View on GitHub

Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Lego Quatro

quorten

2019-08-05

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

Once upon a time, there were Lego Quatros that were twice as big as Duplos and 4 times the size of regular Lego bricks. They got discontinued from the market. Wikipedia didn’t really have much information on it, though.

20190804/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Quatro
20190804/DuckDuckGo lego quatro discontinued
20190804/https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/QUATRO

Interesting, Lego Friends is a reboot of one of their earlier girl-themed lines, with a much bigger marketing push, and it turned out to be much more successful in sales and growing the market for Legos, which was previously still stuck at 90% boys despite the earlier girl-themed lines.

20190804/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Friends

How remote syslog works, and how to use it with Docker

quorten

2019-08-04

Categories: unlipic   docker  
Tags: unlipic   docker  

How does remote syslog work? Here, look at these RFCs. It really is pretty simple, just syslog text lines over TCP, UDP, TLS, etc.

20190804/DuckDuckGo udp syslog
20190804/https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5426
20190804/https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5424
20190804/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslog

And for my own reference, how do you configure Docker containers to send their logs via the remote syslog protocol? Easy. --log-driver syslog when starting a container.

20190804/https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/logging/configure/

Earth's rotation is speeding up

quorten

2019-08-03

Categories: twitter  
Tags: twitter  

Interesting. For most of the length of history, Earth’s rotation has been slowing down due to tidal deceleration. But in the last century, Earth’s rotation has been speeding up due to mantle effects. It is not anticipated that this will last for too long, but if a negative leap second does happen because of this, that will really drive our tech infrastructure out of whack.

20190803/https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html
20190803/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/?utm_term=2019-07-30T17%3A33%3A42&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo
20190803/https://towardsdatascience.com/next-gen-adaptive-neural-systems-c71615eae2a
20190803/https://www.marieclaire.com/career-advice/a27616322/uber-self-driving-car/

To those who are leaving the vintage computing community...

quorten

2019-08-03

Categories: tour-de-force   vintage-computing   mac-classic   apple-ii  
Tags: tour-de-force   vintage-computing   mac-classic   apple-ii  

Dear ex-vintage computing fans,

Vintage computing, ah, yes, fun isn’t it? Well, at first, yeah, it is fun, but once you really get into the meat of vintage computing, pretty soon, you realize you are quickly operating in a community that is fast becoming short handed.

In the old days… okay, fine, to be quantitative and unambiguous, in the 1970s and 1980s era, there was an unusually large number of people, even including especially young children, who were eager to learn technology and work in that field. This resulted in the 1980s and 1990s boom of professional electrical engineers and computer programmers, who quickly decided to drive the computer revolution and work at companies of the like of Apple Computer and Microsoft. As a result of this generation who lived through tremendous innovation within their lifetime, there was a once avid community of vintage computing enthusiasts. Many old-timers viewed the old computer technology as monumental, themselves and their tech career being indebted to the old technology that came before them. Therefore, they saw it as high value to maintain the old computers and some time to relive the old way of computing.

Read on →

The final fate of XEmacs

quorten

2019-08-02

Categories: unix  
Tags: unix  

XEmacs, ah, yes, the venerable Emacs fork that got ahead for a short amount of time, but soon fell behind. Last time I checked a couple of years ago, I remember trying it out and deciding not to use it because it looked laughably out-of-date. What ever happened to it in recent times? Ah yes, the inevitable fate came to it: because it had fallen too far behind GNU Emacs and there were too few developers left on XEmacs, it was retired to maintenance mode indefinitely. Essentially, it’s a clear way to state that XEmacs is slowly fading away, but without immediately declaring its official end.

20190802/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEmacs

Interesting venture capital funding and one project

quorten

2019-08-02

Categories: twitter   random  
Tags: twitter   random  

Interesting venture capital funding here.

20190802/https://www.trailruncapital.com/

Now, this sponsored project is really interesting. Making human grade edible food from cricket protein? For the time being, humans aren’t quite there yet toward eating that kind of food, but for the sake of creating dog food, this is really a blast! Pets and owners alike really like it compared to the alternative protein-rich food dogfood sources.

20190802/https://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/cricket-protein-dog-food-startup-chippin.html

Unit testing in Ansible

quorten

2019-08-01

Categories: ansible  
Tags: ansible  

How do you do unit testing in Ansible? Good question, so far I’ve only ever done integration testing in Ansible by the means of Testinfra. However, Ansible does have the means by which you can write true unit tests, rather than self-contained integration tests as is the case when you write tests using Testinfra, Serverspec, Molecule, or otherwise.

20190801/https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/dev_guide/testing_units_modules.html#use-of-mocks
20190801/https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/dev_guide/testing_units.html

Raspberry Pi 4 is here!

quorten

2019-08-01

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Good, news, Raspberry Pi 4 is here, 9-12 months ahead of schedule! It is the much-awaited redesign from 40nm to 28nm silicon, and with it boasts a boost in performance more similar to desktop PC levels.

20190731/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
20190731/https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-from-35/
20190731/https://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2019/06/22/raspberry-pi-on-raspberry-pi/

Unfortunately, a notable caveat is that Raspberry Pi 4 does not support network boot quite yet. On the other hand, a great advantage is that it’s USB power port is USB on-the-go, so anything you can do with a Raspberry Pi Zero, like “memory program” download a boot image, you can also do with a Raspberry Pi 4.

How did I stumble upon this new knowledge? Well, as you were just reading in my previous blog articles, I was searching how to get the serial number of a Raspberry Pi, and then I stumbled across the Raspberry Pi license key generator, which noted that MPEG-2 license keys will not work with Raspberry Pi 4 since it does not have the necessary hardware. Wait, what? Raspberry Pi 4 is already out? Indeed it is.

20190731/http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

Yes, I know, I know, I was over a month late to the party, but I still found out in a somewhat reasonable amount of time.

Get Raspberry Pi serial number

quorten

2019-08-01

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

How do you get the serial number of a Raspberry Pi? Note that the serial number is not printed on the circuit board. You must get the serial number in software.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

That’s all there is to it, and the value in “Serial” is it. The MAC address, matter of fact, is generated from the serial number by default.

20190731/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi get serial number
20190731/https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/2086/how-do-i-get-the-serial-number

Linus kills the floppy disk driver from Linux

quorten

2019-07-31

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

Oh my, when searching about for what comes after DevOps, I found this on the Register. The floppy disk driver in Linux is being marked as Orphaned.

20190731/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/30/torvalds_floppy/

The main problem with USB floppy disk drives is that they are basically only practical for reading 1.44 MB floppy disks. If you want to read floppy disks of any format, you’re going to need some more tools, tips, and tricks. Here are a few that were mentioned in the comments of the article.

One of the old methods was to use the Catweasel custom floppy disk controller that could read a multitude of different floppy disk formats in the same 3.5 inch floppy disk drive. Unfortunately, it is discontinued and really only works with pretty old PCs. A more modern solution that is similar in design is KryoFlux, but it has some questionable licensing terms.

20190731/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KryoFlux

Here’s a a pretty nifty trick you can do for reading Amiga floppy disks:

Read on →