@linear@nya.social avatar

linear

@linear@nya.social

unprofessional computer witch in a professional embedded engineer's clothing

i live in the midwestern US and bend computers to my will

i like old computers, weird operating systems, and writing emulators

polyamorous, vaguely relationship anarchist

sometimes i make music as 'ersatz waterfall'

consumerism is destructive

we should control our technology, not let it control us

i do not have a mastodon account

i try to put alt text for all my image posts, but it frequently doesn't work on this instance

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

packing up most of my PC software (and everything else, I'm moving in <2 weeks) and. turns out i have a lot of PC software

this isnt even all of it, there's a few items missing

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

@Stinkie pretty big, about 8 hours drive away

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

if Operating System is so good why didn't they make an Operating System/2

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

hah, wow. okay. OS/2 1.2 is very bare bones.

not that this is unexpected or surprising

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

trying to install OS/2 1.x on my 286 and i am sure having a time of it

i finally managed to get one version (Microsoft OS/2 1.21, on 5.25") to boot to the install screen. nothing else will in any configuration i've tried so far. some of them start to if and only if my hard drive controller is disabled

but once i get to the install screen in MS OS/2 1.21, the keyboard doesn't work. which unfortunately, i expected, since the Hyundai Super-286C's keyboard controller is.... odd.

good thing it's socketed! and that it's also socketed on other motherboards much later than this one, for some reason! so i have replacements!

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

the machine is happy with the swapped-out keyboard controller, thankfully. not sure about OS/2 yet

i completely expected the KBC to be an issue, it's an issue with DOS and Windows 3.x as well, you have to pass a specific flag to HIMEM or it just stops responding completely when HIMEM is loaded

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

it likes it!!!!!!!!

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

i would very much prefer to have IBM OS/2 1.30 though, for Reasons

but if Microsoft OS/2 1.21 is all that i can boot, then that is what i will try for now

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

maybe i should email microsoft and be all like "hey so yknow MS-DOS 4. and how it's MIT now. well, what if OS/2 1.x?

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

cold take: the kids should be allowed to protest without having to face the threat of violence from the local viscount's private militia

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

pocket 286 when

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

OS/2 2.1 Special Edition (aka OS/2 for Windows) installation

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

today i am powering a soldering iron off of one of my solar panels in order to reattach a connector on my other solar panel

how is everyone else's day

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

if you or a loved one has suffered from building gcc, you may be entitled to compilation

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

i'm beginning to feel like there's an entire category of operating systems that was, for a time the only category of operating systems most people interacted with, and then suddenly they disappeared from the commercial market, and hardly anybody noticed

today, we have workstation and server operating systems, which are often essentially identical under the hood, because they share a very similar set of goals

but we used to have operating systems designed for personal computing, because that's what the computers that they ran on were for.

the incentives between those categories are different, and at least in my opinion, that shows in the final result.

we had classic Mac OS, before that was replaced by a derivative of Unix - an OS designed for mainframe and server systems.

we had Windows 9x, before that was replaced by NT, which shares enough internal similarity with OpenVMS (an OS designed for mainframes, by the same lead architect) that Microsoft got sued by DEC and settled for some cash plus a promise to port NT to DEC's new processors.

we had BeOS and OS/2, both of which had many advantages over the alternatives on the platforms they ran on, but weren't positioned well enough to compete with Microsoft and Apple's absolute bullshit tactics.

one might've expected that smartphone operating systems would've taken a turn back in the "personal computing" direction, and in some sense they sort of have, but if you peel back all the layers, you still find a Unix-like kernel at the center of both iOS and Android

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

been fixing up my little local solar harvesting rig since the place i'm moving next month has expensive electricity and i figure since i already have this, i might as well use it and save myself a few bucks

i haven't been using it much here since the grid power is solar anyway

once i get things tweaked a bit i'm pretty sure i can manage running almost all of my devices off of this, despite the limited wattage

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

i spent time yesterday tweaking my tiny Athlon 5350 PC, doing some coarse-tuned undervolting and stress testing to try and reduce its power consumption as much as possible. stock, it peaks at about 42w during boot; with my changes closer to 32, and there's definitely room for improvement. that's including the display, which is a small portable one powered off the machine's usb port

that system is running ArcaOS right now and i don't have display blanking or sleep working but i'm going to try to figure out both of those (even if it means writing code and/or doing some low level debugging)

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

need a matrix client that runs on ArcaOS...

ncommander, to random
@ncommander@restless.systems avatar

Well, NetBSD-10 GENERIC doesn't boot on the MicroVAX.

NetBSD 10-INSTALL does, and will infact boot a system off the HDD if its recompiled to remove the RAMdisk.

We're going to bave to do some debugging next stream.

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

@ncommander rc6 installed and booted on my vaxstation 3100/m38 just fine (havent upgraded to 10.0 proper yet)

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

@ncommander i watched the serial console (i have a modern serial terminal hooked up to it), nothing seemed out of the ordinary

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

i have just been laid off

if anyone has any good leads on a job for me, please reach out

i'm good at embedded linux, programming microcontrollers, and old-school unix sysadmining, and have done a mixture of those things professionally for almost a decade at this point

burgerbecky, to random
@burgerbecky@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

My eye doctor made a crazy suggestion that might actually work.

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

@burgerbecky good eye doctors are like that.

i was having issues i didn't understand how to address and that were making it hard for me to work (i, like you, use computers for a living) and was extremely stressed about it, both because it was hard to read things due to the double vision and blurriness, and because it was painful. old eye doctor didn't help at all.

so i went to my childhood small-town family eye doctor, he took a look, and just started casually explaining to me that there was nothing to be worried about, he got me some "computer glasses", got my insurance to pay for them, and told me a specific type of eye drops to use and when/how to use them, and explained why the whole thing was happening (basically: eye infection a few years ago never properly recovered, surface layer of my eye kept getting re-damaged during the night as my eye dried out, in somewhat of a "feedback loop"; surface layer heals fine if you give it a little bit of help, and then it will also lubricate itself properly)

apparently a lot of issues he sees are like this, where people are worried and facing debilitating issues but there's a simple way to address it

indigoparadox, to random
@indigoparadox@mastodon.social avatar

I have now joined the 21st century and am using Wireguard. It's on fleek. Now I can stay connected to Home Assistant from my (and soon my mom's) phone(s) without exposing HA to the Internet or paying someone money or hopping through their honeyp- I mean datacenter. Maybe other stuff, too.

I apologize if my adopting this means it immediately becomes cheugy and everyone migrates to something else. 😔

linear,
@linear@nya.social avatar

@indigoparadox [tv commercial legal disclaimer voice] Wireguard is a registered trademark of Jason A. Donenfeld

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

the new NixOS sponsor policy is incredibly disappointing, and as far as i'm concerned it might as well not exist at all

linear, to random
@linear@nya.social avatar

it's official! NetBSD 10.0 is out now!!!

http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-10/NetBSD-10.0.html

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