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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 15th, 2024
Many years ago I was out of the country turning up a new site. Along with racks of servers we had a pair of cabinets shipped to us that contained Cisco 6509s, patch panels, with 300+ ports pre-mounted, pre-cabled, and tested from our main US site. This was a weeks long project and we were […]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 24th, 2024
TL;DR so awesome, so much room for activities I should have done this years ago This is such an exciting game-changing, lifestyle change! I moved my desk! Ever since I moved in years ago into my small apartment my desk has always been in my bedroom, where in my place in Redmond it had been […]
Posted in rant, Uncategorized on May 13th, 2024
(Rant warning) TL;DR I gripe at how complicated it gets and offer no solutions. I really do like what Let’s Encrypt offers. Just getting there figuring out what options work and don’t work is work. I don’t know how the muggles manage it. TL;DR 2: HTTP-01 was out because of internal sites. DNS-01 was the […]
