Knuckledragger

So as hardware is wont to do, a magic gremlin appeared between the Beelink and my gee whiz main display. It's a dual mode monitor that does 1080p @ WTF Hz (480 or something) and 4K at 180Hz. I run it in 1080p mode almost all the time. I began to get suspicious that the problem was hardware related, so I spent an hour integrating the Beelink into the shelf that hots the M4 mini and a bunch of other hardware. That meant dusting off and wiring up my trusty KVM switch. "KVM" is a misnomer in this day and age, but the function is the same. It has been my experience that newer (Silicon based) Mac are ...fussy about KVM switches. Fortunately, this one works with every device I have plugged into it. The downside is that KVM triples the number of wires. 😫 The Beelink is now getting along fine with the 2013 vintage 1200p Lenovo panel I use for system administration. Debian comes with FFX installed (yay!) I am too tired to pursue setting up Pihole tonight. Also, a friend of mine who has been high up in the IT food chain for 25 years now (he is the DNS guy @ ADBE) also said, and I quote "Repeat after me. Net. BSD. Less gui bullshit." I will ignore him ...for the time being.

Happy birthday, Stretch! Here's a comic from 15 years ago.

So apparently Pi Desktop is based on Debian Bullseye, which went EOL in August. That explains the 404s I've been getting trying to update it. The repositories are gone. My next step is to install Debian, probably with GNOME. The Linux Nightmare continues.

Update 1 (of many): I successfully made install media on a thumb drive and was able to install Debian PiOS on the Beelink. The install process was mostly painless. There were a few points where I had to select something non-obvious to continue. Linux is FLOSSy and it never fails to show off that fact. That's about the extent of the good news. Debian ships with Chromium. For the last half hour, I have been trying to install Firefox and ...completely fucking failing. I can download the tar.gz file sure. I can extract it. I have tried a number of directories. The extractor defaults to /tmp. I cannot drag the firefox directory out of /tmp and place it elsewhere. I made $HOME/Applications. I extracted FFX there. I found what I think is the executable. It will not run. I have done like 17 searches using DDG and the Goog on how to install FFX on Linux. The answers are remarkably unhelpful. I'm breaking for lunch. Also, at the risk of accusations of preaching to the choir: Every experience with I have with Windows and now Linux is an argument for The Mac Tax. W11 is horrible in the most dystopian, Orwellian way imaginable. Linux is not horrible, but it is endlessly, relentlessly opaque an unhelpful. Linux assumes one's day job is linux and has no interest in any other possibility. Also, 10.6 Snow Leopard was the best version of MacOS, I will die on that hill.

As I have mentioned in Jacob's Jacobless Jacobing, I recently bought another micro PC for the purposes of installing Raspberry Pi OS (in this case Raspberry Pi Desktop.) The more I learn about smart devices, the more I want to return to monke build a proper standalone adblock/anti-tracking machine. Seriously. We live in a schizophrenic's nightmare. That 4K LG TV is like the offspring of the Five Eyes and Mark Zuckerberg. Your "Internet of Things" refrigerator is phoning home to China. A Russian has hacked into your washing machine. My solution to this Orwellian hellscape is try out a Pihole. Raspberry Pis, as devices, have become so cartoonishly expensive that it's actually a better economic decision to buy a low end micro PC (see above.) This thread will primarily serve as "lol, Knuckles thinks he's a linux geek" but will hopefully include at least a little useful info. The new micro PC, a Beelink SER, arrived today. I learned that the other low power micro PC I bought in 2022, a Minisforum UM350, is significantly more powerful than the Beelink. The former has a Ryzen 3 3550H (4 cores, 8 threads, better per-core performance, Vega 8 graphics) and the latter has a Ryzen 3200U (2 cores, 4 threads, Vega 3 graphics.) This is actually a good thing as the UM350 can pull up to 35W (I think mine is rated at 20W, but it's been ages since I looked that up.) The 3200U pulls 15W. Obviously, I will be running the Pihole 24/7 once it's fully set up. Also, I don't exactly need 3D graphic performance of any kind with it. The biggest surprise thus far is that I bought a unit that was not supposed to come with an OS and surprise, SUCKER! It's got Window 11 pre-installed. That OS is like a goddamn venereal disease. This evening I downloaded the Pi Desktop OS image. It's a svelte 3.4GB. I'm not sure I have the energy at this hour to format a bootable thumb drive and begin the OS installation process.

A couple of days ago marked the 10th anniversary of the passing of Don Buchla. While Bob Moog was the "kindly grandfather" synth designer, and Lev Theremin was "secret agent" one, Don was the "I did acid in the 60s and came up with such radical synth designs that 60 years later the industry is still trying to catch up with me" pioneer.

I wonder if Flickr is blocking certain countries? I'll try my VPN. Hola, me llamo Arrastrando los Nudillos! ¿Dónde está la biblioteca? Mi amigo Brent tiene una cabeza gigante. Erm, I mean. I am now using ProtonVPN, with Spain as the exit country. The images loaded slowly, but they did all eventually show up.

DOH. You're right. The D200 was one of the last CCD Nikon DSLRs and that is the reason it's so prized by collectors and eccentrics. The only CCD body that followed it was the entry level D3000.

Futzing with the D200, special "thumbnail" edition: " These are the original resolution as shot. Nice CMOS CCD color science at least.

Ugh. I got Nikon'd. 20+ years of shooting Canon and the rapid decrease in my ability to see has made operating my D200 a challenge. I was messing with the ISO and/r the WB buttons and fat fingered the QUAL (image size) one. For three days, I was shooting with my D200 at its lowest (2.5MP) setting vs. its native 10MP. I didn't lose anything spectacular, but it's certainly disheartening to learn one was shooting on "thumbnail" resolution.

Toshiba Aurex system from the late 70s:

"🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 Papua New Guinea 🇬🇧"

. o O Even though I only have one Nikon body and it's about to turn 21 years old, I think I'm going to buy a Nikkor 35mm F/2.

I have successfully gotten DeaDBeeF to scrobble played tracks to last.fm on OS X Catalina. This is more difficult than it sounds. I ended up asking three different AIs (Gemini, Clod and uh duck.ai) for help with the problem. Each one gave me a different answer that did not match my experience. Finally I solved the issue by downloading a new copy of the DeaDBeeF binary from a different site. That was it. "Downgrading" from W11 to OS X 10.15 has been a series of hoop jumping. The Goog full stop doesn't support such an old OS, so no Chrome (BFD) or Drive (kind of a BD.) Password management can be a headache. The Intel-based Mini is comically energy inefficient Even at idle, the case is significantly hot to the touch. Conversely, the Minisforum UM350 (visible in the background right, struggling to download a W11 update) has a mobile Ryzen 5 3550H in it and could probably run off a 9V battery. One major upside is that the System Preferences panel on Catalina is the old style one with big icons and a sensible layout, not the horrible new "mobile" one with which current versions of OS X are saddled. You know, because the Mini is a computer. Not a "device."

Incoming Sony post. A stack of 90s. There is an entire subculture built around vintage Sony kit, for some odd reason. A lousy photo of some great ES. A clever redditor took a Sony ST-80F tuner and installed a Raspberry Pi (when they weren't $300), HifiBerry DAC+ Pro, and screen. He made his own UI for the round display shape. Similarly, this guy modified an ES tuner with a Raspberry Pi, OLED display and rotary encoder. Also, look at that goddamn ES tape deck. I would [Note from Legal: REDACTED.] to own one of those.

Goddamn. Iron Maiden played Boston last night. For ...over 45 years, they have been consistently one of the best if not the best live shows in all of metal. I follow them on FB, like an unc (as the kids say.) They posted these photos: Wish I could have gone. Paradoxically, but unsurprisingly, it's much, much easier to get to BOS from W.Mass than it is from MV.

A good friend of mine mained a Samsung Galaxy Fold for years. He said it kept him from needing to replace his laptop (which died) for quite some time. There were a bunch of obvious and not so obvious limitations. Case selection was a big one at first. Also, some apps just don't play nice on the big screen. Linus of Tech Squeaks ran a newer Fold for a while and he said the same thing. Of course, AAPL has clout with app makers that not even Samsung can muster. I'll be a bunch of developers will make it a point to update their app for the iFold here. I would never buy one (I hate smrt phnes and view them as a necessary evil at best) but I will watch how the saga of Apple's last geegaw, ahem, unfolds.

Apple unveils iPhone Duo.

Holy shit. I just learned that a guy named Sebastian that I went to college with the 90s died of leukemia last month. He was 56. Sebastian was an interesting character. He was significantly dyslexic, and so was in college at a far later age than most of the students. The college we attended (Landmark) was specifically for LD students, so he didn't stick out that much. I had a strong if occasionally antagonistic friendship with him. I caught another student referring to him as "Sebbie" so I started calling him that. He immediately put the kibosh to that, telling me if I kept it up he wasn't going to respond to me when I talked to him. I complied with his wishes. Not that long after we watched Dumb & Dumber on Laserdisc (a huge deal at the time.) I saw the famous "Kick his ass, Sea Bass!" scene, and poor Sebastian had to deal with me calling him "See-Bass" for the rest of his time at Landmark. Apparently Sebastian had been sick for many years. He was, to put it charitably, a very heavyset fella in the 90s. We're FB friends, but he does fuck all on that platform (which is to his credit.) Occasionally family members tag him in photos and I had noticed that Sebastian had lost a shit-ton of weight. "Good for him!" I thought foolishly. Now, looking at his profile (it's his birthday today) it's clear he had kept losing weight and not for good reasons. Sebastian is not the first college chum I've heard about dying entirely too young. Hell, he's not even the first Landmark student. There was a guy named Alex Knowlton who died of cancer 2017 at age 45. Still, it's never not a shock when one of one's peers dies of a disease like leukemia.

How about amp box porn?

The "ACK!"rooms.

I have like six AAPL posts in the works, but right now I'm going to focus on this: Someone on island is selling The. Worst. Mac. ever made. A good friend of mine bought one of these when it was new. His was over $3K (jn 2013 dollars) and it was an utter piece of shit. Nevermind the lack of upgrade path an other limitations due to the form factor. He knew all about that going into it. The damn machine hard locked at least once a day. Not when he was working, but if he left it on and came back later, it'd be completely unresponsive. No amount of OS reinstalls, calls to AppleCare, and even having the unit sent in to be serviced ever fixed it. The techs "could not replicate the issue." Conversely, the "cheese grater" G5 tower and Mac Pro he owned on either side of it continue to work to this day. He maintained that the little trash can was the worst Apple product he ever owned. TBH, if the seller was asking ...$150 and not $350, I might buy it just for the lulz. At the price he's asking, I could pick up a used low end Apple Silicon Mini and get far more performance at much less power consumption.

This song has been going through my head recently, for some odd reason.

This is a mindfuck:

Interesting bit of history here: