RIHAHN.COM

Month: June 2023

  • History in computers

    My company has been in business since 1999, and one of the services we used to provide was hardware compatibility testing. What hardware compatibility testing is, is seeing how a given piece of software operates on various hardware platforms – CPU, north/south bridge, video card, sound card, etc.

    In 2018 we stopped offering this sort of testing; it had fallen to the wayside as hardware homologation and better driver models had appeared in more modern operating systems. But we still have a lab full of antiques from when we did this sort of thing, and I keep it around because I’m into old computers…

    The above photo shows some of the test machines we used for compat testing back in the day. The age of the system increases as you go from the upper shelf (8th gen Core i7) to the lower left (Pentium II 350Mhz). In between are K6-IIs and IIIs, Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, Core 2 Duos and Quads, Celerons, Durons, Semprons, Athlons, Phenoms, and a few other CPU architectures of bygone days in various sockets and Slot 1 / Slot A configurations.

    These machines are basically frames without side panels or, in some instances, case plastics. They were intended to be life support for a motherboard / CPU combination that various peripherals would be plugged into to fill out a compatibility test matrix.

    We used a lot of drive imaging to make this go… Early on it was done with Norton “Ghost” images on CD – which is why all of the machines have a rom drive in them, but in early 2010 I switched things over to Clonezilla pushing images from a central server… Which is why all of the test boxes also have a NIC in them.

    And yes, I still have all of the drive images. If you know someone who needs a period-correct Win98 install for a K6-II, I can hook you up. 🙂

    You’ll probbaly notice the piles of video cards on top of the rack… Most of the compat testing we did was for video games so we always had the latest chipsets on-hand, and those cards on the top shelf are cards I pulled out of the various test systems we last used in 2018.

    I also have a cabinet in that lab full of video cards ranging back to the dawn of PC gaming…

    These are all numbered to correlate to a spreadsheet of make, model, chipset, and in some cases firmware versions. The cards start in the upper left with a couple of Voodoo 3 2000s, and eventually get to a GTX 1080 at the bottom.

    Sadly, when taking this photo, I noticed a couple of cards with failed caps… I need to figure out if that’s something I want to fix I guess. These are cards that will probably never see electricity again – and probably not worth the effort.

    My personal collection of old PC hardware contains a couple Canopus Pure 3D II cards that I used back in my EverQuest days, and a “Diamond Stealth 24” from all the way back in 1993 – which predates the collection here by a couple of years. But between this cabinet and my own collection – it’s pretty complete. 🙂

    Listening to "Saved by the Bell" by Miami Nights 1984

  • But it’s a dry heat

    Summer has finally arrived here in Colorado, and over the weekend it went from rainy and mid-70’s to dry and mid-90’s. And, being as the local utility company has raised the rates for electricity into the realm of painful, I’m determined to not use the AC at all this year.

    See, my AC is a 2-ton unit which pulls about 13 amps of 240v just for the compressor/condenser. When you add the 10 amps of 120v furnace blower and whatnot it’s about a $120 a month just to keep the house cool in the summer. And $120 is like a whole bag of groceries per month! (sigh)

    Anyway, where I live in Colorado is essentially a desert – which means evaporative coolers work really well and can usually pull off 10-15 degrees below ambient on just a water pump and a fan. So, last night my roommate and I both bought a Bonaire “HI FLO 800 CFM” portable evaporative cooler from the local Home Depot for $250 each.

    Mine is in my office and the one my roommate bought is in the living room, and other than sounding like a waterfall while they’re running they do a fantastic job of cooling the house off with a mere 5 gallons of water and 1 amp of 120V each.

    As an added bonus they also raise the humidity a bit, so less getting struck by lightning every time you walk across the floor and touch something metal.

    All in all I’m pretty happy with my $250 purchase, and in theory it’ll pay for itself before the end of August when it cools off again.

    Listening to "Confie (Hold On)" by Kalax

  • Despite the cost of living, it remains popular

    Just got back from my Saturday morning run to King Soopers; $27 in gas and $111.70 ($93.43 after coupons) in groceries.

    Gas was $0.50 off thanks to grocery points, so a mere $3.60 a gallon for the good stuff – and I burned a bit more than I usually do with the extra trip to MicroCenter with my CFO… He’s also a car guy, so any chance we get to leave work in one of our cars is generally taken and it tends to not be very casual once we get on the highway. 😀

    He’s got a resto-mod 67 Camaro SS that’s pretty nice, but my 300 demolishes it. So, because I can’t have the fastest car in the company, he has money down on a new Lotus Emira that will arrive “someday”…

    I’m betting the 300 will demolish the Emira too… Well, maybe not in a corner…

    Anyway, I also spent a bit more than usual on groceries hoping that I can front-load some costs and in turn save some money in the longer term – because I have a fridge in my office at work now…

    Story time!

    My company owns the entire building we’re in, but we don’t use all of it, so various spaces on the first and second floors are rented out – and as a small perk for renting from us you get ‘as available’ IT support from my company… We supply wifi on our building-wide Meraki mesh setup with a VLAN’d SSID for your business, VOIP phones if needed, and we can help out with small computer or network issues on an as-available basis.

    Until recently we had a lawyer’s office on the second floor… Said lawyer decided that with everything going to shit now was a good time to close his practice, retire, and head for a more sane state. And when he moved out, as a thank you for all the tech support over the years, he gave us some of his office stuff; a couple of all in one printer/scanners, some computers, some furniture, and a dorm-sized refrigerator.

    I’ve since moved that fridge into my office on the third floor…

    We have a pretty nice break-room at work with couches, huge TV, game consoles, foosball and arcade machines, a couple of microwaves and refrigerators, a snack vending machine and soda machine. And my CFO offsets 50% of the cost of stuff in the snack / soda machines, so up until 2020 everything in either machine was a quarter.

    Well, now we live in different times and the snack machine is full of tiny $1 bags of junkfood and the soda machine is always empty because it’s just not feasible for the snack company to sell sodas for even a buck anymore.

    But now I have my own fridge in my office, which is locked when I’m not there – so last month I bought three 12-packs of Coke Zero on sale and that lasted me all month. And today 12-packs were on sale again, so I bought another three 12-packs for next month for $15. On sale, each soda works out to about 42 cents, which I can live with.

    King Soopers also has a new Kroger store-brand breakfast bowl that’s actually quite good, and they come as a 5-pack for $14 – if you can find them. As mentioned, they’re pretty good, and Kroger can’t seem to make them fast enough to keep up with demand… This morning they had a few available, so I got two 5-packs which is breakfasts for two weeks – at a dollar less per breakfast than the Jimmy Dean bowls I usually get.

    I also buy pints of Kroger ‘nuclear milk’, which cost a bit more ($1.29/pt), but the shelf life is insane – the three pints I bought today expire November 17th, for example…. Honestly, I’m not sure if the milk is actually irradiated, but whatever it is they are doing makes it so I don’t have to toss out expired milk because I didn’t get around to using it quick enough… So I spend a little more for less waste.

    I also splurged a bit today and bought a deli chef salad ($6) because cheap food generally doesn’t have any real greenery and – man – I just need a salad on occasion.

    Listening to "Boardwalk '82" by Android Automatic

  • Car Stuff

    I tend to post something about my car every thousand miles, mostly to keep track of utilization and whatnot. And, being as I passed another thousand mile milestone this morning, here is said post.

    I bought the car with 20 miles on it on August 10th, 2022 – 317 days ago – so I’m averaging about 9.5 miles a day, or approximately 284 miles a month… Not a lot of miles, but that’s because I live 4 miles from work, generally only go in every other day, and don’t really go very far any other time I’m out.

    Though I might put some miles on the car this weekend – if all things align…

    Anyway, I get a lot of thumbs up, window leans, and walk-ups when I’m out and about with the car – so if you don’t like to be noticed this is the wrong car for you… And the question order when someone walks up is as follows:

    1. “Does it got a Hemi in it?” – Yes, yes it does.
    2. “Is it fast?” – It’s fast enough.
    3. “What kinda gas mileage it get?” – Honestly? I don’t really know.

    To be fair, if you have to worry about gas mileage or gas prices this really isn’t the car for you. I know it holds 18.5 gallons of ‘the expensive stuff’ as it requires 91 octane or better, and uses about a quarter of a tank of that per week. So if I’m averaging 284 miles a month on 18.5 gallons we can extrapolate that it’s getting about 15 MPG… But that’s just an educated guess as I top the thing off every Saturday and don’t really sweat the details.

    I also don’t really do any highway travel in the car either… I mean, the longest highway trip in the last month was the eight miles from the office to MicroCenter and back. I’m sure it’ll hit the roughly 400 miles per tank that US cars get on average if I did some highway travel, so I expect it gets about 25 MPG on the highway.

    That’s still a far cry from the Nissan Kicks econobox commute-appliance I had before this – which got about 50 MPG on the highway… But the 300 is by far a nicer place to be with all of the leather and legroom and sound deadening and speakers and ride quality and performance and safety features and…

    And I don’t have to roll the dice every time I merge with traffic – so there’s that too.

    Listening to "Babe" by Styx

  • Exhibit A

    Right after the last post, I had to break out the old Dell laptop again – so I figured I’d do a quick post that kind of illustrates a typical day for the Wizard…

    I have a client here at work that makes an internet connected thingy – which really narrows it down I know – and they do a lot of their app-to-device QA over in one of my labs. Normally this QA is sanity checking on various mobile devices to make sure the UI works at whatever the new screen resolution is or that the app works as intended in whatever the new OS version happens to be.

    But occasionally we help them recreate problematic scenarios reported by their customer service, and the current problem is a couple of specific home routers that aren’t working for their onboarding process.

    One of these routers is the base model Eero, which is Amazon’s in-house wifi router and isn’t a big deal to replicate – other than the Eero setup wanting your location, email, phone number, blood type, and a copy of your family tree to set up the mandatory online account to activate the damn thing…

    The other two are proprietary “Technicolor” wifi routers commonly supplied by Comcast for their broadband service – and that’s the reason I’m involved…

    The two proprietary routers were fairly cheap on ebay, but aren’t real happy about operating outside of Comcast’s network and expect their WAN side to be supplied by coax.

    I was getting ready to build a DOCSIS test network using an old Arris C3 and a selection of open sorcery (DHCP, TFTP, NTP, Syslog, and this), but I was eventually able to convince these routers that their WAN connection was being provided on an ethernet port by ONT (Optical Network Terminal) instead of coax.

    This still requires a lot of hand-holding to get the routers to understand what they are talking to, and due to these requirements a separate test network was needed…

    To set up this test network I needed a local router to talk to my edge router, and for small scale test networks that aren’t doing performance testing I like to use the venerable Cisco RV042 because it’s rock solid and super flexible, and lets me do things like supply custom DCHP flags… But once again no modern browser will talk to the web server in the RV042 because it’s more than two years old.

    So I had to drag out the Dell XPS again, and ten minutes later had reverse engineered Comcast’s provisioning strategy well enough to sufficiently emulate it for these two routers… And tomorrow we’ll do the testing to try and determine if it’s the router, wifi, or Comcast that shuts down the client’s onboarding.

    And that’s why they pay me the big bucks. 🙂

    Listening to "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins

  • Let’s Get Dangerous

    I do complicated computer wizardry as part of my day-to-day life so I’m always elbow deep in some bit of hardware, reverse engineering the new hotness, or hacking functionality into something that was never intended to do whatever it is I want it to do… And yesterday this was making a WISP switch I use to run a bunch of external IP cameras on the building happy.

    The switch in this example is a Netonix ws-12-250-ac which handles the media conversion from fiber to copper and the POE for the external cameras.

    It needed a firmware update to handle discovery of some newer hardware, and this required talking to the switch with a computer – which should have been simple, but no…

    See, the stuff that makes the Internet end-users see isn’t exactly ‘modern’ most of the time. Hell, your average managed switch that’s making the world wide weird work usually has a command line interface that you reach via RS232. And when was the last time you saw a serial port on a computer? My point exactly.

    The Netonix is slightly more advanced in that it has a web-based GUI, but the web server in it isn’t designed for end-users so it’s not updated to the current padded-room standards of the Internet – and that’s where things broke down.

    Yesterday I discovered that every mainstream web browser is 100% incapable of talking to the web server in the Netonix because the Netonix uses TLS 1.1… And you don’t even have the choice of using an older encryption standard these days.

    Chrome, Edge, etc on Windows wouldn’t even try to talk to the Netonix – I’d get a No Valid Encryption alert and that’s where things would stop. Even digging into the internals of the browser to switch off forced HTTPS and rummaging around in Windows network security to try and re-enable TLS 1.1 was unsuccessful.

    MacOS and Safari fared slightly better in that it gave me the option of going to the scary web page, which would offer up the login, but the page after login just resulted in a blank screen – because the browser was once again trying to force TLS 1.3 on the new page… And there was no facility to stop this behavior.

    In both of these cases the failure was simply because web browsers have been coded to put training wheels on the Internet, and there’s no way to remove the training wheels because user-land cant be trusted with switches…

    Fortunately I keep a wide selection of antique hardware around; hardware from a time when the Internet wasn’t such a padded room, so there are options if you want to be a rebel.

    The hardware that finally made everything work was my old Dell XPS M1710, which runs Windows 7 for just such situations and is the reason I keep it around… Because sometimes you need to live dangerously, and modern hardware and software simply won’t let you bungie jump naked into a tank full of piranhas for the thrill of it.

    Sigh.

    Listening to "Everywhere" by Fleetwood Mac

  • Music

    Music is a pretty large part of my life, which is one of the reasons good reproduction of it has been so important to me over the years… I’ve always had high-end hardware for my listening pleasure – be that a home stereo setup, a portable player, or even my cars.

    This is mostly because there are songs that are indelibly etched into some decade of my life or act as a soundtrack to some carefully preserved memory. A few bars of some tune can play back an entire event in the dimly lit past, so I like to make sure that the music of my life sounds as good as possible.

    So, accordingly, I’ve had a lot of neat audio equipment. Like the Panasonic RX-CD70 ‘boom box’ I had in ’87, or the full stack of SAE gear that ran ADCOM amps that pushed Acoustat speakers that was my home setup on the later 80’s. I even tend to put high-end equipment in my cars… Hell, my current car’s audio system was tuned by Jimmy Iovine – you know, the former producer / chairman of Interscope Geffen-A&M Records…

    Because of all this musical reproduction hoopla I’ve always been into well engineered audio as well, so a lot of those afore-mentioned ‘memory tunes’ are from various Alan Parsons albums, like “Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)” instantly takes me back to driving around Worcester Massachusetts in the late 80’s. Or “Eye In the Sky“‘s memory of sitting in front of an Apple ][ is so strong I can still see the output from the hex editor I was using on the green 80-column monitor in the computer lab at my high school in ’84.

    For my more modern musical tastes I’m heavily into modern progressive like Porcupine Tree and ‘synthwave’. I got into Porcupine Tree because of the engineering… Steven Wilson is such an amazing engineer and each track he works on is incredibly well crafted… His remixes of my favorite Jethro Tull albums are incredible as well.

    Listening to "One Brown Mouse" by Jethro Tull (Steven Wilson remix)

  • ‘Burger Helper

    It’s been a long time since I’ve made Hamburger Helper… In fact, the last time was probably back when I was in the Navy and living in New London – that would be the late 80’s for those keeping track.

    ‘Burger Helper was a staple when I was growing up, which is probably why I’ve shunned the stuff over the years; connotations of hard times. But I have some Keystone canned ground beef in my long-term food stores that I need to rotate through and they had a sale on ‘Burger Helper “cheeseburger” and “stroganoff” running at my local grocers…

    So tonight’s meal is post-apocalypse beef stroganoff – made with shelf stable canned ground beef, reconstituted powdered milk, and a box of talking-glove meat-mix… The only thing I didn’t use was one of the water filters, my camp stove, or the hexamine fuel to make it a truly SHTF meal.

    Being former military and a bachelor for most of my adult life, I’ve eaten a lot of sketchy meals – and accordingly I’ve learned a lot of tricks to make pretty much anything palatable… For example, dill weed in small amounts is a savory flavor enhancer – so if you want to turn up the savory in a dish use a pinch of dill.

    Ultimately my evening meal was probably indistinguishable from any other box meal and if I didn’t mention it no one would know it was all made with ingredients pushing five years old.

    It’s nice to know that when the end times come I’ll still get a nice warm meal on occasion. 😀

    Listening to "80's Love" by Moonrunner83

  • Book Report

    Back in August I decided to take on the challenge of re-reading / reading the entire Xanth Series by Piers Anthony.

    In January I was most of the way through the tenth book, “Vale of the Vole”, and as of this morning I have started on “Faun and Games”, the 21st book in the series. So, moving right along.

    One nice side effect of this challenge is that I’ve taken to spending at least an hour every other morning during the week sitting outside in the sunshine just to read… See, I switch off days at the office with my roommate, and the days I work from my office here at the house I start the day with an hour of reading.

    This may not happen in the winter as sitting outside becomes problematic, but I’ll see what I can do. 🙂

    The additional reading time has meant I can add a few other books into the mix as well, and I just finished A.A. Atanasio’s “The Dragon and the Unicorn” – which is a far, far more complicated read than your typical Xanth novel.

    So far the biggest issue is I’m using my Kindle and e-books – and some of the e-books are terribly done; bad formatting and bad scanning being the foremost issues. The current book, “Faun and Games” is one of the bad ones where I have to literally translate things to read it. For example, the scanner had a real issue with ‘n’s and tended to turn them into ‘h’s and it randomly missed or added periods and carriage returns, so there are pages without sentence breaks and other pages where each paragraph is broken into 3-4 pieces.

    So it’s not as fun as it could be.

    But I soldier on and will finish all 46 novels! (It just may take another year…)

    Listening to "Edge of Oblivion (Instrumental)" by New Arcades

  • Update

    Back on march 31st, we had a bit of a fire nearby… A fire that caused about a dozen homes to be evacuated while the local fire department spent most of a day containing it.

    The little wooded area out in front of my house was looking pretty rough for quite a while, but while I was out on my walk today I noticed things were pretty much back to normal…

    I think most of the regrowth has been do to how wet it’s been the last few months; right now it’s easy to forget eastern Colorado is a desert.

    Normally by mid June we’re already seen temperatures approach 100 degrees and we’re living under a perpetual wildfire warning, but this year we’re not cracked the mid-80’s yet and there’s a flood watch until Tuesday night.

    I’ll take it.

    This is a cyclical thing though. Every ten years or so we get one of these cool and wet spells – which is just occasional enough that everyone forgets about the last one and freaks out because it’s raining. 🙂

    Listening to "Journey to the Second Sun" by WOLFCLUB

  • I drive an invisible car…

    That has to be it. It’s the only thing I can think of that explains the propensity for people to completely miss the fact that my bright white four door rocket barge with the crazy loud race car exhaust is sitting in the spot they wish to occupy at that moment.

    Here’s today’s example…

    See if you can catch the exact moment he realizes I’m right there…

    I drive super defensively because of stuff like this, so I kinda knew the guy in the truck was just going to ‘come on over’ right about the time he merged onto Parker road (the road in the video). So there wasn’t any real danger – just more annoyance that people behind the wheel are generally oblivious these days.

    Listening to "Good Times Roll" by The Cars

  • iPod

    Today’s old hardware is a 4th generation iPod Touch…

    While I don’t have my original ‘click wheel’ iPod anymore, I do still have my original 2005 iPod Shuffle and this 2010 iPod Touch – and they both still work!

    The 4th generation touch came out in late 2010, and I picked this one up for Christmas that year. It’s the smaller of the offerings and only holds 8gigs – but with even high bitrate AAC that was enough space for a couple of days of music.

    I also spent quite a few hours playing some physics-based puzzler on this thing, and probably got my money’s worth from that alone. 🙂

    Like the rest of my antiques, the Touch is in great shape both mechanically and physically… For example, here’s the back of it:

    My monitor is reflected in the chrome to add some contrast…

    Apple went away from polished stainless steel eventually, because while they look great initially, they’re usually a cloudy mass of scratches in pretty short order. Mine lives in a small velvet bag when I’m not playing with it just to maintain the shiny.

    Overall the iPod still works well and sounds great! But it doesn’t work with Apple’s newer offerings such as the cloud-based subscription service that renders iTunes into a radio station where you call the shots. So the only music on this iPod is stuff I’ve purchased in past.

    It came with iOS 4.1, but currently runs iOS 6.1.6, which is the last version of the OS Apple made for it. So while you can press buttons and it will ‘do stuff’, nothing is of much use. The weather app used to connect to Yahoo – and that stopped working a few years back, and several other apps are in the same boat where they attempt to connect to services that no longer exist… But it still plays music, and that’s good enough for me.

    One last picture of the old OS, just for posterity:

    Listening to "Victoria" by Ollie Wride

  • WWDC 23

    Yesterday was the annual Apple “World Wide Developer Conference” – which is where Apple shows off all of their new and updated stuff.

    There was all of the usual stuff; iterations on current machines – like the 15″ M2 MacBook Air, which is pretty nice for anyone needing a basic, well-built, laptop.

    There was also the quick mention of the new Mac Pro… It’s basically the old Mac pro case with the CPU and logic board out of a Mac Studio, and several PCIE slots for cards. It starts at like seven grand though, which is a lot for a $4000 Mac Studio in a fancy box.

    The big news though, and the thing that they devoted half of the show to, was the Vision Pro HMD.

    I’ve purposely avoided “VR” for the most part since the turn of the century. Prior to 2000 I spent quite a bit of time, money, and development effort on VR – even having a fancifully airbrushed $6000 Liquid Image MRG2 ‘back in the day’.

    Not me, but this is an MRG2

    But the whole scene hasn’t really moved forward, other than getting smaller, faster, and higher-rez, since then.

    The hardware is nice and all, but the use-cases were still lacking. VR has pretty much been a solution perpetually looking for a problem.

    I think the Vision Pro might actually have the right mix of hardware and use-case though, and when they finally make them available next year I’ll probably take the $3500 plunge and buy one – it’ll be cheap by comparison to the last HMD I owned.

    Listening to "Not Alone" by Kalax

  • SGI

    Ever wondered what a $30,000 computer looked like in the mid 90’s? Well, let me show you…

    My circa 1994 / 1995 SGI Indy

    A plethora of dead peripheral connections… The 13W3 video connector (on the left) was amazing for the time.

    The above, in 1994, came with a 150Mhz R4400SC cpu, 24-bit XL graphics board, 64MB RAM, and 1GB SCSI2 HD for the low-low price of $22,995 (equivalent to $47,000 in 2023)…

    Here’s Info World talking about it in January of ’94:

    Mine has the late ’94 200Mhz R4400 and the 256MB ram option, making it the most powerful pizza box on the planet in early 1995, and a smidgeon over $30,000 new – or about $61,000 in 2023…

    In 1996 I added the second 1GB SCSI2 HD to it.

    The usual first question is “How did you afford that in 1995?”

    The answer is I didn’t – the place I worked at bought it in the above spec for my use, and it was forgotten during the merger with Ingram Micro in 1996 – and it’s been banging around in my collection ever since.

    Currently the power supply is on the fritz and needs to be replaced. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but SGI in their infinite wisdom decided that the power, reset, volume up/down, and speaker needed to be in the power supply, and the power supply needed to be spot welded together… So, in the above photo, see that second bundle of smaller wires coming out of the PSU and going under the power wires to the main board? That’s the aforementioned buttons and speaker connections.

    Basically someone needs to re-engineer the entire power supply to build a replacement, and that’s not happened yet – so everyone with an Indy is looking for new old stock PSUs for them…

    There’s a lot of old 90’s and 00’s data locked in this thing from when I used it as a desktop – someday I’ll get a working PSU and open this particular time capsule. 🙂

    Listening to "Something Just Like This" by The Chainsmokers