justanother (u/justanother)

justanother commented on Ask HN: Where to Work After 40? · Posted by u/asim

justanother · 8 months ago

As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it?

Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...

justanother commented on Ham Radio All-in-One-Cable github.com/skuep/AIOC... · Posted by u/CTOSian

golem14 · 9 months ago

I really would like to have a simple re-implementation of ye olde TNC-2s that had a small eprom and a kiss mode TNC with a fricking BBS on ax-25 that worked like a charm. They existed I believe around 1988-1990ish.

I mean, yes, this cable works with direwolf, but then I need to have a full linux system running, which I could do without for the purpose of an emergency comms system.

I just found https://github.com/cheponis/KISS-TNC2, but I think this is just the KISS mode, not the AX25 stuff.

I found https://www.ir3ip.net/iw3fqg/doc/wa8ded.htm which I think describes the TNC2S software I was running many years ago.

Any other pointers would be great.

justanother · 9 months ago

I have one of these in the garage. I think they're 6502-based with the OS on EPROM, or at least that's what I vaguely recall from last time I had mine opened-up about 20 years ago. I can dump the ROM if it'd help.

justanother commented on What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/_Microft

SoftTalker · a year ago

Just short the terminals with a screwdriver before you touch anything else? (Look away in case there's an brief arc flash)

justanother · a year ago

Yeah, I try to bleed it with a long-handle screwdriver for 30 seconds. In fact, the couple times I've managed to zap myself was with residual current even after that, so I can't imagine what the full potential is. It's just a no-fun job.

justanother commented on What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/_Microft

justanother · a year ago

I understand he got permission and everything was checked out by actual RF eggheads, but damn. I won't even change a HV run capacitor unless i'm wearing crocs, standing on cement, and wearing the rubber oven mitts. And even then, I keep one hand behind my back. Because there have been accidents, and they hurt (the pool pump run cap fails approximately annually in this climate and if I paid someone to change it every time, I'd be a lot poorer).

That said, the food demodulating the signal into audible noise is badass.

justanother commented on The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth userlandia.com/home/iigs-... · Posted by u/rbanffy

dhosek · a year ago

I remember being surprised to see someone with an Apple IIgs when I was in undergrad (late 80s) and discovering the platform still lived. The fact that they were still selling the Apple II line in 1993 (1995 if you count the Mac add-in card) seems pretty damn miraculous to me.

justanother · a year ago

That rabbit hole goes pretty deep.

In the early 1990s, the IIgs community went through this sort of "faux workstation" phase where we had 16MHz hotrodded accelerator cards, high(er) resolution graphics cards like SecondSight, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (GNO/ME) along with the beginnings of TCP/IP support (gstcp). If you squinted one eye, we could almost hold our own against something like SPARCStation 1 as long as you didn't want to run Mosaic. You could fire up a desktop with a few shell windows and compile C programs and telnet out while playing SoundSmith (not-quite-.MOD) songs. That is to say, we were pushing the whole mess beyond anything a sane person would even fever-dream of attempting.

The community today is putting out more releases more steadily than any other era I can recall since then, but we seem to have mostly backed off of the whole "workstation" application that was in a few dorm rooms at the time.

Edit: FWIW I just noticed the date today. Happy 8/16!

justanother commented on Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 Workstation [video] youtube.com/watch?v=1PP--... · Posted by u/doener

justanother · a year ago

As a longhaired teenager, I rarely got the chance to physically touch these things (although it did happen a couple times). Mostly I remember telnetting into a machine, noticing that it was Irix, and being able to login as "4Dgifts" without a password for a root shell. The joy was short-lived though, because as soon as you tried to build software (regardless of how "portable" the package was), you ran into interesting problems, if the compilers were even installed. I eventually got to spend several days with a Webforce Indy and its fancy (what we would now call a) webcam, where I took my first-ever selfie in 1995 and made my peace with the dev environment. These lil things were definitely ahead of their time, even if their price tags weren't.

justanother commented on Show HN: Applesoft BASIC editor with example programs paleotronic.com/applesoft... · Posted by u/empressplay

RRWagner · a year ago

I was the original publisher of the Merlin assembler (I gave it the name) and didn't know about this. I'm very happy to see it!

justanother · a year ago

Nice to see you here on HN, Roger. Some of us still use Merlin 16+ every weekend when we get a little free time.

justanother commented on Fiwix: Unix-like kernel for the i386 architecture github.com/mikaku/Fiwix... · Posted by u/ingve

justanother · a year ago

Not sure if this was intended, but in Belizean creole, "Fi Wi" (pronounced "fee wee", not like WiFi) means "ours" or "for us." Good name for an MIT-licensed kernel project.

justanother commented on Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers? · Posted by u/ipaddr

justanother · a year ago

If you want to make money, there's no place like eBay to move vintage hardware. If you're more concerned about it going to a good home, show up to any sort of vintage hardware meetup (KansasFest, VCF, etc) and someone will take it off your hands. Generally speaking, most vintage hardware is something that someone else wants, with the notable exception of generic Intel/AMD clone hardware, and even that stuff is gaining traction in the community.

justanother commented on Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell corecursive.com/building-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

heresie-dabord · a year ago

You have long experience in computing and especially in the innovative currents that shifted the paradigm. Cheers!

Your first paragraph creates expectation that the second paragraph disappoints, though. Would you explain why you think PowerShell is "nice"?

justanother · a year ago

It's a way of using Windows that is very tolerable to POSIX commandline diehards. The similarities are numerous and include enhanced scriptability and even small details like up-arrow command history. You could get all of that with Cygwin, but Powershell adds tight OS integration, access to COM objects (or whatever we're calling them this year) as well as the remoting of objects. It's a useful and powerful shell that reminds me of VMS DCL and csh.