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About
Kurt Weiske's other blog. Retro tech enthusiast, photgrapher, and systems guy. Blogging like it's 1999. Static blog generation, talking tech...
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Links
realitycheckBBS
kataan.org
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mastodon
tilde.club
Internet Nodes...
Reading The Hacker
Crackdown and felt nostalgic at the term "internet node".
Back in the '90s, having an internet presence meant having a box sitting at your employees colocation facility or if you were lucky, on the end of your home DSL connection. I ran Linux as a firewall, web server and mail server on my home connection, others were into the *BSDs, and one friend of mine ran IIS on a DEC Alpha workstation running Windows NT for MIPS processors. I blogged, had a couple of mailing lists, shared secondary DNS for people who offered secondary DNS for me, and ran Jabber for a short time.
I miss those days where you felt like an active participant in the network, rather than a "consumer" of "services" provided by a couple of players.
I've started to see people running their own Mastodon nodes at home or in the cloud, and it's heartening to see people taking control of their presence again.
There are a ton of options nowadays for a home internet node. A Raspberry Pi can suffice. The old PC you have in your closet could do just as well. Some routers can load OpenWRT software, which turns your proprietary router into an embedded linux system that routes, firewalls and can run small apps like static web servers.
I run realitycheckBBS, a telnettable bulletin-board system I'm run since 1991. With my BBS software, I've got traditional telnet and web-based message boards, mailing lists, file areas via FTP, a functional web server with blogging and templates, news server, mail server and IRC. It's all running on a Windows box, but I could easily move it to Linux and get a standalone web server like NGINX or Apache to more easily build non-BBS web apps.
Running this blog is another guily pleasure. I started off with a daily personal blog in 2000. It varied between being a photblog, a personal blog and a place to store techical information I wanted to save. It's now all photos, and another domain hosts a "brand" site with the technical information from the past and new technical info.
I'm running Blosxom, a web blogging tool I remembered from back in the '90s, when PERL was *the* thing - another guilty, nostalgic pleasure.
Stream-of-consciousness blogs fell by the wayside with Twitter and Facebook, it's nice to buck the trend.
posted Tue, 12 Dec 2023
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Back to Photography
Does anyone miss photography? With an actual camera? I burned through a
*lot* of film in the early 2000s, and complemented film with shooting on
early digicams. I'd say I shot more photos with a camera phone, but those
photos were less creative, less planned, and less thought out.
I miss that sense of combining the surroundings with my vision that cameraphones don't seem to capture.
I have a handful of decent digicams from the mid 2000s, a DSLR that currently has a lens focus issue, and 2 prosumer cameras. I'm planning on taking one with me when I go out. The problem is, I need to look harder for subjects. My best photography days happened when I was working in San Francisco; it's a subject-rich environment, from candid people shots to geometric architecture, street abstracts and urban decay are all within a 30 minute lunch walk.
My photography is available at www.kataan.org if anyone's interested.
posted Thu, 07 Dec 2023
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How it all started.
I picked up a Casio FX-3600p calculator on eBay recently. 
I took a calculus class in college from a professor who inspired me. He'd grown up in a world where people did calculations by hand, and he saw calculators as tools that would free mathmeticians from grunt work and let them do the theoretical work, the dreaming. He required students to spend a little more and get programmable calculators. We spent the semester getting to know our calculators and getting to use them to do all of our heavy lifting, so to speak.
Before that class, I mostly used computers to play games. After that class, I saw calculators and computers as tools to do the repetitive, error-prone work and started programming in earnest.
I was a poor college student, so I picked the Casio - it was the cheapest option available. Other kids splurged on the HP 41CV or HP 71 calculators, which I would have loved to have. I have an HP 41 emulator on my phone, that's the closest I'll come to one.
The FX-3600p is a lightweight compared to today's graphing calculators - it could store two programs in memory and each was limited to (I think) 38 steps. That was enough to store equations and let you run through several iterations to graph it, saving a ton of time.
It does have its charms, though. The calculator I received arrived in great shape, and the original lithium CR2025 battery is still going strong.
posted Wed, 06 Dec 2023
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The End of Putty?
I'm working with Windows Terminal on my Windows 11 desktop, and it's a nice
environment. I can run my WSL terminal, Powershell and DOS command shells in
one tabbed interface.
I loaded my public keys into my profile and am using the SSH command in
Windows to connect. After years of relying on Putty, I'm thinking I might
not need it anymore.
I'm starting to use tmux with my SSH sessions, I suppose I could cheat and
open several SSH sessions at once in different tabs under Windows Terminal.
posted Wed, 06 Dec 2023
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