Posted in troubleshooting, Uncategorized, vintage on May 6th, 2026
I’ve had an Adtran Total Access 908e (TA908e) VoIP/voice gateway for over a year now with the intent of replacing my collection of Cisco ATA and Grandstream ATA for the BBS and other modem stuff. Allegedly it does a better job at VoIP processing and gives me better line density, but first I need a […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 22nd, 2026
I haven’t ranted about the 328 skid steer I also inherited from dad. On the surface this thing should be great for clearing brush, fencerows, moving stuff around; it has a heater, A/C, roll-up cab. We have several shear and grapple attachments for just that. This thing has been a giant, multi-year pain in my […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 22nd, 2026
My last trip to Oklahoma was a mild disaster. Nothing going right, skid steer still not fixed after $4700 at the shop, multiple 2+ hour trips fetching parts, aggravating oil and filter changes, and more house plumbing issues. But at least I got the IH 484 tractor up and running again. Between this tractor with […]
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 […]
