Posts by The Unexpected Bill

Any printer you want, so long as it's HP...

Some data points, for whatever they might be worth, which probably isn't very much...

Although the indicated type and printer icon definitely did change, the drivers for my printers (including a Brother MFP) remain untouched and functional. Some are network attached, others are local. Microsoft's print to PDF driver also still worked.

There's a managed printer available from my work computer, and thus far, its icon and indicated type have not been affected by this issue.

Re: Try Deepl:

In that same vein, I would like to bring your attention to the following: Twin City Christmas, specifically the track entitled "There Ain't Enough Papers for the Reindeer". (Years later, when that link has probably crumbled away to dust, hopefully your favorite search engine can still find this gem.)

The backstory, in the unlikely event anyone cares: the album in question was produced by a city near my part of the world in the mid-1990s as a fundraiser. It consists entirely of local talent. I have no affiliation with it, and might not even know of it, were it not for the fact that my father was one of the few people who bought a copy on CD.

Re: The big problem

Probably not all that old -- a lot of "small engines" are still carbureted to this very day. Only a few have electronic or mechanical fuel injection systems. Even those that run on propane or natural gas will likely still have a carburetor and a fairly large generator can still use what would be considered a small engine.

As best I'm aware, all Diesel engines are implicitly fuel injected.

Fine print: my perspective is one of how things are done in the United States, because that's where I am. Perhaps other parts of the world are doing things differently.

Provided this was some kind of Dallas timekeeper package or one of the many, many clones...you can actually re-energize them if you're not afraid to employ some violence. (I recommend having a few spares to practice on. I lost a few before I got good at it. You can find the more common ones on certain popular auction sites.)

I think one can still get the good old DS12887 brand new. Not so for the other variants often seen in EISA and Microchannel computers (like the DS1387 and DS1397). The only thing one can do for those is to re-energize them with an external power source, which is doable because there also existed versions of those chips that didn't come packaged with the battery and clock crystal. For the packaged ones, they just flipped those pins up, extended them to meet the battery and crystal, and then sealed the whole thing in epoxy.

Carefully carve away the epoxy around the battery pins, puncture at least one of them to disconnect the internal cell and then connect your own external batteries. (I can't take credit for this procedure.)

This has also worked on the various clones of these modules that I've found, like the Benchmarq bq3287mt and Twinhead's TH6887A. The only ones I never got around to figuring out were the STMicroelectronics Snaphat and Caphat modules, mainly because the only equipment I had that used them died of other problems.

Re: Chorizo

You sound as though you have a beef with that!

Sometimes You Can

It depends upon what you have to work with. Some LGA775 era Netburst stuff and Core Solo/Duo systems were 32-bit only and will let you drop in a new processor having 64-bit support. You might need a BIOS update before installing the new CPU.

These days it's probably questionable in terms of how well a modern OS will perform on such hardware and whether it's worth investing even a few bucks into a better CPU when a computer having a vastly better specification might only be slightly more expensive. Still, you can oftentimes perform such an upgrade if you want to...

Re: The mystery

I always thought it demonstrated a lot of gall on Adobe's part to push other software (oftentimes of dubious repute) while delivering security fixes. ("I'm only here because your software is defective! How dare you take advantage of your mistakes as an advertising platform!")

Only rarely did I ever see them push Chrome in this part of the world. Around here, it was almost invariably McLaughee Security Scam that was offered. While I had absolutely no interest in Google Groan at the time, and only grudgingly so today, at least it could be argued that it was useful by comparison...

Re: "just works"

With "conventional" multi-monitor setups, I've never had a problem with any major Linux distribution. (I tend to shy away from the lesser known offerings for reasons similar to those in the article.)

It's under some of the less common arrangements that I've run into trouble. As an example, I have a touch input capable LCD monitor that I wanted to use with Linux Mint 20's xfce variant on a Dell Latitude D630. The displays themselves all worked fine, but it appeared as though the operating system was treating both displays as though they were touch capable. This threw the calibration completely off. (As I remember it, there was a built in calibration tool and I tried it to no improvement. It would place calibration marks on the laptop's internal display, where they could not be touched.)

I'll grant that this wasn't a problem with anything being displayed, though it did prevent me from using the secondary display completely as intended.

It would be nice if low resolution displays were handled better. Over twenty years on, I still run into problems with Linux GUIs where the windows are too large and can't be shrunk down any further to fit the confines of the display resolution, so you can see and use all the elements within. This happens just enough to keep things interesting.

As someone who has become annoyed with the directions that Windows and Mac OS have gone, I'm glad to see the major strides that major Linux distributions have made in user friendliness and ease of use over the past two decades. (As a frame of reference, my adventures started with an early Red Hat Linux version running on an IBM PS/1 486.) There still remain plenty of rough edges that need sanding down, especially if you tread off the beaten path or have a "corner case" situation.

Re: @ Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

"Coincidentally, I updated to Mint 20.3 not half an hour ago. To do that I had to click - I think - three buttons, and didn't even have to stop what I was doing until the obligatory reboot. Apparently, Linux is too hard for those used to Windows."

Linux Mint point upgrades (at least for me) have always been just about that easy. Oh, sure, there was invariably some goofing around to find the right set of incantations that led to an older Dell/Broadcom wi-fi adapter working again, but that was about it.

I wish I could say that a major version upgrade was the same. It's not. I have an old Dell Latitude 2120 netbook that was for some time my daily driver* on Linux Mint 18 something-or-another. A few months ago, I thought it'd be the prudent thing to do to bring it current, even though on every front except being current on security patches, it worked fine.

I'm going from memory when I recount this tale of woe, so it may be that I've missed a step or not gotten something completely right. Instead of the nice graphical mintupdate client, there's this awful console based script you're supposed to run. Okay, fine. There's also a whole laundry list of other things to do...backing out any newer packages you've installed from other repositories, removing those repositories, configuring and using Timeshift if your version is new enough to have it, and probably other things besides.

I wouldn't mind the console based approach one bit if the script's user experience wasn't awful. Here again, you do what it wants, in the way it wants you to do it, or else. As I remember, it insisted that I do a dry run and Timeshift on releases where that feature existed. Okay, but maybe I'd rather have sailed a little closer to the wind. Maybe I don't have the disk space for Timeshift or I don't want to use it for that purpose. That should be my choice. Periodically throughout the upgrade process, it'll ask you to bump your privileges with a sudo prompt. If you're not watching for that, and it's understandable why you might not be, it stalls.

That poor netbook made it through relatively well. Another one (a much less powerful Latitude 2100) did not. At some point during that upgrade, and in spite of have done everything it wanted for safety's sake, some part of the process just died and left the system hanging there. It was with some trepidation that I finally rebooted it, only to find that it was no longer capable of booting graphically. Fortunately, the network stack still came up and I was able to walk it through what was left of the upgrade from the command line. I'd hate to think where a non-technical user would be if this happened to them.

I don't even want to talk about printing on Linux. Most of the time I've had anything to do with it, even on well supported devices (i.e. those that understand PCL and/or Postscript), it has been an irritating process at best. Then again, I hate printers and printing on any OS, and wouldn't mind it at all if every printer in the world just magically fell out of an open window one day.

I've yet to see any desktop Linux react gracefully to the system's running out of (or just low) on disk space. Windows and MacOS both give you a warning that you'd better stop and do something about this problem. Popular distros for desktop use just start acting screwy, and maybe you can open a terminal to run df, if you know to do that. A lot of people don't. I don't think it unreasonable for the computer to clearly warn that something bad is about to happen that will make it unstable or worse. (As you might guess, Timeshift has caused this problem for me.)

Try hooking up a touchscreen monitor to a system where any non-touch enabled displays exist. Tell me what happens. (For me, the system behaved as though it assumed all the monitors were touch capable, and this threw the calibration of the one touch-capable display way off. Evidently, nobody ever tested for what happens when you do that! Yes, I tried to recalibrate and it put some of the targets on non-touch displays.)

I like Linux Mint. I think it's probably one of the best distros going for those just starting out and then some. I'm still unconvinced for the reasons above (and so many more that we won't get into today) that Linux in general is a good fit for everyone who uses a computer, and especially those who don't understand computers reasonably well or aren't prepared to dive in and troubleshoot, possibly becoming quite involved in doing so, when it's all gone wrong.

I feel as though the author of this article is well suited by Linux and even Unix before it. I'm glad it suits them more or less down to the ground. (I'm very sincere here: no sarcasm whatsoever.) To discount other people's feelings and experiences that maybe Linux isn't everything perfect and then some is shortsighted at best. There's still a lot to be done in the name of usability and discoverability. (Yes, I know it's open source and that means I could do it...which is fine, except for the part where I'm not a programmer because I've never enjoyed computer programming no matter how many times I've forced myself to do so. I've certainly done it when I had to, however.)

* Lord have mercy, although it should be said that at the time, an Atom N550 and 2GB of RAM wasn't a bad existence. The small screen size and limited resolution (1024x600) were more of a problem than anything else.

Re: Lightning Protection

Very early in my schooling, I remember a teacher telling us students that if we saw a weather warning symbol appear during a TV broadcast, we should turn the TV off and unplug it right away. I dutifully went and told this to my parents. Of course, neither they nor I ever did so and none of our TVs ever suffered lightning damage.

Many years ago, and in spite of knowing better, I once strung an Ethernet cable across the yard between two structures for a temporary connection. That was fine until one day when a storm rolled in. Even though the storm still seemed to be quite a ways off, there came a tremendous crash of thunder and a brilliant flash from the wireless router (already in very sad shape) sitting on my desk. That was the end of it. I never did find any obvious damage on the circuit board, so I'm still not sure what produced such a light show.

Going back to TVs and lightning, a very rurally situated friend of mine and his family were weathering a storm at their home when all of a sudden the fire department showed up at their door. They were all very surprised by this, until one of the firemen explained that someone had seen lightning strike their TV antenna tower and produce a brilliant fireball. Convinced that there had been an explosion, someone called it in. They went to check the TV and found it no worse for the experience, apart from a severely magnetized picture tube that the degaussing coil eventually cleared up. The TV went on to operate flawlessly for several more years after that and even survived a mishap with excessive line voltage from an incorrectly wired generator. (It is the latter that actually did more damage, smoking a few diodes within the power supply. Once replaced, the set came right back to life.)

Why the Y?

I apologize in advance for doing this, but Y is at least sometimes considered a vowel.

I'm not fond of the way they spelled it either.

Re: Wot no Wi-Fi?

Google recently extended the lifetime of all new models to eight years from the date of platform release. I think they did so at the beginning of 2020 or thereabouts.

Even as one of those obnoxious people who tends to keep his technology around until it's given every bit of good that it possibly can, I think that's pretty fair with the qualifier that you want to be sure of selecting a truly new model. Later Chrome OS updates added a field in the "About Chrome OS" part of the settings application indicating exactly when a model's support lifecycle ends. It would certainly be more helpful still if this information was featured on the carton or at the point of sale and maybe that will happen at some point.

Realistically, all of this means you'll probably get about seven years. With many Chromebooks landing in the hands of children, I think a lot of them will be fairly used up by that point.

By way of Lacros, Google's also been tinkering with the idea of further separating Chrome the browser from Chrome the OS as a potential extension of a given platform's life. (I'm only an interested party with a lot of time for cheap computers with low power consumption, and have no affiliation whatsoever with Google or anyone else who provides Chromebooks.)

You can keep things going for a while longer, provided you're feeling somewhat adventurous. Many Intel (and possibly some AMD) Chromebooks can be modified to run an operating system of your own choosing, especially if that happens to be some variant of Linux. I'm hopeful that in time the same might be true for the ARM based Chromebooks.

Using FTP in a browser

Yes, I absolutely still do, or at least I did until Fx 90 landed. (In fact, I pref'd it back on in Firefox 88 and 89.) Adobe in particular still maintains an FTP site with patches and other updates for software new and old. HP's FTP site is also still running, and quite handy for products they have "forgotten" about, or at least it is when they haven't helpfully purged the files from there as well.

It won't be as convenient to use a standalone FTP program for quick downloads like this.

Re: Shit at search, too. (Was: Google - great at search...)

Indeed, their search used to be second-to-nobody.

I've noticed (at least) two things, one fairly recently and the other that's been going on for a while. The more recent change is the inclusion of "nearby" words (similar meaning, usage, etc.) in your query. I see why in a broad sense that this could be useful to someone, somewhere, but for me it's just infuriating because it works so poorly (at least it does in my usage case).

Sometimes when you're going for a web search, you're already teeing up for that long drive down the fairway of hopelessness. It's even less helpful when Google starts dropping words or entire phrases from your query and offers links you can click to include them again. If it's not there using the search terms as entered...just tell me!

(Yes, I know you can force strings to be included in your query. I find that goes from "not specific enough" to "too specific" almost instantly. Google Searches used to work far better as "divining rods" of sorts if you were close but not quite sure of or accurate about something in your query.)

I dunno...maybe I haven't kept up with the times and I need to relearn searching the web. Every now and then I try the other major search engines and find them even worse soon enough.

Re: Old stuff

I can't speak about the DEC (it probably has some value), but an original IBM PC is worth anywhere from one to a few hundred bucks, depending upon how complete it is and whether or not it works. Unusual options and upgrades certainly help the value. Of course, all of this hinges on finding the right person in your part of the world.

I remember legions of the original IBM PCs flooding area computer stores as businesses got rid of them, in the late 1990s. A lot of these places resorted to scrapping them as soon as they showed up. I rescued mine before they'd done any truly irreversible damage (like breaking off expansion card tabs for the gold contact fingers), but they did get as far as yanking all the cables that would come out of it. It survives today (albeit in somewhat disheveled condition) with a 286 upgrade and a VGA card. I'd like to get an XT-IDE board for it at some point.

Re: Have you actually seen the performance of a 5+ year old iPhone with the latest Software?

Yes. I have a first-gen iPhone SE.

The battery is probably best described as "rather goofy" in regard to its behavior, but it still works acceptably well and has never shut down unexpectedly in regular use. (Cold temperatures have always bothered it, and this has gotten worse with age.) It claims 94% capacity. I'm pretty sure that's a fib. It's the original battery.

The one unexpected shutdown that it had was a byproduct of the previously noted cold weather conditions, and I wasn't surprised when it happened. iOS noticed and told me it would throttle the CPU, but gave me the option to disable all throttling and restore full performance at my own risk, which I did. (Unless there was a time when this couldn't be reversed, I'm not sure why people complained about it.)

As to performance, I have no complaints whatsoever. Even on iOS 14.5.1, the first-gen iPSE is still very snappy and responsive. As much as I hate cellular phones, this to me is the nearly-perfect phone.

Although I'd like for it to see iOS 15, I'll be surprised if it does. At least it should still get security updates for a while...

Re: When you say "pants",

Dell kept using Broadcom Ethernet chips in their Latitude laptops until at least the D530/630/830. I've never had a problem with any of them under any OS, but I'm not sure why they didn't go with Intel Ethernet parts like almost everyone else.

I still have several in regular (almost daily) use, particularly the D630. There's also a D531 floating around, one of those curious models where Dell briefly dipped their toe into the AMD world. (Not sure what it has for a wired Ethernet solution, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was also Broadcom based.)

Finding good working batteries is getting to be more and more of a problem. (The cheap Chinese ones aren't very good. Thankfully, none have halted and caught fire as yet.)

ARM Chromebooks and Linux

GalliumOS runs pretty nicely on a wide variety of (albeit older) Intel based Chromebooks. They don't (yet? ever?) support ARM devices.

In spite of their Linux-based underpinnings, I'm not aware of any other easy (or even difficult) ways to run a conventional Linux on any ARM based Chromebook, old or new. I'm hoping by the time of its demise in 2025, that there might be a viable offering for the Lenovo C330 (MTK8173C ARM based) and similar Chromebooks. If mine's still working by that point, I'd definitely switch it over.

If anyone is aware of any such Linux distribution for ARM based Chromebooks of any kind, I'm definitely interested.

Re: Build it and they will come...

It's been a while since VMWare established a requirement for a microprocessor having virtualization capability. I've forgotten exactly when this happened and a cursory search didn't turn it up.

VirtualBox still provides for software emulation of an x86 CPU and doesn't require hardware-based virtualization support.

ESXi is even stricter on the hardware requirements, as I found out recently when trying to shoehorn it onto a dusty old Dell Optiplex 755 with a C2Q 6600. (My intention was just to tinker around with it, as opposed to any serious use.) Even after finding an older version that would still consent to running on such hardware, it turned into a death by a thousand cuts kind of experience.

Yes, people really do this. My reasoning is that it works and is paid for.

I wish VMWare would have taken a different stance here -- instead of out-and-out prohibiting it, they could have said "you can do this, but we don't recommend it at all". I'm sure it would have been fine for casual tinkering.

I stopped caring mainly because I had previously found ESXi's web based virtual machine client to be pretty buggy. Keyboard input reliability in particular was pretty horrible.

Re: Inquiring mind would like to know...

A properly designed integrated circuit ought to last for many years, if not decades.

Re: Why bother?

I'll grant you that running Token Ring might be a clever idea...but where do you get the hardware these days? Wasn't Madge/Ringdale the last Token Ring company left standing?

A better question might be where you'd get the drivers even if you find some old TR hardware sitting around. The Linux TR project (http://www.linuxtr.net/ , guess I can't embed links) site is still online but it's been years since that site was updated and I'd be shocked to learn that any TR driver code was still present and workable. Drivers for Token Ring hardware in Windows versions after Server 2003 and XP would also be quite surprising.

Maybe NetBSD has something?

(In case you're wondering, yes I do in fact still have a working Token Ring network. Or I would very quickly upon powering up the backbone gear and any nodes. I've got a few IBM 8228 and 8226 MAUs in reserve, while a North Hills LAT3371 MAU is my primary. It's tied into my Ethernet network with an IBM 8229 LAN bridge. For a while I even had separate 16 and 4 megabit networks, with a PS/2 Model 50 bridging between them.)

Re: I got caught by a detector van

Funny you'd mention that -- just for "grits and shins" I named a wireless network set up for testing purposes as "cat detector van". I had no idea that someone had spoofed TV detector vans in this way before.

More seriously, I've seen mention made of a lower cost TV license for black and white sets. I'd be greatly curious to know how many people in this modern day and age are still watching a black and white TV as a "daily driver". Probably more than I'd guess. Are black and white TVs of any kind still on the market over there? I'm also curious to know if a "TV audio only" license exists: at least here in the 'States, AM/FM radio receivers with television audio capability for all VHF channels were once quite common.

Re: Half way

I forgot about that! When the need first arose, I was kind of broadsided by "where DID they put the shutdown option anyway"? I wasted a little time ticking through the Start screen and logging out before finally asking SysInternals Process Explorer to do the job. Never mind that doing so was like using a big truck to move a single sheet of paper, it worked.

The next thing I found was a snarky article from another publication (not to be named here, but I'm sure you can find it if you believe that a Start button won't fix Windows 8'sproblems) that said "just push the power button". Whatever. That whole thing just reeked of snark and stupid. While that'll work and may be a legal move under Windows 8, I was of the impression that earlier versions of Windows performed the most orderly shutdown they could before power was shut off, if you did this. So I didn't do that.

The fact that someone has to search the web to find this doesn't just mean it is that person's fault. This is thoughtless, feckless UI design at its very worst (or is that best?) ...

@Stoneshop

These token things are tougher than you might think. I came to have an "obsolete" token and decided to see what it would take to break the thing. A bored mind is a dangerous thing.

The short answer: quite a lot!

Don't try any of this at home, nor anywhere else.

I threw it at walls, jumped on it, stomped on it, ran over it with a truck, attempted to stuff it into a paper shredder, chucked it down a two story staircase repeatedly and watered it. It was still in one piece up until I chucked it down the staircase. Then the casing started to break, but the electronics still worked.

Around that time, I decided to pull the coin cell battery from it, and saved that for another project (probably re-enlivening a computer clock module or something) since it still seemed to be good.

The end finally came when I threw it in the microwave oven for a few seconds...not once, but twice. Nothing happened the first time around, and the thing still worked when I put the battery back in. The second time produced a very nice flash and bang, which was the end of the line.

Maybe you didn't ask. Now you know.

Worth what you paid to hear it...

So far as I know, all the "odd numbered" revisions to the IP spec are beta and testing releases only. Even numbers are for production use.