Tandy 1400LT

So, ya, I promised no new projects this year.  But when a Tandy 1400LT came up at a reasonable price, I had to jump on it.

It turned out that the only thing "wrong" with it was a missing AC adapter.  But another eBay sale later, and I have an AC adapter.

The floppy drives are working well.  The screen is good.
I took it apart for cleaning an inspection.  Even the clock battery wasn't leaking (but as soon as I get my Man Cave back, I'll be replacing that).

So, some Windex, rags, Q-Tips and elbow grease later, and it looks almost new.

The album is here.

I used many of the diskettes I created for my 1100FD and created some extra ones.  Pretty much all the software works really nice.

One interesting thing about this PC is that it has 768K of RAM.  It comes with a driver that will take that extra 128K and turn it into a RAM disk.  The boot floppies that came with the PC copy things like COMMAND.COM there on boot - which makes this feature really nice.

Office Exile day 9

Nothing really to report today.

I'm just getting tired of the toilet paper issue.

Luckily, we already had our normal supply.  So we are good for about another week.

But every time I go to the store, the shelves are empty - I mean completely empty - of toilet paper.

Did the hoarders drain the supply chain so badly that we are still recovering?
Or do they show up every morning and buy up all the TP on the shelves?

I got to the store minutes after it opened today.  (Meijer is normally open 24/7 but is now closed from 10p-8a for restocking and cleaning.)  So they should have had some.  I thought I saw a package on someone's cart as I was going in.  But the shelves were empty.  Same for Family Fare.

Of course, our worthless governor doing her unconstitutional "shelter in place" order didn't help.  I'm sure that it caused another bout of hoarding.

If you are hoarding, please stop.  The only people who have a legitimate reason to hoard are the over 60 crowd since they really need to stay away from people (they have the highest mortality rate from this virus).  Everyone else: just buy what you need.  If people did that, there'd be plenty of TP for all of us.

New server - Update

The USB hub arrived yesterday and only took me a few minutes to get set up.  It works like a charm.

The second hard drive was added to NAS2 and there were no problems.

Now, I have to rethink things a bit.  I think the second Pi4 that I have will become a cold standby.  I'll clone the SD card when everything is set up.   Then I'll install it in the rack, but unpowered.

But the other 2 hard drives are on order.  When they come in, I will have all the parts and I'll find out if this set up works for what I need it for.

In exile

Working for home is greatly overrated.  I mean, I like my man cave and it's the perfect place to set up a home office since the desk, computer monitors and office chair are there.  But spending 8+ hours there every day... it wears.

So, today is day 8 of our exile from the office and, I'm getting...  I want to use the word 'depressed', but that's not correct.  I'm lacking energy.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Benefits with working from home:

1. Short commute.  I can walk to work.  8)
2. No distractions - at least none inside our condo.
3. Very relaxed dress code.
4. No lunch room filled with free junk food.  So it's kinda hard to snack (we don't keep much junk food in our condo).

Drawbacks:

1. Lack of human interaction wears on you.
2. I find I move less than I do when I'm in the office.
3. I'm less productive.  There's just some things that are harder and more time consuming do to via the VPN.  And hope that the device that you are using back in the office doesn't decide to lock up.

So, there's not much I can do about most of those.  But I can move more.

I dug out my old hand weights and every hour or so, I stand up on the exercise mat and do a set of upper body exercises.  It only takes a minute or so and gets my energy levels back up.

Death to the hoarders!

So I went grocery shopping early yesterday, thinking that the main reason we can't get our stuff is because we are going so late (and close to the time that they are normally restocking).

Not only was the TP all gone, along with the usual: paper towels, soup, most packaged meat.  But the flour was gone too!

WTF!??

One person claimed that it was because people wanted to bake their own baked goods.  Really!  I wasn't aware that the bakeries have shut down.  They don't do self-serve on the donuts anymore, but I've seen no shortage of baked goods.

Personally, I think that someone is winding these morons up and then they go out and create a shortage to make this whole COVID-19 thing seem a bigger crisis than it is.

New Server

So Haruka is getting old.  While she's working just fine right now, sooner or later she will fail.  So it's time to start working on the replacement.

The plan is to create a Raspberry Pi setup with laptop hard drives.

I use Haruka for:

1. Remote playing.
2. Backup our main systems
3. Serve media (music, pictures and video).

Here's the planned BOM:

• 8 Slot Cluster Cloudlet : Stackable Cluster For Raspberry Pi 4B and other Single Board Computers
• Raspberry Pi 3 B+
• 2 Raspberry Pi 4 B+ 2GB
• 3 500 GB 2.5" hard drives
• 2 1 TB 2.5" hard drives
• 5 USB3 to SATA adaptors

Phase 1:
Cannibalize the NAS kit hardware for the "play" system.  I also want to see if I can NFS mount the drive as an experiment.  The only outlay is for the case.

This was very successful.
I loaded log2ram to make the SD card last longer.
I renamed the 'pi' user to mine (and made sure that the user numbers matched).

Phase 2:
I got 1 Pi 4 and the other 2 500 GB hard drives and cables.
The plan was to set up the backup system with disk mirroring.

Not quite successful.  The Pi4 will work just fine with 1 hard drive, but it will fail with 2.  The drives pull too much power.


So the plan changed a little bit.  Add to the BOM:

• 1 Powered USB3 hub

This lets me hook up all hard drives to the one Pi4.  I originally was going to serve the videos from one Pi4 and the backups and music from the other.  I knew that 4 drives was out of the question.

But the with the powered USB hub, the hub can power all the drives.  Now I can hook up all 4 drives to the one Pi4.

So waiting for the USB3 hub to arrive.  Then the project can move forward.

Death to the Toilet Paper Thieves!

So, last night we went on our weekly grocery shopping trip.

We get to Meijer and, I swear, it looked like the Zombie Apocalypse happened and everyone went bonkers.

No toilet paper, paper towels, bleach, hand sanitizer, etc.  Canned food was very low.  Bread almost gone.  Produce was also very low.

Why?  COVID-19 isn't that bad.  70% of us will get it and the vast majority will live through it with only flu-like symptoms (after which we will be immune).

The CDC said that only those in the high risk category (like the ones with low immune systems) should shut themselves up for the next 2 weeks or so.  That's fine since most of those people are already shut up in nursing homes.

But for the rest of us, the only thing we need to do is lower our contact with people to slow the spread.

But we did ask ourselves "Why toilet paper?"  IMHO, the left-wing media wound the morons who actually listen to them up for this purpose.  Nothing says "crisis" when you go into a large retailer and find empty shelves.  BTW: those shelves will probably be full come Tuesday when the supply chain fills things back up.

SunFounder NAS kit

So I picked up a SunFounder NAS kit and the hard drive for it finally arrived today.  So I set it up.

For $80, you get a nice enclosure, eInk display with buttons, fans, USB-to-SATA adaptor and an SD card with Raspian and Open Media Vault on it.

You need to supply a Raspberry PI (I used a 3B+ I had laying around) and a 2.5" SATA hard drive (that I got on Amazon for $30).

Overall, this is a pretty simple set up.  I had some issues setting up NFS, but that was an Open Media Vault issue.

So for $80 + $30 + $35 = $145 I got a nice little 500 GB NAS.

You should install log2ram on it to lengthen the lifespan of the SD card.  I would like to see them upgrade the distro to include that out of the box.

But other than that, it's really nice.

Now, does it meet my needs?  The jury is still out on that.  We'll see.

The plan was to replace Haruka with a bank of Raspberry PIs.  Using a case like this.  I would have a Pi that:
1. Does the backups of our PCs
2. Serves our Movies
3. Services our Music
4. Allows me to access stuff from outside our network.

None of Haruka's drives are over 50% used and they are 1TB drives.  So 500 GB drives for the Pis would work nice.


The wheels are turning.  We will see.

COVID-19 = Tower of Babel?

I recently read a Blog post today that "COVID-19 heralds the end of Globalism" and I can't help but think there is a grain of truth to this.

Looking at this from the point of view of just diseases, a homogeneous society is the most susceptible to diseases since the disease finds it easy to jump from host to host.  (Read what has happened with bananas for a real-world example.)  In a heterogeneous society, diseases spread much slower, or even die out, as the disease runs its course and can't find another host to infect.

Globalism is the idea that we are one big, homogeneous family.  It's open borders and people moving from one place to another freely.

From a disease point of view, this is a really bad thing.  If people from a location where the disease is rampant - especially if the disease has a long incubation time - move en masse to another location, the disease spreads easily.

If the borders are closed, the disease can be stopped, or at least the spread slowed to keep it manageable.

Logically, this means that globalism is bad for pandemics (or diseases that have that potential).

Relating back to the Tower of Babel...  The story is basically saying the same thing: globalism is bad.

Remember, globalism isn't about "diversity".  It's about sameness.  It's not about living peacefully with your neighbor.  It's about making you and your neighbor the same.

True diversity, a heterogeneous society, is good.  In the short term, it's good to keep COVID-19 down and, hopefully, out.