Wow, now this is interesting. Looking for a modern version of WebRing? IndieWebRing is one attempt that appears to be gaining momentum. Also, tildeverse is another great solution out there.
20200526/https://indieweb.org/indiewebring
20200526/https://tildeverse.org/
Here again is another discussion of why Trisquel is based off of
Ubuntu rather than Debian, but there is some important key information
about the systemd versus sysvinit argument in here.
Wow, this is a really interesting story here, the whole of it. What
happened after Debian switched from sysvinit to systemd? Of
course, we know some developers were outright mad. But, here’s the
key. sysvinit became broken in Debian, so developers had to make a
fork, one of which is called Devuan, that restored sysvinit back to
functioning. In the meantime, they partnered with Debian to bring
sysvinit back into working condition in Devian. But then, the
Devuan community came to an abrupt end when one of the lead developers
pulled an April Fool’s joke that the Devuan website was hacked. This
made a significant number of people upset, chaos, arguing, apologies,
and frustration ensued, that lead developer resigned, followed by
another, and another, and pretty soon, things just fell apart. With
Debian sysvinit back into operation, folks switched almost
seamlessly from Debian to Devuan, and that was the end of it.
20200525/https://trisquel.info/en/forum/why-are-we-based-ubuntu-and-not-debian
20200525/https://lwn.net/Articles/786593/
20200525/https://web.archive.org/web/20190331191212/https://www.devuan.org/pwned.html
ThinkPenguin Wi-Fi devices. Great Respects-Your-Freedom devices until they crash or lock up under heavy Wi-Fi activity, right? Yeah, that’s the problem, I’ve upgraded my firmware many times to no avail on fixing the problem, many times hoping an upgrade would fix it. What I’ve found out instead was that simply using more Wi-Fi access points to spread the load further away from the central router was the main way to move crashes off the central router… at the expense of them happening on the edge routers instead. Okay, so now I know the crashes are definitely a Wi-Fi induced problem, wired networking and routing causes no issues whatsoever.
So, although my first suspicion is that the culprit is hostapd
because the crashing problem consistently happens across two different
classes of device hardware, there are two main places where crashes
may be happening:
The Linux Wi-Fi drivers, what interacts on the lowest level to
provide the wlan0 interface to user-mode.
The user-mode Wi-Fi software stack, basically that’s entirely just
hostapd.
Interesting, by mention in 68kMLA, I saw a name-drop to activity
happening in vcfed, the Vintage Computing Federation. They have
info not just on vintage Macintoshes and Apple II, but on a whole host
of vintage platforms. Their forum is the go-to where most of the
activity is happening, they have a site-wide blog but it is mainly
only for vintage computing fair announcements and the like at the
moment, which are canceled/postponed for the time being due to
Coronavirus.
20200525/DuckDuckGo vcfed
20200525/http://vcfed.org/wp/
20200525/http://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum.php
Want to capture DOS screens when running on real hardware, rather than under a virtual machine or emulator? SNARF is a great tool to do this that’s up to that job.
20200525/DuckDuckGo snarf screen capture
20200525/https://www.pixelmetrics.com/Snarf/index.htm
Through hole desoldering. Got solder stuck in a stubborn hole and having trouble getting it out? One of the big sources of desoldering frustration can be if a through hole is connected directly to a heatsink or ground plane, because the heat will get conducted out to the plane and the joint will not get hot enough to clear the solder away. One good trick is to use a hot air gun to help heat the joint up a little hotter so you can remove the solder. Another trick is to put some bare solid copper Cat5 wire through the hole to clear things up better.
Finally, a good point to note. Solder wick can cause you trouble with desoldering because it can soak up some of the heat and subtract from the heat available to apply to the joint.
20200525/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/59764-trick-to-desolder-thru-holes/
Many times I’ve longed for the possibility of turning vintage Macintosh computers into a manufacturable design. Sure, there are a lot of standard chips inside a vintage Macintosh, however inevitably there is some custom silicon for the floppy disk controller, the clock/PRAM circuit, and so on. What if these parts could be recreated via modern manufacturing?
Well, reading about the 6551 ACIA, which is used in the Apple II computer for serial communications, I’ve come to the right place. Rochester Electronics “specializes in fully authorized device duplication.” So, there you go. If you’re looking for the know-how on how to recreate silicon chips that do not have design documentation for them, Rochester Electronics is the place to go.
Of course… there is a substantiated reality in all of this, though. Rochester Electronic’s biggest customers are large corporations and governments that have clear long-term contracts that are making money for them. Inside of this market, they can easily command higher prices for parts that are specifically designed for embedded systems. And, unfortunately, a vintage Macintosh falls pretty far away from the desires and requirements of this main market.
What software engineering process or tool consistently improves software quality? Good human health. All the hype over tools, in empirical studies, that have shown only limited or questionable gains. But when it comes to crunch time, high stress, and not getting enough sleep, there is quite empirical proof about how much software quality goes down during those times.
20200524/https://increment.com/teams/the-epistemology-of-software-quality/
Finally! Vindication in a concept I was trying to put forward but get tons of rejection from family folks. I guess the thing is, this is also one of the marks of a highly effective software developer.
Wow, this is interesting. An ice cream truck that does not dispense ice cream. The driver of this truck, who takes it merely as an occasional recreation, has gotten quite the number of interesting reactions from people of all ages.
20200524/http://www.citypages.com/music/scary-northeast-minneapolis-ice-cream-truck-has-heavy-metal-no-ice-cream/570670651
The Minnesota State Fair is canceled this year, they don’t want to ruin it by providing a bad experience with all the mitigations that would have to be put in place for Coronavirus. This wasn’t the first year it was canceled due to a public health outbreak.
20200524/https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/minnesota-state-fair-2020-decision/89-2c4ad3d0-7996-4d15-8be8-9edc703cafb9
After having come quite a long ways in my software framebuffer software, I thought my programming skills may now be up to the challenge of programming 2D and 3D graphics on the Apple II computer. But, a first question to answer, how fast would my various subroutines run? I would have to write a simple benchmark program to answer that question. It should be easy, just run in a loop, and time the results. But wait, how do I do timing on the Apple II computer?
On a modern computer, there is a dedicated timer chip or subunit of the CPU that does exactly that: timing. Since this timer is independent of the computations happening on the CPU, it is very easy to use for the purpose of measuring wall clock time. Alas, the original Apple II computer had no such chip, that’s why early game software all used CPU cycle counting for timing.
But surely, there’s still a better way, isn’t there? The vertical retrace happens at a deterministic interval on graphics output, about 1/60 of a second in NTSC. I can just hook up a vertical blanking interval interrupt handler and count the number of vertical retraces to measure wall clock time. Well, yeah… in my particular case with my Apple IIc Plus, I can do that. However, the only reason why I can do that is because the Apple IIc Plus includes built-in mouse support, and the Apple II mouse card patched in support for vertical blanking interrupts as the original Apple II computer didn’t have it.