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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Many useful tips and tricks from 68kMLA

quorten

2019-12-15

Categories: vintage-computing   mac-classic  
Tags: vintage-computing   mac-classic  

Here is a collection of many useful things I learned from my visit to 68kMLA.

First of all, this video on discharging a CRT. Of particular note, it is a good idea to wear safety glasses whenever working on a classic Macintosh, due to the exposed CRT tube posing a risk of implosion if it is damaged. Another useful point of discussion is the question of using a bleeder resistor in the discharge cable. Initially, Apple officially used a bleeder resister in the discharge cable, but due to technician feedback that they preferred to use without a bleeder resistor so that they could hear the audible crackle from the spark, their later design did not feature a bleeder resistor.

But, my opinion, if you hear the audible crack, that can also cause oxidation on the connector ends, and maybe that is wear and tear that you would prefer to do without.

Also, good news, that later Macintosh models such as the Macintosh SE have a bleeder resistor connected to the CRT to discharge it when the system is powered off. Nevertheless, sometimes that bleeder resistor can fail, in which case it is safer to practice the CRT discharge technique regardless.

20191214/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/58417-discharging-a-crt-video/

Read on →

Thread lock

quorten

2019-12-15

Categories: mat-sci  
Tags: mat-sci  

Thread lock? I’ve heard that mentioned by a friend. Oh, interesting, it is an oil placed in metal screw threads to help prevent them from slipping and unscrewing. So that’s why there’s always a weird oil on metal screws. Or maybe that’s just plain old oil. Well, the photo of thread locking fluid definitely doesn’t look like plain old oil, so yeah, probably not the case.

20191214/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread-locking_fluid

How to glue plastics together

quorten

2019-12-14

Categories: mat-sci  
Tags: mat-sci  

Okay, so I have various projects where there were originally two pieces of plastic, or a piece of plastic and silicone, “glued” together, but I accidentally broke the brittle “glue” and now they just won’t stick together again. I can see the remains of some sort of yellow substance that was used to bind the two non-porous, dissimilar materials together, but I can’t tell what it is exactly. If I had to give a guess, I’d say it’s epoxy. Indeed, in some cases, it is. In other cases, it is rubber cement. Still other more specialized cases use more specialized materials.

Well, taking a web search for gluing platistics together, I came to this pretty good wiki How article. Note that the hardest plastics to glue together are polyethylene and polypropylene (low coefficient of friction), some of the easiest are polystyrene (high coefficient of friction). “Poly cement” or “plastic cement” is the name of the game for plastic glues.

20191214/DuckDuckGo glue plastic together
20191214/https://www.wikihow.com/Glue-Plastic

My first steps taking Go Hugo for a spin

quorten

2019-12-14

Categories: blogging   golang  
Tags: blogging   golang  

For a long time (okay, 2 years), I wanted to migrate my then-fledgling blog from Jekyll to Go Hugo in order to speed up the build time and reduce the esoteric Ruby dependencies that were difficult to setup on my older Trisquel (i.e. Ubuntu-based) distribution. Well, now is the time.

First, in the interest of preparing for Raspberry Pi, I installed Go Hugo via downloading the source and building it.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$HOME/go/bin
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
cd $HOME
# Make sure to clone this outside your GOPATH.
https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo.git
cd hugo
go install --tags extended

20191213/https://gohugo.io/getting-started/installing

That took a while to build, but once it was complete, it was all downhill from there following the tutorial. I picked the hugo-octopress theme because it looked similar to my existing blog’s theme, but honestly I really didn’t like it. It was more like a last resort pick, just something to get me started.

Read on →

The rise and fall of Playstation 3 Supercomputers

quorten

2019-12-14

Categories: misc   unix  
Tags: misc   unix  

PS3 supercomputers, a fragment of time. Also it’s interesting as some have commented elsewhere, the advanced Cell processor architecture never really became popular among game programmers, mainly because very few were making their own game engines. Instead, they were repurposing on top of Unity3D, and that’s also why the specific platform features are no longer as important as they use to be.

20191213/https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supercomputer-ps3-umass-dartmouth-astrophysics-25th-anniversary?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Different ways to start a program on Unix and Raspberry Pi bootup

quorten

2019-12-14

Categories: unix   raspberry-pi  
Tags: unix   raspberry-pi  

Have a Raspberry Pi and want to start a GUI emulator program or similar directly on bootup?

This is a good article about two easy and common ways to set up autostarting a GUI user program on a Raspberry Pi on bootup. First, set up auto-login, then on the auto-login account, set autostart either in your .bashrc file or in an lxsession autostart file.

20191213/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi freedesktop autostart
20191213/https://blog.startingelectronics.com/auto-start-a-desktop-application-on-the-rapberry-pi/

A third, more advanced method of my own? Add your program to “/etc/shells”, then use “chsh” on the auto-login account to set your program as its “shell”.

Also, yet another method which I recommend more for GPIO software than for GUI software is ot start your user program from a systemd unit file. See my older blog article related to this subject for more info.

AI Dungeon 2

quorten

2019-12-13

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

Looking for a more advanced text-based adventure game that has a better undersanding of natural language? Take a look at AI Dungeon 2. It uses artificial intelligence with a massive trained model database and requires very powerful GPUs to run at an acceptable speed. Also, it’s open-source, so you can build and run your own.

20191212/https://github.com/quorten/AIDungeon

Here is a modification to connect AI Dungeon 2 to a Twitter account to listen for replies and give responses.

20191212/https://github.com/dfeldman/AIDungeon/blob/master/twitterbot.py

Here is more information on AI Dungeon 2 from the creators.

20191212/https://pcc.cs.byu.edu/2019/11/21/ai-dungeon-2-creating-infinitely-generated-text-adventures-with-deep-learning-language-models/
20191212/http://aidungeon.io/

Self-driving cars should be called "cryptocybers"

quorten

2019-12-13

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

Interesting article I’ve found here. Self-driving cars should be called “cryptocybers”? Ha! Why is that? “Crypto” because the driving mechanism is not understood by the layperson, “the driver is hidden,” and “cyber” because that is the actual correct word for “driver.” “Automobile” cannot be used because that word has already been used for manual driving car.

The problem with the name of self-driving cars: when almost all other words are taken and repurposed for uses that are not entirely consistent with their original meaning.

20191212/https://hackaday.com/2019/02/14/the-problem-with-self-driving-cars-the-name/

Lots of interesting info from 68kMLA

quorten

2019-12-12

Categories: vintage-computing   mac-classic   raspberry-pi  
Tags: vintage-computing   mac-classic   raspberry-pi  

I went looking around on 68kMLA today and found some interesting info.

First of all, having trouble with garbage on the screen when booting a Macintosh SE/30? Try replacing the RAM SIMMs, they can sometimes go bad and cause this. Next up would be the address multiplexers.

20191211/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/58398-se30-vertical-stripes-death-chimes/

This is a very interesting thread about various accelerator cards, one containing an FPGA that generates the video expansion output.

20191211/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/31485-bolles-finds/&page=5

Got some NiMH batteries that aren’t doing so well and running out of capacity? Try putting them in the freezer overnight, take them out to let them warm up for a couple of hours, then give them a long charge. They may very likely be restored to almost full capacity.

20191211/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/58429-freezer-nimh-battery-trick-still-works/&tab=comments#comment-624227

Here is are some interesting information about a demo program that was put together on the original Macintosh. Technically, it was a lab prototype 512K Macintosh, because the full demo software didn’t fit on the original 128K. There’s also some interesting information about the origin of Macintalk.

Read on →