On one hand, upgrading Rimiru’s OS to Windows 11 was fairly painless and seems to pass the core “Does my shit work” test. Certainly not the worst experience for upgrading a Microsoft OS ever to be had.

On the other hand, I can’t help but think a big margin of how much you love or hate the visual changes probably has to do with how tied to Windows 9x / NT you are versus having spent time off in the land of other operating systems. In a word, W11’s visual changes remind me of Android and iOS. Alternatively you might just be pissed off that people moved your buttons around, again.

Considering that I actually prefer these kind of OS over the traditional UI, I probably appreciate the fresh coat of paint to things like the Settings app more than most. But hey, I was greatly thrilled by the evolution of the W10 settings app over ye old Control Panel. So obviously I’m more in favor of modernization of the UI than hanging onto the 1990s.

On one hand preparing everything for the crockpot this morning was a great success. Combing the goods with some grilled chicken, cheese, and noodles was both filling and delicious.

However I remain concerned that the cosmos may die from the bean farts. It’s a legitimate concern.

Seems like it’s been a fairly productive and filling day off.

Spent part of the day slurping coffee and playing Project Wingman between feeding and walking the dogs. Including the mission “Cold War”, where you’ve basically got a Star Destroyer’s worth of air craft duking it out for air superiority. Made up a batch of blended food for Willow’s stockpile.

Managed to get started on the cleaning, along with prepping foods. Put beans on soak, chopped green onions, broccoli, and ham for dinner tomorrow. Scheduled a reminder to put the beans in the crockpot in the morning. Even made a few ham, cheese, lettuce, and horseradish wraps to stock up on snackables.

Plus making mac / cheese for dinner made a perfect way to use up some leftovers. A little of the onions and broccoli, leftover taco meat, etc. Yum.

Is it just me or do my thoughts often revolve around food? Hehehe.

The problem with songs stuck in your head is they can be rather loud, but if you're lucky they're also good songs.

Another head hangs lowly

Child is slowly taken

And the violence, caused such silence

Who are we mistaken?

But you see, it's not me

It's not my family

In your head, in your head, they are fighting

With their tanks, and their bombs

And their bombs, and their guns

In your head, in your head they are crying

In your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie

What's in your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh

Do, do, do, do

Do, do, do, do

Do, do, do, do

Do, do, do, do

Another mother's breaking

Heart is taking over

When the violence causes silence

We must be mistaken

It's the same old theme

Since nineteen-sixteen

In your head, in your head, they're still fighting

With their tanks, and their bombs

And their bombs, and their guns

In your head, in your head, they are dying

In your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie

What's in your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie

Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh, ay, oh, ya ya

Zombie-ie-ie....oh

No New PC Needed: Windows 11 Runs on a 15-Year-Old Intel Pentium 4 Chip

For some reason this mockery makes me remember a certain Pentium 4 machine at work. It used to be a bench machine in the lab before other arrangements were made. I remember looking up the vintage of processor, it was a model of P4 that had sold over $500 when brand new.

For a machine that we mainly use for browser, terminal, and various operations to monitor a test system the machine was painfully and ridiculously slow. About the only time anyone will use that machine for today is when you need the floppy drive.

When I saw AI: The Somnium Files added to Game Pass, I sheeplishly added it to my download queue but more caught up with the new Avengers game that landed about the same time frame. Somium seemed like a game that I might enjoy or be bored of, and I really needed some stress relief at the time. Thus smashing AIM kill bots as an alternative to exploring planet 4546B was my plan. Finally got around to trying it this weekend.

Well within a few minutes of the first "Somnium" with the quirky Aiba made me able to guess which it end of the spectrum it would be. The initial crime scene investigation is about as serious as an icepick stabbed corpse lashed to the merry-go-round. However the Aiba messing with the protangist's dream is about as serious as smelling a potted plant and it flying up your nose.

The game manages to follow the investigations track fairly well but is peppered with insanity, game and movie references, jokes, and all kinds of quirk characters. I positively love the Boss's office and her crazy remarks. Having reached the part where Aiba calculates the "Best" way to deal with the goon squad^, and Iris's Somnium being a Minecraft inspired danceathon to defeat UFOs....oh so cinches it.

If these folks are making another AI/Somnium game, I am so buying it. Unless the murder mystery ends in a way that makes me want to chuck the controller through the screen. Thus far AI: The Somnium Files has been one of the most fun games I've played all year, lol.

^ If you weren't amused at how underwear, porno mags, and a muscle loving bartender fit into resolving a shootout then Aiba's trick with the fire extinguisher will surely amaze you!

Ecto 1 Featurette: Resurrecting the Classic Car | GHOSTBUSTERS

Now that's a classic. Back when the movie was young, Ecto was old enough to wonder where the heck they dug it up from in the first place. Today? I'm pretty sure it's about as famous as any Cadillac is gonna get.

Steve Jobs once chucked an iPhone prototype to impress a room full of journalists.

I kind of love this concept. Not because it’s the kind of gambit he might pull, but because it illustrates the point so perfectly. Unscathed or smashed beyond all recognition anyone’s question about the device’s durability would have been reasonably answered beyond all doubt.

Plus there’s another point: not to be afraid of trying. I’m sure some engineer somewhere had quite the puckered ass at the time. But you can’t be held back by fear if you want to accomplish something meaningful.

iOS 15 review: Forget quantity, Focus on quality

Which frankly is now I like my updates, especially if you toss in a side of stability!

For the most part I’ve met iOS updates with the mindset, “I’ll just be happy if it’s stable”. Because when iPadOS 13 landed the features were much needed but the stability was crapola on my then young iPad Pro. Recent releases have thankfully been less hazardous and iPadOS 14 would become pretty stable for me.

Upgrading to iPadOS 15 thus far has passed the stability requirement. Plus for the first time it feels like new features have landed in a polished form. Running multiple applications using split screen, slide over, and the would probably confuse non nerdy users multiple instances thing, now work really damn well. iPadOS 15’s the best implementation of such things I’ve had since Samsung started to screw over theirs in favor of Googly multitasking and focusing on DeX.

So while I honestly could have cared less about the multitasking features earlier on, beyond slide over being a common offender in my iPadOS 13 instability, iPadOS 15 actually makes me view the fancy split screening stuff as a feature I can use.

Positive things:

• Walked the dogs
• Fed the dogs
• Played video games
• We all had lunch
• Walked the dogs again
• Did most of the cleaning

Negative things:

• Never, want, to, clean, again

Yes, I think it's time for a break.

Somehow the thing that really bothers me about transferring files this way, is the speed.

Not because it's ridiculously slow by modern standards, but because it's nearly twice as fast as my last dial up connection in the '90s 🤣

When you end up transferring files over a serial port between computers made in 1992 and 2021, I'm not sure if you're crazy or have a strange concept of relaxing.

That said my PowerBook Duo's Printer-modem port seems to support a whopping 57,600 baud. Which works out to about 4.5 ~ 5.2 KB/s using ZMODEM between TeraTerm and SITcomm. Perfect for listening to music or making a sandwich as files transfer.

In my life: I have had relatively few dependable encounters with adhesives. If there's a good way of joining pieces together that doesn't involve adhesive, I'm probably going to choose the other method.

Deciding to Velcro a USB hub to the side of my monitor, I decided to also go ahead and Velcro the switch to the other side. Which I had meant to double sided tape or Velcro to the wall, but have had on a humble picture hanger until I could get some of either.

Well trying to get the backing paper off this shit, I'm now pretty convinced I won't have to worry about the Velcro not sticking to the monitor or the hub and switch. Because as far as adhesive goes that shit works!

Misc thoughts on System 7.5.0

Poking around the classic MacOS has been an interesting experiment.

One of the things I find remarkable, brilliant, and rather lovely is getting the old Macs to boot! Seems like just about anything with a usable system folder and a means for achieving block I/O from it will boot. Compared to mucking with MBR based chain loading schemes and infernally buggy BIOS this has been a good plus. Offsetting that is how Apple's partitioning tool refuses to initialize SCSI disks without some kind of ROM identifying it as one of theirs, which seems to have been dropped by the later IDE days.

For the most part I have chosen to ignore the desktop on PCs in preference to a home directory. I've known people who cover the Windows desktop in icons all over. Mine has largely been spartan since I focused on UNIX systems, and since XP tried to make multiple users suck less on shared home PCs.

Classic MacOS on the other hand makes it curiously inescapable. It actually feels more like a "Shelf" to me than a desktop. Because its behavior is not like desktops that I am used to. On most "Desktop" operating systems that I've used: the actual desktop was simply a special folder. If you stuff a file on it the only difference from any other is not needing a file manager or a bunch of tabs or clicks to reach it later because you'll just be moving windows out of the way to see it or using a shortcut to navigate there.

I've found that moving files from floppy disk to desktop doesn't move the file off the diskette, so much as it seems to flag it as part of the desktop. Moving it somewhere else then generates the kind of I/O event other platforms do. Further when booting from other media: the desktop is subsumed into the current session. I.e. boot off a Disk Utils floppy and you'll still see the desktop, but the icons for your HDD and floppy will have switched positions. That's actually kind of cool in my humble opinion.

On the flipside the trash seems to work similarly. Trashing files off a floppy does not return the space, but unlike some platforms does send it to the trash rather than forcing a unix style deletion.

When working with the desktop and your hard drive: placing data on the desktop seems to be treated like the root of the drive. Opening a file info dialog will show a path like "MacHD: My Folder or File", and you won't see it in the actual drive: just the desktop. One thing that made this apparent to me is the option to default to a "Documents" folder for the file open/save dialogs. System 7.5 created a Documents folder on my desktop but it doesn't appear in MacHD despite the path shown in Get Info. I opted to leave an alias on the desktop and move the original into the HDD view, reflecting how I found the file system from my Wallstreet's MacOS 9.2.2 install.

At a more general level is the feeling that Apple's designers really did not believe in the keyboard. There are shortcuts for many common tasks, but when it comes to manipulating text the system UI has been use the mouse or piss off. Even simple behaviors we now take for granted like shift+arrow to select text do not exist in System 7.5. Fortunately, I actually like the trackball :P.

There's a web abbreviation that I took a long time to learn, called "TIL" or "Today, I learned". Well, I'm gonna call this one closer to "Today, I giggled" :P.

Trojan Room coffee pot - Wikipedia

And somehow this makes perfect sense to me.

Things that make me mildly sad:

• That when I got my first CD-Burner, CD-Rs were so expensive we could only do backups about once or twice a year.
• I bought a spindle of like a 100 DVD-Rs less than a decade ago, and I may not be able to use them up before I did without stooping to using them for Frisbees and coasters.
• How I rarely need to use CD-ROM or DVD-ROM but inevitably
• Need CD at home because the drive won't do a DVD, of course I only have DVD-Rs.
• Need a DVD at work because the data won't fit a CD, of course I only have CD-Rs.
• That at this point the only reason to care how many discs I use (or waste) is the wear and tear on my BD burner.

To which I'll add that time I saved $5 to $10 and got a CD-ROM only external drive instead of a DVD-ROM one was probably one of the dumbest ways I ever tried to save a few bucks 😜. The irksomeness of hauling it out of the closet aside, the USB enclosure my old Blu-ray drive has been in kind of...rocks.

Thus far, I have found System 7 rather interesting.

On the PowerBook Duo 230 AKA 30 year old Mac, I've got 7.5 running off a BlueSCSI mounted internally. Tech by Androda has a PowerBook configuration that comes with a lovely 3D printed bracket, which was easily mounted using the rails bolted to the original Quantum drive. The only real problem that I had was initializing the drive, in the end I opted to download a prepared blank image. As far as I can tell the difference versus dd'ing my own is Apple Partition Map, Eventually I need to find a nice disk utilities package that fits on a floppy, as the Disk Utils disk offers me little value beyond it boots and has a system folder.

Installing was fairly straight forward since I was able to build floppies using the PowerBook G3 AKA 20 year old Mac. No idea of how, but disk one appears to be bootable but ha sno system folder visible like the Disk Utils disk. The installer however kind of sucks. Attempting an easy install takes about 20 - 40 minutes of swapping 7 floppies, and then dies and deletes the entire staging area off the disk. So I went about doing a custom install piece by piece and determined that its the Apple Guide on diskette 7 that causes this. Also for some reason it follows a pattern of eject disk 1, ask for disk n, eject and ask for disk 1, eject and ask for disk n; whenever I first start installing some item from custom install. Making this whole process a pain in the ass. Once in a while it decided to want to floppies at once. So, while I kind of love how easy it is to get classic Mac OS to boot: I think the 7.5 installer sucked. It is however quite simple and easy to use, if you can get it to work :P. At 7 floppies plus a Disk Utils, it's not too large a set either.

Beyond that however, it works superbly and for a machine old enough to have school aged children of its own, I find the Duo 230 quite snappy. The real pain was trying to get Stuffit Expander loaded, since getting the images to mount on my G3 was mostly an exercise in futility. Once I finally got the disk made, I both set the write protect tab and wrote a message about not losing the disk because it's a pain to build. When I was putzing with Basillisk II on my OpenBSD machine it was fairly painless because I could just mount the image directly. In System 9.2.2, I ended up using grabbing the Virtual DVD-ROM/CD Utility off Macintosh Garden. Disk Copy and ShrinkWrap told me to eff myself. Trying to mount in Toast just froze the G3 such that not even the mouse could move. Never liked Roxio on Windows, and don't think I care for it on Mac either. Needless to say I wasn't happy getting StuffIt Expander onto my Duo!

One thing that remains to be determined is whether or not I care to migrate to System 7.5.5, or a larger internal image.

Testing 7.5.3 -> 7.5.5 in the emulator was a fairly painless experience. Give or take that it takes forever to unstuff large files compared to my Duo. The StuffIt archive is 70~80 meg. More general stuff in the emulator seems to suggest 7.5.3 improved performance on 68k processors, not just on the younger PowerPC processors. But overall seems less important without a PPC based Mac. Given the size is something like net install + 19 floopies + 3 update floppies, I'll probably defer that until I have a working RaSCSI where I can just place the files rather than imaging a ton of diskettes.

Regarding the disk images, I'm less decided. I chose to setup BlueSCSI with a 250 MB image. Partly because I just wanted to see it work, and partly because I intend to have RaSCSI be an external drive to shuffle between systems. Considering the Duo came with a dead 160 MB drive and they apparently were sold in 80 MB and 120 MB configurations, I'd like to think 250 MB is a nice balance between the hardware's era and large enough not to care. Between system folder, basic software, and copies of the floppy loaded setup files, I'm only using about 30 MB. I plan for RaSCSI to present a large 4 GB volume, possibly several; but I could just as easily use that internally.

One oddity: the maximum date. Despite HFS having a limit of 2040 for its max date, I couldn't go past 2019 without the date wrapping around to 2019 in the control panel. Apparently this was a bug in the date/time control panel, and someone wrote a nifty control panel app that lets you set the date correctly.

While I will admit that I didn’t have high expectations for a USB floppy drive, I had expected it’s life span to be measured weeks, or at least days of I/O time. Over the past 3 weeks I’ve probably had disks in use for less than 6 hours. The MTBF had been much poorer than I’m used to for floppies, but relatively effective.

On the positive side thanks to 20 year old Mac and 30 year old Mac, I actually have points of reference without having to drive to work and borrow my “Old” machines internal IDE floppy drive. The Wallstreet series seems to have a really great floppy drive compared to the Tendak USB drive, even if the PowerBook’s drive is old enough to walk into a bar and buy a beer.

The real question I suppose, is do I want to try and get a replacement while the drive is within Amazon’s window (as well, as should be under warranty from the manufacturer). Or do I just want to take it apart and putz with it, since the replacement will probably be just as awesome.

Simple solutions to simple problems

When I moved, I ran two cables around the room. One to behind the headboard as a spare in case I re-arrange the room someday, and another to the corner my desk is on. My desk and bed being along the same wall with desk and headboard at opposite corners.

One of the things that has irked me all these years is how much of a tight fit this is. To pull my desktop forward to access the cables: I've had to yank the Ethernet. Very annoying. On the flipside when screwing with old computers, sometimes Ethernet is a better deal than Wi-Fi. Thus the cable under the headboard has been handy. Give or take that I usually end up wearing out my knees since the headboard isn't handy, and the dog takes my spot while I'm putzing with computers.

Finally I've caved in any decided there shall be a gigabit switch at my desk instead of a direct connection to my gateway across the room.

Since the $20 TP-Link 8-port gigabit switches I replaced some old HPs^, I opted for one of these TP-Link Lightwaves, It's rare that I need more than one port at my desk, and space is at a far greater premium than ports^^. Damned thing is tiny as can be. I envision its mounting place to be Velcro to the back of my monitor, but for now a simple picture hanger provides an immediate solution.

And for good measure of testing: Rimiru streaming Netflix from its 1 Gbit/s Ethernet while my PowerBook G3 runs off its 10 Mbit/s Ethernet for grabbing some floppy images for the 'ol Duo.

^ HP makes some good switches. These worked great as long as you didn't do a lot of multicast, but had a bigger problem. Turn off a computer and all ports would experience batshit packet loss until you turn that machine back on or unplug it from the switch. Weird.

^^Unlike at work where there's more space and far more equipment. My home is a more wireless network centric place :P.