Via www.retrothing.org. Brad Smith went and re-created The Dark Side of the Moon on a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
Damn, it’s good. Or I’m strange. Or both.
Geek
Keeping Aaron happy :-)
When I started this blog, it was all about the house.
Well, things have moved on, and while the house still needs lots of attention, I’ve also started blogging about guns and cars and computers.
I figured that this is not fair to houseblogs.net readers, so I spent a little time figuring out how to exclude some posts from going there.
Turns out it’s dead simple. Changing the RSS feed to http://www.retro.co.za/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=-6,-56 excludes categories 6 and 56, being “Guns” and “Cars” (I left the “Geek” for Laura-Jane).
So if you’re running WordPress, and you don’t want the wrath of Aaron… :-)
Data cabling
A while ago, I got my Malawians to install a piece of gutter drain pipe from the roof of the main house, down the wall, under the path, and up into the (free standing) garage roof.
I finally got around to putting some cabling into this pipe.
Three lengths of CAT-5, one 4-conductor telephone line, one eight conductor bundle for the alarm system, and a piece of five core trailer wire for one day when I want to put some of the lights in the house on a 12V UPS type system.
I had to cut a hole halfway and pull the wire through in stages — too much friction around the corners. (Don’t mind Tanya’s pet plastic bag blowing in the wind).
Now to wire up the network points on both sides, so we can get rid of the patch cable going out the garage window, across the driveway, and into Tanya’s room.
3-phase redundancy
So there I was, pottering around home yesterday morning, and suddenly the lights go out. And the bleating of the UPS reaches my ear. Some inspection shows that the fridge is still working, Tamsyn is still happily playing on her computer, and all the trip switches including the big ones in the box outside are happy.
Further inspection shows that we have one phase of the three phase circuit, and even further inspection shows some very dodgy looking wiring on the pole side of the feed.
So Tanya gets instructions to phone council and I bugger off to work.
Long story short, at 1800 it was starting to get dark inside the house, and we still had only the one phase.
Battleshort! I disconnected the two dead phases, and shorted all three phases together on “my” side of the mains breaker (which is the bottom of the bottom left switch in the first picture, but I did it at the input side of the breaker that feeds the garage, just because it was more convenient.
So around quarter past eight, just as I’ve put the bread in the oven [1], the crew pitches.
Of course, they had to cut all power to fix the feed, and when they reconnected the power everything now hanging off the one phase was cold, so that tripped the outside breaker, which lead to the quickest removal of a kludge you can think of (figured I had to remove all evidence of my meddling before they came inside to look why the lights were not burning…)
[1] We had friends over, and I make Pioneer Woman‘s Marlboro Man’s Birthday Dinner (well, the pan fried steak with blue cheese sauce, crash hot potatoes, and buttered rosemary rolls part of it). With store-bought dough in my black pot, Porterhouse steaks from Constantia Pick & Pay, and lemme tellya, that blue cheese sauce is something else.
Sq-eee!
OK, so I’ve now also joined the eee-crowd. By design, mostly — Tanya didn’t like the Linux part of her eeePC, so the deal was, I get her a Windoze netbook and she gives me the eee.
So I got a Dell Inspiron 910 from Digital Planet, using eBucks — didn’t have to “pay” a cent. Bargain. OK, the thing comes with not enough RAM, due to a Windows XP licencing agreement with Microsoft. But this can be fixed.
Anyway, back to the eeePC. Of course I want a full desktop on it. And of course I can’t resist fiddling with it.
With the result that I’ve had to restore factory settings with F9 / format disk / re-install Linux about four times already. At least the process is easy and elegant. I’m storing my stuff on a 1 GB SD card, but I can see a bigger card making this a useful system.
My scale is trying to kill me.
If you have a Boardman’s BF103 Digital Scale, take note.
This symbol denotes female,
and this one denotes male.
If you get it wrong, the POS will look things up in the wrong table, and pronounce you, the guy, underweight, and her, SWMBO, the love of your life, the one you promised to love and cherish, and the person most likely to kill you if you Don’t Watch Your Step, as obese.
You Have Been Warned.
Scalzi rocks
Marko pointed me to Scalzi. Being of the opinion that Marko knows what he’s talking about most of the time :-) I ordered a copy of Old Man’s War from Amazon. Just finished it, and it rocks.
A bit rough around the edges, couple of things he (in my opinion, of course) missed, but not bad for a young ‘un (Mr Scalzi is two years younger’n me :-)
I can’t help but to compare OMW to Neal Stephenson‘s first book, The Big U. I really really like Stephenson, Diamond Age, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon are highly recommended [1] — but The Big U, while having excellent ideas, is way shaky.
But let’s face it — I expect that from a first novel. And that’s why Scalzi rocks. If he improves like Stephenson improved, or for that matter like Pratchett improved [2], it’s going to be phenomenal. If he just maintains, it will still be good.
The other three books in the trilogy immediately found themselves on my Amazon wish list.
Now I’m into Parker’s Devices and Desires, the first of a trilogy. Someone recommended it, but I can’t remember who. Looks like it might be good.
[1] You have to be really into Stephenson to read the Baroque cycle :-)
[2] Go read The Colour of Magic again — it’s shakey :-)
Fun with a Cisco 1600
(Long geeky post alert. You probably don’t want to read this unless your Cisco is dead and you got here via google or something).
A number of years ago (May 2005, to be exact) Tanya’s Cisco 1600 (diginet leased-line router) went funny after a power outage. I pulled in a favour, got a friend of a friend who works with these things to look at it — but he couldn’t fix it.
After much googling* I learnt that there’s a “cookie” in Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM) which very few people know about since it’s factory-set. If NVRAM is wiped, you have a problem. You need to connect to the Cisco using the right kind of cable, a terminal program, and 9600,N,8,1.
If your cookie is cleared, no problem. If it is corrupt, though, you will need to calculate the password to be able to change the corrupted bits.
System Bootstrap, Version 11.1(7)AX [kuong (7)AX], EARLY DEPLOYMENT RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc2) Copyright (c) 1994-1996 by cisco Systems, Inc. First location in NVRAM fails ... cannot size NVRAMWarning: monitor nvram area is corrupt ... using default valuesBad checksum on cookie structure, resorting to backup copyWarning: Cookie information is corrupt environment write to NVRAM failed C1600 processor with 2048 Kbytes of main memory(Here I hit Ctrl-Break)monitor: command "boot" aborted due to user interrupt rommon 1 > cookieBad checksum on cookie structure, resorting to backup copyWarning: Cookie information is corruptcookie: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00rommon 2 > priv Password: (This would be 0000 for the above cookie, otherwise you need to calculate it)Bad checksum on cookie structure, resorting to backup copyWarning: Cookie information is corrupt You now have access to the full set of monitor commands. Warning: some commands will allow you to destroy your configuration and/or system images and could render the machine unbootable.rommon 3 > cookie View/alter bytes of serial cookie by field -- Input hex byte(s) or: CR -> skip field; ? -> list values interfaces soc 0: 00Â Â Â (unknown) Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > 01 vendor: 00Â Â Â (unknown) Â Â Â Â Â > 01 ethernet Hw address: 00 00 00 00 00 00 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > d5 aa 96 de aa eb (Anybody recognise this?) processor: 00Â Â Â (PAN) Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > 09 Hw rework: 00 00 00 00 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > 00 00 00 01 interfaces soc 1: 00Â Â Â (unknown) Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > 02 unused 1: 00 00 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > 00 00 BCD-packed 8-digit serial #: 00 00 00 00 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > 00 0d 8c f3 unused 2: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > capabilities (future): 00 00 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > cookie version #: 00 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â > 01
Now, you should be able to
rommon 4 > sync rommon 5 > boot program load complete, entry point: 0x4018060, size: 0x1da950
But instead what happened was
rommon 4 > sync environment write to NVRAM failed
So I pulled the cover, found the 28HC64 8k x 8 CMOS EEPROM, bought a new EEPROM and a socket from Communica, performed the appropriate transplant, and all is now well.
Now here’s where a bit of black magic slips in. I had to do this the previous time, and after much struggling I found that I also had to do it this time. And I have no idea where this information comes from, but it’s in my notes from 2005.
The first time the router boots up, go
> enable # configure terminal (config)# config-register 0x2142 (config)# end # write # reload
And then repeat with the original 0x2102 value. Then proceed to configure the router. I didn’t do this, and all was well, except that the configuration interface would not accept “ip route” commands, and of course the router wouldn’t. Route, that is.
There. Now you know as much as I do. Ask if you need to know how to actually configure the router.
* Actually, “googling” is rather generic since I found this page via altavista, not google.
My kind of recipe
It goes like this.
AD points to MonkeyGirl. I’m impressed, so I start reading her blog in reverse back to post #1.
Along the way, she points to JB on the Rocks (not that funny) and Lawdog (FSCK funny).
JB’s latest post is a recipe. For Potato Soup. My kind of recipe.
So now I’m going to find myself reading both JB and Lawdog, in reverse, back to post #1.
*sigh*
Edit: and then there’s Atomic Nerds. *double sigh*