A Time-Wasting Ramble

Just doing a bit of time wasting here. I just spent an inordinate amount of time watching Dan Wood videos about MorphOS, and his usage of that operating system. I've seen several of Wood's videos, including a couple that became rather popular. Especially the one's where he talked about using Amiga software in the mid-2000s. Interesting stuff for a techie obsessed nerd.

For those of you who don't know, MorphOS is a sort of mutant outgrowth of the old Commodore Amiga systems of 1980s and 90s. It's a dedicated attempt to make the Amiga-style operating system viable in the modern world. As far as I know, it's still mainly running on the old PowerPC architecture. But there has long been talk of porting it over to the X86 architecture, which would be intriguing.

For myself, I never used an Amiga. The closest I ever got was having the AmigaForever emulator kit installed on a Windows 7 machines I used to have. However, that computer hasn't been used in years, and in fact I'm not even sure where that old laptop is. I never really played with the emulator that much, though I'd occasionally fire it up. Most of the system installs were just that, system installs, with base software. I probably could've gotten onto something like AmiNet online and grabbed other software, but it just didn't really seem worth it. After all, the real purpose of that emulation package was to play old Amiga games, and I was never much of a game player. (Though I did enjoy running some of the “demos”, which were pretty cool.)

I think the greatest fascination for me in watching these videos is seeing the programs Wood was/is using, and getting a feel for what he uses them for. Like so many other nerdy types, I have to admit to a rather voyeuristic interest in what tools people use on their computer systems. And Wood does actually use MorphOS as part of his everyday workflow, which I really do find fascinating. Granted, Wood was an Amiga user from back in the day, so he has a background knowledge of the system. And a goodly collection of software he's accumulated over the years. It makes sense for him to use MorphOS, as he's familiar with it.

MorphOS looks really interesting. And, it sparks that little tickle in the back of my head to go down to my storage building, dig out that old PowerPC Mac Mini, and hook it back up. And then download & burn an ISO, and give it a spin…

Alas, I have to put the brakes on, and admit that's not going to happen. I have no room on my desk for a desktop computer setup. And I really don't want to drop c.$100 for the license to a bit of software that I really have no major use for. Besides, I have Linux running on my laptop systems, so… (Though, there is that 12" Powerbook that I forgot was in the back room… Hmmm…)

Still, it impresses me that someone is using something other than the current “Big 3” platforms (Window, Mac, or Linux) to do serious work. I like that. Makes me wish I could use my systems more productively, as well. My Linux boxen really demand to be put to serious work. Maybe, someday… If I'd just stop wasting time watching videos on YouTube…..

Yet Another Yet Another

Well, I'm trying. Really. I am. I've been trying to put together some ideas for things to write here, but that hasn't been as easy as one might think. Which is kind of unusual for me. Anyone who knows me personally (God help them) know me as a person who has more than his fair share of opinions, rants, babblings, etc., all ready to spill out. Yet, when it comes time to get them down on paper (or tossed into electrons, or whatever), I begin to falter. I think a lot of the lethargy comes from the quarantine. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the quarantine is a bad thing. It has helped lower the number of infections and deaths. (Which is, in its own right a frightening statement, given the number of infections and deaths we are seeing with the social distancing, etc. I won't get into the whole "reopening" debate here...) What I think it is is a sense of almost divine lethargy. You do begin to lose track of days after a bit. I shouldn't complain. I have no sickness in my family. We are able to keep going as best we can. At least for the moment. But... There is that desire for "normality", whatever that may be. Or at least some sense of stability. Or, at the very least, some better sense of differentiation from one day to the next. This runs the risk of sounding like me whining. I'm most certainly not. Again, I'm lucky. I live in an area that is relatively free of the ravages of the virus. Though, for how long that goes on..? I keep trying to get my head a bit clear, and to do some creative stuff. But, all to often, I get lost in just gorging myself on the news of the day. The Internet does have both its blessings, and its curses. When the news of the world is laid out before me like a grand buffet, I tend to dive right in. That does tend to curtain me giving time to doing any of my own work. As does some of my hobbies. I haven't been buying computers, nor pens, these days. I do have several of both about to fiddling with, and fiddle I have. I've settled down in my Linux distro-hopping, but I at least try to keep up with things. And, since I've been at home quite a bit, I've been playing with pens a bit, too. (Sadly, my handwriting has not improved in the least...) Oh, and I occasionally play with old typewriters as well. Which sometimes makes me think about the wonderful world of "typecasting", typing an entry on a typewriter, the scanning said piece and posting it here. I used to do something silly like that with screen grabs from old Macintosh emulators. The latter also reminds me... Damn it. I better stop. All this is doing is giving me reasons not to even finish this quick note. I suddenly want to go and dig out an old Mac (which still has an emulator installed), and do something foolish... So much for anything creative for the night...

Thoughts in the Time of Terrible Things

Well, this is a bit different. I haven't put a post on this blog in five years, at least. It's sort of been a desert of technical babblings. Maybe I'll leave it as such. I don't know. It is, indeed, the Cabinet of UnNecessities.

The World, as We Know It

It's definitely a different world from when I last was in this cyberspace. I never thought I would see things as they are now.

I live in the U.S., and things have not been good here for the last 3+ years. Maybe you've noticed...

To be sure, I never thought that things could fall into the state they have. And the last few months have been sort of a microcosm of horror that's driven that point home with an unrelenting force.

How did we get to this point? What the hell happened? There's a LOT of answers to all that, for sure. As they say, it's complicated...

I'm not sure how the world is going to be when we come out of this. If we come out of it. We've never been through anything quite like this in the modern era, and I'm not really sure we're all equipped to deal with it. It makes me wonder...

The Way Things May Go

But I do hold onto hope. Despite the chaos, despite the lack of leadership, despite the sometimes overwhelming idiocy that seems to boil up in times like these, I still try to hold onto a little bit of hope. There are still good people out there. And we can only hope that they are still the majority now. Maybe they can keep the world going on.

That's the world we live in now.

So...

As I'm caught up in the quarantine, sheltering at home, taking care of family and trying to practice social distancing as much as possible, I'm probably going to have a lot of time on my hands. So, maybe, I might just start sticking stuff back here on this blog.

I don't really know what might show up. Maybe it'll be me ranting about world situation as a whole. Maybe it'll be me just babbling stuff about the computer I'm playing with at the moment. Or a book I'm trying to finally get around to read. Or maybe I'll just meditate on a particularly good fountain pen.

Maybe it'll just be me trying to keep my mind occupied, distracting myself, giving myself a slight rest from some of the things going on out there. I think we all need that.

Really, I don't know if it'll be interesting or not. Or even what it will be in general. This is, after all, the Cabinet of UnNecessities. Let's just see where things lead us. If anywhere...

Just a Test

This is only a test - December 5, 2015

Just sweeping some dust out of the old blog, and trying out a new production tool.

More to come.

Soon.

A Brief Note in the Window

So...  Been a long time.

The reasons are legion, and maybe I'll go into them one of these days. 

Foremost amongst them was spending nearly two years on the road, living in hotels, and doing the six-day week.  With a goodly bit of travel on all those intervening days.  Fun.  Needless to say, free brain activity wasn't exactly a big thing with me. 

But, for now, those days are somewhat behind me.  I recently managed to get back closer to home, even though I still end up driving a good bit for work.  But, I'm home, so...

More horrible, computer-wise, was that I was basically stuck with the scourge of the modern business world, Windows.  Because of the business and government websites that I often had to access, I was stuck with using Internet Exploder...er, Explorer for work.  So, I spent a great deal of my in-office time staring at Windows 8.1, and Microsoft Office.  Not exactly soul-enriching, that.

When I came back, I found myself drifting back into the Macintosh realm.  I started to rediscover some of the creativity tools available (like Scrivener, Ulysses, and Nisus Writer Pro), and began to fall in love with them again.

However, the call of FOSS kept, well, calling.  Sadly, my beloved Crunchbang had fallen by the wayside.  I had to move on, so I went in a completely different direction, and took up with Fedora, which I quite liked.  But I've had my eyes on several other distros.  I found myself drifting back towards Debian, version 8.1 which I recently installed on my newest Thinkpad, a T440p snagged 2nd/3rd hand refurbished.  I even recently found a new version of Puppy Linux, called "PuppyBang" that I really want to try. (Grabbed the ISO, but haven't zapped it onto a thumb drive yet.)

I had to do a mass migration of my old computers out to storage, and one of those was my T400, the SlackBox.  It, and my copy of the SlackBook, got packed away.

Today, though, I managed to get out to the storage building and get my Slack stuff back out.  (I had to exchange a couple old junker Powerbooks for them, but...)  So, after a round of updates/upgrades (and something I'd not gotten round to before, installing multimedia codecs), I have Slackware 14.1 up and running again.  I'm typing this on it right now.

And, I grabbed a current copy of the ArchBang ISO, and burned it.  I kept out a couple clunker laptops, and intend to use them to do some software testing, and ArchBang is going to be my first candidate, giving myself a slightly closer look at the Arch world than Manjaro did.  (I've also heard of some CrunchBang replacement candidates out there.  And I also want to get some playtime in with Viperr, the French OpenBox Fedora spin, and VSIDO, the Debian "unstable" distro with FluxBox, which looks interesting.)

So many things for one fool to do...  Maybe I'll come up with some stuff to toss out here on the blog.

We shall see...

Went and Did It

Yeah,  I did.

I went and put in an order with Mr. Volkerding, et al, from the Slackware Shop, and had a Slackware DVD (and a copy of the Slackware Linux Essentials book) waiting on me when I got back home.

I'd prepped prior to trying out the install process.  And, thankfully, the install was painless.  Just to test, I installed the 32-bit version of 14.1 on my Thinkpad T400 (Core2Duo at 2.53 Ghz, 3 GB RAM, and a 160 GB HD).  Hardware detection was flawless, and everything was set up perfectly.  (Even the touchpad, which had me a bit worried.)  I installed Network Manager, and it picked up my wireless without a hitch.

Of course, being a drone who watches YouTube far too much, I immediately set about installing Flashplayer.  (I know...)  I ended up going to the SlackBuild route, which was an adventure, but one I wanted to take.  I wanted to get familiar with the system, so...  Luckily for me, smarter souls have left instructions.  Took some minor modifications, but I got it installed.  And I could watch movies.

But I couldn't hear them.

No sound, whatsoever.

OK, let's think this through logically.  The first thing to do is panic, and desperately try to think what the hell I've done wrong?  What didn't install right?  What's wrong with the plugin?  Etc., etc.

Luckily, through the haze of general ignorance came a sudden spark of realization:  Remember all that time playing with Puppy Linux?  Remember having to occasionally monkey with the sound manager?

Took me for freaking ever to remember the name "alsamixer".  Jump into the terminal emulator, fire it up.  A few seconds, and problem solved.

I now have a nice, functional install of Slackware 14.1.  I chose to use XFce, as KDE and I don't always see eye-to-eye.  Everything works, and Good Grief, how much software they jam into this thing!  I am a bit curious about CalligraOffice, which I've not used much.  (The BrainDump program from the Calligra folks looks particularly intriguing.)

And, as a side note, installing Slackware knocked the sense into me to figure out what I did wrong with that copy of Salix 14.1 that I thought I'd botched.  I now have a nice install of Salix on one of the ancient Toshiba's.

So, there's been a bit of an overkill of Linux installations this weekend.  But I'm having fun.

Until the next round...

Cracking the Cabinet Door

So....

It has been a while.  But it's been a busy while.  I've been through one job which, while not being the greatest, at least paid the bills.  And when that one wound to an end, thankfully a friend called and...  I'm still employed.  Though it was another move, and a whole lot of stuff dumped in my lap very quickly.  With more to follow.

But I'm back.  Sort of.

This is just a touching base sort of thing.  I've been been so busy as of late, I had to pare back the computer stuff for the while.  But I've kept my hand in.

Most of the time at work, I'm stuck using Windows 8.1.  I have to admit, it works.  It's fast booting (a large improvement over it's predecessor), and is about as stable as Windows 7 ever was.  But...well...  blah...  I had to finally put my beloved little Thinkpad X220T on the shelf because it was...well, little.  My eyes are not in the best of shape these days, and that 12" screen wasn't doing me much good.  So, for office work, I've switched over to a Thinkpad Edge with a 15.6" screen.  No touch capability, but I never used that anyway.

I still keep one foot in the realm of Mac, and on in the realm of Linux.  And here, I've both stayed the same and moved about.  Still using OS X 10.8.  Mountain Lion isn't Snow Leopard (God, do I miss AppleWorks!), I've managed to configure the MacBook Pro up write as a "creative writing machine".  I discovered Scrivener, and have started relying heavily on WriteRoom and Nisus.  One of these days, I'll get round to making some comments on each.

Linux remains a hobby.  I seem to have adopted CrunchBang as my fallback for everything.  I have it on my Thinkpad X301 "Kodachi", which is my backup computer.  However, I've been juggling my main "Linux box", from a T410s, currently running Manjaro XFCe, and a Thinkpad X1, running Mint 17 Cinnamon.  I had Salix running on the T410s for a while, and loved it, but on a complete whim put Manjaro back on the system.  However, I loved Salix so much, I'm going to have to find something to put it back on.  (One of these days, I'm going to do a straight Slackware install on one of my systems, but I just haven't worked up to it yet.  I'm still too much the "lazy slacker...")

Which brings me to Puppy.  Puppy Linux is the evening's project.  I'm actually typing this right now in Dpup Exprimo, booted off a USB thumb drive on the T410s.  It's outdated, but I like it.  I have a bad tendency to boot into this, even over Puppy Slacko, or Quirky (which definitely lives up to its name).

But tonight's fun was FatDog64 which, if you're not familiar, is a 64-bit Puppy.  I've had a love/hate relationship with FatDog since way back when.  I think I originally ran FatDog64 600, and rather liked it.  But, when a new version came out, I updated, and the problems began.  The main problem being, the newer versions would never find my Save file (containing all my system settings, etc.) on boot up from a USB stick.  I never bothered to research this, just got mad, nuked the installation, and moved on to other things.

Well, the other day, on a whim, I downloaded the 700 Beta 1 edition to give it a try.  And ran right into the same problem.  I set up my Save file, reboot, and nothing.  Only, this time, I decided to be a bit of an adult (what a bummer) and do a little research.  Turns out it's a fairly simple fix.  Seems FatDog "boots too fast" for older USB drives.  Solution: Pass a boot parameter to slow the boot down by a few seconds.  I added the line "waitdev=5" to the boot menu.lst, and things worked fine.

It's the strangest things that get you back in the game...

I'll definitely try to get back on.  Maybe do some reviews.  Some writeups.

We shall see...