A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Afasoas]

Can you not use a docker/lxc container for Roundcube?

[Feanor]

Yes, probably.
But I'm not knowledgeable enough on that technology, so I went with actual silicon.
Which is getting rarer these days, where it's virtualised all the way down

And I did want a nice modern LAMP machine for other stuffs too, and the little HP hums along rather nicely with CentOS7 on it.

[BrianI]

Oh, French Fiddle Sticks! (although can we get these, post Brexit?)

Looks like my online-upgrade from Linux Mint 17.3 to Linux Mint 18.1 has failed, leaving my essential packages non functioning... Clean install time from dvd iso I think...

[T42]

French fiddlesticks, yeah... After being limited to a French-KB laptop for 10 days I managed to find a spare German KB and hook it up.  Nice to be back to full size KB again, but now I'm hitting Ös for Ms, Qs for As and all manner of Gallic aberrations. Bah. It'll pass.

[Mr Larrington]

I feel your pain, T42.  Back in the last century, when Miss von Brandenburg was still a Penniless Student Oafette, she would bring her keyboard with her and plug it into my PC for the duration.  Swearing was copious and not just because it was a nasty plasticky thing instead of an IBM Model M.

[David Martin]

We had a VT 220 (or similar) to access our main server. This had a norwegian VT keyboard but also had the joyous ability to change the coding on the keyboard at the terminal. The joys of trying to login when your colleague had left it set to an other language..

[Bledlow]

I sometimes start typing only to discover that the input mode is set to hiragana, with the keyboard set to match  . . .

[jsabine]

Do you reckon I should confirm that mynamemysurname@gmail.com is the right address to associate with the Twitter account that someone called 祐也 (Japanese for Yuya, according to google) is trying to set up?

[Kim]

Do you reckon I should confirm that mynamemysurname@gmail.com is the right address to associate with the Twitter account that someone called 祐也 (Japanese for Yuya, according to google) is trying to set up?

Someone (who may or may not be Kimblerly Wallace of New York, USAnia), has a tweenage girl who's trying to set up an Instagram account.  I can't help feel sorry for her, as in my day luser parents had the sense to stay out of what you did online.

[Dibdib]

I've got an old, underpowered laptop which, for Reasons, isn't worth salvaging and is headed for the tip.

Before it goes, I've pulled out the Bluray drive, as £10 for a caddy is a lot more palatable than £100 for an external Bluray drive. The RAM and HDD aren't worth bothering, but is there anything cool I can do with the rest of the carcass before it goes to silicon heaven?

[Vince]

Viking funeral and post it on You Tube

[Vince]

Unless its a Toshiba Satellite C660 and the touchpad works, in which case I could give it a new home.

[Dibdib]

Alas, not even a Toshiba. Old HP from about 2009ish. I would have donated it, except that a) Vista  and b) it's cooked its own innards so badly it falls over from heatstroke after an hour or so of work.

[Kim]

Anyone not feeling old?  http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/ should solve that...


(I reckon the demise of RS232 is greatly exaggerated, though I did deposit a box full of 9-25pin adaptors, gender changers, null modem cables and the like^[1] at the tip last week.)


_{[1] The Centronix printer cables had been breeding.}

[Zipperhead]

Anyone not feeling old?  http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/ should solve that...


(I reckon the demise of RS232 is greatly exaggerated, though I did deposit a box full of 9-25pin adaptors, gender changers, null modem cables and the like^[1] at the tip last week.)


_{[1] The Centronix printer cables had been breeding.}

I must have a look in the boxes of old shit and see if I can find my breakout box.

Once HoneyDanber UUCP was released by USL (in about SVR5.2 I think) getting uucp working became a lot simpler. Am I giving away my age?

(I can't remember where I first saw this link - https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo.git was it here?)

[TheLurker]

<old-fart mode="war-story">
I remember doing lots of work with _supposedly_ standard RS-232 interfaces on pathology (Haem/Chem/Bloodbank mainly) analysers and SWRHA's implementation of Phoenix.  Oh the hours of "fun" sorting out the bit settings needed to get the stop bits, parity and line speeds aligned with those available on a PDP-11 serial port. One and a half stop bit variants were especially good "fun". And then all the games writing handlers dealing with "inventive" use of ACK/NAK/STX/ETX in-band flow control and that's before you even got to the weirdly packed data. 

Mind you it was bloody sight more fun (and less volatile) than JavaScript. 
</old-fart>

[Dibdib]

young fart - I don't think I've ever used a serial cable. In fact, I was reading that and realising I have no idea how terminals would connect to a mainframe/minicomputer - would it have a bank of serial ports on the back?

[Kim]

young fart - I don't think I've ever used a serial cable

*thunk*

[barakta]

young fart - I don't think I've ever used a serial cable

*thunk*

Dibdib is a whole *five* years younger than us... We must be right on the edge of this tech.

[Kim]

*looks around the room*

Actually using a serial port right now:

• Scrolly LED sign
• MSF radio clock receiver

Stuff that has a serial port that might at some point be used:

• PIC programmer
• 10/100 Ethernet switch
• Multimeter with data logging

Not a chance:

• Laserjet 4050 (speaks Ethernet)
• Analogue (with digital storage) oscilloscope
• UPS (Speaks USB)

We seem to be doing quite well at getting rid of the things, tbh.

[Dibdib]

Maybe, and I think I was a little underexposed to tech for a while too. My first exposure to the internet was my dad's work laptop about 1996/7, and then we bought a PC maybe in 97/98 or so. Before then, it was just tinkering with cassette games on an Amstrad CPC464 or the painting apps on an Atari STe.

So I guess I 'grew up' with PCs just as USB was becoming ubiquitous, and must have just missed serial peripherals.

(on preview - also I've never really been a hardware guy, and even in my "tinkering" stages it was more software than hardware - discovering usenet as a teenager, teaching myself HTML, the Golden Age Of Napster, etc...)

[Vince]

I have experienced two iterations of serial hair tugging.
As a junior programmer I had to workout how to connect the venerable printers to the shiny new IBM PCs. Life got much easier once I persuaded the boss to buy me a breakout box. I also abused all the standards by putting two serial connections down a single cable when they wanted new terminals at the far end of the factory, but didn't want to schedule a shut down to get new cabling installed.
More recently, interfacing marine electronics using the NMEA0183 standard. technically its RS422, but just happens to work via a standard serial interface.

[tiermat]

Not got to the end of the article, yet, but it has woken up memories of my first, post college job. I was a printer repair guy, with all that entails. It also made me remember the chips required for serial comms, 1488 & 1489. That and Ferrets. S'pose you had to be there, really.

[ian]

I do remember the time when you sometimes manually had to jig the interrupts from COM ports on Windows. I suspect they never fixed that, it turned out to be easier in the Microsoft world to let the technology deprecate.

I used to have a Seagate magneto-optical drive that used RS232. Or possibly that was a febrile bad dream. Back in the day, it was a oddly favoured mechanism for connecting capillary electrophoresis machines to superannuated Apple IIs (I'm not that old, but the control software was).

[Mr Larrington]

Ah, serial cables, he said, smoothing his flowing but greying locks...

When I was a young Mr Larrington taking his first tentative steps into BOFHdom, Important People in my then-employer's IT department had a hardwired terminal via a serial cable anything up to a hundred and fifty yards long and the riff-raff had to make do with accessing the VAX and/or PDP¹ via a primitive network, which involved miles of co-ax, desktop boxes which converted RS-232 serial-speak at 2400 into something that could be fired down the co-ax, and a bunch of rack-mounted things that translated it back before feeding it into the Babbage-Engines.  The limited number of rack-mounted things meant not everyone who wanted in could do so at whim and there were frequent "Is Your Session Really Necessary" reminders.  Not that the Babbage-Engines could have coped with that many lusers anyway, especially if the mad Yugoslav nicknamed "Vlad the Compiler" was one of them.

If you were Very Important - the IT Director, the system mangler or the BOFH - then you were allowed to jibble the printer port on the back of your terminal to accomodate a second hardwire into the PDP.  Which needed a different cable.  I had boxes of 25-pin RS-232 shells and connectors under my desk and a GBFO reel of 4-core serial cable strategically placed for lusers to trip over if they came a-whining about the line printer running out of paper, the laser printer needing hitting with a hammer again or the plotter drawing pretty pictures on its own bed because some gobbin had forgotten to put in a sheet of shiny and expensive paper before stabbing <RETURN>.

1: The VAX was for SCIENCE and the PDP for word processing.  Payroll was done on a Mac!