It’s been more than a year. I’m back for more CLI, command line,
anti-X(Not really, since I’m a photographer and need windows. )
goodness. So, what’s the Distro of the month—proud to say that
I’m still very much in love with Arch Linux even though I’m guilty of
pining after Ubuntu.

I’ll never be a Linux guru but I guess the title of Linux
tinkerer—never aspired to be more. My goals had mostly been:
resurrecting the old computers like a Pentium II 450 MHz all the way to
Pentium 4 that I can get my hands on—maybe just a few at a
time—limited space in my room.

Fiddling with Arch Linux had been enjoyable but I do worry about their
support for i686 and x86_64. That means I might not be able to install
Arch Linux on some of the older computers and I’m getting pretty
familiar with Arch. Another problem faced is that Arch Linux has some
really cutting edge softwares, a stray package might break the balnce.
In any case, I’m a Linux Hobbyist performing installation on none
mission-critical hardware so I’m happy.

Currently I have an old Toshiba M40 running a fresh installation of Arch
Linux which I’m using to hammer out this post. The screen is
unservicable but I’m might turn it into a headless music server. The
next unservicable computer that I have is sitting on the
floor—cutting-edge stuff—Pentium 4 1.6 GHz with 1 GB RAM. I’m having
some problem starting it up but hope to install Arch Linux, Crux or
Debian on it; maybe turn it into a Media Center.

Ideas are floating around in my head… we’ll see about giving these computers a new lease of life.

Here are a bunch of images from Natalie and My image-blog: Laconic Oration.

All of these are from the month of November, which was a busy month over there. We found a bunch of great items that needed to be shared. This selection is just a very small fraction, so if you like looking at things, go to the blog.

ps- click here and here to see small collections from September and October.

more at http://laconicoration.tumblr.com

scott

We are not able to accept the following items:

* Clothing, shoes and bedding

* Books and magazines

* Dishes and glassware

* Small kitchen appliances

* Computers

* Unboxed blinds

* Aluminum framed windows

* Anything rusty

But you can probably donate many of these things to your local thrift store. There is a Goodwill just a short ways away, here in Forest Grove.

Bye, bye old Compaq 5240

If I lived on the second floor I’d give this 50 pound dinosaur the old ‘heave-ho’ out the window – yeah, I love the sound of breaking glass…

Ok, este es un canal al que me sucribí ya hace un tiempo y pues estan a la dirección de un Dr. que pues masomenos tiene el estilo de Michio Kakú. Para los que saben quien es, se que les van a gustar estos videos.

Y lo mejor de todo… USAN MAC.

——–

Ok, this is from a channel I subscribed a while ago and they work under the direction of a PhD. and well, he has a style like the one Michio Kakú has. For those that know who that is, I know you´ll enjoy these videos.

And the best of all… THEY USE MAC.

Favorite:

Favorite:

I now have a Apple Macintosh IIci and a Quadra 950 added to the collection. Will try and take some photos over the weekend.

[harper's]

Last night I went to the Saint Leo Library to use their computers. My computer here at home is so old and the java script doesn’t work that I had to go somewhere with a decent computer system. It was fun being back out on campus. I saw a Librarian I used to work with and met a nice woman that was working beside me. My darling daughter and some of her friends went with me. They seemed to enjoy it. My darling son was off work already, he works in the library and lives on campus, and I guess he was busy because he didn’t show up.

So I worked on three articles and sent them off to the editors. One of them is missing on my work bench at the site and one is still under editing review. One of them needs some editing and then I can send it back off. It looks like I’m going to have to go back out to SLU to finish it.

I figure if I can go out twice a week and crank out about 5 or 6 articles while I’m there and edit the ones that need it I may make some extra money. It was really fun to research and write the articles. I don’t think the web will replace actual physical writing, but it is a great oppurtunity to start out and get some credentials.

I do hope books and other paper publishing will be around for a long time. There is nothing like having the weight of a book in your hands. The electronic readers are nice, but they’re not the same. Maybe my views are old fashioned and the new generation doesn’t feel that way, but I hope not.

Our houses are full of them: old computers, fax machines,video players, vinyl records, unwanted armchairs, fridges in the garage – things we don’t want but that still work.

Research by Gumtree reveals that we dispose of more than £6 billion in usable household items a year, including 1.35 million working fridges and freezers and 2.6 million sofas. People out there want our redundant stuff – but how do we find them?

A few weeks ago, I tried to give away a working, 10-year old laptop. I didn’t want to throw it in a skip, which would be wasteful and adding to toxic waste. I contacted Computer Aid International and the Community Recycling Network. Both accept laptops, but when they heard my words ‘10 years old’ – they politely declined.

So I tried Freecycle, an online forum where people give away and pick up unwanted stuff, free of charge. I joined my local group and posted a message. I received several replies within an hour and suddenly my 10-year old laptop was of value and it has now found a new home with a cash-starved student; who went away very happy.

Since then, I’ve used  Freecycle to give away a fax machine, an office desk, a chair and a washing machine. I’ve received some tomato plants and some gardening magazines.

I’ve also visited SwapXchange, which offers items to swap from all over the country via its website. This site offers everything.

Another way of getting rid of belongings is via Gumtree - a popular online classified website which is free to use. There’s also charity shops and car-boot sales.

If you’re still unsure about how to declutter try national charity Waste Watch, which will provide details of organisations in your area that can recycle both home and workplace waste.

It doesn’t matter how you declutter, as long as, you avoid adding to the mountain of waste. Giving stuff away or swapping feels great!

Previous midweek inspirations by Woollywotnots can be read from these links:

Colour in your home

Brain Exchange

Flickr Love

Thinking about the future

Lists

Developing your colour sense

Sources of Inspiration

Time with Friends

Your Car

Back to School

Finding your mojo

Weather and Seasons

Trash to Treasure

Pay it forward

Sound of Music

Lost art of letter writing

This interview with Steve Furber CBE was filmed at Manchester University on 17th August 2009. He talks about his involvement with the Mk14, how he became involved with Acorn Computers, the success of the BBC Micro, the development of the ARM processor and his latest project : SpiNNaker.

You can view the video here.

Information About Steve Furber : Steve Furber Steve Furber appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours
Information about Acorn Computers

The youth of today don’t know they’re born. We had 256K of memory and we were grateful for it.

(From the Casa Grande Dispatch, Arizona, 26 Dec 1984)

The following article was taken from http://www.number10.gov.uk/page20409

I personally believe Bletchley Park should be in the same league as the Science and Natural History Museums.

We received a petition asking:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to save Bletchley Park.”

Details of Petition:

As has been reported elsewhere, Bletchley Park “have two to three more years of survival”. The Bletchley Park Trust receives no external funding. It has been deemed ineligible for funding by the National Lottery, and turned down by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Please do not allow this crucial piece of both British and World culture to disappear. If ever an example were needed of Britain leading the world, this surely would be it. To allow it to fall into the hands of developers would be simply unconscionable.

Read the Government’s response

Thank you for your e-petition.

The Government agrees that the buildings on the Bletchley Park site are of significant historic importance and, although recognising the excellent work being carried out there, at present it has no plans, nor the resources, to extend its sponsorship of museums and galleries beyond the present number.

A number of things are being done to help Bletchley Park.
 
English Heritage, Milton Keynes Council and English Partnerships have worked jointly with the Trust that runs the Park to prepare a Conservation Management Plan for the site.   English Partnerships has acquired some parts of the site and will ensure that any development of these areas is planned and delivered in a way that reflects the important historical nature of the Park.  English Partnerships has also invested in the core site and contributed funds towards an emergency repair programme on Block D, the largest derelict wartime building in Britain, and is planning to undertake further substantial works to sensitively refurbish this important listed building. 
 
The Heritage Lottery Fund’s regional development team, along with the DCMS sponsored  Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in the South East have been in regular contact with the Bletchley Park Trust, offering advice and guidance on how best to put together a robust application for funding.   In addition, the Trust has now made a further application to the Heritage Lottery Fund.

In November 2008 English Heritage announced the award of a grant of £330,000 to Bletchley Park to cover urgently needed repairs to the roof, and in March of this year it was announced that Milton Keynes Council, in partnership with English Heritage, will provide a further £600,000 for critical restoration work.

The May open day for the Retro Computer Museum has been featured in the latest edition of Retro Gamer magazine.  Click the image below to read the fill article. Make sure you take a look at their website here, and join the forums!

Click for bigger!

]]> http://manufacturingrarity.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/images-from-dusty-hard-drives/ Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:50:52 +0000 agent grey http://manufacturingrarity.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/images-from-dusty-hard-drives/

Into every life some Computer Hell must happen and I suppose it is my turn.  Kind of like jury duty, my number to experience computer difficulties has come up.  I’ve successfully stalled such problems for about two years, but now, finally, I think the end has arrived and I can no longer dodge my rightful tour of duty in Computer Hell. 

 About a month ago I was working on the kids’ desktop computer.  This is an old eMachine computer that was purchased nearly 8 years ago.  It was obsolete, easily 5 years ago.  Even so, the computer has managed to get us through and keep the kids connected far longer than expected.  This is due in part to my brother and his wife being pretty technologically savvy and actually possessing skills in rebuilding computers.  However, the thing finally gave up the ghost when I was surfing last month and it got a little too friendly with a deadly Trojan virus which apparently my system is not protected against.  There’s no doing anything with that computer now. At least, not with my level of expertise and my pocketbook’s status there isn’t. 

That’s how my own laptop which is over 4 years old came to be the household computer. This one is nearing the end of it’s usefulness too, because it no longer has the power or the memory to load pages quickly or to have more than one on two pages open at a time.  If I’m on Facebook, forget it.  Everything stops.  The most recent episodes of computer hell have involved me pressing a button to open and email and waiting in excess of a minute for the email to load.  Yesterday, the computer overheated on me and completely shut down.  I just walked away and did something else.

The kids need a computer with a printer that works for their homework projects.  I need one, preferably that I don’t share with them because then I’d never be on it, so I can begin doing some serious writing in the hopes of someday really publishing something instead of forever just talking about it. Sigh.

A good friend of mine purchased a new laptop for me for my birthday, but through a fun little miscommunication it ended up in Australia instead of North America.  The same friend has promised to take a look at my old laptop and see if there is anything he can do to salvage it and the printer.  I’m fairly confident that my tour in Computer Hell will be fairly short in duration.

 It all does explain why I haven’t written regularly lately.

Me: Gary, can you go into the attic and get Jana’s husband?

Gary: WHAT?!!

Me: That backrest pillow, they call it a husband. (no I do not have some guy up there waiting for the day when my daughter is ready to marry. We do not save anything with a heartbeat. At least not intentionally).

Gary: Oooh, the attic? (eyes glistening) Sure thing!

For those who read the last attic post you will remember we have a tendency to save EVERYTHING and that attic is a scary place. Gary now jumps at the chance to go up there and throw stuff down to get rid of. At least today I was not called a crazy old hag.

This week he found the box to the activity rocker. Yeh, it was from my kids. And here they are holding the box. What, 15 years is too long to save that? Do they even make these things anymore or have they deemed them unsafe and likely to cause brain damage like everything else my kids played with?

I would also like to mention that he found an Apple llci up there. Yes, this baby was my first color mac. This sucker came with a whopping  80MB hard drive (note I said MB not GB) When did that come out, you ask? September 1989, 5 months after Jana was born! 

Hey, at least I did not have her ‘husband’ up there for that long!

____________________________________________________________

On another note, would you be so kind as to vote for my blog buddy blondemomblog as the best local blog/nashville because she is really cool and I would love to see her win. Click here and vote.

Haven’t had enough of me yet? You can also read me at 50-Something Moms Blog. For photo enthusiasts, visit Leaving the zip code, photos from outside the comfort zone

 :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  :  : 

The first view of ‘the school computer’, there was only one in the early 1980s at Rutherford School, was the massively unimpressive Commodore PET.

Where are intarwebz, dammit?

This thing was so cumbersome that it had to be wheeled in on a trolley. Our lanky Maths teacher, Mr. Parker unveiled it as if he were uncovering the ancient treasures of El Dorado, while we stood unimpressed. It didn’t seem to do very much at all and after he had spent about 10 minutes trying to get it to work out the area of a square, I think Michael Piggott corrected him and fixed it. Oh dear.

I remember not being at all impressed by the thing and it wasn’t until I saw a ZX Spectrum and that you could also play games on a computer, that I really wanted one.

We did get to see an early version of a instant messaging thing at Longbenton School (I forget why we were there in about 1984 or so – never seen so many pictures of Peter Beardlsey in my life), where they had an intranet (well two computers linked together) and a person at each was merrily typing away and magically those very messages were appearing across the room instantly. If only I’d seen the potential back then I could have bought shares in Yahoo or Apple or something.

Eventually the school did get some BBC Model B computers but I never touched them in spite of taking O-Level Computer Studies, which was a peculiar subject in that we learned about computers but seldom actually touched one. No wonder we all failed.

By that point though, a lot of us had our own computers at home and I do recall a bunch of us sitting in the school library trying to think of some way to write a game on the Spectrum. I think it was a little ambitious given that most of us could barely program in BASIC and we never got past the first meeting.

Bow down nerds, for one of your peers has topped you all:  A classic Queen song, played by using vintage computer parts.

Courtesy of Zak, whose performance of Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit” on his old Nintendo wasn’t well received at his family reunion.

what a computer may look like

It turns out the the COMPASS placement test I’m going to be subjected to on Saturday morning is made by the same people that make the ACT.  Unfortunately, since my ACT scores are more than ten years old, I can’t just use those to get into this stupid Calculus class.  Turns out, a lot of things have changed in the past ten years with the standardized test. 

1) Everything is on the computer now.  Although I’m not exactly afraid of technology, this weirds me out.  (Evidence that I am old: I can remember teaching my dad how to use a mouse when I was in high school.  I can also remember the evil genius of changing the font color to “cyan” in elementary school on the Commodore 64.)  The thing with computer tests is that you can’t go back and change an answer.  Also, they frown upon it if you need to write on the screen to cross out an answer.  Strangely enough, the 18 years of my life spent in the educational system were pretty heavy on using pencils and paper to take tests.  Thus, most of my test taking skills evolved with the assumption that a test taker could always return and change an answer.  Pencils have erasers, after all.  Which leads me to my next point…

2) No more scantron.  Well, now that the computer is in full effect, no need for the scantron.  I miss the scantron.  I miss the #2 pencil thing.  I miss wondering who ever had a pencil that had any other number on it.  What is a #1 pencil like?  Is there a #3 pencil?  Who is the poor schmuck who thinks he can use a pen on a standardized test?  (More evidence that I am old: This particular complaint reminds me of my mom complaining about the death of the punch card and the 5.5 inch floppy disk.)

 3) Tests on the computer are graded by computers. The aforementioned hellish GMAT has two essays at the beginning of its pain parade.  These essays are totally worthless for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that they are graded by computers.  I can’t help but imagine the Microsoft Word paperclip popping up during test time.  “Looks like you’ve written a a flimsy thesis.  Would you like some help not being an idiot?” (Even further evidence that I’m old: I didn’t see Microsoft Word until my senior year of college.  At that time, I thought the paperclip was cute, and helpful.)

4) Computer lab computers almost always suck.  ’nuff said.  I’m just really hoping for a functional mouse.

At least on this COMPASS test, I will have access to the built in calculator on the computer.  So, my fatal inability to memorize multiplication tables will haunt me no longer.  I’m fervently hoping that the computer keyboards have the number pad, because having to use the mouse with that thing makes me stabby.

There’s a nice list of C64 emulators here.