The collected works of guardian452 - Page 19

nice posters of fairchild and steve&steve

I finally put slackware on my peecee. It works in the sense that it is the first linux I haven't wanted to throw out the window. It's like the un-distro. Everything is vanilla and there is no real package manager to update some random bullshit and break everything. Perfect!

Since all I really use it for is mail (mutt), reading the news and watching gamepass (firefox), and reading e-books (using okular for now) it works really well. I had to learn how to sleep/wake (because I didn't want kde with it's power demons etc so I wrote a script that sleeps with the lid and suspends at 0% battery) and install wicd (again, kde does that for you...), but slack's instructions make it all easy. Of course if you want it out of the box to work kde is pretty good for that sort of thing

I use osx at least 8 hours every day at work and although nice it is also nice to play with something different for fun.

What I find most fascinating is that if you follow the instructions you will be rewarded quickly. Rather than spending a day to figure out where the instructions went wrong and/or another day to figure out what makes your particular machine/installation different than what the instructions expect. Which has been my experience with every other linux except gentoo which I haven't used in close to 7 or 8 years now, at some point emerge wrecked *everything* so I gave up on it.

Linux mint left a foul taste in my mouth when I tried to switch the default search engine to bing. They really don't want you using anything other than yahoo or google and they make it obvious mint is getting paid for your searches. At least with bing I can cash in my rewards

Not to mention it is just ubuntu with a coat of paint. In my experience the more the OS tries to do, the more opportunity for it to screw up. Why I like OSX so much is it tends to stay out of my way. Slack is very similar in this regard. I can banish away the app store and updates on mac without fear of retribution or even a slap on the wrist, and I can do the same in slack.

Anyways, if you use DWM, you will probably want to make a script to write the root window name, here's mine:

Which will give wifi network, battery power (if in use, in watts) and SOC, and of course the time. Go easy on me as I am still learning the shell-scripting and have been cobbling things together from examples, etc...

The output is something like...
Network: Blaugrana | Battery: -9.6 Watts 94% | Tue 08 Sep 11:49 PM

Note the date...

Hamei I don't think you would want to bother but slack is working well for me so far. I've been using it for almost a week. It is about as close to the "un-distro" as you can get in the sense that it is just a loose collection of packages, the kernel, and an installer to put it together. You add programs with installpkg pkgname.txz which is a tarball. Of course the old tar xvf, make, make install works pretty good too There is no branding, no updates to break things, no custom versions, no repositories that have trouble connecting, etc.

Also the paths are where you'd expect and there's no g-damnned sudo.

I will concede to kumba that I have mostly fond memories of gentoo. But emerge definitely has reliability issues. Package managers are not dumb and have a very difficult job to do even just resolving dependencies. I often feel that the decisions they make are often in not the user's interest but instead the developer of whatever the most recently updated package wants.

If I had known about slack a while ago I would have been using it all along (I knew about it, at some point I even had a free sticker??) But I was always told that it was too "advanced" (for 1##7 users only!) and I should stick to more mainstream systems. Like gentoo I suppose arch is the new gentoo but I've never tried it and don't care to.

Maybe someday I will update beyond firefox 24. Or at least get a version of adblock that supports it. I almost feel like an irix user when it comes to my default browser However (on some level) I like my vintage firefox...

hamei wrote:

guardian452 wrote: Linux mint left a foul taste in my mouth ...

Do you suppose there are enough people in the kermyooonity to create a "distro" <spit> that's quality-centric ? It would be a lot of work but there's really nothing out there like what Linux used to be, or Irix, or BeOS or even classic Macintosh. It's all such avaricious shit now

Or is personal computing well and truly dead ?

http://sta.li looks promising, but probably over ambitious for casual use. Up-and-coming OpenBSD 5.8 will support my thinkpad's wifi card with their new rtwn(4) driver which looks more interesting to me. I used to run OpenBSD on an old Satellite (i586) and it is also "quality-centric".

http://suckless.org/philosophy

robespierre wrote: it could be a source of long term unreliability, since PCBs have internal power and ground planes. if the bent piece shifts it could short them together.

Do you know the pinout for these modules? Checking for shorts across all the bypass caps as a last resort would be a good test as well. Or throw it in a junk machine first to see what happens. I would think there would be polyfuses / PTC breakers if not on the IP30 at least on the frontplane I would normally suggest you are a worry-wart but the smashed piece is dangerously close to that (probably for power) connector.

A clean snip using a dremel with a cut-off wheel is probably the safest fix.

At the time AMD and Apple/PPC were also railing against the giga-hurts gods - apple had their "megahertz myth" ads and AMD puffed up their model numbers a bit - suddenly a 1.2 ghz chip was called an athlon 1800, etc.

Of course, this is the timeframe of the netburst architecture, even the pentium 3 outperformed it, clock-for-clock. So it is entirely possible for a high end (900mhz) fuel to outrun a 2ghz netburst p4 for some tasks.

There is a lot of writing by Darek Mihocka which is ideal for a hobbyist level (you and I are probably not going to be reading architecture white papers) in this series that explains the shortcomings of the netburst arch in terms a quasi-layperson like you and I can understand (we are not all kira ) http://emulators.com/docs/nx01_intro.htm

Long story short, netburst was an evolutionary dead end, intel went back to the p3, pM, core series instead.

Good luck getting that past the TSA !

interesting MOTD you've got there...

ivelegacy wrote: do you mean what happened with the homemade misunderstood clock?
- Looks like a bomb - and a Muslim teen Ahmed was arrested for bringing homemade clock to school

because they haven't yet seen my EAT generator, buddy, it really looks like a bomb
ofcourse it's not, but … it's 10K..40K high voltage generator
it can really hurt people, I wanted to build to test candles in combustion engine
currently it's damaged, I just need to pick up 3 new inductors coils

oh, so might be a problem to come in USA for me? Do I need a special pass?
might I need a T shirt with the message " don't stop the science, pleaZe " ?

( )

Eeeehh, just put it in an aluminum box with an apple sticker on it, it'll sneak right through

Unfortunately Ahmed did not know this trick, he could have built a far more dangerous device but if it looks good he would have had no trouble at all

ivelegacy wrote: is there a grammar mistake in the MOTD?

is it " welcome to Hell " (without "the") ?

I see " Welcome to the Jungle " (Guns & Roses song), " Welcome to Hell " (Spawn Comics)
funny grammar, like " happYness " vs " happIness " (used in "The Pursuit Of Happyness", Gabriele Muccino & Will Smith movie)
LOL

That is correct... "Welcome to Hell". Alternatively, you could use an adjective... "Welcome to Robot Hell".

Kind of like Facebook vs. The Facebook . It only works if the The is part of the name. Of course, I got rid of my facebook account years ago so

My wife came running in, half shock/half amazement, when I played with smcfancontrol on my mac pro and turned everything up all the way. Half power drill, half jet turbine, half lawnmower.

"I thought that thing didn't have any fans in it! What did you do??!"

ivelegacy wrote:

MorphOS (aka Mos) is a lightweight, highly efficient and flexible desktop operating system. It includes primarily proprietary as well as open - source components. Its many features range from a modern exceptionally customizable graphical user interface, which can utilize 3D hardware acceleration, to a high-performance Just-in-Time compiler that emulates the 68k family of processors and thereby allows to transparently execute legacy applications developed for the Commodore Ax00 series of computers. You will find a selection of core components described below

I installed Mos on MDD (PowerMac [email protected]): great experience, I envy my friend (the machine is not mine, he asked me to prepare a dual boot, linux/Mos).

It's a nice OS, even if it misses great applications, you "could" find it interesting. It's fast, with a decent filesystem and interface.
Your machine is supported, you only have to check the video card.


Posted just to inform you about the alternative fun

No, it's not supported. Only the "old" G5s (a1047, with PCI-X and AGP slots, not PCI-E) are supported. I've been fascinated by morphos but have no reason to use it.

hamei wrote: On a more pleasant note, I just read that faceblob is scared to death. 95% of their income comes from unwanted advertising, 78% of it on mobiles, and the Apple Store just started selling ad-blockers

To quote Mrs Lovett, "Die ! Die ! God in heaven -- die !"

I just made a facebook after my wife playing with it for a few weeks. We have one simple rule - no real names and no real pictures. This should be a no-brainer. I have found FB is a great tool for hiring people. It's like having your own personal PI People say things they would never say to a potential employer. I've weeded out dozens of candidates without even having to scroll down too far

vishnu wrote: In short, keep it to rainbows, ponies and the like. Thank you! The Management."

That would only make the site at least 20% more awesome...

Not that I'd blame you, it would only prove some sence of normalcy in an insane world. Besides, this site has gone downhill ever since fu left.

Ordered a pair of thinkpad X1 carbons for field use. Which is to say, I asked the IT guy for "smaller" laptops then the 16" HP walmart specials he would normally get as they are fedexed around 2 or 3 times a week. I recommended a thinkpad because I have an x220 at the house for tinkering about with slackware and for the kid to play with - but did not exactly specify any make or model.

OOohhhhhh boy, thinkpads need to die. Lenovo is, as they say in the industry, sucking-the-big-ten-inch. They are slow to sleep/wake. There is no Fn-row (instead a touch panel whos functions need to be cycled through). There is no caps-lock key. The track pad has a mind of it's own - the $79 black-friday-special chromebooks have a trackpad that works, even! And the "classic" trackpoint is buried below the level of the keys which makes it difficult to use.

The machines have a touchscreen - the screen itself is as good as my work mbp (13", 2560x1600). I would say the colo(u)rs are better than a mac except the anti-glare coating isn't nearly as good, and the brightness needs to be turned up nearly all the way to be seen even in my sunny office (the windows are tinted, but it is still a corner office). Anyways, the touchscreen... doesn't seem like they have improved at all since the unit in my old X41, especially compared to my wife's vaio touchscreen. It is as flaky as the touchpad and seems to only support rudimentary multitouch which is shoddy at best. It may be because even in 2015 they are still coming with windows 7 instead of 8 or 10 Which does a terrible job supporting any DPI setting other than the standard. So that gorgeous screen, in reality, looks ugly as sin.

Finally.. .the icing on the cake... they can't even read a fucking PDF anymore. Whatever program comes built into windows to read pdfs (I don't know what MS calls it nowadays?? Part of explorer?) Lenovo has deleted, and replaced with nitropdf. A trial version, and now after 30 days you are expected to pay for this basic functionality. I have one in phoenix and one in shafter CA and now I need to do remote maintenance just so the computer can read a fucking pdf...

And the battery lasts for only 3 hours.

I'm guessing the only icing on the cake is these things are probably half the price of a comparable macbook air.

I don't have to get out that way, thanks to the magic of teamviewer and fedex


I'm working with a fairly awesome telematics package for our vehicles, and it will eliminate the need for the fedexlaptop circus, but it isn't going to be ready until next year. And we'll still have all the old stuff to support...


Anyways, what happens in Shafter that makes it so... interesting?

I sold my thinkpad x220 and am now iphone 5s- only (have a mac @work tho). Probably going to start bugging IT for a 6s or 6s+... I have an original ipad still kicking around for my tr1's (supporting app doesn't work ios >8 ) but it's not very useable... Maybe a classic!?

Ipads still seem like big iphones to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that but I can type just as fast on the phone so...

From what I've read the hardware is great but the software (specifically keyboard support) could use a lot of spit and polish still! It would be neat to get one for the pencil but I would need a coloring book app!

ivelegacy wrote: my GaGa friend has become jealous (she is redhead) and Santa Claus has threatened a few bad intentions to take hostile action against me in retribution for something done or not done (the real reason is that he doesn't want to make you know that he comes from Atlantis, and that his sledge is an old military weapon, powered by steam and sugar

so pssssssssss keep it secret as never said, I do not want to start the new year with a citation in court )

Computer graphics, just to do her hair
To wash her body, she uses compressed air
A ruby laser, just to paint her face
To keep her back straight, she has a Meta Base

She is so strong, she never cries
There are no secrets in her x-ray eyes
And when we talk, she don’t talk back
‘cause she’s my cybernetic sister, and that’s alright

She’s never tired, she can dance all night
She charges up, under neon light
She don’t get hot when we make love at night
She’s air conditioned, she keeps her temperature right

She is so strong, she never cries
There are no secrets in her x-ray eyes
And when we talk, she won’t talk back
‘cause she’s my cybernetic sister, and that’s alright

Ooooh, she never tells me lies
Ooooh, she’ll always sympathize
But ooooh, those aluminium thighs
There’s nothing like being cybernetically satisfied

{robot voice}
Hi, I am your cybernetic sister
And I am here to ensure that you are cybernetically satisfied
Enjoy me
Enjoy me
Enjoy me

They say machines just cannot feel
They’re printed circuits, and magnetic fields
Well here is something you just won’t believe
This heap of junk is in love with me

She is so strong, she never cries
There are no secrets in her x-ray eyes
And when we talk, she won’t talk back
‘cause she’s my cybernetic sister, and that’s alright

She is so strong, she never cries
There are no secrets in her x-ray eyes
And when we talk, she won’t talk back
‘cause she’s my cybernetic sister, and that’s alright

Heh,
You know, she says, I don’t want you, message understood
She does everything that she would expect a good girl should
She don’t get hot when we make love at night
She’ll give up without a fight

{robot voice orgasm}

Basically, hamei popped the cherry of the wrong basement-wanker, who happened to have a green name.

hamei wrote: But I refuse to be treated like a two-year-old by a guy who wandered off for five years to play an online cartoon show.

And if we are not big enough to discuss world-changing events without thread locking, then this is not the right place for me anyhow.

Heard this song on the radio (WNKU of course!) and enjoyed it was confusd/entranced by it enough to look up the vid. Seems very reminiscent of early/mid 90's CGI. But it just came out a few weeks ago!




http://www.newsweek.com/story-behind-fl ... ida-399955

Around mid december I sold my thinkpad (for more than I bought it for, so win!!)

Let me back up a bit. I replaced my worn out, battered, slow, macbook air whos battery maybe lasted for two or three hours, with the thinkpad last June because I was excited about many of the new features coming in windows 10. Since I haven't really used windows since the xp/vista days, I forgot microsoft was full of shit and many of the new features wouldn't work at all and in reality my 2.5ghz core i7 thinkpad ran less than half as fast as a 1.4ghz c2d macbook from 2010. Especially when booting up. And the screen sucked. And the touchpad sucked. And it had to update itself ALL the time. Especially when trying to use it. And the battery life sucked. So I sold it.

I figured I would replace it with a new macbook, the little one in gold (I borrowed one for a bit and really liked it) or even an ipad. But when I realized if I can do it on an ipad I can do it on my phone, so I didn't buy anything and have no computer-shaped machine to my name.

I have a macbook pro at work (standard issue although I have seen a few airs without retina...) and if I have to work on a weekend I might bring it home on friday rather than going into the office. Tends to only happen once a month or so.

So... No 'computer' for me. My wife has a vaio (I am not allowed to touch it!) but even she is so smitten by the screen on her galaxy she only uses it for writing and other things where having a keyboard/larger screen comes in handy.

Also thought about getting an apple watch but I realized the nike sportband is still king of the wrist. Maybe next years apple watch?

I've started reading books again. Kickass tends to be better than tpb for books. And I need to be at work to use the real computer for that, or have my wife download a book and email it to me. Which I guess is the one big shortcoming with iphone, lack of torrents. Spotify replaced itunes everywhere for me, and the need to torrent music. Ditto for netflix and movies. Once in a great while I will buy/borrow a paper book if I find something interesting. Or art/picture books.

Is anybody else here living in a "post-PC" world? PeeCees have never been better and I can't shake the feeling that... nobody cares

Aaaahhh before I had the MBA I had an X40, it was great. I wore that thing out .

Almost forgot, I took my old mac pro to work. It is a time machine and fileserver for everybody else now. I guess it's still technically mine..

Harsh, man. I may not have much dignity but at least mine doesn't come from a machine.

I built a small end of line tester program (@work) for iphone that connects to a ble can adapter. I suppose it would run on ipads as well...

I should learn swift (one of these days!) but I don't see obj-c and xcode as a big hinderance from the Appointed Overseers, but, I've also never submitted anything to the app store...

fu wrote: just when i was thinking of asking the ‘channers about those embedded, mini-whatever you call them kits (like the raspberry pi, bandana-split or doo-wap-de-l’arte). not sure if they count as post pc though.

I grew up with avrs, 8051s, msp430s, etc, so whenever I think I have an excuse to buy a rpi I pull a $3 mcu out of the cookie jar and use that instead. I thought about using it as a telematics device but the lack of a built in gsm modem, and lack of decent software both OS and application level for what I wanted to do kinda scared me off. Not to mention any security holes I wound up using the STW TC3G and could not be happier with the results. STW makes our ECU as well which I also develop for in my spare time. I'm the only engineer at work so I do not have a whole lot of time to devote to software development. It's all in C and Codesys (IEC 61131-3 IDE). There are also 3 PCBs in the vehicle which I designed and programmed the avrs for.

So, long story short, no. I still do everything with AVRs that most normal* people would use an RPi for. Even my crazy RGB under cabinet kitchen lights (I converted every incandescent bulb and the double-t8 light, never did the cfl thing, in my house to Hyperikon and Ikea LEDs last summer) with remote control 'app' is... AVR

*I say 'normal' loosely because a really 'normal' person thinks a raspberry pie is a dessert!

I think there is a rpi derivative out there that has a built in canbus. Not that a mcp2515/2561 is all that pricy buuuuuuut...

If you had an RPi and actually used it as a desktop, like with kb and mouse, I would still call it a PC. It's probably better than the $70 "windows with bing ads" laptops that walmart sells. I don't know any rpis that are used like that, tho. All embedded gee-whiz stuff. Like your toaster can text you when it's on fire, etc.

I know nothing about emulation and would have zero interest towards the development of such a project. However, I would be very happy if there was some sort of virtual SGI that I could use and ran Irix, even an older version like 6.2. Even if it ran at Indy R4000PC speeds We can always throw more modern horsepower at it. If target performance around an r4400sc indy with xz graphics on an i5 were possible it would be very neat and maybe even useful. Since I guess the host would be linux or osx I can see why this discussion is not suitable for irix development forums

This sounds very different from running e.g. MAME on an SGI (the other way around). Why is that discussion not suitable for the irix development forums?

Running...

I am assuming everybody has read Maciej Cegłowski's talk on web bloat that has been making the rounds on all the tech blogs lately.
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

I recently ran into Compuntion's excellent site http://www.compunction.org on body mods. Was trying to take care of a hypertrophic scar I'd developed.

Anyways, where are all the good text-based (no js, minimal http, even) sites at? Any ~gasp~ News sites like that?

I mean, useful sites, not just pages saying how great minimal web pages are or other nerd stuff...

At home:
Ipad g1 (TR1 machine because of ios5 old version) I have a BLE dongle for it)
Iphone 4s- hooked up in stereo cabinet for spotify playback.
AEBS

In the closet:
Apple 1 (retro) I want to have this framed at some point
Apple iie
Ipod touch g2 that needs glass and battery (freebie remote and light switch that I have yet to get around to fixing)
Iphone 5s that needs a battery and screen because the screen and glass are now one piece it will probably not be fixed...

At work:
Mac pro
Macbook pro (with TBD)
Iphone 6s (which is also my main machine at home right now which I am typing this post on )
Airport express

I'm definitely waiting for the 2nd gen watch at this point. I thought I wanted one until I realized how limited they are especially for activity tracking. And how unreliable/slow the apps are. Definitely a 1st gen product :/

ClassicHasClass wrote: You want gopherspace.

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/feeds

Sweet. Been plaing with iGopher. Still trying to make sense of gopherspace, tho. https://appsto.re/us/sCWZC.i

*giggles*

I'll show myself out...

ivelegacy wrote:

skywriter wrote: One thing I really like to do with a Apple MacBook Air with ad-on 3rd party is the same I was able to do with Sun gear - although I can use three full color monitors instead an individual color

to what are those LCDs attached ?

Probably airplay? Looks like a neat setup, if you're into that sort of thing. I prefer my thunderbolt display, even if it's not retina (Soon! Soon! Please, Apple? Please make a retina tbd???)

ivelegacy wrote: with my MacBookAir I can't easily have X11
the best I can have is XQuartz (it's 3rd parts)
which partially supports X11

e.g. I can export " Mathematica " from IRIX, even if it misses Xfonts (already fixed)

I know mathematica 10 on OSX is a gazillion times better than 5.2, even if 8-ish was the best. You don't need any X at all

Playing Splatoon <3

I recently purchased a Eaton UPS for my Mac Pro (5S 1000VA) and it has a built-in weekly self-test feature. I set it up one Friday afternoon around 5:30

So every Monday the computer is shut down because the UPS has self-tested and this is stored in the log...


So the UPS itself works fine (e.g. if I turn off the circuit breaker) so long as I have the USB cable unplugged. I would ideally like the computer to shut down when the UPS only has a certain amount of time left but I was told this feature was broken in some versions of OSX. So I set it like so:


Is there some way to not shut down the computer while it self-tests??

nyef wrote: My theory is that Apple assumes that everyone just uses recent Apple laptops. One of the reasons I'm running Linux on my Mini 2010 is that OSX post-10.6 or so has broken power management (no suspend-to-disk) on that hardware, which was a major part of my use-case when I bought it.

Huh, this is a 2006 mac pro running 10.10. It is the best OSX for this hardware. Everything works great, it is more stable than 10.6.8.
What kills me is it's a hack, this machine isn't supported past 10.7 It has the tiamo boot.efi

I also rolled my 2014 macbook pro back to 10.10. 10.11 has a weird USB issue that mean my thunderbolt display only works the second time I plug it in. 10.11 also gets confused whether caps lock is on or not. (e.g. sometimes I have to have caps lock light on to type lowercase...) It hangs while waking up, it seems the second time after waking up after being undocked (undock it, it will wake fine the first time and hang the second time). So I'll stick with 10.10 which works perfectly.

Now that panasonic has some good hi-dpi options my next machine will probably be another toughbook. I use my CF-53 a lot more than I used to and I'm thinking about trading my TBD for one of those big curved dell screens. Go to the panasonic full time and turn in the MBP. The speakers in the dell screen will probably suck, but I can get a cheapie set from bose or logitech and just have them set on my desk...



So, as a "recent apple laptop" user, I can say, no that is not the case and there are plenty of bugs here as well...

Dennis Nedry wrote: When I was trying out 10.11, the UPS did another self test and everything closed up and the system turned itself off. I was able to replicate this behaviour simply by pulling the power plug on the APC and then plugging it in 5 seconds later. Even if I managed to abort the shutdown sequence in the GUI, OS X would terminate WindowServer a few seconds later and the system would go down regardless.

That's the bug I mentioned in the OP. The only option that actually "works" is the "shut down after xxx minutes". If only my UPS didn't report it was on battery power when running it's self test. There must be a self-test signal it sends out that OSX ignores.


What I could do is hook up a 120v relay to the mains and an MCU to send the signal to the computer to shut down if there is really a power loss... jeez, what a hack. Or I could send the UPS back, which is probably a better option since we only loose power 4 or 5 times a year. Just the vagrancies of older hardware and HFS have me a little concerned...

That's what I did. But we have long outages more often than not (too long for the UPS to ride out) and it would be nice to shut down the system cleanly.

Now at my apartment less than 2 miles from work I have been living here for almost two years and the power has not gone out once!

Think it will fit the x230 as well. Ordered as an upgrade but decided I'd rather upgrade the whole machine instead. So it's never been tested or used.

Free for a 'channer, just pay S&H. (Or come on down to zip 41076 and pick it up!)

I use icloud keychain but there are a gazillion PW managers out there, including 2 or 3 that are pretty good (e.g. 1password...)

I love these...

ClassicHasClass wrote:

I have one in ... shafter CA

Shafter?? Where men are men and sheep are scared?

How often do you have to get out that way?

Soooooo.... Guess where I am

An instruction that reads a a string and automatically convers " u " to " you "