Logout @logout@hackers.town

John Horton Conway, author of the Game of Life, died because of Covid-19. So I made this, in assembler, on ZX Spectrum. R.I.P.

Oh, this #beznoska brewery mentioned by @pkotrcka@layer8.space is indeed very good. But how am I supposed to get up to work after exactly three hours of sleep?

My current desktop, I'm more than satisfied with it, there are just two minor things:

1. Thinking about moving the menu/taskbar to the top, just like OS/2 Warp 4 had because it is otherwise more similar to OS/2 than to Win 9x.

2. Need to make xconsole work, it doesn't by default in Void Linux because it doesn't log anything to /dev/console.

Isn't xosview just beautiful? And useful.

After years, I've got it! Asus P/I-P65UP5!

Gopher: gopher://i-logout.cz:70/0/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_how_i_got_my_holy_grail.txt

HTTP version: http://hracka.org/~logout/phlog/2022-03-23_how_i_got_my_holy_grail.txt

Pictures included 🙂

OK. I did it, it's on my phlog 😁

well, I could have written this for my phlog, instead of tooting it. and that's why gopher dies ... 😆

Long retro-computing toot ahead! With pictures!
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Some 10-15 years ago I bought on a local flea market something that looked like an FM radio tuner for the RS-232 / COM port. It cost about $0.5, so I took it and soon after forgot about it. Recently I found it again while searching for something completely different and decided to finally make it work and talk. It was harder, than I thought it would be.
Typhoon was a brand of German company Anubis International GmbH and was quite known in central Europe around the turn of the century as a manufacturer of speakers, webcams, TV tuners, graphics cards, and other PC peripherals and components. The brand itself still exists, but has changed owners several times and has no connection to its own history.
When I googled the Radio Star, I found just one link - to some old eBay auction where someone sold it with cables and a floppy with driver, but that was all. So I googled more for other Typhoon-branded peripherals and from one photo of the packaging got the URL of Typhoon website from 2001 and then went straight to archive.org.
Sadly, the website is what websites back then used to be: generated by a CGI script with long, long URL strings full of parameters, and archive.org didn't and mostly still doesn't archive these well. I had to try another approach: I looked at all the archived files and discovered a pattern:
- there was huge amount of cryptically named ZIP archives
- and there was less huge amount of HTML files (375 exactly) which had the word "drivers in the URL and the same cryptical part as the ZIP archives.

Yes! The latter heap contained product pages with a list of driver archives for various systems from the first heap. So I opened one after another, and after about four hours and 161 opened pages I found a product page for my Radio Star. After that it was all easy...

...the FM tuner works. I just had to use an old Nokia headset as I don't have anything else with a 2.5mm jack capable of reproducing sound. And I had to use an old personal organizer sync cable as an antenna, because that is the only other thing I have with a 2.5mm jack. Why did all this take me so long?

TL;DR I bought an FM radio for the COM port a long time ago and finally made it work.

I never delete comments on my blog. As it is my own file-based hard-coded CMS, i just change the file suffix from .comment to .trolling and the comment disappears. I hate to do it, but time to time, there just are trolling attempts and I hate these even more.

@cdmnky hello, just doing the (ir)regular Bongusta maintenance and found that there is no gopher on seedy.xyz anymore. Is that final or temporary? Thanks!

I have first numbers! Joe's Own Editor a.k.a. joe a.k.a. my preferred editor everywhere - 7.5 hours of fetching, configuring and building with all dependencies.

It took 14 hours to depack the NetBSD pkgsrc tree on Jornada 720. I wonder how long it will take to build a single package and if it will go through at all.

I published this on my blog, but as it is in Czech, i will do a short thread here in English: About 18 years ago I got an Intel Celeron 366 for Slot 1 with something else. As I had no use for it, I mostly as a bookmark (for paper books of course!). After all this years I was curious, whether the poor old CPU works, but it had no cooling and buying any on eBay wouldn't be worth it. So I scripted one in OpenSCAD and printed it. Long story short: The Celeron works!

The keyboard is known as very bad, it's made from industrial switches with almost no travel, so it's like hitting solid wall.

Quite a lot of modules exist: 32 and 64 column video display, graphics addon (512x256 but slow, slow, slow - 3 seconds to fill the screen!), plaintext and graphic BASIC dialects, Pascal, Assembler, serial interface, even punched-tape reader. And two years ago someone finished SD-card interface, which I today successfully built.

If you don't know the machine: it's one of the 8bit computers built in socialist Czechoslovakia. 8080-based, modular, with horrible keyboard.