Posts by Criggie 120 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2014
The model T was more of a tractor than a car - sure the wheel turns left and right the same, but there's a 2 speed gearbox controlled by pedals, and the brake is the rightmost pedal.. You also have to manually control the spark retard, and crank it to start. The model T had a 20 horsepower engine, and a fuel tank under the driver's seat.
But yes - they had an ignition key that looks like this in the earlier 1914-1919 era - sometimes called a coil switch.
https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_fill,g_auto,h_1248,w_2220/f_auto,q_auto,w_1100/v1555340366/shape/mentalfloss/image_23.jpg (from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/77352/show-tell-ford-model-t-ignition-key )
Later ones had a more conventional looking brass key.
I managed to get two physical hosts on the same scsi bus. It was a P133 running linux and a mac LCII. Both could see the Mac's internal drive and a Syquest EZ135 external drive and a second external Microbpolis 4GB drive.
But the Mac couldn't see the other controller on ID6, and the PC couldn't see the mac's controller on ID7.
https://criggie.org.nz/scsi/
As a tall person, I'd pay good money for an oversized room. I mean where EVERYTHING is oversized.
So the doors are 3 metres tall, with a handle at face height, and you need a step to get up onto the bed which is truely enormous.
So often in life, things are smaller than you remember them. Sales idea anyone? Alternative Airbnb perhaps ?
I still have a small wrench on my keyring, perhaps 5mm or 3/16th of an inch.
Its got an apple logo on it and a double offset, and was used for holding those lug nuts on the back of IO cards. Dates from 1989 when I was at high school and we were fitting apple //e with mouse cards. I would have been about 13 and learned a lot mostly watching other people do the upgrade.
So El-Regonauts and Commentards alike, what weird and wonderful things are on your keyring?
I do wish we could add photos in-line here.
My CD player in the workshop is an old 8x cdrom drive with a play and stop button on the front. Its crowbarred into the housing of an old IBM 5.25" external floppy drive, which has a suitable internal PSU.
The only hackery was putting a stereo RCA out connector on the back . Works well in the garage.
Yep - used to have a net use h: /home in a login script for XP clients in the 2000s/
Then one serve of new machines started coming with those 4 port USB card readers, and windows used C through H for them.
C Boot partition
D second partition
E Optical drive
F/G/H/I drives were four card reader slots even if they were empty.
And the net use command simply failed. Fix was to assign O for Optical drive, and UVWX for cardreaders, leaving H for home, N and M for Network and MUSAC, S for Student and T for Temp.
My old boss was an ex-lineman, and used to tell a story about a farm dog who would bark whenever the phone was about to ring, but only in summer.
Turned out the mutt was chained up to the ground stake, and in summer the ground was dry and a poor conductor. Dog was some metres away and with water bowls etc, was a better ground conduction path than the earth stake. 75 V ringing voltage through K9-grade conductor induced the barking.
I've still got a laserjet 4 in my spare room, with a parallel port jetd-erect too. Works superlatively for printing large runs of stuff, cos the cartridges are dirt cheap now.
At 4 ppm you can print for just over 2 hours till have to refill the 500 page tray.
Prints fine from Linux, but Microsoft killed the driver in win7 and later.
Dude - go buy Synergy. Its absolutely gomsaggingly essential in your situation.
You have one keyboard and mouse on the master, and the other machines have theirs removed or shoved around the back.
All the clients simply look to the master for K+M inputs, and you move your mouse cursor from screen to screen just like normal. I run 2 clients and a master at work, and it support a lot more. Of course you can't drag windows from one machine to another, but you can (mostly) copy and paste data in the clipboard between machines. And if the master or clients have multimonitors of their own, that works great too.
Its so simple its utterly forgettable. https://symless.com/synergy
(Just a user, no connection)
My old boss told a story about being instructed to fetch a left-handed shovel.
Obviously stores guy knew the line and said "we ain't got none", so he asked for a regular shovel and temporarily borrow a grinder and cutoff wheel. Proceeded to cut off the folded-over bit of the blade for where the right-foot pushes, changing it to a left-foot shovel.
He took that back to the foreman and was doubtless branded a smart arse for life.
Switch/router backups are frequently overlooked. I like Oxidized, but RANCID does the same sort of config management.
Set it up once, add/test new devices, and then forget about them until there's a crisis.
(wanders off to confirm mine's running as expected)
Not sure what your wall plates look like, but most of them have a clip-on cover and the main part which is screwed to the wall.
I've always put the pretty sticker label on the clip-on cover, but also written the port number directly on the plate underneath. Sometimes there's a label on the wire in the wall, but that's less-visible.
Here in New Zealand, Cadbury's never recovered from the stupidity of switching the recipe to include palm oil. Customers voted with their feet and found superior chocolate in Whittakers and other brands. Cadbury backpedalled fast, but never escaped. Now they've shut the Dunedin factory and have to import their brown sticks from Australia.
Globalisation be damned.
I remember a time in the early 2000s when I was working at a high school, doing IT stuff, and something weird was going on with NTP.
The details escape me but it was to do with a leap second, and I was incorrect, so in foolish youthful ignorance I posted about it on an operator's email list.
Well bugger me if the authentic Simon didn't ring me up to correct me. Colour me star-struck, still remember the event almost two decades later.
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