2025, shows signal euqipment at the location where they were seized by the agency. (U.S. Secret Service via AP) AP |
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| Doonesbury September 29, 2024 |
Borepatch posted about a guy who got Linux to run a 4004 microprocessor. My response to this foolishness is the above tune. But then SiGraybeard wonders if the 4004 can actually do anything useful, which got me to wondering. I mean, the stupidest microcontroller I ever dealt with was Intel's 8051 and comparing it to a 4004 is like comparing a Cadillac to a kid's tricycle. So what was it used for? Somebody asked this question on Quora and got a boatload of answers. I liked these:
Intel 4004 was the first commercially available microprocessor. This 4-bit microchip was released in 1971 and was mainly designed by Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima. It was designed for use in calculators, automated teller machines and cash machines. - Odysseus Hoang
Basically Intel realised they were having to reinvent the wheel for every calculator manufacturer that came along with a different specification for a new device.
They decided it would be better to create a processor with a fixed set of instructions, with the new functionality to be provided by the code burnt into ROM. Future changes can be accommodated by changing the code in the ROM, not a total redesign of the chip. - John Stephenson
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| ASUS 27” 1080P Video Conference Monitor |
Bought a cheap computer off of E-Bay ($60) and a used monitor off of Amazon ($70). The monitor supposedly had some blemishes but I did not find any. I intend to load Linux on the computer but right now it has Windows 10 and it works so I'm using it.
.jpg) |
| Dell Optiplex 790 USFF Quad Core i5 Windows 10 |
The first problem I have is that every time I adjust the volume it beeps at me. Because Windows has settings for everything I thought surely there is a way to disable this annoying beeping, and there may be, but in all of my searching I have not found it. Oh, there are dedicated followers of fashion who have solutions, but disabling all system sounds or downloading code is not something I want to do to solve this stupid problem. The one workaround I found that seems to work is to use the scroll wheel on the mouse. That will change the volume and it won't beep. Death to Windows.
The next problem I ran into is I open Files and I see some files I want to delete, but I can't. WTF? I can't because this is Quick Access which is somehow special. Effing Windows.
Third problem, and this one is not just a Windows problem, is I open an image and I see that I don't want or need it, so I want to delete it, but I can't. I have to close the image, go back to Files, locate the problem child and now I can delete it. Locating the file is not a problem if there are only a few files in the directory, but if you have zillions of images, and you've been stepping through them for a while, locating the problem child can be annoying.
I have this problem with Google Drive as well. Over there I deal with this by renaming the file to Delete Me. Now I don't have to worry about where it is stored. If it shows up in the current list of files, great, but if it is buried somewhere else, it's still okay. If it ever shows up in a directory listing I can just delete it without bothering to look at it. Could be a problem if someone else had access to my computer, but no one in my family has shown any interest in what's on my computer, so I'm not too worried. Of course, you always need to be on the lookout for North Korean agents. They are constantly breaking into my house in the middle of the night and moving my shit around. Dad burn commies.
This morning I'm sitting at my computer playing silly computer games and I hear this noise. It sounds like someone running a vacuum cleaner upstairs or maybe a leaf blower outside or a fan or something. Finish my game and look around trying to identify the sound and I realize it's coming from my new computer - the cooling fan is running to beat the band. What the heck is going on? What program is running that using so much processing power that it requires maximum cooling? All I have running is the Microsoft Edge browser with four tabs open, one for each of my silly games. What is going on? Well, let's close the browser and see what happens. The fan and the noise stop. Weird, man.
I've been thinking about text editors, Aedit in particular. Aedit was like the first text editor I really got to know. This was back in the early 1980s and we were using Intel blue box development machines that the company was renting from Intel for the astronomical price of a thousand dollars a month, least ways that's the way I remember it.
I kept using Aedit when I went to work for Intel. I spent, I dunno, five or ten years using it. Then Windows came on the scene with their fancy schmantzy bullshit and I got to learn a whole new way way or ruining my life.
So here we are 30 years later and I am still pining for my lost Aedit text editor. Then I got to thinking that I should probably just write my own. I mean, how tough can it be? So now I'm thinking about this and I start thinking about different ways of storing text in memory. Do we do it by the line, or maybe strings, or just as one big block of text? This leads to the question of how do you handle the case where the text it too large to fit in memory? Kind of an unlikely scenario, I know, given the amount of memory modern computers have, but Aedit ran in like 64KB and could Handle any size file. Well, any size you could fit on a disk and our 8 inch hard disks were only 10MB. I do remember tackling files that were over one megabyte and Aedit did not complain. It might have gotten a little slow, but it handled the file just fine. So now I'm wondering how would I handle a multi-terabyte file. That is probably a ridiculous case, but if you are going to allow a program to handle large files, someone is going to push it to the limit, so you need to be prepared.
And then I thought: I wonder if maybe somebody else has already done this, and lo and behold, they have:
Port of Aedit to C
Using the source of Aedit shared on https://github.com/abiliojr/aedit.git, the code here is an attempt to port from PLM to C and to support newer operating systems.
So now I have another reason to get myself in gear and get a new Linux box and get away from this stinky Chromebox.
I am gearing up mentally to tackle setting up another Linux computer. Just like anything else in modern life, there are a number of hoops you have to go through, which makes me wonder is it really any more difficult than dealing with a medical insurance claim?
One of the first obstacles you have to surmount is partitioning the hard disk. Linux wants to divide the disk into two or three separate sections. One is for the the space you and the operating system will share, one is for swap space and another is because disks these days are friggin' huge, so we're just going to chop off the back 40 in case we take on some durn fool project that wants a bunch of dedicated space. Probably not going to happen, but whatever.
How do you explain this to someone who isn't familiar with the intricacies of modern computer systems? How about pages? Computer hard drives are typically divided into pages, much like the land for a city is divided into lots. Each page holds 4K (4096) bytes, which is roughly enough for one page of text in a book. A disk with a capacity of one terabyte (one trillion bytes) could hold 250 million computer pages, each of which could hold one page of a book. If a typical book has 250 pages, your one terabyte disk could hold one million books.
Pictures are another story. A printed picture may have a resolution of 1,000 lines per in inch. To accurately record one square inch of such an image digitally would require 1,000,000 (one million) pixels. Each pixel requires at least 3 bytes of data, so an 8 by 10 glossy would require 240 million bytes of data. To store that image on a computer disk would require 60,000 pages. Our one terabyte disk would be able to hold 16 million images. If we compiled these pages into books, at 250 pictures per book, we would have 64,000 books.
If a book is one inch thick, and your bookshelves each have six shelves and each shelf is three feet long then each bookcase could hold 216 books so we would need about one million bookcases to hold our 250 million books. You are going to need like 200 buildings each 10 stories tall.
Bayou Renaissance Man is talking about how the protests at college campuses are being organized and funded by outside sources. These are not spontaneous, grassroots protests. They are professionally managed and run. So now I'm wondering just who is funding these protests, so I ask Google and what I get back is a lot of nonsense:
US student protests against Israel are orchestrated by Qatar-funded groups, aiming to promote Islamist ideology and malign Saudi Arabia, as revealed by researchers.
Qatar, the same country that is playing host to Hamas leadership.
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| George Soros is paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country. |
New York Post blames billionaire George Soros:
No one familiar with the state of modern academia can be much surprised by the wave of anti-Israel tent-city occupations sweeping US campuses — but that doesn’t make them 100% “organic.”
And The Post’s discovery that lefty philanthropists are funding student “protest leaders” may be just the tip of an iceberg.
Encampments at Harvard, Yale, UC-Berkeley, Ohio State and Emory in Georgia were organized by branches of Students for Justice in Palestine, which gets cash (some direct, some indirect) from the Soros family “charities” as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and retired Wall Street banker Felice Gelman.
Gelman and the Soroses also give to Jewish Voice for Peace and Within Our Lifetime, two more groups intimately involved in the protests.
At least three organizers — Malak Afaneh (Berkeley), Craig Birckhead-Morton (Yale) and Nidaa Lafi (University of Texas-Dallas) — are paid fellows of another lefty-philanthropy favorite, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
USCPR community and college fellows earn stipends of $2,880 to $7,800 for work organizing campaigns to demand cutting ties to Israel.
Soros and Biden, what a pair.
P. S. Beware - I don't know whether it is my computer, or the websites I linked to, but when I had all these sites open my computer slowed to a crawl. I blame Google. I'm going back to Linux as fast as my little feets can carry me.
Up until about six months ago everything was fine in Google land, but then things started getting squirrely. Keyboard and mouse responses got slower, page loads got slower. Not a lot, just enough to be annoying. Today the edit icon disappeared from this blog. The edit icon is a little picture of a pencil that appears at the bottom of each post. It only appears for your own blog.
I was messing around with the layout this morning. It didn't work, so I undid all my edits and that's when I noticed the missing icon. Frightened and confused I asked Blogger Help and found this little turd:
Since browsers can block third-party cookies by default, edit elements may no longer be visible on your blog. This is also related to the new widget management options.
I suspect that the 'new widget management options' are what's behind all my current annoyances. I will be replacing my Chromebox with a Linux box very soon. I suspect I may have to replace my browser as well. Does Netscape still exist?
Rumor has it that FBI raided the home of the guy who runs the dreamlandresort.com website in Rachel Nevada. The site is devoted to all things pertaining to Area 51, you know, the place where the gummit hides the UFO's and the aliens. This piqued my interest because I've seen at least a couple of movies where Area 51 played a part and I enjoyed those movies (Independence Day comes to mind). So let's see what we've got. We've got a Twitter thread offering up the internet's opinion. One of the subjects is whether the FBI has taken down his website (they haven't), but then the issue comes up as to whether then can take it down. Do they even know where it is? So sum dood looks it up and comes up with the latitude and longitude. Hmmph. How he'd do that? Well, it can't be too tough, so I thought I'd give it a go. I opened a terminal window on my Linux box and typed "ping " and then pasted the website's name. You didn't expect me to actually type it, did you? Of course, the Linux terminal window is old, so the standard cut and paste keys (Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V) don't work. You need to right click and select. Still, copy and paste is generally more reliable than my typing, especially for experiments where you don't know whether it is going to work or not.
Anyway, ping returns the IP address along with some gobble-de-gook about once a second. It will keep on doing this until you kill it with a Ctrl-C (yes, the same Ctrl-C you used to copy the URL. Different interpretations for standard commands on different planets). Take that IP address and feed it to iplocation.net and dumps a bunch of valuable data on your screen. Highlight that data, copy and paste it into your text editor, remove all the redundant stuff, Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, open a spreadsheet on Google Drive, type Ctrl-V to paste it, do a little judicious editing and you get this:
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| Geolocation data for IP addess 69.168.83.86 |
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| X-acto Razor Saw |
I cut the front panel off of my computer speaker, fairly successfully I might say. There was a groove running around the circumference of the speaker box and I was able to make my cut using this groove as a guide. I used an old razor saw (possibly X-acto, probably some off brand) that I've had lying around for a zillion years. At one time I aspired to build models of cars and airplanes and rockets and such, but I never got a round toit. I still have the tools I acquired back then, so I pulled it out.
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| 4" Vise Grips |
I think I have a red plastic X-acto handle somewhere, but right close at hand I had a small pair of Vise Grip pliers and they worked just fine as a handle.
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| Bose Companion 2 Series III Multimedia Speakers |
My kids got me these Bose speakers a couple of years ago for my birthday a couple of years ago and they worked fine right up until a couple of week ago when they didn't. The best feature is that they have a volume knob. YouTube and Linux both have on-screen volume controls, but they are kind of problematic. If either one is turned up all the way, then the other one does not provide fine enough control. Maybe if have exceptional mouse skills you might be able to get what you want, but I don't have the patience to fool with them. However, I can handle a rotary knob just fine.
You can pop off the speaker grill and take out the four screws holding in the speaker, and that allows you to see that there is a circuit board inside, but you can't really get to it, hence the saw. And yes, I checked that the power supply (the wall-wart) was delivering power. These speakers should not have quit. Now that I have board out maybe I will be able to locate the problem.
Now all I have to do is find my VOM.
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| Ford GT-40 1966 198 piece jigsaw puzzle |
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| (2) 8GB Computer Memory Sticks |
This battery business is getting out of control.
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| Wallbox Quasar 2 |
"At the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Wallbox Industries will unveil its second-generation bidirectional home charging station for the North American market."
Like its predecessor, the Wallbox Quasar 2 can draw power from an EV's battery pack, allowing the car to serve as an emergency backup power source for homes. Bidirectional charging effectively turns electric cars into energy-storage units, giving homeowners more flexibility in energy use, Wallbox said in a press release.
Chuck Egg reports:
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| EcoFlow RIVER Max Portable Power Station |
I own an EcoFlow River Max "Portable Power Station" and a portable foldable solar panel (which is much more expensive now than when I bought it a couple years ago. Supply line issue, perhaps?)
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| PAXCESS 120W 18V Portable Solar Panel |
My mom has COPD and uses two oxygen generators. Her smaller transportable battery powered oxygen unit can be charged and powered by 110v or a 12v (cigarette lighter) outlet.. The Oxygen unit's detachable battery can run the O2 generator for up to about 4 hours. When we inquired about a second battery we were told the price was about $400 because it is a "medical device". So, instead, I bought the EcoFlow Battery because it was just a few dollars more, but had a lot more potential uses since it has 110v, 12v and USB outlets.
In fact, we've used the EcoFlow to extend battery power for a few extra hours on mom's O2 machine, but more often we've used the Ecoflow battery to power our internet router, computers, TV, and LED lights when the power has gone out for short periods.
In the summer, I connect the Ecoflow to a portable solar panel to charge the Ecoflow battery, then use the USB ports to charge, for free, our phones, tablets and laptops.
No, the cost for a high watt-hour battery backup may not make sense for the average household, but a lot of people use them for temporary power during outages and a lot more people use them with solar panels when they are camping. I've loaned my Ecoflow out to friends a few times during power outages and they've used it to brew a pot of coffee, watch TV, and charge their cell phones.
The Ecoflow I use has a high wattage button that allows the battery to power a table saw, circular saw, or other power tools which may be more convenient than running an extension cord.
The Ecoflow unit we use has a capacity of 576 watt hours. It's simple math to calculate how long the battery will power LED lighting (at several watts per hour, per bulb) or an internet router (2-3 watts per hour), etc. The battery displays remaining power in both watt hours and minutes at the current load.
Power tool companies are making widgets that make 110VAC from power tool batteries. They don't deliver a lot of power and they don't last long, but there seems to be a market for them, charging phones, or job sites without 110 where you don't want to run a generator.
We seldom get hit with power outages. I wonder if being just down the street from Intel's Ronler Acres multi-billion dollar computer chip factory has anything to do with that. I kind of suspect that they went to a lot of trouble and expense to make sure their money printing machine has a reliable supply of 'lectricity.
While some people are making a lot of noise about how electric cars are more efficient, save you money and are good for the environment, that's all it is, a lot of noise. What it's really all about is convenience. I have a smartphone. I don't like it very much but I carry it with me everywhere because it is very useful. I like my gasoline powered truck, but having to go out of my way to reach a gas station and then wait in line to buy gas is annoying and inconvenient.
Me, I'll put up with all kinds of annoying bullshit if it means I don't have to spend any money, but now I'm thinking about spending $80 for a new printer so I don't have to walk upstairs to get my one page of printout or figure out how to connect my Linux box to the printer on my wife's Windows box. I mean I already spent an hour on this and got nowhere. Yes, I still use paper and pencil for some things.
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| Take a nap and eat cake. It’s biblical. |
I'm not sure if I have fallen into a pit or I am just relaxed.
We got the siding project done on John's house just in time for it to start raining, so the paint is going to have to wait for spring. The project cost twice as much as originally estimated, which was half what the contractor wanted, so it ended up costing the same. However, having Osmany do it meant the house was practically rebuilt. When he pulls off the old siding he finds 3/8" sheathing of dubious quality, which disgusts him, so he rips it off. Now that he has the sheathing off, he can insulate the walls before he puts new 1/2" OSB sheathing and then new cedar siding. He also did the demolition and disposal, which weren't included in the original contract. He made enough money to make a sizeable down payment on a late model Toyota pick-em up truck, so everyone is happy.
We had a couple of inspectors from the Portland Building Department come out and look at the new house a couple of weeks ago. Their performance did not match my expectations which disconcerted me a bit. I stewed on it for awhile and now I think I have a better understanding of the situation so we can go ahead with nailing down the subfloor and framing in the new kitchen. That should keep us busy for a couple of weeks. Then we are going to have to talk about drywall, and I expect that is going to be expensive. I'm hoping it will be under $25K, but that might be wishful thinking. Whatever. We're making progress and we'll eventually get this bitch finished.
Determined daughter bought a house not far from here. It needs some work. Of course it does. She might have a plan, but she is going to need to hire an engineer / architect to see about removing some walls. That's going to cost. There are some things she doesn't mind spending money on, but hiring professionals at $200 or $300 an hour just grates on her.
Property tax bills showed up this month. Tax bill on the new house went up like 15% even though the value only went up 3%. Seems Portland voters voted for a couple of new tax levies for some kind liberal feelgood bullshit, stuff that I probably would have voted for 30 years ago. I am really having a hard time imagining a typical Portland voter. I mean there is a cluster of rich folks surrounding downtown, but the eastside goes on for miles and it's mostly working class, isn't it? All I can surmise is that the Democrat's propaganda machine is more effective than the Republican one.
My big computer display died a while back and I've been limping along on this tiny little 1600 pixel display. I keep saying I should take a look at the dead display, but I'm pretty sure that's a waste of time. If I open it up, I might find some damaged component, but more likely not. I mean, even if I find anything broken, it is extremely unlikely I will ever get around to trying to fix it. If I fiddle with it and get it working, it might work for a day or a week before it fails again. I should just chunk it in the trash, but that pains my inner miser so much that I haven't been able to do it.
I am getting very tired of my Linux computer. It takes forever (a minute or two) to boot and then another minute or two to load the Chrome browser. My Chromebooks takes seconds to do this. I started looking for Chromeboxes, but wading through the crap to find what you want is painful, so I am avoiding that as well.
I have a couple of computer programming projects I would like to see completed, but I'm not making any progress on them and I am not sure what it would take to get me going.
I also want to study up on rockets and bitcoin and magnetism, but I'm not making any progress on these either.
All I really want is a piece of cake and a nap.
I read a post the other day about Bi Directional printing. The post was on Schneier on Security and is about how malicious code can be inserted into source code. It does this by looking innocent. However when the compiler reads the file, it gets parts of it in different order than what you see on the screen. I think we can presume the compiler gets the raw file and what we see on the screen has been rearranged according to the constraints of the window and the formatting control characters embedded in the file.
There was an example posted so I thought I would try it out. The sample, however, did not have the control codes embedded in it, all it gave you were the two examples, one with control codes active and one without. So I thought I would give it a try, I mean it shouldn't be two hard to open up some kind of text editor and insert a couple of control codes, should it? Well, for some reason, man, the find function on my text editor has flat quit working. Do-do-Do-do - are we in the Twilight Zone?
I've been threatening to replace my Linux box with a Chromebox. You can buy them now. A few years ago you couldn't, you had to roll your own, and that was too much trouble. I'd gone through that in setting up my Linux box, but after having been using it for years without having to get back under the hood* I'm not keen to do so now.
I've been threatening to replace my Linux box with a Chromebox. You don't suppose the Linux box was listening in, do you? I mean it's what I use for all my web surfing, surfing for a new Chromebook (drool). Do I get a high power one or do I get a one with a Celeron processor? I think the high power ones also use an Intel processor with some kind of alpha-numeric name. And then there's the question of memory. I think I have a choice of 4, 8 or 16 gigabytes. I think this box, the one I'm using, has 4, but I can't be bothered to check. I guess I'm a little irritated, all that time I spent screwing around, waiting for computers to boot up. Maybe that's why I did it, I was a glutton for punishment, people looked at the job in passing and just passed on by. A smarter me might have done that, but I guess that's just who I am. There is a certain satisfaction in successfully jumping through all the hoops and finally getting the machine to behave.
A couple of weeks ago, four of us spent the afternoon moving a big piece of cast iron a couple of miles across the west side. Any complaints? No, just a chorus of 'that was fun, we should do it again some time'. Probably deprived some honest hardworking men a day's wages, but not everyone has an unlimited budget for hobbies.
Oh yeah, the control codes, from Google search:
I'm not quite sure just how or what to actually insert in a file, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.
*Capiche 'under the hood'? To work on an automobile engine, which used to be a very common activity but hardly ever happens any more, you had to open the hood, so all the time you were working on the engine, you were 'under the hood'. For some reason, most people, maybe 95 percent, won't ever engage in it. It might be lack of aptitude, or just simple disinclination, or possibly even a gut level revulsion. I don't know, people are weird. Anyway, 'under the hood' means getting down into the inner workings of of whatever mechanism, virtual or mechanical, is under discussion. That's a weird way to put it, 'under discussion'. The thing is broken and it needs to be fixed, there doesn't need to be any discussion. Aha! But anything worth repairing that breaks down is going to cause a discussion. Is it worth fixing? Can it be fixed? Who can do it? Should we just buy another one, it'd be quicker, etc., etc., etc.
Update April 2022 replaced missing video.
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| Keyboard Function Keys |
Here's a couple of things I just discovered. You may already know this. Maybe everyone except me knows about it. Whatever. Here they are. Oh, yeah. This is for Mint Linux. It might work on Windows or Apple, but does anyone use terminal windows in those places?
1. If you are doing something full-screen like a game, you don't need to exit full-screen to go do anything else. If you have a second browser window open, Alt-Tab will take you to the other window, no waiting the 50 milliseconds it takes you computer to restore regular windowing mode. But maybe your computer is faster than mine and for you the delay is invisible. You still have to do two separate actions: exit full-screen mode, and change to a different tab. If your other browser's window is already set to where you want to be, then Alt-Tab will take you directly there. There, I saved you two keystrokes today, and every day for the rest of your finger typing existence.
2. If you are working on a piece of code and you are using a terminal window to invoke the compiler and test your program, there tend to be two commands you issue: Compile (cc doggy.c) and Run (./a.out). That works while you are sorting out the basics with the compiler, but once you get things sort of operational, you might want to running your program with a variety of parameters, and you might have to try a few variations, maybe even dozens before you identify a problem. You go off and edit the source code and then you come back to your terminal window to compile your program, but where's the compile command? When you were alternating between Compile and Run, the previous command was only two keystrokes away (Up Arrow twice), but now after a zillion test runs, it's buried somewhere in the log that scrolled off the top of the screen an hour ago. You really want to sit there pressing the Up Arrow key over and over and over again? Presto-chango, we have an answer for you: a second Terminal Window. Use one for your Compile commands and one for your Run commands. Each window keeps its own record of what happens, so no more endlessly repetitively pressing the Up Arrow key.
P.S. The picture at the top is from a web page with a very long list of keyboard shortcuts. I didn't read it, I just noticed it was very long.
My printer became uncooperative earlier today, so I posted my problem on the Linux Mint Forum
The printer (HP C4385 Inkjet) has been working fine for years. It ran out of paper on the last job and now I can't get it to print anything.
I tried rebooting, no help. Then I cleared the print queue and shut down the computer and the printer and then restarted. No help. When I try to print something the job shows up in the print queue as 'pending'.
After the movie this evening I thought I would give it another shot:
Well, it's sort of solved. The printer finally decided to try and print something and then it promptly chewed up the paper, so it looks like some kind of mechanical malfunction. That's what I get for bragging on it. And letting it run out of paper. Don't let your printer run out of paper. It's liable to go on strike, or even worse, go over to the dark side. Don't be like me and let your printer run out of paper.
Update next day. Printer is working again. I banged it around inadvertently while trying to get a look at the feed mechanism. There is a part behind the feed wheels that comes off for cleaning, and it comes off easily. So I cleaned the wheels and then I fed it one sheet of paper and it printed just fine. Put the full stack in again and it balked. Put a short stack of paper in (maybe an eighth of inch high) and it worked fine. So some, but not too much.
