by srhuston

Could Be, Who Knows?

Could it be? Yes, it could.
Somethin’s comin’, somethin’ good, if I can wait.

–Stephen Sondheim, “Something’s Coming”

[Personally I prefer the version by Yes, but that’s just me]

I’ve been wanting to get a project or two I can solder and tinker with, because I’m getting that itch. I’d keep looking at things like various radio kits, but the biggest problem with kit radios is that they tend to be directed at CW operators which I am not – even the most powerful kit radio I could easily grab ahold of would do max 10W SSB, and that’s not enough to make meaningful contacts for me. So while it would be fun to assemble and test, I probably wouldn’t use it much after that. And recently I realized that I’d been saving up some money but without a goal to save for. That can be a dangerous combination, so I went looking for something that would scratch that itch to build and tinker again.

Enter some retro computing items. Some years ago when looking to populate my wish list with more items, I stumbled across some things that I didn’t know existed. Of course there’s old computing stuff out there, and I love playing with it, but some of it is too old to be reliably dealt with – too hard to source the parts, or too expensive, too big, all kinds of reasons it’s not a Good Idea. Well, some enterprising folks out there have come up with good ways to handle that via emulation and replicas, and I am here for it. The first one on the list is a replica of the IMSAI 8080, which many will know as the computer that David Lightman uses in the movie WarGames.

Image of the IMSAI 8080 replica front panel showing all its switches and LED lights for address and data values.

This replica is done by The High Nibble (love that name) and is available on his website. One of the main reasons I want one of these is of course the movie factor, but also because I love tinkering with old hardware, and why not? It has blinkenlights. That makes it better. One downside to this particular kit though is that it’s not readily available from what I can tell – the order form is more of an interest form, and after you submit your address you’ll get an email when a kit is available to purchase. It’s also a little more expensive than other items on my list, which is not a mark against this kit at all – I think it’s worth every penny, I just didn’t want to spend that many of them on one item at this time. So this one will stay on my list for another day, hopefully soon.

What’s next? Well, the IMSAI was one of the first “computer clones” (those who remember the early 90s to 2000s may recall when things went from “IBM or Apple” to “Send In The Clones” as everyone started making mostly compatible hardware). The original that it copied was the Altair 8800, and I remember seeing them as well when I was first getting into computing. You may have too, as it’s a pretty iconic look.

The Altair-Duino Experimenter sitting on top of the Altair-Duino Pro, both being replicas of the Altair 8800 computer with mechanical switches and LEDs for address and data values.

Adwater & Stir (another awesome name) offers the Altair-Duino which comes in two flavors. One is pretty close to the original in terms of space and expandability, and the other is slightly smaller and much more shelf friendly (and cheaper). Since I’m more interested in tinkering and building, and don’t plan to add expansion cards at the moment (nor do I care to have it take up a lot of space on a desk or cart somewhere), the smaller “experimenter” fits the bill quite nicely. It keeps the cool factor between the blinkenlights and the panel switches, where you can actually “toggle in” an entire program if desired but not necessary since a bunch of stuff is preloaded on the Arduino inside for you to cheat and load very quickly. But if you want to bit bang on the panel, go for it – and that’s exactly the kind of thing I like to read about. Reading those pages, I also saw a comment at the bottom of one of them that gave me a head scratch (or maybe a record scratch):

I also have to say “thank you” to Oscar Vermeulen of Obsolescence Guaranteed for his recreation of the PDP-8, which got me on this quest to recreate historic computers.

PDP-8 I thought? I don’t know much about the DEC machines, but they had blinkenlights too.. and I remember seeing them in the background of various podcasts where Steve Gibson was a guest (such as “Security Now”). So I moused over to there, and found something I could really get behind: the PiDP-11/70

The front panel of the PiDP-11/70, a replica of the DEC PDP-11/70 computer with mechanical switches and LED lights showing address and data values.

The PDP-11/70 was a computer from Digital Equipment Corporation and was instrumental in the design and creation of Unix. It’s also one of the last machines to still have a proper front panel with lights showing address and data information (later PDP-11s had their panels replaced with blank panels since after the boot sequence the switches and registers were typically not needed). As you may guess from the name, the brain of this one is a Raspberry Pi running the ‘simh’ emulation package, so while there’s the faithful recreation of the panel and operation there’s a lot more power internally to do other things, including running a full Unix if you so desire (nevermind the fact that the Pi itself runs Linux anyway).

So armed with all of this, what to do? Well, I counted up the savings I had sitting here and realized a bit of good news – I had enough for the PiDP-11 and the Altair-Duino. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do and ordered them both. Plus a new Raspberry Pi 4B since the only one I had sitting here is a 2B which, while it’s plenty powerful enough to run the emulator, doesn’t have built-in wi-fi (and the cost of a dongle is a portion of the cost of a whole Pi at that point). The Altair and the Pi will be here Saturday, and I hope early enough that I can get a good start working on it, while the PDP will arrive next Tuesday and probably have to wait until evenings and/or the weekend for its time to shine. I’ll be taking photos during the process to document it and share here, because.. well, this is just too freaking cool not to share. Oh, and if you’re curious about the term “blinkenlights”, it comes from a long line of posters and such that would be placed around machinery as a WWII-era joke. See an example below, or read the entry from The New Hacker’s Dictionary that explains it well.

A warning sign in faux German from old jokes that found their way around computer labs in the 1950s. It reads, "Achtung Alles Lookenspeepers! Das computermachine ist nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten."

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by srhuston

Silence Is Golden

Even in the quietest moments, I wish I knew what I had to do.

–Supertramp, “Even In The Quietest Moments”

Been quiet here, but less because I fell out of favor for writing things and more because I have nothing to write. Still waiting on the replacement mixer I mentioned previously, but for slightly different reasons – I got the RMA paperwork and sent the bad one off to them, it took a week to get there (I literally could have carried it, by hand, the 16 miles from my house to their warehouse faster than FedEx who sat on it for four days 40 miles away from both of us for… reasons) and then instead of shipping me a replacement I got a gift card for that amount. Wondering why I moused over to their site to see the model listed as “Temporarily Out Of Stock” which is their tag for something that is going to take so long to get more – if they do – that they won’t backorder it. So a couple times a day I hit refresh on that page hoping for something to change, and meanwhile deal with the crunchiness of the old mixer.

Other than that there hasn’t been much going on. Some issues with carpal tunnel flaring up a little (fortunately the same right wrist as before so the old brace went back on today) which appears to be affecting a flexor tendon the most. At the same time, the PsA flare in my left hand subsided a little, so I’m still down to one useful hand but at least it’s not zero. Haven’t done anything radio-related still, and every time I think about it or start to there’s something else, besides I don’t want to get into debugging any possible problems with the setup until the mixer is replaced. And no other projects in the shack to get into at the moment either. On gaming, I’m still working through the postgame items in San Andreas for 100% completion, but after watching my eldest playing Pokemon Sword I got hooked (Pokemon were kinda becoming a thing as I was just a little too old for it, so I never got into it). So I’ve been playing that game and enjoying it. But none of that is really “post worthy” so there’s been nothing to write here. Maybe all of it combined is worthwhile though. Anyway, cat tax below.

Hobbes, my orange and white single-brain-cell creature, trying to make biscuits on a blanket and forgetting what to do with his back feet.

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by srhuston

Moving Right Along

Fozzie: “I don’t know how to thank you guys.”
Kermit: “I don’t know why to thank you guys.”

–“The Muppet Movie”

So…. what’s going on here? Why the sudden desire to put stuff, and pushing it out to other places and whatnot? Well, it’s a long story.

A long time ago I set all this up because I wanted a place to put stuff to share with the world. Writing on websites was pretty new in 2000, and I got on the bandwagon because why not. I posted stuff left and right, and of course didn’t expect people to flock here and interact – why would they, I had nothing really to offer except, well, me – and I was mostly fine with that. Somewhere around 2006 I moved the site from being hosted on my own home computer which meant keeping that online all the time, to an actual hosting company. At the same time I moved it to WordPress instead of Slashcode because the latter was notoriously difficult to maintain while my hosting company (Dreamhost) had a nice single-click installation process. I do systems administration as my day job, I don’t want to do it when I’m not getting paid, so that was a huge bonus to me. I was doing well, even putting up some new stuff, when I discovered Google Analytics. Now I could see what kinds of traffic my site was getting, and while that was never the goal, it was a neat thing to look at. I want to say that was some time after 2009 or so, which would have been some time after joining Facebook and connecting with a lot of people I’d known over the years.

After having GA set up for a while, I went looking and realized something. Nobody went to my website. Nobody intentionally, anyway. Remember how people said sites like Livejournal were just “screaming into the void” and nobody looked at stuff there? Yeah, turns out that was my site too. Now, sure, I wasn’t planning on having a high-traffic bastion of entertainment or instructional data, but still I figured I’d have something a little more active than random people who clicked because a page showed up in the results after searching for “ceiling cat is watching you masturbate.” But the analytics didn’t lie, I was also screaming into the void.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to talk… a bit. Over the years I’ve watched people tune out while I’m talking. A fun trick is to start going off on some outlandish thing and see if they catch on, or see how much you can keep going until they suddenly realize the last few lines were about an alien invasion or crossdimensional rift that flooded your basement with catnip mice. I thought, if I write things here then maybe that’ll scratch that itch – I’ll feel like I’m getting to talk about the things I wanted to, and others won’t have to listen to it. But when you see that nobody’s actually looking, you realize you might as well be talking to a wall. And I can do that just as easily without exercising my fingers – something which some days is a lot more difficult than others (and if you have no idea why that would be, I went over it in another post that nobody read 😛 ). But why wasn’t anyone coming here to read things anyway? Well, I think a big part of it was that everything was corralled into a single place, a book where all of our faces would gather and meet and chat and post. And so the idea of leaving that place to go look at something else.. well, that’s like work for some. Work that they don’t want to do, and I can’t blame them. If I can get 90% of what I want from one place, why go bouncing to other places as well? Just be glad with what I’ve got there. But that means, if you want to put your stories out there for people to see, you have to put them in that space where they’re looking. But for various reasons, that place is falling apart more and more. Ideologies that don’t mesh with my own, rules that oppose what I think are good and just, all kinds of things. And I’m not the only one thinking that, others are as well. In fact, Wil Wheaton posted a thing about it, and while I’d been debating what to do at that point, reading my thoughts coming from someone else whose writing and engagement I respect solidified it for me.

So, that’s the plan. Try to write here the things I want to share with people, and hope that the time is right that people will come read it especially if I put some effort into sharing those links elsewhere. I’m also on other platforms, and I need to set up a sidebar thing linking to them or something, I’ll get around to that too. One other thought that has come up before, especially with the amount of fun I have doing audio work, is to do a podcast. That seems like pissing into the wind just as much as (or even moreso than) a website these days, but it’s something I’m still thinking about. Having enough content to publish is the problem for something like that usually, but maybe if I set the low expectation of “you’ll get something when I have something to give” it would work out. Don’t know, but love to hear your thoughts about it.

Oh, one last thing, since I mentioned hearing your thoughts. You may have noticed comments are off all over here. I got tired of dealing with spam comments long ago, and turned off all comments on all posts. I may try to figure out how to turn that back on in a way that I’m happy with dealing with them, but… not sure. You can reach me in a number of ways, though – including in IRC which is linked right on the sidebar there. Meanwhile, here’s a photo of a cat.

The author and one of his cats (standard issue), Astrid.

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by srhuston

Quiet, Please

Hush, hush, keep it down now

–‘Til Tuesday, “Voices Carry”

After two failed attempts at making my headphone attenuator, I finally got a working one. I showed an “in progress” shot in an earlier post, but mentioned that it didn’t work when I tried to solder everything together. Physics really, I wasn’t thinking ahead to having to slide the protective cover or shell over the whole thing and resistors don’t bend in the middle. I only really have one in-progress shot of the working one:

Image of a 1/4" stereo female jack on a cord with stripped wire ends, and a 1/4" stereo male plug prepared for installation.

But the finished product looks pretty good if I say so myself:

Soldered 1/4" stereo plug with resistors attenuating the signal as it comes out of the mixing board.

The biggest part of the problem is getting those four resistors in there correctly. I had done it with the “in-line” version but .. well, I didn’t like it anyway, so when it didn’t work I wasn’t heartbroken. This one works, doesn’t have shorts or wiggly bits that cause issues, and plugging my headphones into it and the cable into the board means I have a larger dynamic range on the one potentiometer as expected, and “loud” in the headphones can be made to be “loud” in the room so there’s no surprise (or booming headphones sitting on a desk somewhere).

Plastic under-desk or on-wall headphone hanging bracket sticky taped to a plastic drawer cabinet and held on with a plastic clamp.

Speaking of headphones on a desk, I fixed that too. Or I will have, once I’ve given the adhesive some time to bond. This drawer is usually under my desk by my left knee, so the headphones will be nearby but out of the way, not taking up desk space, and also perhaps not getting dusty when they’re not in use. I could’ve screwed it to the underside of the desk, and still reserve the right to do so, but if this works then it’s less “permanent” and still useful, and if it falls off after two weeks I get a screwdriver and make it so.

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by srhuston

Knobs Sufficiently Twiddled

Yeah, reaching for a title there… anyway, after a few hours of “WTF why isn’t that working” I figured out the stuff I wanted working, namely there’s a new script on my IRC bot that watches for articles here. I guess my thought is, if I’m more “public” about what’s going on here, maybe I’ll use it more? Who knows. There’s another project that I started on though, and has been sitting patiently on my desk since yesterday afternoon as well, so I think I’m gonna push up the volume and turn the chair to the soldering iron.

by srhuston

Fiddling Knobs

Trying out some new things… here’s hoping I don’t break stuff. Then again, it’s Saturday evening before a snowstorm and a holiday weekend, what better time to break things?

by srhuston

All Mixed Up

You’ve got to trust your instinct
And let go of regret

–311, “All Mixed Up”
Behringer Xenyx 1204USB mixer in use in my shack

I seem to have had a run of bad luck with mixers lately. Why do I even have one? Well, I play with audio a lot, either because of various Zoom meetings, or because I do amateur radio stuff, or because I listen to music, whatever. And while the “simplest” solution for some of these is just to plug stuff right into the computer and have it work, I like flexibility. So my audio routing is… complicated. And I like it that way. Interestingly I’ve tried to write up how all that is done a couple times, and got as far as a few Reddit comments where I described it and a draft on here, but never officially published it. I don’t think this’ll cover the uses I wanted to with that post, though it will probably serve as a jump point, because the main issue here is that I’m annoyed with having to send back three mixing boards in less than a month.

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by srhuston

Fixing a Hole

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering

–The Beatles, “Fixing a Hole”

For a while I’ve had an old HP 3435A desktop digital multimeter. Picked it up at a surplus place for $60 so I could have a meter that sits on a shelf and is always ready, doesn’t need batteries, has a decent readout, autoranging, basically a bunch of features that my existing meters did not have. Recently when I went to use it, I found that the voltage it was showing was impossibly wrong – I seem to recall it was an AA battery I’d just removed from something marginally working but it read 0.2V – and then shortly after the only thing it would display is “OL”, its code for out of range. Around the same time as that, I saw a video from Great Scott! that talked about a portable DMM that also has a two-channel 50MHz oscilloscope. Now I already have an old analog scope here, but .. well, it’s old, and it doesn’t have a lot of the nice features that newer scopes do. So after getting that new meter in my hands, I decided recently to take the old one apart and see if I could find out what was wrong with it.

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by srhuston

Quick Thought..

For the times, they are a-changin’

–Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are a-Changin'”

With the direction things are going over on that blue F site, and a comment from Wil Wheaton who seems to have done similar to me when it comes to use of a website (though I’ve obviously never had the following here that he has had there, I came to the same conclusion – put the things where the people see them and you get interaction)… I’m giving more thought to resurrecting this a bit more. I do post things on that facey-space for a narrower audience than I do here or on other public forums, and I don’t know if/how I would continue that – not all of my thoughts are meant for everyone, and I think most people are that way, but I don’t think people would sign up for something to see those more reserved moments. Maybe I don’t share them? Maybe I don’t share them here? Don’t know the answer, but something’s blowing in the wind. I think I’ll start by creating a new category, and maybe put some of those “quick thoughts” that I’d share other places there. Maybe I even do something with themes and whatnot so only 1-2 “quick thoughts” will be visible on the front page to keep the noise lower or something? More thinking required.

by srhuston

Everything Zen? I Don’t Think So.

Follow men’s eyes as they look to the skies, the shifting shafts of shining weave the fabric of their dreams.

–Rush, “Jacob’s Ladder”

[Note: Yes, I did think of the Bush quote after already settling on the Rush quote, which is why the title]

Last week I virtually attended the ISC2 Security Congress which was in Las Vegas NV. Three days of cybersecurity talks and other related topics which is always good for increasing the continuing professional education (CPE) credits needed to maintain my CISSP, as well as get insights to new technologies, things I wouldn’t otherwise hear about, new threats, and all sorts of other things. One that comes up now and then is the topic of burnout and fatigue, and they always try to have a few people to talk about how to manage stress. This year was no different, and one of the keynotes in fact was Dan Harris. Dan is a retired news anchor and journalist, and wrote a book called “10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works – A True Story.” While I’ve probably seen him on TV before (I know Stephanie commented that he was one of her favorite journalists when she watched TV news more often in the past), I don’t know that I knew who he was, but I was definitely intrigued as soon as he started talking.

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