Month: April 2024

At work I do a little of everything, and one of the things on the list of “everything” is graphic design for things like advertising, flyers, t-shirts, trade-show booths, whitepaper headers, holiday cards, and anything else that needs some art.

A couple of weeks ago it was decided that we would go to a couple of trade-shows this year, which requires new marketing materials and an update to the booth design to cover the new stuff we do.

The problem with booth graphics is they are huge… 300 dpi across several feet of canvas results in pretty large files, and the web-based Photoshop replacement I’ve been using runs out of steam at anything slightly larger than A1.

Soooo, I had to re-up my Adobe subscription, and Adobe only really runs on Windows and MacOS. Add to this that my hot rod PC really only runs Linux and Windows and – welp.

Friday I backed up everything in ~/ and started the Windows install right after work; and finished getting the OS into a usable shape and everything restored / installed by about 2am.

Most of the effort was just shutting down Windows 11’s incredible desire to report everything to Microsoft. Sure, there are config switches you can turn off that tamps down the behavior – but to really gain some privacy in modern Windows you need to do registry tricks, remove applications, rename things, and lock directories to prevent the weekly update from just turning it all back on…

In the end though I got Windows to behave, and I spent the weekend working on art projects for work and some new textures for my Secondlife avatar.

I also installed a couple of video games that didn’t run well in Linux and goofed off a bit. Granted, things like Proton and WINE have come a really long ways towards making gaming on Linux a reality, they’re still only about 90% of the way there… Give it another year, maybe two, and there won’t be any appreciable difference between Linux and Windows as far as games go.

Really, if it wasn’t for work wanting me to do art and Adobe’s steadfast refusal to support Linux, I’d be perfectly happy with modern Linux… But that day isn’t today unfortunately, and for a while at least I’ll be wrestling with Windows.

Listening to "Legends Never Die" by Against The Current

Been doing a little work on the car; new CAI and over the weekend I put a new oil catch-can on it.

What the catch does is strip the oil out of the PCV return into the intake, and this prevents cooked oil on the intake valves. And given the thermal characteristics of a big ‘ol Hemi V8, this is a good thing.

Next up will (hopefully) be a new rear differential and, while I have the car in the air and the suspension taken apart, better springs and a brake upgrade.

Listening to "Awaken" by Valerie Broussard and Ray Chen

Just for posterity, ye olden blog here is now over 1000 posts… Not bad for 20 years.

Listening to "Alive And Kicking" by Simple Minds

A couple of days ago I ordered a new CAI for the car, and it came in today – so I wasted a half an hour in the garage installing it…

That air filter is the size of a small motorcycle helmet…

The difference in the car is pretty noticeable with the CAI – better throttle response, a butt-dyno is registering a few more ponies, and the soundtrack at WOT is a wonder to behold.

All in all I think it was a good waste of $400.

Next up, an unlocked ECU and programmer.

Listening to "Cars" by Gary Numan

A friend of mine worked for the phone company back in the early 90’s and was sent over to Panama to support the military during the ousting of Noriega, and he has a lot of stories pertaining to his time there.

One such story is about going to a McDonald’s where he used an intercom to order his food which was delivered via a slot under bulletproof glass, and there were armed guards in the lobby. It always struck him as the penultimate example of what a place looks like when the government fails.

Today I walked the mile and a half over to the McDonald’s near my office building, where I ordered via touch screen and my food was delivered via a slot under bulletproof glass, and there was an armed guard in the lobby…

My company has owned this building for about 15 years now, so I remember when the area was really nice. The decay really began with the addition of the light-rail station just up the street in 2017, and has dramatically accelerated in the last few years… Now I have to walk around the building every morning to evict homeless folks camping in the doorways and clean up cardboard beds and stolen Amazon grocery delivery bags from the apartment complexes nearby.

Last year the building was broken into and ransacked, and that was also the beginning of cars getting broken into in the parking lot every now and then.

So, long story short; Aurora Colorado in 2024 has achieved Panama City in 1990.

Listening to "All She Wants To Do Is Dance" by Don Henley

Found a good deal on a new filter and intake tube for the car the other night, so against my better judgement I purchased it… $400 later and I have an aFe Power “Magnum Force” intake and the dry filter arriving between the 18th and 22nd.

Being as an internal combustion engine is really just a pump, this is just a small part of the whole. The exhaust I put on the car a year and a half ago improved the engine’s ability to move the air out, and this will improve its ability to move air in.

When all is said and done, the exhaust and intake will only add perhaps ten horsepower to the car, but they set the groundwork for other things like the unlocked ECU and programmer that I’ll get someday.

Listening to "Resilience" by Dream Shore

In the early 80’s the phone system was kind of a passing interest of mine – specifically the rapidly developing digital switching systems that were replacing the very mechanical and very analog systems that had been commonplace for so long.

To be fair, a lot of my interest stemmed from Ma Bell telling everyone they couldn’t know about how it worked – which turned it into a challenge. And then the breakup of AT&T in 1984 really stirred the pot and generated a lot more interest.

In what was probably a lucky move for me, I joined the Navy in ’86 and that more or less removed me from contact with the phreaking community before I got into serious trouble. But that only lasted until 1993 when I started to get back into it again.

In the early 90’s most of my free moments were invested in BBS culture, which extensively utilized the phone system and in-turn became a haven for people with a shared interest in such things. Eventually things turned from theoretical telecom exploration to some physical efforts, but I insisted that if we were going to lay hands on the system that we maintained some morals; we would never cause harm to the system and we would never exploit the system. Our goal was simply to learn more about the system – not break shit and cause chaos.

Over a three year period, before I took off to Virginia and Ice headed to college, we did a lot of telecom spelunking and learned a ton about how Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph / US West operated in the “303”. Everything we did held to our strict code of conduct, so we never interrupted service or caused problems for anyone.

Probably the coolest part of what we did though was the scenery we got to see while we were tracing out the system. In Colorado the phone system has to reach places that you only see on postcards, so scenic photography was just as important on our outings as documenting what we found.

Early this morning I headed out to visit a few places we ‘discovered’ back in the 90’s. These days I have to go pretty far afield to find things that still exist – but there are still a few out there.

Listening to "Steppin' Out" by Joe Jackson

Ages ago – 1985 / 1986 – I had an Atari 800XL computer that was my gateway to an online world through bulletin boards and things like Compuserve.

Prior to that my family had an Atari 2600 that lived on top of the television in the late 70’s, and that was my introduction to video games. I still remember the day I got home from school and caught my mother playing Breakout… It was so incongruous for my mom to be playing a video game that the memory has stuck with me forever.

Anyway, today my CFO rolled into the office with an Amazon box and stating he had something for me… This isn’t unusual as the company buys all sorts of stuff from Amazon on an almost daily basis, but what he pulled out of the box was unusual.

It was an Atari 400 “mini”.

Apparently he was cruising Amazon late at night, saw this thing, and knowing of my retro-computing habit / addiction figured I’d like to play with it – so he bought me one.

After some jaw-jacking about both of our experiences with old Ataris, he left me to get it hooked up to something so we could mess with it… Inside the box was an old-school Atari joystick and the 400.

The machine itself is a pretty good homage to the original Atari 400, right down to the raised edges around the membrane keys – it’s just “fun size” compared to the original machine.

The keyboard and cartridge slot don’t function, of course, but otherwise the thing is really exacting in its replication of the original. It has four type-A USB ports on the front for the new USB joysticks (where the original had four 9-pin ports), and on the back are a USB-C for power, an HDMI, and another type-A USB for extra storage.

Anyway, it took all of 5 minutes to get an HDMI monitor up on my desk and get this thing plugged in and running.

It comes with something like 25 games, one of which is “M.U.L.E.“, which I played a lot of back in the day. But my CFO wanted to play some old Broderbund games – so I quickly pulled down “Lode Runner” and “Choplifter” for us to play.

My CFO ripped through the first five levels of Lode Runner before my CEO called and he had to run off. I then flew around in Choplifter for a bit before getting back to work.

All in all the 400 “mini” is a pretty neat system. It’s an emulator, of course, and it’ll emulate a 400, 800, 130XE, 800XL, and 5200 pretty faithfully – which is roughly a bajillion games from the 80’s, some of which I still have in my collection. So I guess I have a “new” 800XL now and I need to update the list of retro systems I have before I run off to play far too much “Archon“. 😀

Listening to "Rio" by Duran Duran

On Friday the car hit 6000 miles – so as I usually do here’s the record:

I purchased the 300 on August 10th, 2022, which was approximately 600 days ago – so I’m managing to stick to the roughly 10 miles a day that I’ve been averaging since I bought it. Which is interesting considering the 300-ish mile trip to Walsenburg and back last month and the fact the car ticked over 6000 miles on the way back from North Denver.

I’ve been eyeballing some modifications for the car such as a 3.09 geared differential, long tube headers, and a racier intake which may happen this summer depending on how cocked up the economy remains as we head into election season… Typically right before an election the current regime does everything they can to make everyone’s economic situation as nice as possible to garner votes – so who knows, maybe I’ll find myself with a spare hundred dollars or so this summer.

Listening to "Who's Behind The Door" by Zebra

I’ve been building a computer to load my old BBS on for giggles – a Dell E521 running Windows XP.

The E521 is interesting because it’s one of the last machines Dell made with a Windows XP option – so it’s about as powerful a machine as you can run WinXP on – and the restore CD has things like the drivers for the Nvidia chipset included in the OS install, so it can actually see the HDs without resorting to voodoo.

This E521 started life in 2007 as an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ with 2 gigs of 600Mhz DDR2, a 5400 RPM 160G HD, and an Nvidia GeForce 7300 LE video card all running from an anemic proprietary 300 watt PSU. These days it’s an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ with 4 gigs of 800Mhz DDR2, raid-0 7200RPM 1TB WD “Black” HDs, and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS with a 550 watt modular ATX PSU… That’s more than enough for a DOS-based BBS I think.

I have a 6400+ CPU and an 8800 GTS I could put in the machine to max it out – but the 6400+ is a 125 watt part and I’m not sure the stock E521 cooler can handle it, and the 8800 is a 2-slot card which won’t fit in the case without dremel work…

Anyway, getting back to the point of this post: Windows XP is objectively better than Windows 11.

Kind of a big statement, and I think I need to back that up…

First there’s the UI: WinXP has personality in all of its buttons and bars, and is a bit more “nuts and bolts” than Windows 11’s soulless expanses of flat rectangles and Fisher Price user experience. XP expects you to work with the OS, Win 11 expects you to just paw at the brightly colored boxes to get a treat…

XP is way, WAY lighter than Win11. The machine I have sitting here is a fully patched Dell OEM XP SP3 image – it has 22 processes running and is using about 500megs of ram and zero percent CPU at idle. I’m waiting for the Win11 laptop I’m using to contrast with to finish the weekly .NET security update so I can pull the numbers…

Okay, it’s done (only took ten minutes and a restart…) The laptop I’m using is a fully patched Dell OEM Win11 22H2 image, it has 83 processes running, is using 3.8GB of ram, and 5% CPU at idle.

XP has been finalized and doesn’t suffer from Win11’s “Change for change’s sake”. I have literal muscle memory for doing things in XP’s UI going back like two decades, conversely every time I sit down to use Win11 the last update rearranged things and I have to hunt for what I need before I can perform the function I sat down to do.

XP is a static OS and new apps and features are added as you see fit, and you can remove things you don’t need. Win11 is subject to whatever Microsoft feels like shoehorning into your PC today despite what you might want, and a lot of it – like the Xbox integration – can’t be removed by the end user.

And – just to keep this from being a novel – a ton of effort was put into XP to keep your stuff from being accessed by anyone but you. Win11 is mostly telemetry that tells Microsoft everything you do, see, click on, etc. and stuff like OneDrive will actively try to fool you into storing your data “in the cloud” where good ol Microsoft can digest every byte of it for user modeling.

And that’s why I figure XP is objectively better than Windows 10/11.

Listening to "Heartbeat City" by The Cars

Back in the 80’s I was what they called a “Latch Key Kid”, meaning I usually locked up when I left for school, and let myself back in when I got home – usually an hour after my parents left for work and 2-3 hours before my parents got home. This worked pretty well save for those days when school was out for some reason and my parents still had to go to work… On those days my lunch was usually something in an aluminum tray made by Swanson’s or Banquet. Like these:

I think this is where my like of Salisbury steak and beans and franks comes from, and to this day I still love them both.

Anyway, with the advent of the microwave in the mid 80’s, the handy Swanson’s aluminum tray meal kinda fell to the wayside and was replaced by things like “The Budget Gourmet”:

Fast forward about 40 years and modern TV dinners kinda suck. They tend to be flavorless and texture-less – basically ‘gut wadding’ used to keep you from being quite as hungry as you were before you ate – and I therefore don’t bother with them.

Unless they are one of these:

This is from a local restaurant called “Lazy Dog” which somewhat specializes in old-school aluminum tray TV dinners. These run about $9 a piece in a six-pack and are basically a restaurant meal you have to cook at home, in the oven, for 45 minutes… Lazy Dog rotates the offerings seasonally, so I never get bored, and I really enjoy plopping down in front of the TV with a legitimate TV Dinner and putting on some old 80’s show for ambiance. 🙂

Listening to "TV Dinners" by ZZ Top