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  Friend of mind has a Silicon Graphics Iris Indigo. Not sure if it boots, but it's intact. Are these interesting today? They were neat-o when new.

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  Huh, I didn't know smolweb had a specification, and a validator! https://smolweb.org/validator/ Tested my www.bleeve.me. Mixed results; I had been assuming I was already lightweight. I wasn't too bad, four Class F, six D... ... but the validator is looking everything in the .css file, little of which is used. I understand the problem I think, so no complaints. A half hour with the .css file and I got most of the smol heavy=load stuff out. Interestingly the few high-load feetch I will...

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  My bob's name is plumb.

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  Ages ago I bought a bunch of NOS Philbrick classic opamp modules from some old guy who had a warehouse at the Oakland airport. A buck each in the box! I gave most of them away, and somehow, not one datasheet survived. Which is terrible because these Philbrick opamp data sheets are THE SINGLE PROTOTYPE for nearly every (American thread) electronic component data sheet from then to date. Every IC datasheet copied the Philbrick sheet verbatim. All I can find in 30 seconds of web search is this sh...

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  If you haven't read the story of radar development, it's weirdly heroic (wartime or not). It's a very crazy technical story, with weird wartime stuff going on. If you think Moore's Law was interesting, look at this wikipedia paragraph on the cavity magnetron: "A cavity magnetron that was introduced by John Randall and Harry Boot at the University of Birmingham, England in 1940 was an improvement over earlier versions.[3]: 24–26  [4] Their first working example produced hun...

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  I should make this thing go. Its got a five opamps, the top slots are for options i think. The modules are not potted, so repairable. In 1980 i lived at 333 Columbus ave in boston. Philbricks 1960s plant was 300something columbus. I didnt know that til the early oughts.

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  This is wonderfully crazy. Every page of every issue of BYTE magazine in a single image. Zoomable to great detail. With regular expression search! https://byte.tsundoku.io/

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  What? There's a NEW Mexico now? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJzXbqyU8A

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  Lol, TLDs: "In 2018, Spamhaus rated .men as the worst top-level domain in terms of spam and scamming. .men comes top with 60.6% of its 73,000 domains identified as "bad", resulting in a badness index of 6.48. The company that runs .men, GRS Domains also runs the third worst registry – .loan – with 59 percent bad domains and a 6.22 index." wikipedia

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  Having found the manual for pmate text editor I'm more in love with it than ever. Its insanely compact. About half its commands are written in macros of its basic commands. It doesnt do regexps for example but your search command can contain commands to match variable things. And things stored elsewhere as variables. Ok granted a lot of this is aesthetics. But there is this phenom i keep coming across, in "early" development stages (Unix, cpm): for a given program...

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  I just found a copy of the original distribution/installation disks for EZ-ROUTE, a PCB layout and routing program, for Windows, from year 2000. It was fairly primitive but it worked; I used it a lot. If you want it, it's here: https://www.inglevale.com/EZ-Route.zip Contents of two 3.5" flops in a ZIP file. EDIT: EZROUTE seems to still be around!

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  I have a group of people doing important work on the ground, who are very smart but are not nerds. They want to use Proton to share files amongst the group. Im not convinced its a good idea. How does their encryption work? I can look later offline (sic) but wondering if anyone had any experience. Or can share experience with smaller scale sharing systems?

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  Remember when you could carefully pickup the telephone handset of an other extension, put your hand over the microphone, and listen in on someones phone call? Good times.

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  A friend with an iPhone attempted to send me a photo (MMS) to my android (grapheneOS) phone and got, from number 866: "sorry, this service is not available" And the image/text does not arrive. Is this some extended iPhone service thingie? Web search turns up helpful suggestions from Apple Support "did you try power cycling your phone", and this gem: "To send a message as iMessage or MMS, you need a cellular data or Wi-Fi connection." Weird.

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  Sigh, even I have to have an "AI" policy. https://www.bleeve.me/AI.html (Interim one for now, I'm busy.) There's a depressing amount of LLM garbage in the vintage forum. I suspect I will cause Problems in my usual subtle way at some point. There's someone cloning vi for CP/M; a commendable project. But it's all crapped up, I won't run it. I haven't told him why yet. As is always the problem, the author seems like a decent person, except this One Thing. But...

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  Not yet beep and flash.

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  Do COVID tests from 2020 have any efficacy in 2026? I assume not, that tests have degraded and virus mutated. But web search reveals no timely information.

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  Where does everyone find the time to watch all these videos?

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  A friend of mine just now sent me this text: As I was pushing stuff around at my storage units a woman across the hall was pushing her stuff about. It turns out she is the daughter of Curtis Schreier, one of the totally visionary artists of Ant Farm. I'm friends with Chip Lord, one of the Ant Farm founders, and I met Curtis at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Media Burn. Curtis is the total hippie tech visionary genius crackpot. His daughter just sent me this:

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  The FSF is our ARRL.

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  The first step to a general strike is a full pantry. For yourself and one other.

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  Has anyone here tried out one of the small language models, tinyLLM for example? Are they truly self-contained? Don't need an internet connection to run? To run on against the contents of /home/tomj. Does this idea piss people off? Be blunt. Assuming it would be actually self-contained and not a tool tethered to one of the corps.

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  Went to two big corp chain stores this week! Weird. Bust Buy, i think its called, had an SD card holder, biked over instead of online. The front of the store, with a phalanx of salesmanmals, where sll the oversized TVs and impulse buy crap usually is, was empty, with stuff pushed around to hide the fact. Last store I remember looking like this was Fry's Electronics, a couple months before they went bust. Today went to the Target at Eagle Rock mall. Wow, dead mall, with one lively store...

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  So Synology says this: Warning: Enabling SSH service may bring security risks to your system. Please enable it only when necessary and avoid making changes to system configurations. ? lol

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  A friend of mine is doing that crazy long walk up the sierras (he's done 1048 miles), had his Pixel 10 in AIRPLANE MODE for days, and of course no wifi to sniff, and the clock drifted off more than one hour. So GPS stuff becomes not usable. My first thought was that GPS provides accurate clock but my second was, I don't really know how GPS nav works.

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  I had forgotten just how fucking tremendous Dr. Dobbs Journal was. Check out Volume 7. (The Volumes contain all of that years' monthly issues.) https://archive.org/search?tab=all&query=dr+dobbs+journal+vol&and%5B%5D=collection%3A%22dr_dobbs_journal%22

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  We're old people, so of course we have plates we do not use hanging on the wall.

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  OMFG I'm so glad we're not surrounded [here in Los Angeles] by thousands of years of history. What a fucking burden. Our house is 103 years old! (lol, ducks)

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  Folks here looking for new DIP CPUs know about the NEC V20, right? Pin compatible with 8088, but runs Z80 code. Dunno if it will do that from-the-socket. RTFM datasheet. No idea who makes these though the new 8088 laptops sold on AliExpress all use them, so probably still made... #retrocomputing #i8088 #z80

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  Wow, but no, utterly obvious and effectively no change to anything, since "customer product ratings" have been meaningless for essentially forever. But here we are. This is from a garbage seller (tractor supply) I never buy from but refer to for "unreasonable price". Like amazon, this "unbranded" product costs less than a real one, so i'm using them for anti-shopping. This one (water tank) is $275, while an equiv. from a far-less-awful corp is $520. I'm buy...