Had a little excitement in my neighborhood this afternoon in the form of a small wildfire in that wooded area in front of my house.
I was working from home today, and after lunch I heard what I thought was a trash truck outside followed by some yelling and the sound of my neighbor’s gate being opened. And while this wasn’t really unusual, with the added yelling I decided to go open my garage door (which faces the street) and see what was up.
Surprise! Fire Truck!
Sitting behind my house was a fire truck, which is pretty unusual, so I walked out to look up the street…
Okay, so something was definitely going on…
It turns out the wooded area that runs in front of my place had somehow caught fire, and the yelling was the fire department going door to door evacuating people. My neighbors were apparently evacuated but I was just far enough away to avoid the warning.
The burned area as viewed from my front porch.And the view from the mailboxes…
All in all there were eight fire trucks and a slew of other emergency vehicles that responded, and it only took them an hour or so to get it put out. The news says there were about three acres burned, which includes the wooden foot bridge they just rebuilt last year.
The local fire department is very on the ball, and it was neat to see them in action… Pity about the woods though – I guess it’ll grow back.
And due to this I spend a borderline insane amount of time creating filters, building heuristic systems, and blocking entire countries to keep my personal email junk-free. Which is great if you own your own mail server, but harder if you use mail services offered by other companies…
For example, I’ve had Apple’s email service since early 2000 – when Apple released iTools. And because of this I have an @mac.com email address (and me.com and icloud.com) I keep around for historical reasons. But Apple isn’t as on the ball as I am with regard to spam, so I periodically have to find inventive ways to stem the tide when some 20+ year old email list gets put back into service.
First I have to point out that from a filtering point of view, Apple is really good. I pretty much never find offending penis enlargement emails in my inbox, but the junk mail box will usually show 50-60 items each morning during a spam storm – and that bugs me.
Apple users tend to get spammed by farms that send millions of junk emails per hour, and it generally takes Apple a week or two to figure out the domain lighting them up is 110% garbage and block the domain. But, if you don’t want to deal with the noise for that week or two, here’s the fix:
Okay – Log into iCloud and go to Apple Mail.
First, figure out the domain; this can be done by clicking on a few offending emails so that they open in the view window and clicking on the arrow next to the sender’s name. The domain will be something like spammer.org or junkmail.com. You’ll probably notice that most of them are coming from one particular domain – make note of this.
From there click on the little gear icon above the mail box list and go to preferences.
From the preferences window, click on “rules” in the left panel and then in the right window click on “add rule” – this will change the dialog in the right window to the rules panel.
You’ll see two inputs here: the upper one will have a drop down that says “is from” – put the domain in the box under this. The lower section will also have a drop down, click it and select “move to trash and mark as read”.
Now click “add” and then “done”.
Congratulations! Everything coming from that particular spam cannon will now automagically go straight to trash and be marked as read so you won’t even know about it.
I recommend checking your domain-level round-file rules once a month or so to see if they’re still needed. Apple will eventually get around to blocking them, and then you won’t need it.
The other day when the roomie and I were returning from dinner at Culver’s, I noted the odd antenna box sitting next to the rearview mirror in his truck and decided to look it up on my phone.
It turns out that it’s part of a Viper alarm / remote start system.
The roomie wants remote start for his truck and was naturally interested in this, wondering if it worked and if so if it was a simple matter of getting new fobs for it. But nothing I could find online for the system seemed to work – in fact it appeared to have no power. So, I started poking around under the hood and found a heavy gauge wire stuffed behind the battery that had been cut off.
And that led us to spending half the day in the garage tearing the truck apart…
Tracing out the power wire led to half of a subwoofer install behind the driver’s side rear seat, and that required unbolting and removing the seat to get to. So while the roomie rummaged around in the dash looking for the Viper box, I was tasked with removing the seat and then the remains of the subwoofer.
It took about an hour, but I was successful. The Infinity Reference 551a amp, the Hifonics Zeus processor, the Rockford Fosgate level converter, and about a mile of random RCA cables and speaker wire that was balled up under the carpets have all been removed.
It was the first car stereo stuff I’ve done since my PT Cruiser, and was kinda fun… And got me thinking about tuning up the 300’s audio a bit – even though it’s already pretty amazing.
As for theViper stuff – it had been removed from the truck. They left the antenna portion because it’s glued in place and the cable run through the headliner would clearly be a PITA to remove. So, like the sub, the previous owner pulled the easy to get to stuff and left the hard to get to for us to figure out.
And this led to the roomie finding out the Viper system was purchased and installed by BestBuy, and he has purchased and scheduled an appointment to have the new one installed.
Remote start is a powerful sales tool apparently. 🙂
Listening to "Running in the Night" by FM-84 and Ollie Wride
I was listening to Space Radio this morning on the way into the office and Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” began playing… It’s a very poignant song and one of my favorites in their catalog along with “Save a Prayer”, but the bridge really stood out:
Papers in the roadside
Tell of suffering and greed
Fear today, forgot tomorrow
Ooh, here besides the news
Of holy war and holy need
Ours is just a little sorrowed talk
Another song from yesteryear that fits even better in {current year}. Just replace ‘papers in the roadside’ with ‘headlines on the TV’ and the song could be referencing CNN this morning…
Yesterday morning I mentioned to my roommate that his 2017 75th anniversary edition Wrangler unlimited was leaking all over the garage floor – which prompted an hour of helping him figure out what was leaking… Some PCV hose at the back of the intake manifold that requires a contortionist with really small hands to get to had come apart and was blowing oil all over back there.
See, the V6 “Pentastar” that runs the average newer Jeep is installed with a gallon of KY and a shoe horn. It’s such a tight fit that you have to essentially take the upper half of the engine off to change the spark plugs – and this virtually inaccessible problem at the back of the intake was just the latest in a long line of frustrations with this Jeep: it’s underpowered, poorly geared, rides like a paint shaker, has no real amenities outside of the stuff he’s installed over the years, and it’s also a pain in the butt to work on.
This led to yet another discussion about him wanting a truck – something Dodge with a similar drive train to my 300 so we can buy bulk oil, filters, brake pads, etc (and he can use my cast-off parts as I upgrade things) – but not wanting to go into debt for another decade just to get one… And there was the worry that a truck wouldn’t fit into our 1.75 car garage because even the small 1500 is like 20 feet long…
And that led to me mentioning a local used truck dealership that I’d shopped in the past, Berkenkotter, which got really good reviews, and pulling them up on my computer to show him what they had.
The first truck was what he needed but wasn’t what he wanted. So I dug around a bit more and found a 2019 Dodge Ram “Rebel” 4WD with the 5.7L Hemi in it for a decent price. So off we went to go look at it.
The first stop was the dealership I knew about, which is right next door to a BBQ place I like in Parker – Hickory House. Unfortunately the truck wasn’t at this location and we were sent to Castle Rock to the other location.
And unknown to us there are actually two Berkenkotter dealerships in Castle Rock, and Siri sent us to the wrong one… So back in the Jeep and five blocks north to the right location.
We got there and I practically took the truck apart right there in the parking lot to check it out – and everything seemed okay. It’s a 2019 with about 38,000 miles on it, and I know the drivetrain when properly looked after can go a quarter million miles without issue.
So the roomie got the keys and took the thing for a spin while I stayed behind, and he returned with a huge grin… The 5.7L V8 compared to the Pentastar is a completely different animal.
Anyway, the dealership offered him $4k more than he owed on the Jeep, which was used as the down on the truck and taking its cost to about $30k, and after taking everything out of the Jeep and depositing it on the floorboard in front of the rear driver’s side passenger seat, he drove it home.
Me airing up the tires while the roomie takes pictures of his new truck. That’s the town’s namesake “Castle Rock” in the background.
The truck needed air in the tires and was on fumes, so we stopped just up the road at a 7-11 to fix this… $120 later the tank was full and the tires at 55psi.
All in all the truck is in pretty nice shape. I ran the Carfax on it and it was $51k new and a rental in Utah for the first 5 months of its life – which was also 13,000 of the 38,000 miles. From there it was auctioned off and picked up by Larry H Miller, brought to Denver, and sold to someone who put the rest of the miles on it before trading it in for something else.
It’s definitely “used” and has the dings and scratches of a work truck, but mechanically it’s in good shape. It needed the front sway bar links re-torqued, as all of these trucks do, which was what we did this morning.
Then the roomie took the truck over and got it washed right after lunch, so it doesn’t look quite as homely now:
2019 Ram Rebel 4WD in black – as is proper.
The thing I find most interesting about the truck is just how much storage it has… There are cubbies everywhere; in the rear floorboards, under the seats, in the doors – there are even two gloveboxes and the center console probably holds ten gallons of stuff. Perfect for my packrat roommate.
It also has a really nice interior:
The stereo sounds good and the space radio service is still running, so we’ve had the ’80’s on 8′ station running for the last two days. The truck needs new tires and the pre-requisite oil change; the Hemis are really oil sensitive and who knows when the last one was done, so it’s important.
The roomie also wants to add a hard cover to the bed, remote start, and the 8.4″ uConnect touch screen to it, which is about three grand, but otherwise he seems rather happy with the thing.
The down-side – because there’s always a down-side – is the truck is two inches too long to fit in the garage. This means the roomie has been relegated to visitor parking a hundred yards from the house and my 300 now has the garage to itself… Which I can certainly live with, but it’s not optimal.
The floppy emulator I ordered a few days ago arrived yesterday afternoon, so I spent the latter half of the day puttering about with antique computers…
The emulator came as a box of parts, but was pretty easy to assemble overall and I had it up and running on the latest firmware in no time.
The emulator itself, and the 20-pin cable to D-SUB 19-pin Apple external drive adapter
What this doohickey does is read drive images off of an SD card and presents that information in track/sector format to the computer. Basically a modern computer to 1980’s computer time machine.
The method I used to make said drive images was a bit convoluted and required two virtual machines and a handful of OSs…
The important piece was a bit of software called HFVExplorer; an old Windows app that can create and manage HFS file systems as images. This obviously needed to be run in Windows, and I happen to have an arm-based Win11 image in Parallels (a virtual machine system for Macs) for just such situations.
The second VM is Basilisk II, a 68k Mac emulation that will run on pretty much anything. This was used to decompress old archived disk images and application installers that used Aladdin’s “Stuffit” – a data compression tool used by Mac folks in the before times.
With this I was able to download images of the original MacOS 6.0 and MacOS 7.1 floppy sets, and create installable media.
Back over on the Mac Plus I discovered that it wouldn’t boot off of the 7.1 installer and insisted on the 6.0.8 installer. So after booting off of 6.0.8 I was able to format the 20meg HD and install 6.0.8…
Finishing the fresh 6.0.8 install
Back in the old days this would have been an Olympic-level feat of floppy swapping as the OS came on 8 disks and the installer liked to bounce around a bit between disks, so it was about 12 swaps in total.
Once 6.0.8 was installed and the system rebooted it was time to do an in-place upgrade of 6.0.8. to 7.1. This is pretty easy; boot off the HD, mount the 7.1 installer image, and install…
The most worrisome part of the whole process is waiting the 5-7 minutes while the installer tells you it’s deleting old out of date stuff from the HD, without any real feedback such as a file list or even a progress bar. You can tell by the drive noises that something is going on though, so there’s that at least.
Eventually though 7.1 will start installing and you are rewarded with more floppy swapping – and about a half an hour and a reboot later…
Ahh, that new OS smell…
So now I have a proper, clean install of 7.1 to base my future entertainment with this machine off of. Unlike the state the machine was in when I got it, this install includes all of the networking extensions and control panels… So my next effort will be getting an old Asante scsi-to-ethernet adapter working and getting the antique onto my local network here at the house.
Who knows, maybe I’ll even get the old 68K onto the Information Superhighway – and cruise really slow in the right-hand lane with my blinkers on. 😀
The first thing one should do with any old computer hardware is work out how to get it to connect to the local BBS.
The Mac Plus needed some OS level help to get a modem working… The MacOS 7.1 install ‘works’, but it’s in pretty rough shape from the previous owner. It looks like someone was running out of room on the 20meg HDD for the various apps they were using, so they started pulling things out of the system folder.
Most of the ‘personal’ stuff was removed from the HDD, so there’s space now – but the OS is a bit messed up. I’ll reload it once the 80’s floppy to 20’s digital media adapter arrives.
Anyway, getting to the BBS involved copying extensions and control panels off of my 165c via 800k floppy, and then a lot of fiddling to get LocalTalk and AppleShare working. This let me connect the two machines together via serial to get Black Night (An old 68K BBS terminal app) onto the Mac Plus.
See, Black Night’s executable is bigger than an 800k floppy will hold, so 80’s networking was the only real solution. Way back in the mid-to-late 80’s, AppleTalk was the most used computer network standard on the planet – which is when I got involved with it – and it was a lot of fun to wring all of that 40 year old network knowledge out of my antique brain.
Once I got Black Night running and got the System 7 modem tool to work again, it was pretty easy to get my serial-to-wifi modem emulator to connect to EOTD via telnet. And once connected I checked my messages, replied to a couple of folks, and then logged off to return to the 21st century…
In early 1987 my duty station had changed from a TDU at the Groton Subbase to the USS Pennsylvania (SSBN 735), which was being built down the road at General Dynamics Electric Boat (E.B.). Over the previous Christmas I’d gone back home and returned with my Atari 800xl, and then sold my 800xl when I moved into the barracks at E.B. – so for the first time in a long time I was computerless.
Fortunately, one of the guys who arrived at the barracks a month later had an Apple Macintosh Plus, and he had set it up on the counter in the rec-room as that was the only place to really put it. And after some discussion I got his blessing to mess with the thing, so it became the system I used for about a year.
That was my first real exposure to the Macintosh platform, as well as access to a 68000 CPU that wasn’t being used for science stuff where my father worked – and it always stuck with me, even as I got into the Amiga platform in 1988…
Today I gathered up a bunch of old Apple computers and peripherals at work and ran them over to Apple Rescue of Denver – a recycler / restorer of old Apple stuff – to offload them on someone who could use / part them out. And while I was there spotted this old Mac Plus looking for a new home…
And I decided to give it one.
The Apple M0001A in all of its beige glory
This particular Mac Plus came with a keyboard, mouse, Mac Saver fan, and a Macintosh HD20 external drive. And this unit has been upgraded to 4megs of ram from the original 1meg and the 9 inch diagonal screen and its whopping 512×342 resolution looks great and has no issues.
The above unit would have run about $5000 in 1987 dollars ($2600 for the computer, keyboard, and mouse, $800 for the 3megs of ram, and $1500 for the HD) – this would be $13,000 in today’s monopoly money.
Something to think about when pondering $4000 for the latest Apple Silicon powered laptop…
Overall the Mac and its peripherals are in amazing shape, and the ‘clunk’ of the keyboard as I was using it immediately sent me back in time.
Now to bodge a method to get software from the Internet onto the 37 year old computer. 🙂
A few hours later…
ClarisWorks, go!
Fortunately I have a floppy drive for my G3 laptop, which will format / write 800k disks, so I have some basic ability to install things. But, that said, I have a Floppy Emu (model C) on the way – which adds the ability to use 21st century technology with 80’s computers.
