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Showing posts from September, 2021

More speech.

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Sigh.  YouTube Will Remove Videos With Misinformation About Any Vaccine . I don’t really care what the topic is, I fall back to Justice Brandeis:  “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”  Whitney v. California , 274 U.S. 357 (1927) The past year has been a rollercoaster of things that couldn’t be uttered without being “canceled,” only to have those falsehoods become credible possible truths... Just one case in point, the “SARS-CoV-2 came from a Chinese lab” theory was widely derided as a baseless conspiracy theory , only to become recognized as a viable possibility (that even Jon Stewart has advanced ). Or ... Remember how fast folks were to shut down anyone questioning whether or not a cloth mask could provide protection against 0.09 μm virus particles? This is the only meme I could find over a year later, but even suggesting that was

Drones and coal-fired paddlewheel aircraft carriers

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As in, military unmanned aerial vehicles. I was surprised, a while ago, to learn that timed-out B-17s had been converted to basically guided munitions , with early television systems and radio-controlled interfaces to the flight controls. But I was kinda shocked to learn that actual drones like we might expect to see today, were flying in the 1940s! The Interst ate TDR actually saw service in the Pacific Theater, circa 1944 (developed in 1942). The  TDN-1 , successful but never used in operational service. Developed and test flown in 1942-1943. Almost as shocked as I was to learn that the U.S. Navy had two operational aircraft carriers, used in the Great Lakes for training purposes, that had been converted from coal-fired paddlewheel steamers: USS Sable (IX-81) USS Wolverine (IX-64)

Adding Google Search to Arctic Fox

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The Arctic Fox browser , which I’m using on an ancient MacBook running OS X 10.7 “Lion,” comes setup to search with DuckDuckGo . Which I probably should really start using. But 2+ decades later, I’m used to Google. Theoretically you can add Google (and a bunch of other search plugins) from within the app, but they’re all dead links to addons.palemoon.org. So I rolled my own. It’s online at: https://pastebin.com/Xap6Peix Create that file as (e.g.) google-palemoon.xml in whatever directory your Arctic Fox install stores its search plugins (on mine, it’s: /Applications/ArcticFox.app/Contents/Resources/browser/searchplugins ). Restart the browser and select Google from the search field’s drop-down menu. Hope someone out there finds it useful.

Dual Booting the MacBook: Linux and OS X

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Building on my experience getting a reasonably usable Lion install going , and finally getting Linux up and running ... I wiped the 120GB SanDisk drive and installed Lion first, partitioning the drive in two and setting the second partition up to be “free space.” I had kinda borked the install the first time around, and could not figure out why the USB installer was booting straight into the “Installing” screen and then throwing an error: “There was a problem installing ‘Mac OS X’. Try reinstalling. Rebuilding the USB installation media, and zeroing and repartitioning the hard drive, had no effect. Turns out I needed to zap the PRAM (start up the machine holding down Command-Option-R-P). I then installed Lubuntu in the unused space, with a 200MB /boot/efi FAT32 partition (with the “boot” flag set), and a 1GB swap partition. Everything seems to work great, I can boot between the operating systems by holding down the “Option” key at startup. Best of both worlds. I get the

Saved.

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A few days ago, I noticed my trusty U2311Hb monitor flicker a couple of times. Barely noticeable. But I learned my lesson when my ancient 2007WFP died. I immediately ordered a “grade A” used U2417H . (Which, I know now , means an “Ultrasharp” monitor, 24", from 2017, with a full high definition display). I like the Dell U-series monitors. They’re antiglare, IPS, work well (for a decade or so at least), and can be found cheap - and I’m a cheap bastard. Anyway. It arrived today ahead of schedule - just in time for the 2311 to do that thing where the screen works perfectly for about 2 seconds then goes completely dark. Swapped in the new screen, ran an HDMI cable to replace the DVI cable, and now, back to work... (This one has a USB 3.0 hub built in; need to get a 3.0 A-B cable .)

New tech breathing life into vintage hardware

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FrogFind - The Search Engine for Vintage Computers. 68k.news - Basic HTML Google News for vintage computers. Wicknix InterWeb browser . Action Retro’s video: I Rebuilt the Entire Internet... for Vintage Computers . Code for the above sites: https://github.com/ActionRetro/ PHP port of Mozilla’s readability library . Browservice : Browser as a Service. A web "proxy" server that enables browsing the modern web on historical browsers. It works by rendering the browser viewport into images, which are then shown by a JavaScript application running on the client browser. ( Looks like it will work with a Windows 95 era client , but not anything truly archaic, like Mosaic-on-UnixWare 1.1, or a IIgs browser.) K-Meleon , a browser for older versions of Windows. Collected links to, e.g., a version with TLS 1.2 support. (Discovered through this discussion .)

Getting Linux installed on an ancient MacBook

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The Centon "Diamond Series VS1" 60GB SSD I tossed in my old MacBook about 6 years ago died suddenly and without warning. I happened to have a SanDisk 120GB drive I recently took out of a small server floating around, so I finally got around to getting Linux installed on this thing. (Typing this on it now.) I've tried doing this before and always gave up. I wasn't sure if I had a USB drive that was compatible, etc. The key is patience. A lot of patience. I started off with one of the Matt Gadient ISO images (specifically lubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64-mac-mattgadient.com.iso), and followed the instructions found on Stefan's page . I used a 2GB partition on a cheap 16GB USB flash drive I had within arm's reach (it identifies itself as vendor_id abcd, product_id 1234, product "UDisk" manufacturer "General" ...). When I booted the MacBook with the USB drive inserted, I smashed and held the Alt/Option key immediately after I hit the power button