Geek

Worn Out

We’ve been networking with Microsoft Windows for pretty much 20 years. Two decades, starting with Windows 95 (Might even have been Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, can’t remember, it’s been… 20 years).

And for all of those 20 years, we’ve had the PCs on a workgroup called “FOO* SYSTEMS”. Note the space.

Because now I have a Windows 7 32-bit box, and a Windows 7 64-bit box, and my venerable Windows 2000 box**. And lo, the Windows 2000 box can see both Windows 7 boxes in the network neighborhood, and copy files from the one Windows 7 box to the other, but neither Windows 7 box can see (1) itself, (2) the other Windows 7 box, (3) the Windows 2000 box, or (4) pretty much anything else in the notwork*** neighborhood.

So I started experimenting (what the Brits would call a spanner and Erin would call knobdicking). Frobbed with the firewall settings, IPV6, homegroups, 56-bit encryption, enabling NetBEUI, standing on my head and holding my breath, and who knows what else.

And you know what the problem is?

That fscking space in the workgroup name.

That space has been supported for 20 years, and that support has finally worn out.

* Usage #2 of course.

** Which has absolutely nothing wrong with it. Except that it won’t run the latest version of FireChromePera. Which is required to run the latest version of Flash. Which in turn is required to browse anything running on port 80 these days, primarily to support their revenue stream.

*** Not a typo.

2014-02-11 by wrm Geek 0

Mind Bender

So I recently retrieved my Argonaut 505 Amateur Radio Transceiver from storage. Turned it on, no hiss from the speaker. That’s… unusual, points to a dead audio amplifier.

Geek line, do not cross. Geek line, do not cross. (TLDR: I solved the problem)

2014-01-31 by wrm Electronics Geek 0

Never happened!

The Hobbit / Smaug. You can sit watching it and shout “Never Happened!” all. the. damn. time. and you’d be right more often than not.

OK, you also need “no FSCKING WAY!”, especially when barrels are involved. But impossible as it is, that also Never Happened.

Dayumn. There’s a book. And there’s a movie. And there’s a correlation with the name and ~~most~~ many of the characters.

Hell no.

(And is it just me or did they skimp on the CGI? Some of those wargs reminded me of Apple ][ games, just a bit)

2014-01-28 by wrm Farting around Geek 0

Slapstick

I suggest all of y’all out in the meme-o-sphere start using “slap the tree” in place of “jump the shark“.

How I met your mother should have been canned last season.

2014-01-14 by wrm Farting around Geek 0

Avo Model 9 Mk II

My parents bought this Avometer for me at a boot sale when I was most likely still in primary school. It didn’t work, of course. But it’s a neat piece of kit.

I remembered about it again the other day and went to find it in the attic where I do quite a bit of stowing.

A few decades worth of dirt.

Some cleaning and some googling and…

Hey! It’s a year older than I am (366 = March 1966).

I’ve never even seen one of the 15V batteries for sale anywhere, so these batteries have been in here since before I got the meter. And most of the time I’ve had it was spent in a hot attic. The batteries are flat, of course, but I would have expected things to look a whole lot worse.

Now I distinctly remember that I tried to find out what’s wrong with this meter, and at the time I concluded that the movement was not working. Well, it turns out that there’s nothing wrong with the movement. This is great news. Anything else is easier to fix than a d’Arsonval movement.

Here’s the damage. This is the 42.2 ohm resistor between the 10mA and 100mA taps on the DC switch (see the schematic at the end of the user manual) and I would say that it’s maximum power rating was exceeded…

I will see whether I can find or make or devise a replacement*, and I’ll clean up the outside.

Please, if you have one of these, be nice to it, don’t gut the insides like this poepol did.

* Believe it or not, 42.2 Ohm is an E96 value, but I might need a higher wattage and I’d probably end up putting ten 422 Ohm 1% resistors in parallel. Edit: Six 470 ohm, six 560 ohm, and one 4k7 in parallel makes 42.2065 which is good enough for me.

(Edit: link to balancing the movement)

2013-11-18 by wrm Electronics Farting around Geek 0

300 WinMag

And so it came to pass that I found myself badly in need* of a flat rifle. Not one that’s been under a truck, mind, but one with a flat trajectory, for use at distances further than the 100m or so that my collection of leverguns are capable of.

So I asked around, and found a new barreled action in 300 WinMag. Perfect. Got an endorsement letter (as a dedicated hunter) from Kaapjag, applied for the licence, waited about four months, got the licence and the gun.

Reading up on the Howa, I came across this page which explains how to adjust the trigger. But the first step is, take the whole thing apart and clean it up. Get the gunk out, and also lightly sand the relevant surfaces to smooth things out.

[When I find the pictures I took I’ll post them here. I suspect they’re on a memstick that crashed. Suffice to say, the inside of the trigger assembly was dirty!]

Johan van Niekerk out in Plattekloof makes awesome stocks. Unfortunately he didn’t have a template for the long Howa action, only for the short one. So I had to wait while he ordered a stock from the ‘states to use as a template. Took from February until June, but I am way happy with the result.

He epoxy bedded the action, put in two aliminium pillars where the action screws go through the stock, and added two crossbolts (you can see the holes, roughly in line with the scope rings).

The scope is a 3-9 Redfield Revolution with the Accu-Range BDC reticle.

Load development

A factory round is made to a specification — typically that set by the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute (SAAMI). When handloading, you have a bit more leeway — your hard limits are not the paper specification, but the actual rifle in your hands.

1. Pick a bullet. Every time you change the bullet, you have to revisit all the points below. In my case, I picked the Sierra 180 grain Game King. While the Match King might be more accurate, I’m developing a hunting load here, and in general match bullets are totally unsuited to hunting.

2. Cartridge Overall Length (COL). The cartridge has to fit in the chamber of the gun. The bullet can’t protrude to where the lands of the rifling starts, because it takes the pressure of the exploding powder to force the bullet into those lands and grooves, engraving the lands on the bullet which then impart spin on it.

In general, it’s good to seat the bullet about 10 thou (~~0.001″~~ 0.010″ or a quarter of a millimeter) away from where it would contact the lands, so that it has a short “jump” before it hits the rifling. Varying this distance can also improve accuracy.

There’s also a second hard limit that’s sometimes overlooked, and that is that you preferably want your ammo to fit in your magazine. Sometimes, this is not a problem, and there’s plenty space in the magazine, other times, not so much.

So, step the first. Load a bullet in an empty case, just deep enough to hold it in place. See whether this combination fits in your chamber. If not, seat the bullet a little deeper until you can close the bolt. Measure the COL, either to the tip of the bullet or (better) using something like a Stoney Point bullet comparator.

This is the maximum length cartridge that will fit my chamber — about 3.540″. The caliper shows the SAAMI spec 300 WinMag COL of 3.340″. The Howa has a very long throat, obviously.

So far so good, but does this monstrosity fit in the magazine? Not a chance.

Step the second. Continue seating the bullet until it fits in your magazine.

There we go. That fits my magazine.

Notice the other nice thing? All other things being equal (hint: they never are) you want the whole neck of the case to be in contact with the bullet, which means that it should be aligned with the parallel sides of the bullet, which start just after the boat tail and at some stage stop being parallel by turning into the bullet ogive. The pic above shows the IMO optimal seating depth relative to the case neck for a boat tail bullet. Further in and you’re encroaching on your powder space, also at some stage the front end of the case neck stops contacting the bullet (not really an issue with a short neck like this, more of an issue with something like the 30-30). Further out and not all of the case neck is gripping the bullet.

3. Pick a load. The general rule of thumb is, get as many data points as possible, then start low and work up. The Somchem manual lists 60.8 to 67.5 grains S365, 67.5 to 75 grains S361 and 68.5 to 73.5 grains S385 for a 180 grain bullet. I started at 66.6 grains S365 and worked up to 69 grains. The first (3 shot) group was just under an inch at 100m, but a bit slow at 2880 fps. More powder didn’t really give better groups, until the groups started opening up at 68 grains and 2980 fps.

So I switched to S385. 74 grains (which is over the Somchem max, I know) gave 3040 fps and this:

Yes, I know. It’s a fluke. But it’s a pretty fluke.

* People would argue, but I’m calling it a need, so there.

2013-10-28 by wrm Geek Guns 3

The slow unwinding.

There was a time when a (well-do-do, granted) man-in-the-street could travel at twice the speed of sound, 18km above the earth, as often as he wanted. Ten years ago today, we lost that. The Concorde made its last passenger flight.

This quote, from ten years ago, hits it right on the button:

The Roman Empire crested at Hadrian’s Wall and thereafter retreated slowly, step-by-step, so gradually that few people noticed that with every year, there was a little less.

The Western Empire, did we crest at the Moon? If we did, surely the death of Concorde is akin to the last of Rome’s Legions departing Britain. And the most troubling sign is not that Concorde is no more, but that we watch it’s passing with such complacency.

We’re throwing away the future. We have seen the stars, and meekly followed the State back to our mud puddles and sandboxes.

Then, in 2011, the Space Shuttle made its last flight ever. With no replacement.

Right now, we have people like SpaceX and Virgin working hard to get back to where we were. Back into space, back on the moon (we were last there in 1972 — are you spotting the pattern here?) and beyond.

I fear that we are living at the crest, and I hope that I am wrong.

(This blog post partly inspired* by Spider Robinson’s In the Olden Days (pdf and online). Go read.)

* I doubt that “inspired” is really the right word.

2013-10-24 by wrm Geek 0

Fortune 32:16 and the longevity of floppies

Way back when, back in 1987, I was studying engineering over at the University of Stellenbosch, and I read about this thing called BIX, the Byte (magazine) Information eXchange.

So I went over to Professor Krezinski at the Computer Science department and asked him nicely to let an engineer play with their toys and to my surprise he agreed. Gave me access to the building and organised an account on the DG, which was connected to some magic elf (X.25?) boxes which in turn connected to… BIX. Where I spent some time (not a whole lot, my father’s credit card was paying for my time) chatting to some very bright people. This was when smileys still looked like ^_^ and {^_^} (Hello jdow, wherever you are)

But there were other interesting computers in the lab (on the third floor, ISTR). Specifically, an AT&T 3B2 and a Fortune 32:16. And since I was designing a 68000-based computer at the time, I copied all the Fortune disks, thinking maybe, some day, I can make some of this stuff run on my machine.

That day has not yet come :-)

But I recently found those floppies again, and copied them using Dave Dunfield’s ImageDisk 1.18. And they were all still 100% readable (OK, on one floppy the jacket had warped, I had to remove the disk and stick it in a cleaning disk jacket to read it).

Bitsavers have some documentation online, and from this it’s clear that Fortune Systems never intended the user to poke around under the hood. Apart from the 68000 processor, I can’t find any details online about the chips used, the amount of ROM on the motherboard, or anything like that (Unleashing a hex editor at the diagnostics software shows mention of a Z-80 processor, as well as “CTC” and “SIO” and “dual port RAM” — sounds like an I/O device. There was apparently also some kind of an MMU).

Anyway, here are my disk images. Disks are 80 track, with five sectors of 1024 bytes each per side.

I’m not too sure how useful these will be, since this 2005 posting to ClassicCmp states that

They also had a reasonably effective copy-protection scheme.
Uninstalled Fortune software on distribution media was encrypted using
a key known to Fortune and to Fortune's installation program.  When
you installed software from the distribution media, the software would
be decrypted and then re-encrypted using a key based on the
motherboard serial number for storage on the hard disk (so you
couldn't just copy the executables from your system to some other
system: installed software only ran on the system on which it had been
installed); and of course the installer marked the distribution medium
as "installed" so you couldn't just go install it again somewhere
else.

2013-10-01 by wrm Computers Geek 1

Warbots

The archive-diving continues (I’m checking all my old floppies and archiving everything that looks interesting).

Found a ZIP file WARBOTS.ZIP. This is yet another Robot War type program, this one written by Chris Busch in 1990. Unlike Robot War (which has a vagely BASIC-like syntax) or Arena (x86 assembler, urgh) the syntax is very Pascal-like (which figures, since Chris wrote Warbots in Turbo Pascal).

Now, for some reason Chris decided to encrypt the robot sources supplied as examples. But, Tyler Akins tells us that it’s a simple XOR “encryption”, and some fiddling with ICY Hexplorer armed with the hunch that “vitiex” is most likely “repeat” gives us the hex key 040c for the first line of scanbot.war. After that it gets tricky, “Ehh | 5” translates to “Add y 1” using a key of 040c0c — so the key changes by some rule. I really don’t have the time to figure it out but it’s obviously not that tricky.

This at least gives an idea of the syntax.

Warbots doesn’t run in a DOS box under Windows (2000 and 7 tested) so that’s all I have for now.

2013-09-12 by wrm Computers Geek 0

Forget Elysium

The World’s End RAWKS.

2013-09-10 by wrm Farting around Geek 0