Nostalgia
I found my old Flickr account from the 2000s with 18 pages worth of photos. Going back through them was a nostalgia trip - I shot a lot of film in the early 2000s, I'd discovered lomography and was working in a subject-rich environment, San Francisco. It was a town going through a lot of change, and some of the buildings I captured were gone in the following weeks and months.

There's a lot to be said for pocketable cameras. With a LOMO, I'd leave the focus at 8-10 feet and in sunny weather (or shooting with ASA 400 film), you'd probably get your subject in focus. Reach in your pocket, shoot, repeat. I've been shooting again with an old Canon digital pocket camera, but it's not quite the same.

With my phone I need to pull it out, unlock it, press the camera app, wait for it to load, then sight and shoot. It's just not the same.

posted Tue, 16 Jan 2024
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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 Thu, 07 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 Thu, 07 Dec 2023
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Exploring smol
I've run an environment in DOSBOX for reading BBS messages with a QWK reader, a handful of DOS utilities, my trusty copy of Qedit, and Xtree. Editing like it's 1989, all over again. With mTCP, I have a handful of TCP utilities that work in DOS. Using DOSBOX's serial port redirection, a DOS COM port can look like a TCP port. Set COM1 to port 23, open a terminal program like Telix, enter ATDT and you're connected via telnet. I've thought about setting up an IRC client, Lynx for DOS, a terminal client, a DOS word processor, an old copy of Lotus 1-2-3 I have laying around and see how long I could survive.

posted Mon, 27 Nov 2023
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Upgraded
I did finally find a system upgrade, a Dell Optiplex 5070 - it's got an NVMe slot for a future upgrade, 9th generation i7 and 64 GB of RAM. USB 3 and USB-C on the front panel. TPM 2.0 for my eventual move to Windows 11. It was a little bare-bones compared to a consumer-grade Inspiron, since it's most likely a business lease return. $25 got me a wifi/bluetooth M.2 card and a SD card reader for the front to flesh out some of the missing conveniences. It's a nice little system, albeit boring. I'm tempted to break out my rattle-cans and spray it a random color, like we did back in the '80s with boring beige boxes. I sprayed all of my drive faceplates a sickening bright color of green or fluorescent orange and felt like I was pretty 1337. What did we know?

posted Fri, 22 Sep 2023
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Quiet Afternoon
I noticed by old PC was running hot when I *accidentally* ran CoreTemp (I was trying to run another program using search from the Windows Menu). 61C at idle seemed a bit high, 68C when running loads moreso.

Thought it was time for a cleanout, so I took it apart, vacuumed the heck out of the inside of the case, got the sticky dust off of the cards and the motherboard with a nylon paintbrush. Took the CPU cooler off, dusted off the heatsink, cleaned all of the fans thoroughly. Removed the dried thermal paste with alcohol and cotton swabs, and placed a thin coating of new paste on the CPU. One last blow-out with compressed air, re-assembled the case, fired it up, and now my system is running at 29C.

Not bad for 30 minutes' work.

New computers are a LOT easier to work on than when I started fixing PCs. Remember masses of too-long tangled ribbon cables, multiple ISA cards for IO, and full-height disk drives?

posted Sun, 16 Jul 2023
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What to do?
I've got a deadline to spend money on a new PC. A nice problem to have, by the way.

I've typically gotten by with older hardware and gotten a lot of life out of it (10+ years out of a Dell Precision Workstation T3400, 5+ years out of my current Dell Inspiron 3847 desktop) but I'm looking to make a leap with the next desktop system I buy.

I've had SATA-3 SSDs in my desktops for some time, I'm looking for a desktop with NVMe storage - I think they'll be useful for longer than sticking with SATA. TPM would be nice, as Windows 11 will require it.

My current system has a 4th generation i7, it seems that newer i5s will run circles around it. I still would like an i7 at least.

A tower PC case makes more sense - trying to cram another drive into a SFF case is a pain, and I'm always worried about cooling and airflow.

The Dell 7080 looks like a good choice, renewed, they're inexpensive - they can take a lot of memory and support NVNMe.

posted Mon, 10 Jul 2023
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Testing long lines
Here is a test of word wrapping long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long lines. Yay!

posted Mon, 10 Jul 2023
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