Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 18th, 2026
I have several Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 out in the field running Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS/Debian 9/12/13, and like everything else have Chef running on them. These are 32-bit armv7l and 64-bit aarch64 platforms and installers normally aren’t built for them, so you gotta do it yourself. I’m not a fan of just spewing files […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 1st, 2026
I’ve been working my way through fixing up vintage computers and software, so why not get a vintage tractor running? TL;DR: good news: tractor runs, bad news, a lot of bad things [photos: flickr – IH 484 tractor] We inherited this 1979 International 484 from dad and it’s sat here a few years now. I […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 28th, 2025
I haven’t posted in a while, but the big news I finally cancelled my cable TV service after 20 something years! Thanks to Comcast’s infinite money grabbing ways, they would happily let me stay on a data plan with usage caps forever until I “upgraded” to a new unlimited plan, which finally prompted me to […]
Posted in retro, Uncategorized on Mar 31st, 2025
A collection of stories of evolution, follies, starting from scratch, and what not to do. When I started my ISP back in the summer of 1996, how to bill customers and collect money from them was an afterthought. I started with nothing, not even a database, and not realizing what a vital chore it would […]
Posted in retro, Uncategorized on Mar 14th, 2025
I’ve been happily nerding out with vintage bulletin board system (BBS) software and UUCP to send/receive e-mail and newsgroups for a while. Something I kept seeing in BBS documentation was mention of the “.BAG format” or “UUCP BAG format” used by satellite providers when delivering Usenet feeds over satellite. I got curious about what exactly […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 6th, 2025
If you find yourself with some Cisco IR809G and probably other Cisco IR800-series industrial integrated services routers from eBay, you probably find yourself needing the DC power plug/connector. It took me a while to find these as the Cisco part number is useless in the 3rd party world. Mouser lists them as “Pluggable Terminal Blocks […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 28th, 2024
I’ve been tinkering around with other vintage projects the last several months. Many of the photos land over on Flickr but I’m pretty sure the googles never index them, so they’re largely undiscovered and I haven’t written widely about them and why I care. So here’s my “life story before the recipe” list. Logitech […]
Posted in retro, Uncategorized, vintage on Nov 16th, 2024
[photos: flickr – Vintage dial-up modem teardowns] [photos: flickr – Analog telephone adapters] For several months I’ve been buying old popular models of dial-up modems from the 1990s to test how they fare over VoIP connections along with different analog telephone adapters. To my great annoyance maybe a quarter of them didn’t include an AC […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 16th, 2024
This is my second Petcube Bites and after a few years of operation it stopped dispensing treats. Treats started getting jammed between the rotating loader head thingy and the slot loading to the launcher chute and I’d have to empty it out and pick out the offending treat, only to have it jam the next […]
Posted in Uncategorized, vintage on Aug 26th, 2024
This is part of the project to connect my Wildcat! BBS to a retro X.25 network, but it also applies more broadly to “reverse telnet” operation of a Cisco router where you telnet/ssh to a router at a given port to access a serial device hanging off of the aux or a terminal line. I […]
