gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/phlog The free-floating phantasms resident in the mind of The Free Thinker, brought home to you in 68 columns of plain-text purity by the kind generosity of your local neighbourhood Gopher. en-au https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:33:13 +1000 gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2026-07-20More_Dams.txt MORE DAMS Another morning with a dodgy internet connection, so I'll briefly write up yesterday's dam adventures instead of doing my morning browsing. Unfortunately I still can't recover from such excitements anymore so I'm left tired and with a headache, which would've been alright if I'd gone on Saturday as originally intended but now Monday's work is going to be hard. I left it a bit late to set off, so skipped the twisty route via Elane to get past the Lal Lal reservoir, and I also skipped the nearby Moorabool falls for about the third time, maybe I'll get to them one day. I did stop by the long one-lane bridge on the road from Mount Mercer to Meredith which is a really pretty, quiet, spot overlooked by a tall, imposing, rock cliff face. Last time I walked up to the top of the valley and explored some old mine workings, though there was too much water running over the forward through the river to walk over there again even if I'd had the time. Along with my new gemstone fossicking interest noted in my last post, I dug up my father's old 1980s "White's" metal detector last week and took another look at it. It could be a good place to try out metal detecting for gold one day. Beale dam is just next to the Western Freeway but there's no exit nearby. That's fine by me since I avoid freeways like the plague, and instead enjoy flying over them on one of those little country-road overpasses that you never see anyone driving over. Unfortunately the reservoir is gated off, but there's a good view of the well-maintained earth-wall dam from the gateway. The level looked quite high even though rainfall has generally been below average, and especially back around home. It's surrounded by a pine plantation, which seems to be a trait of most of the reservoirs supplying Ballarat. Wilson's Reservoir is nearby, and hidden behind an even deeper forest of pine, but some fancy old entrance gates highlight where you can glimpse the dam. This reservoir is larger than Beale but still quite modest. Judging by the old entranceway, public access was probably once encouraged, but now "no entry" signs are in abundance. Kirk's Reservoir is right at the outer edge of Ballarat today, alongside Gong Gong reservoir which I visited a few years ago, and White Swan Reservoir which I tried to visit before but found gated off. Built in the 1860s, the reservoir has some old gardens, mainly of trees and ferns, and lots of facilities for picnics during its daylight opening hours. The dam is fairly modest and unlike the Gong Gong dam there aren't many period features visible except those associated with the gardens. There is however a very well constructed bluestone channel leading to the reservoir, which runs past another pine plantation and one of the standard 1970s/80s house for the dam/garden keeper. At this time of year you usually see a good tower of smoke from the chimney of these houses, which makes you wonder just how much time these dam workers spend just sitting by the fire. With the house, water-company ute, and free firewood, it seems like a pretty cruisey job. Kirk's water level was lower than the others, but they seem to have a strong incentive not to let it get too high because the spillway washes straight through the park! I expect there's another smaller spillway hidden somewhere. A pretty nice trip back. I got back onto roads I knew before it got dark. In fact I managed not to get lost or even miss any turns, going by my hand-written instructions and map book, though as usual only because I spent a long time studying the maps before I set off. Locals do give you some strange looks seeing a 1980s Jaguar appear on these back roads leading to dams, which probably nobody except other locals ever go down. On this trip those were often the best roads though, so far as condition goes. On the busier roads the tarmac is breaking up all over the place. Photos here: gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/dams_east_of_Ballarat_July_20 26/ - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2026-07-19Camping_Spots.txt CAMPING SPOTS It's sunny this weekend, so like a coiled spring I've been let loose attempting all sorts of things on my weekend to-do list in a rush, and stuffing most of them up. The worst stuff up was at the end of yesterday when, having yet again postponed replacing my repaired fuel tank in my 'new' (old) Jag since now it's got bogged inside the flooding shed, I set to work on my trailer instead. It came from my uncle who died, and was originally my great grandfather's. I've decided I want to turn it into a DIY camper trailer so I can holiday without the hassle of trying to find cheap hotels/motels and trying to cram too many activities into short stays. First job was just to get it up on blocks with the wheels off to get the tyres replaced (the old crossply ones it has are cracking apart), as well as check the wheel bearings where I was told one might be broken. Good news is the wheel bearings are fine, it even has grease nipples so regreasing is easy, one hub is just missing a couple of wheel studs so I'll have to buy those (hmm, or check they weren't removed so the wheel would fit on...). Bad news is while trying to wriggle one wheel out past the hub with it beside the house, I knocked the trailer off the blocks, into the house's old A/C unit, which fell on the side of my 'old' (newer) Jag! Damage wasn't as bad as first appearances at least, just a small dent on the door and only some small scratches made it through the paint, which I've painted over this morning. The dent isn't that obvious, but annoying, and it's the first dent I've put in it. I'll have to try to polish out the lighter scratches later. Anyhow, if anything it's left me more determined to be rid of all my hassles trying to do things here and get away for a while, maybe quite a while. For starters this afternoon I'm going to go visit some more dams east of Ballarat, which I was going to do earlier but as usual spent all my time working out my route and trying to figure out what access is like at different places (it's remarkably hard to tell on maps and the internet whether a reservoir will have security fencing and "Keep Out" signs), or a welcome sign and a picnic area. But I've also been compiling a growing list of places to visit if/when I do get a camper trailer together and can take some long trips. Just about too many to remember, so I'll start a list here: SNOWY HYDRO I've been talking about this for a long time. The Snowy Hydro scheme is an obvious peak for my dam obsession. Only trouble is since I started thinking about visiting it pre-COVID, they've stopped doing regular tours inside the generator building, which was going to be the highlight for me. Now you can apply and be notified when the next tour is happening, but that means tying my whole holiday to them, not even knowing how much warning I'll get if/when they decide to offer a tour. Typical logic of a government operation. Also my 6x4' trailer is small enough it doesn't require registration in the state of Victoria, but that rule doesn't apply in New South Wales. However it's close enough to the border that I can set up camp in Victoria and easily travel around in NSW during the day. In fact I found one camp site at one of the closest Victorian towns that's clothing optional, so that's very tempting to the nudist in me, well in warmer weather than now at least. TASMANIAN "POWER TRAIL" Tasmania is the only other state that allows unregistered small trailers, and they also have the nation's biggest concentration of hydroelectric schemes. I even found a brochure called the "power trail" or something similar for a route touring them, including one early disused hydroelectric plant that's open as a museum. All sounds perfect. Except the ferry crossing will be expensive, and things could get pretty difficult being stranded accross the ocean if the Jag breaks down, but it's pretty attractive overall. MOORALLA GEMSTONE RESERVE One thing that often nags at me on holidays is a sense of pointlessness. You see things, sure, they look pretty, you get a photo, but what have you really achieved by it all? Well Mooralla, right next to the Rocklands Reservoir which I visited a while ago, at least offers some pretty rocks you can take home from a public gemstone reserve (possibly the only one in the state). Since people have been digging it up dor decades, you apparantly have to dig really deep to get nice "geodes" which are hollow rocks that can be cut open to reveal intricate crystal structures inside, but regular small "smokey quartz" crystals are reportedly still findable by digging shallow holes or just looking through spoils left from deeper excavations. Apparantly there's a toilet and you can camp there. I've got plenty of tools for digging holes already, so it seems like a fun idea to work into the evening picking away at a hole and seeing what I can find. Only trouble is the access road might be a little questionable in the Jag. SHE OAKS NUDIST RETREAT This is a relatively nearby nudist retreat. I'm not sure how good I'd be with the socialising aspect, probably as bad as I am with my clothes on. But they have camp sites and apparantly some bushwalking tracks which would be fun to explore naked. Unlike some, they do allow single people in. Probably best not to get my hopes up about finding a girlfriend there though. OUTBACK ADVENTURES My stepfather wants to get rid of his 1980s Toyota Land Cruiser, and has offered it to join my suddenly growing repository of 1980s vehicles. It's rusty and probably needs more work than I can find time for without giving up on depeloping new products for a while. But I'm thinking it might be time to take a break from all that anyway, so it might happen. Plus I've long had these places in mind to visit in outback South Australia and Western Australia: EMU As someone nuts about nuclear technology, how can I resist the site of some of the british nuclear tests during the 1950s? It's accompanied by the ruins of the town "Emu" which was built for the project. A good place to try out my various geiger counters. It is, of course, well away from anywhere and not somewhere to set off to as a first trip. I'd also have to really go over the Land Cruiser mechanically first trip. Also on the way there's Woomera and Coober Pedy to check out, for more military tech, and more gemstones. Oh well, I've finished lunch and I'm out of time to set off on today's outing now, so I'll leave it at that. - The Free Thinker. gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2026-07-12OCC_2026.txt OCC 2026 Hello Gophicrucians! I've always felt the Old Computer Challenge ( http://occ.sdf.org ) was a bit moot for me since I do all my morning computing with a thirty year old Pentium 1 PC anyway, which is also almost always the computer I post to my Phlog from. But a while ago I picked up some old Sun SPARCstations (SS2, SS5, and SS20) from a genuine local UNIX greybeard doing a clear-out, and as I briefly noted in 2026-03-29.2Week_thoughts.txt, I've been thinking of getting NetBSD running on one of them. My experience with Linux (which apparantly now only supports SPARC v8 introduced with the SuperSPARC CPUs in 1992, or possibly only v8e or v9 and later) has been that trying to squeeze it into limited old hardware is an excellent way to figure out how things really work, and how to avoid all the extra modern software complexity and glitz which I find is typically pointless anyway. So my idea was to set up NetBSD on the SS5, or the SS20 if I could figure out why that's playing dead (but unless it's as simple as a power supply fault, I'm not too hopeful on that). First problem was my memory, I was certain OCC started on the 11th of July, but no, that's when it finished. But I was busy changing engine and gearbox oil on my Jag last Sunday when it really started anyway, so I wouldn't really have got started then. On Monday all the emails rolled in from the OCC mailing list that I'd subscribed to, as the rest of the world catched up to yesterday here in Australia, and I decided I'd make a late start that night. It's the middle of winter and to try and save power I normally set the reverse-cycle A/C to 18degC and cower under it on the couch all evening (also if I turn it up too high it's really hard to eventually force myself out to bathroom and bedroom which aren't heated at all). But, although the pizza-box case is kind-of appropriate, trying to set up a SPARCstation by the couch is too awkward. So come Monday evening I cranked up the heating to a luxurious 21degC, which has it working pretty hard on nights like that in this house, and... I still couldn't face it. The floor was cold, I was tired, and I have my doubts that the heater was really managing 21degC all through the room anyway. So Tuesday morning I decided to just make a start on something before work. Sorting out HDDs, boot CDs/drives, and installers for NetBSD was going to be way too time consuming, so I decided to just have another play with the SPARCscation 2 running SunOS 4.1.3_U1, like I did before. The SS5 has an old OpenBSD installation from around 2000 (OpenBSD dropped support for 32bit SPARC after v. 5.9), but somehow I'm more drawn to the SS2 with its OS as Sun intended (in 1994). The SS2 itself is also about five years older than my regular Pentium 1 PC, with the sticker saying "Manufactured Mar-91", so it's also a slightly older computer than even my usual standards. Fast forward to Sunday, and of course what's happened is I've spent the week setting up the thirty five year old SS2 and SunOS4 for all my morning computer tasks, to replace that way-modern Pentium PC, and not touched NetBSD at all. I still haven't been able to get into it in the evenings, so it's all been very rushed, and frequently eating into my work time while I "just see if this wor... oh, what went wrong there?". So just another one of the distractions that I keep getting stuck on lately really. But I did have the dicipline not to allow myself to write phlog posts in my work time, hence no daily updates like other OCCers like to do. Instead I'm just going to run over some highlights in this post (which is rapidly eating through my Sunday now, but I don't really fancy going out into the strong cold wind to try and finish yesterday's shed gutter repairs anyway). SPARCstation 2 INFO: CPU: 1x CY7C601 @ 40MHz (SPARC v7) Architecture: sun4c RAM: 16MB fitted - 4x 4MB (64-128MB Max.) SBus: 3x slots at 20MHz bus speed HDD: 2x 50-pin SCSI HDDs (Maxtor and Micropolis) Original Cost: $14,995 - $49,995 USD (equiv. $36,953 - $123,205 USD in 2025)! http://www.obsolyte.com/sun_ss2/ gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/SPARCstation_2 EARLIER WORKS: When I first started playing with the SS2 months ago I was just connected by serial console, since I don't have an original Sun monitor (funny, I just remembered I had a dream last night about finding one for sale really cheap on Ebay, but no it's still just a Samsung SyncMaster CRT in front of me now) and SPARCstations were too cool for VGA. At first it didn't look too hopeful, with the boot stalling at an obscure error before getting as far as the expected dead NVRAM battery errors which I found a screenshot of online. Or, in the words of my original notes: --------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.obsolyte.com/sunFAQ/serial/ SparcStation 2: ------------------------------------ WARNING: Unable to determine keyboard type FAILURE: NVRAM (f2000003) Battery Failure, Exp = 000000ff, Obs = 00000000Starting real time clock... Incorrect configuration checksum; Clearing to default values. Probing /sbus@1,f8000000 at 1,0 Nothing there Probing /sbus@1,f8000000 at 2,0 Probing /sbus@1,f8000000 at 3,0 Nothing there Can't open input device. ------------------------------------ Hangs there indefinitely. Maybe this is normal without keyboard, but I should get an ok prompt? https://www.tek-tips.com/threads/quot-cant-open-input-device-quot-on-ultrasparc-ii-60.1262175/ Ctrl+Pause/Break does nothing. - In picocom use Ctrl-a Ctrl-\ to send break. - Still does nothing, but worked on SparcStation 5. Seems it's getting stuck before it should even with a dead NVRAM battery: https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showpost.php?s=fa07f5f9669c0fae5dd222a3dde26743&p=444942&postcount=16 https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/attachment.php?s=fa07f5f9669c0fae5dd222a3dde26743&attachmentid=53172&d=1309354848 - Could be trying to boot from second bus device? --------------------------------------------------------------- The SS5 was much more co-operative, with a miraculously still-alive NVRAM battery and a boot-up straight into OpenBSD, though that unfortunately hadn't been configured to allow log-ins from the serial terminal. But maybe I just like a tease because I still got stuck into the SS2. NVRAM module's battery replaced with a rather over-sized replacement that just fit underneath the big graphics card which slots in horizontally over two Sbus bays above, I went through the rather complicated NVRAM reset guide and eventually guessed the right command to boot SunOS from the correct one of the two 50-pin SCSI HDDs fitted inside. 2026-07-15: I found some photos from when I fixed the SS2's dead NVRAM battery: gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/SPARCstation2_OpenWindows/hardware/ After that I set to building a VGA adapter. So I ordered one of the bizarre 13W3 connectors from one of the big electronics component distributors who had a deceptively large range. Deceptive because almost all had three solid big round pins for high-current power delivery instead of the coax connectors used for RGB video signals on the Sun connector. I could only get a PCB-mount connector, with copious gold plating and a $20-$30 price to match. The info about the wiring is all pretty confusing, since Sun changed things around over the years. Also the screen resolution setting works backwards compared to PC - Sun monitors tell the SPARCstation which resolution to use rather than the other way 'round. I used the info in this FAQ: http://www.obsolyte.com/sunFAQ/faq_hardware/hwref4.html#HWRef4Mo It might be overkill, but to have as many options as possible I built my adapter based on the circuit diagram from the last page in this manual for a universal Sun-to-VGA adapter with DIP switches for setting all the different possible Sun (or SGI) configurations: https://www.networktechinc.com/pdf/man078.pdf I found one setting that works well with my monitor, and haven't dared to touch the DIP switches again. :) Thankfully I did get a couple of Sun keyboard and mouse combos (the mouse plugs into the keyboard), so I didn't have to make any adapters for that. The SS2 has onboard Ethernet, but it's an AUI port, which is new to me. This apparantly connects to a separate MAU decice that's linked into the network connection. A hunt through my tubs of weird computer connectors revealed nothing that obscure, so I stole a combined SCSI+Ethernet SBus board from the dead SS20 and fit it in the one spare SBus beside the two slots taken up by the double-width graphics card. SBus turns out to be very plug-and-play, even though the card was about five years newer than the SS2 it all just worked and a new "le1" interface was listed by "ifconfig -a", after the built-in "le0" interface SunOS had been complaining so loudly about not finding a network connection on. The main Maxtor HDD only provides ~150MB storage over three partitions, all of which had only a megabyte or less of free space. A second Micropolis HDD has been installed by the previous owner and some extra programs and libraries were loaded from that. Unfortunately after a few runs this started pumping out endless SCSI errors. Apparantly not for the first time, since in the home directory I found a file last modified in Oct. 1994 called "scsierrs" containing lots of the same error messages. Luckily after its thirty year nap, the HDD had initially woken up with enough life for me to have already made a disk image of its contents on a PC with a PCI SCSI card, so I can write the contents to another HDD. Though I'm a bit limited for compatible SCSI HDDs, so for now I just deleted enough things (eg. Emacs, which wouldn't start for me anyway) to fit the essential files all onto the one HDD and reconfigured the OS to work from just that drive. In the end there's about 8MB left free across three Sun-UFS partitions - "/", "/usr", and "/home". It looks like the previous owner, who I gather got these SPARCstations as cast-offs from businesses (the SS20 still has an asset tag from the British military contractor BAE Systems on it - sadly no HDD in that to scan for left-over nuclear submarine or missile plans), only used the SS2 for a year or two. Also that means that after spending $15k+ on it in 1991, the original company that bought this SS2 new must have only used it for a couple of years themselves. I wonder if the turn-over of modern high-end x86_64 professional workstations is still that quick and expensive? I doubt it. The framebuffer console looks beautiful with its high-resolution pretty-looking font, but it is really slow compared to other computers. You watch lines being written across the screen like with a serial connection. It's not that the system is really that slow - terminal windows in the graphical environments (yes, there are two to choose from!) work much quicker, it's just the framebuffer console itself that's slow. The framebuffer console on the SS5 is much quicker. OCC WORK: That took way to long to write, so actual progress during the challenge will have to be reduced to dot-point form if I'm going to achieve anything else today: * Y2K Alert! SunOS4 won't let you take the leap into the 21st century. So I've had to make it an endless 1999 around here. * I thought the floppy drive could read FAT16 disks from PC, but this one won't. Maybe I misremembered, or maybe it's broken. At least the software-controlled eject mechanism worked so I got the disk back. * Networking configuration with fixed-IP (no DHCP support, Sun used "NIS" which seems to have played the roles of both DHCP and DNS (and more)): ifconfig le0 down ifconfig le1 192.168.1.120 echo 192.168.1.1 > /etc/defaultrouter route add default 192.168.1.1 1 echo "nameserver 1.1.1.1" > /etc/resolv.conf * Edit /etc/rc.local to disable le0 and enable le1 on startup. * Add local hostnames to /etc/hosts and look at all the ancient internet FTP, Gopher, etc server entries in there, obviously dating back before DNS was available (or anyway most of the SunOS4 internet programs like "telnet" and "ftp" don't support DNS - only programs linked to /lib/libresolv.a). * Finding software for SunOS4 is tricky. It doesn't seem like there was any sort of package system, programs were distributed as binaries, often static binaries (though dynamic linking is supported), and though I found an old list of software on old FTP servers, they're all long gone. I've had a little success searching http://discmaster.textfiles.com but it's hard to pick out the SunOS4 binaries in results there. Gopher's own Floodgap server hosts a few things though: gopher://floodgap.com/1/archive/sunos-4-solbourne-os-mp * Having deleted Emacs, I'm left with SunOS4's "vi" as the only interactive terminal-based text editor. It's not like what you get with the "vi" command these days. Backspace doesn't erase, insert mode doesn't move between existing lines, and it beeps in disgust at me all the time when I try to do those things anyway. I had to dig up an old print-out of a vi "quick reference guide" to see about commands like 'x' to delete current letter, and 'A' to append at the end of a line. I've been getting by with other vi clones by just pressing 'i' and going about editing anywhere as I please. No such cheating allowed here! There is at least an alternative "vedit" command which enables a little display of which mode you're in at the bottom of the terminal. Also 'view', which opens files read-only, as some substitute for there being no 'less' command in SunOS4, just 'more'. 'view' doesn't work on text from stdin though. * There are signs of another OS called Spring being installed alongside SunOS4. It turns out this was an experimental OS developed by Sun and others based on a microkernel architecture. Apparantly it was too slow, though not so bad on SPARC as on other architectures. Unfortunately to save HDD space it seems to have been set up to run mainly from CD (presumably in an external SCSI drive), so most of the files are symlinks to that disc, which I don't have (nor do I have the CD drive). gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Spring_(operating_system) * No man pages! It seems the previous owner deleted them to save space and mounted them from another computer on his LAN via NFS (there are 14 NFS mounts in /etc/fstab, for directories on five different computers!). The Open Windows man pages are still there though, and surprisingly the other SunOS4 man pages are on FreeBSD's man page lookup website (though I discovered this pretty late in the game): https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?manpath=SunOS+4.1.3 * Telnet and FTP connections to my "Internet Client" SBC (see old phlog posts about "Xcellent" ideas and similar dodgy puns) running modern Linux and GNU Inetutils work great. The only issue is that the SunOS4 Telnet client gets stuck in line-at-a-time mode, so commands are only sent to the server when you press "Enter". When I found the man pages I discovered you can enter command mode with "Ctrl-]" and use "mode character" to switch to character-at-a-time mode, where you can see what you're typing and also use Links in terminal mode to browse the Web. "Ctrl-E" is also supposed to toggle between line/character mode but it doesn't for me. Tin (newsreader) still doesn't work right though - all the text positioning is messed up. * Telnet and FTP servers are also provided and work fine for access to the SS2 from modern clients. * The FTP client doesn't do DNS lookups, but even if you look up the IP address of modern anonymous FTP servers you don't get very far because it doesn't support passive mode. So as soon as you try to do a directory listing or file transfer it switches to a random port that's blocked by the FTP server's firewall and the connection dies. Oh well, you can look at the welcome messages at least. * SunView is Sun's old windowing environment. It looks very 1980s and has some weird but fun quirks. Unfortunately the demos have all been deleted to save space. I didn't see a program to take screenshots in it myself, but there are some taken in an emulator here: http://toastytech.com/guis/sv414.html * Open Windows Version 3 (started with the "openwin" command) is Sun's X server (XNeWS) desktop. There were lots of proprietary X servers in the 1990s, but I think this is the first X server I've used that isn't based on XFree86 (and then X.Org). It runs Sun's "olwm" window manager and has a bunch of Sun programs installed that are mostly based on the SunView programs, plus or minus the odd feature. The standard X programs are installed too, so there's a fair bit of duplication, especially since there's a compatibility layer that allows SunView programs to run inside the X desktop too, hovering over everything with a sort of halo around them, like a ghost of window systems past. The most extreme case of duplication is with the clock programs, of which there are four overall: clock, the Open Windows version of clock, xclock, and oclock. So of course I took this screenshot of them all running, including the digital modes. The SunView clock in analogue and digital modes is on the left, partly overlapping an X windows that should be in the foreground. gopher://aussies.space/g/~freet/photos/SPARCstation2_OpenWindows/clocks.gif (OK, it turns out those SunView phantoms don't show up in screenshots) * Screenshots are saved in "Sun raster" format with the ".rs" extension, which imagemagick supports. * Display in X is 256 colour, so images all look rather like GIFs. The high 1152x900 resolution looks nice and crisp though. There are no image viewer programs installed, but I guess the image formats would be out of date even if there were. * So far I've tried a few Netscape binaries, which barely fit in the HDD space I can clear, and haven't had much luck. Either they won't start or they start then crash the X server. The "README-communicator-sunos.txt" file on Floodgap includes this note for SunOS 4.1.3: If netscape is crashing under OpenWindows 3.0, make sure you have all of the relevant patches, including patch 100444. I guess I haven't got the patch then, but I don't think I want to risk messing things up by trying to apply it, and it would most likely require too much HDD space to do that anyway. So no Netscape. Lynx used to support SunOS4, into the late 1990s based on the mailing list, but I can't find a binary still online and trying to compile it myself in a few MB with the C compiler included with SunOS doesn't seem that hopeful (early GCC ran on it too, but I see the gateway to dependency hell). * For Web browsing then, Links in graphics mode runs fine as a remote X window displaying on the SS2 in Open Windows from by Internet Client system. At first Dillo wouldn't display any text, but after changing all the fonts to "courier" it now works fine displaying remotely in Open Windows too. Attempts to use the paste button preferred by Sun (along with selecting then click-and-drag) over selecting and middle-clicking to copy and paste text, cause Dillo to hang though. Of course I had to try Firefox too, but their tradition dating back to the Netscape days continues - it causes the X server to crash. * There was a Gopher client written for Sun's graphics toolkit XView, called xvgopher. Most of the copies of it seem to be truncated, but I found it here on Discmaster: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/browse/10583/Internet%20Tools.iso/infoserv/gopher/Unix/xvgopher/v1.0prerelease/xvgopher.static.resolver.gz Source code and (fairly entertaining) readme are here: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/browse/11582/ftp.fujixerox.co.jp_2014.04.09.tar/ftp.fujixerox.co.jp/mirror/bash.keio.ac.jp/pub/mirror/gopher/Unix/xvgopher/v0.5beta/xvgopher.tar.Z/xvgopher.tar Only beta releases are available, and there are a few bugs that cause crashes. In particular the bookmarks always seems to crash for me. But it has a neat back button with a drop-down history list of recently-viewed gophermaps - very modern. Also a very cute gopher icon, apparantly borrowed from xgopher, which blows chewing gum at you while it's loading gophermaps. It allows opening new gophermaps in new windows, which is handy eg. to open the Bongusta page and keep it loaded while you open the new phlog posts. No keyboard navigation/shortcuts though. Here's a screenshot browsing Xiled's OCC entry in xvgopher and viewing the photo from it in Dillo which is running on my Internet Client system and displaying as a remote X window on the SS2: gopher://aussies.space/g/~freet/photos/SPARCstation2_OpenWindows/gophering.gif * There are graphical and terminal email clients, all expecting to read from MBox mail files rather than POP or IMAP. They also talk to the Sendmail server to send mail, and I haven't found an easy way to make it talk to a sendmail equivalent on my Internet Client like I usually do for old email clients on other systems. For reading mail I wrote a script to run on my Internet Client which gets new mail to my normal MD-format inboxes using movemail from GNU Mailutils, then copies it into Mbox format and automatically uploads it to the SS2 via FTP. On the SS2 I can open it in the "Mail Tool v3" graphical mail program in Open Windows. It works pretty well, even sorting the 21st century dates correctly, but of course it's not ideal for modern mail. Besides no HTML rendering or UTF-8 support, it doesn't even decode base64-encoded text, so some text-only emails are even unreadable. Also email headers have gone crazy since the 1990s, and it doesn't hide the unwanted ones. Still, since the mail I get is fairly basic, it worked OK for the last few days that I've had it set up. Here's a screenhot of viewing some mesages from the OCC mailing list: gopher://aussies.space/g/~freet/photos/SPARCstation2_OpenWindows/mail.gif * I thought I'd be able to send mail by running the email client on my Internet Client remotely, like with the web browsers (and "gv" works fine for viewing PDFs that way too!). But no, it's a GTK2 program and they all seem to have the same missing text problem that I had in Dillo and fixed by changing the font to Courier. But changing the default font in .gtkrc-2.0 didn't help! Open Windows comes with quite a full set of fonts to choose from, but they all display blank in GTK2 programs, even though buttons, menus, images, all display fine. Quite annoying. At least xzgv, a GTK image viewer, works for displaying images remotely since it can be controlled by keyboard shortcuts rather than the menus. * I found another email MBox file, left by the previous owner, mainly containing Usenet posts from 1993/94 that he'd set up to receive via Email somehow. This was handy since my internet connection keeps dying due to the fog (and one nation-wide outage which also stopped the state's incredibly-fragile train network for a day and a half), so I've had some history to read instead. By pure chance I found in there a couple of posts to alt.folklore.computers by Sun employees in 1994 discussing the history of UNIX and BSD relating to SunOS4, so I'll copy those at the end of this post. I also found this worthy addition to my Usenet Funnys section, though it looks like this one might have actually come in via real email: gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/collected_files/usenet_funnys/microsoft_executive.txt * It has a sound recorder/player program but I haven't tried that yet. HDD space is an issue again there. It'd be great to have a tracker module or MIDI player, but I doubt I can find a binary for one. * I'm composing this in "Text Editor V3" in Open Windows. It works quite well and has some basic code-editing/formatting features. Though there's no file browser in the open/save window, so you have to enter the directory and the filename 'blind'. I also tried running remotely Nedit from my Internet Client, but that crashes the X server too. * The Open Windows File Manager ("V3" again, maybe everything in Open Windows V3 is "V3"?) is icon-based and has a tree view of directories using large icons which is above the directory contents sub-window. It's not clear how you control filetype associations and curiously text files open in the old SunView text editor instead of the X-based "Text Editor V3". * Of the three X terminal Emulators, Command Tool, Shell Tool, and regular XTerm, none work properly with Tin via Telnet. But you can start an XTerm remotely and have it display as a remote X window instead of using Telnet, so I've been doing that and it works very well. * Well that's more than enough. If you want to see some more screenshots, Nathan's Toasty Tech website has Open Windows 3 there as well, and he even got Netscape to run: http://toastytech.com/guis/ow3.html CONCLUSION Aside from sending Email (which for mail sent from my own mail server I can still do with Telnet to my Internet Client, then SSH to the server, then run Alpine on it directly) it's all working quite nicely at this point as a substitute for my normal morning computing using that youngster of a Pentium 1. The Pentium 1 is clocked at 120MHz and has 80MB RAM, while this SS2's CPU runs at 40MHz and it only has 16MB RAM. I haven't worked out how to get RAM usage stats in SunOS4, but I haven't had any errors from running out of RAM, though perhaps only because there's not enough HDD space to install a program big enough to cause them. Open Windows runs very nicely. Actually it's sharper and feels more snappy than my Pentium 1 (though that doesn't have graphics acceleration in X). The only issue being that even simple programs do take a surprisingly long time to start up, though everything is quite snappy afterwards. The XView toolkit has a unique look and design, as does the OLWM window manager which is very much in the old style akin to MWM. I must say I do miss having a taskbar, though it's interesting to try this different approach to managing windows. If all the old FTP servers with SunOS4 software on them were still alive, I could certainly do a lot more. Still, for things like SSH, SFTP, and HTTPS, which I can do from my Pentium 1 running later software that still compiles for it, I guess I'd always have a really hard time replicating that with SunOS4 (though there is carl for HTTPS, which I should try). Maybe in NetBSD, which I could have tried out if I got that far (as well as on the SS5), but probably at the cost of a much slower and less optimised system than SunOS4, and definitely needing a bigger HDD. Although this is exactly why I have my Internet Client system to handle that sort of software without forcing me to keep upgrading other software and hardware along with it. MY OTHER OCC PROJECT Once I realised the SPARC just wasn't in me for doing this stuff in the cold evenings, I thought I'd try setting up the last LTS Linux kernel with 486 support (removed in v. 7.1) on my 100MHz 486DX4 laptop with 16MB of RAM which I can play with on the couch. I've done most of the ground work for this already, so it mainly just meant compiling the new Linux kernel with a really minimal configuration that would boot with the limited RAM. I did that, copied it to the laptop's HDD with a USB adapter, and it booted up fine (though slowly), but I realised I hadn't installed the modules required for the PCMCIA Ethernet card. So last night, planning to do an OCC post from the couch on the last day, I pulled the HDD out again, put the modules on along with some more software, put it back, and connected the IDE connector half-on, only connecting one row of pins. The BIOS reported "Hard Disk Controller error" and I discovered my mistake. But connecting it properly gave me the same error again. Trying a spare HDD at least proved I hadn't killed the laptop's HDD controller, but obviously the HDD got some data outputs connected to GND or other outputs and wrecked its cicuitry. Except luckilly it still works with my USB adapter (different logic level thresholds or input currents, maybe?), so I was able to read off it and make a disk image to write to the other HDD which finally, at half-past midnight booted in the laptop. But of course I was in no mood to do anything more by that point. The really annoying thing is I stuffed up the same laptop's original HDD in almost the same way about a year ago, by connecting it upside-down. I've been explicitly trying to concentrate on connecting the replacement drive correctly, yet this time I missed that half the pins weren't even going in. So that's two HDDs down (or maybe one and a half?), and the really annoying thing is that I can no longer trust that I've learnt anything. I can try not to make the mistake again, but no harder than I was trying when I already made the mistake again. So I just can't trust myself to ever touch it again, but I will, so I guess I'll just have to keep my one remaining spare 2.5" IDE HDD handy. It really pisses me off when I can't live up to my own expectations like that. Anyway maybe I'll have calmed down about that come OCC 2027 and I can continue with it then, along with making a start on NetBSD of course. - The Free Thinker BSD/UNIX History, Usenet posts: From gingell@opus Sun Feb 13 11:56:14 MET 1994 Article: 33468 of comp.unix.bsd Path: gingell@opus From: gingell@opus.eng.sun.com (Rob Gingell) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: How was BSD written? Date: 12 Feb 94 03:36:09 GMT Organization: Sun Lines: 62 NNTP-Posting-Host: opus Content-Length: 3469 In article <2jekt5$let@nntp2.Stanford.EDU> jonathan@leland.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan Stone) writes: >Casper H.S. Dik (casper@fwi.uva.nl) writes: >>steve@sccsi.com (Steve Nuchia) writes: >>>I always wondered how sysVr4 was written. Did the AT+T programmers >>>implement virtual memory and TCP/IP from published specifications, >>>or did they have access to BSD code? > >>The virtual memory came from Sun. Yes, the SunOS 4.0 VM system was extracted from SunOS (along with other things) and used for the work that resulted in SVR4. The process of doing SVR4 changed it of course, but it's easily recognizable as the SunOS 4.0 and later VM system. >Whose VM system was derived from 4.2BSD, if I recall correctly. >Didn't SunOS 3.x use a "machine-independent" VM system >that *was* VAX virtual memory structures, and translate in >software to the Sun-2/Sun-3 MMU? The SunOS 4.0 VM system's implementation was not derived from 4.2BSD, though its specification at the system call level is very clearly derived from 4.2BSD. However, you're correct that prior to SunOS 4.0, the memory management system in SunOS was essentially straight 4.2BSD. It's something of a stretch to call the 4.2BSD VM system "machine independent", and I don't believe anyone ever represented it as such. It definitely knew it was a VAX VM system. Ports of 4.2BSD, including the pre-SunOS 4.0 systems, tried to create an "abstract VAX" in the lower levels of the system so that the upper levels could operate easily on it. 4.2BSD was certainly well-enough written that it was easy for people to do this, but it basically implemented a VAX abstract machine. >Yes, it's a nitpick, Sun's VM system changed for SunOS 4.x; >I don't know how *much* because I've never studied the SunOS source. >My point is simply that the ancestry is *there*... I see what you're trying to say, but the point isn't really valid. Casper's original assertion is basically correct -- SVR4's VM system is the SunOS 4.0 one, and relative to the code, there's no anscestry there. The 4.0 implementation bears little but superficial resemblance to the 4.2BSD one. Such ancestry as exists comes from the fact that the 4.0 VM system was essentially a complete implementation (and expansion of) the 4.2BSD specification. It was the SunOS 4.0 implementation that was written "from scratch" starting with the specification, and SVR4 used the resulting implementation. Of course, we started with the 4.2BSD specification because (first of all) it was a pretty decent specification that no one had gotten around to fully implementing. We built an original implementation largely because a number of aspects of the "abstract VAX" were too constraining to deliver both the full functionality of the specification and to allow us to rapidly get to the variety of hardware we had and anticipated in the future. The process of building that implementation taught us a lot, things that are reflected in the literal differences from and amplification upon the 4.2BSD specification. The 4.3BSD specification captured many (if not all) of these differences, certainly all the important ones. We were fortunate as we worked to be able to collaborate with a number of people in the BSD community, and particularly Kirk McKusick and Mike Karels at CSRG. Ultimately, of course, later BSD releases also implemented the full specification, though that implementation was as independent of SunOS 4.0 as 4.0 was of 4.2BSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Path: usenet@abyss.West.Sun.COM From: geoff@Eng.Sun.COM (Geoff Kimbrough) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: operating system history.. Date: 3 Oct 1994 16:56:53 GMT Organization: SunSoft Inc. Lines: 84 Message-ID: <36pd4l$oat@abyss.West.Sun.COM> References: <36ho6e$21h@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> Reply-To: geoff@Eng.Sun.COM NNTP-Posting-Host: gemini70.west.sun.com > The original Unix was written on a PDP11 in 197x at Bell Labs in NJ as > an alternative to Multics. It was originally implemented in assembly > ("the only *real* language" in those days), but after Brian Kernighan > and Dennis Ritchie wrote the C language, it was re-implemented in that > by Ritchie and Ken Thompson. I haven't been able to find out anything Unix in assembly: 1969 (yes, based on Multics, hence the name. The standard joke is that they took Multics and threw out everything they didn't understand. 8^) Unix in C: 1973 Unix version 5 1974 Unix version 6 1977 And now it gets interesting... Version 6 begat PWB (Programmer's workbench, basically the shell and assorted Unix utilities that ran under VMS.) and of course, Version 7. Unix version 7 1979 Version 7 begat 2.0bsd, written by students at Berkeley as a non-commercial research project. 2.0bsd was based on V7 and Unix 32v, an unpublished version with virtual memory and 32bit words (hence the name). Version 7 also begat Xenix at microsoft (1980) and Unix System III (bell labs, 1981). Up until this time, AT&T was prevented by court order from being in the computer business, so they had little incentive to productize Unix. They pretty much gave BSD to UC Berkeley. But back in 1977, someone got the stupid idea that there was money to be made, and figured out a way to do it legally by sublicensing unix (first PWB, then SysIII) from AT&T. Thus Peter Weiner founded Interactive Systems Corp. (which never made a profit and was sold to Kodak in 1987.) After the break-up of AT&T's long-distance monopoly, AT&T was allowed into the computer business. They released System V and started working on the System V Interface Definition (in about 1983?) In 1985, Interactive was hired by Intel to provide the "reference port" of V.3 on the intel arch. That port became the base for Interactive Unix (called 386/ix at that time for legal reasons), SCO, Microport, and a host of others in 1987. In 1988, AT&T dreamed up V.4 as a merge of Sys V and BSD, and contracted with Sun to develop it (Sun being the de facto leader in BSD technology at that time.) I think it came out about 1990, again as a "reference port," meaning that you could get source and/or binary, and it ran, but was not really "product ready." > more from that point until Unix V7, which was presumably the seventh > version of the system as published by Bell Labs, and seems to have > been the last version widely used. At this point, AT&T (who owned > Bell Labs) published System V, but I don't know how much if at all > they based this upon the Bell Labs code, nor why they decided to do > this. Soon after System V because widespread, TCP/IP was developed at > MIT and other places by the ARPA people, and it made its way into the > BSD system, which was under development. From what I have been able > to gather, BSD was written from scratch and not based upon any > previous versions, but why the BSD people wanted to do this and why > AT&T didn't sue them anyway, I don't know. This, of course, leads > into the big split we have today between System V and BSD, with other > major Unices (SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, et al) based upon one > or the other (well, really they're not other Unices then; they're just > ports of the BSD or SysV code to another architecture by the company Most of this is incorrect (but understandably so). BSD was based on Bell Labs code, and it was licensed for research use. When BSDI came along and tried to sell BSD (on x86), AT&T did sue them. AIX was based on Sys V.2, originally ported to the IBM/RT (remember that one?) by, you guessed it, Interactive, but has since been worked on by so many differenct companies (subcontracting for IBM) that I suspect that not a single line of Interactive's code remains. SunOS was based on 4.2bsd, and I assure you that licensing fees were paid to AT&T. SunOS is now based on Sys V.4 (SunOS is technically the OS component of Solaris, Solaris is an OS+networking+windows+etc.) AT&T spun-off "Unix Systems Labs" for mysterious reasons (IMHO, because they hadn't a clue what they had and less of a clue what to do with it.) And eventually USL was purchased by Novell. Many Unix vendors then scrambled to arrange long-term licensing agreements with Novell on the theory that Novell had no interest in keeping Unix alive just to compete with Netware. Computer System News (a trade rag that might still be around 8^) made a poster-sized "map" titled "The Evolution of Unix" some years ago. It's reasonably accurate, but has a few lines reversed. The above is from that chart for before 1977, from personal ( and co-workers) memory and experience since then. Corrections are welcome. Flames are not. gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2026-06-29Going_HiFi.txt GOING HIFI [posting this a day later than I wrote it] I got all distracted telling you about how distracted I was getting yesterday, so never got onto my designated weekend job of fixing the guttering on part of the shed. Now though the fog from last night is still out and the temperature outside seems even lower, still, at 10AM. Somehow being fully clothed up a ladder trying to screw in cold metal parts works worse in winter than running around naked for me, indeed cold hands are getting to me a little even typing this. My 4G mobile internet connection has given up in the fog too (for the second day in a row, shame I ran into problems with my outdoor antenna plan so that still isn't finished either). So I'll write up another one of my phlog post ideas... I've ranted here somewhere before that I don't really buy into the pursuit of quality for media consumption. All the fuss over high resolutions and lossless compression and HiFi. Sure you get a slightly improved experience for 10x or 100x the price of the cheapest option, but it's really barely relevent to the experience of finding something new that you really enjoy. I think time and money are better spent on finding new content rather than trying to pull something extra out of an experience you already know. That being said, my mother recently gave me an old 1980s boombox, given to her by a friend, who'd been given it by a friend. In spite of this chain of people wanting to get rid of it, it's actually by far the best boombox I've ever got my hands on (and I've picked up a good few at garage sales over the years). It's a Sony FH-7 Mk II, which unlike my other boomboxes and mono cassette-radios is so nice people have actually bothered to write about it (a little bit) on the Web. There's even, shockingly, a PDF of the service manual available for download, which I soon took advantage of. Nevertheless as a traditional boombox that a 1980s teenager would mount on his shoulder to annoy the neighbours, this thing's 15Kg weight would make that something of a athletic event. That weight isn't even after loading it up with the typical national stockpile of D-cell batteries, because it doesn't actually have a battery compartment - mains only. It's really a miniaturised version of a "component" sound system, with separate modules for each function, stacked up and bolted together with some detachable speakers, then with a detachable handle thrown on to make it "portable". But in return you got the quality of a component sound system, and a silly price tag to match. Actually they even seem to be genuinely worth something today too. I'm not sure about the sanity of Ebay sellers asking thousands for one, but the sold listing show that $600AUD seems achieveable for a working example. So I was very tempted to sell it, but I've been using some cheap PC speakers for my TV since its built-in mono speakers died, and although they're alright most of the time some frequencies cause a reverberation in their plastic enclosures and corresponding buzzing sound which gets annoying when someone's voice or a recurring sound effect triggers it. This thing is definitely at the other end of the spectrum for second-hand audio gear, and after hooking the Aux. input up and wobbling some life out of the long-untouched volume control, I had to admit that, in spite of what I've said about HiFi being pointless, yeah it did sound _really_ good. So combine that with the fact that, as a pretty perfect manifestation of 1980s trendy tech, its value will probably continue to increase in the collector's market over the years, I figured I might as well take the opportunity to put it to use myself. Since I keep a cheapo 80s boombox near the TV already for playing radio and cassettes, it ought to replace that. But upon first test the FH-7's fancy auto-reverse-playback cassette player/recorder would just continuously clunk between forward and reverse playback modes. So first I decided I had to fix that, and clean up the dirty volume (etc.) slide potentiometers on the amplifier too. One of my couch-based repair jobs since it's too cold to be away from the heater in the lounge room during the evenings at this time of year (and I'm starting to think in the daytime too, today). The volume pot was fairly easy. It's a bit recessed so you have to take the case off but then you can squirt some contact cleaner in and after working it back and forth for a while it's now back like new. The tape player was more of a pain since with all the fancy solenoids and four circuit boards of electronics it's all a bit more crammed-in than the cheap, mechanically controlled, tape mechanisms I'm used to. It also has lots of belts - five of them, which mostly seemed to be turning OK and that got me quite confused, but it turned out the belts on the motor were slipping alternately - one slipped in forwards playback mode and the other slipped in rewind, and although at first I thought this was some clever clutch mechanism at work, a bit more light revealed it was just cracked old belts slipping under load. I have a small stockpile of tape belts from the era, even some official Sony replacement parts, but none to match. Ebay sellers offer complete belt sets, but for around $60AUD! Hunting through the parts manual found part numbers for four of the belts (it seems to deny the existance of one belt - a design change perhaps?), and ignoring the two tape counter belts which seemed to still be working (and also hard to access), I managed to find these specs online: Sony 3-530-181-XX BELT, COUNTER Sony 3-533-636-00 BELT (A), COUNTER Sony 3-307-366-00 BELT, FAST FORWARDS (qty. 2?) Inside Circumference: ~4.6Inch / 11.7cm Thickness: ~0.046 (3/64th)"/ 1.2mm Shape: Square Sony 3-307-483-00 BELT (R), CAPSTAN Inside Circumference: ~8.6Inch / 21.8cm Thickness: ~0.025"/ 0.6mm Width: ~0.125 (1/8th)"/ 3.2mm Shape: Flat After a fair bit of searching, I found a close-enough match for the capstan belt, and an assortment of small belts in the right range for the fast-forwards and unidentified belts, on Aliexpress. Total cost about $10AUD, including all the extra charges that Aliexpress springs on you at the last moment these days. When they arrived a couple of weeks later I managed to fit them in, lubricated a stiff pinch roller, and put it back together... to watch it eat my test tape. Well it's not so bad, since it seems to play safely and reliably in forwards playback mode, and rewind/fast-forwards mode, but the take-up spool seems to intermittently stop turning after a while in reverse playback mode. Maybe that's from the grease I accidentally got on the capstan belt while trying to awkwardly hook it on and couldn't wipe off very convincingly? Or maybe the belt size/material just wasn't close enough? Or maybe I knocked something else out of alignment whle poking around inside? The exploded diagram in the service manual showing hundreds of tiny gears, levers, and solenoids flying out at you is terrifying, so I decided to leave it at that and just swich off continuous play mode. So I'll flip the tape over manually at the end of each side like I always have done. That's one advantage of only needing to fix things up for my own use as opposed to selling them on Ebay as fully working. Of course I couldn't resist popping the lids of the other "components" of the sound system to see what's inside them too. Electronic component date codes all looked to be for 1985, so I guess it was made around then. Particularly interesting was the power supply, where the bulk of the weight seems to be, courtesy of a nice brick of a low-profile mains transformer. It's good to see it has a real mains power switch in there too, so it's not pulling standby power all the time while seemingly turned off, like so much modern tech does. I have unplugged power the radio section for now though (connected externally by ribbon cables at the back) since I haven't worked out how to connect an aerial to it yet, and ABC Classic which I normally listen to is also broadcast via Digital TV so I can get it from the set-top box anyway. Also, as one of the early digitally-tuned analogue radios (with an LCD display in the mid 1980s, no less!), I'd say the user interface is in dire need of refinement. It doesn't have any channel scan mode, nor any way to store channels, so you have to scroll the frequency to your desired number with the +/- buttons (while holding FAST for a somewhat quicker journey) each time you want to change channel. I always prefer the feel of tuning in a station with an analogue control anyway, but this digital design seems particularly painful. Still, it does tune to the shortwave bands as well as regular AM/FM (a feature that actually seems to have been lost in the follow-up models), so even though I'm sure I'd always prefer twiddling the big knob on an ananlogue SW receiver, it might be fun one day to hook up an aerial to it and try out tuning to exact known frequencies instead of just twiddling around somewhere in the airwaves +/-1MHz. Speaking of digital, it confused me that the Aux. input on the front is labeled "CD/Aux." (phono input is at the back, and Sony actually made a cool little direct-drive record player in the same footprint that fits on top). I've always had CDs in mind as a late 1980s technology that I saw take over from cassettes in the mainstream while I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s. But a look on Wikipedia reveals that CDs came out right at the start of the 1980s, had albums selling over a million copies by the mid 1980s, and Sony had their second model CD player on sale by the time the FH-7 was made (they didn't have one in its "mini-component" format for a few more years though). It just shows how much slower new technology used to roll out, especially to the then slightly backwards corners of the world like Australia. Not that CDs have reached me properly yet anyway, since I'm here talking about cassette tapes, but with the boombox set up with my TV, I can switch its input over to the PlayStation 2 I use as my video file and DVD player, and that plays CDs too. Even MP3s if I want to go really 21st century. It's even another Sony product! Oh well, almost mid-day now after all that rambling and the fog is only just starting to lift. I guess I'll see if it's much better outside but I suspect todays gutter disasters will be put off until after lunch. Ping is still showing 55% of my internet data packets are getting lost in the fog, so I guess I'll have to upload this some other time. Another distraction for later... Back again to upload this on Monday, and sure enough late to start work again as a result... Got that bit of shed gutter refitting done yesterday at least, well that little part of the overall job anyway. I've uploaded some photos. No time to link them in with the text above so you'll have to match things up yourself. Also a photo of the FH-7 in its new home on a straining flat-pack shelf next to my TV. Out of its boombox configuration though, with the speakers and handle detached: gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/teardowns/sony_FH-7_mkII/ If you're a sucker for comparing different engineering approaches like I am, you can also compare it with these photos I uploaded years ago of the comparatively basic insides of one of my more typical garage-sale boombox finds (suffering from a much more obviously perished belt). A Panasonic RX-4950 that I fixed up for Mr Ebay: gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/teardowns/Boombox_Panasonic_RX-4950/ - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2026-06-27.2Thinking_by_Numbers.txt THINKING BY NUMBERS Hello gopherterraneans! With that greeting I've bumped up my phlog vocabulary past the already heady (and very approximate) height of 18,769 words (and other word-mistakable strings). Yes rather than leave it to the next day, week, century, I got back from my evening run (great fun in the fog under a full moon, but pretty cold since it's winter and I run without clothes on) and decided to get stuck back into my statistical self-analysis begun at the end of my last post in response to the study of words different goups use frequently in Facebook posts (circa 2013) here: Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791 I only skimmed over the text, which does make some interesting additonal points, but the main product of the whole thing is definitely the world clouds for different sexes, ages, and personality types. The images of these are below, but beware huge 2-5MB image sizes: Words, phrases, and topics most highly distinguishing females and males https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?download&size=large&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791.g003 Words, phrases, and topics most distinguishing subjects aged 13 to 18, 19 to 22, 23 to 29, and 30 to 65 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?download&size=large&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791.g004 Words, phrases, and topics most distinguishing extraversion from introversion and neuroticism from emotional stability https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?download&size=large&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791.g006 For internet data sippers like me, the PDF is only 2.5MB and has all those images too: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791&type=printable In terms of men and women, I'd say both groups look rather annoying, which is perhaps more validation of my choice to avoid Facebook. It was also clearly skewed towards American subjects. Since the study was done around when I was crossing over the 13-18 and 19-22 age brackets, it's interesting to note that I'm sure I wasn't using words characteristic of either in online posts back then (which were only to Usenet anyway) and my current (rather broad) 30-65 age bracket doesn't seem to fit me very well either. Yet I can guess that I do fit in the introverted male corner, minus the Anime and Call of Duty obsessions. Still, guessing's for girls, so since I've been rambling here on this unidirectional social platform for years, time to break out some UNIX one-liners and harvest the hard numbers... Running this command in my phlog directory pops out a 18,769 line file with a count of every word I've ever thrown at you, after only a modest delay even on this 120MHz Pentium 1 PC I'm using: cat *.txt | tr "A-Z ,.;:\"()\`\!?\[\]\/_\-" "a-z " | sort | \ uniq -c | sort -nr > ../../phlog_words.txt The list starts with lots of boring words like all the ones in this sentence. I don't have all the fancy analysis tools to filter them like they did in the study, so I very unscientifically just picked out the more-interesting ones used over 100 times, then manually copied in my less frequently used words which are in the study's word clouds (skipping many, and omitting those I've never used at all). Plus some other interesting ones to compare like good/bad and happy/sad. It's rough, but here's the result (formatted into columns using "pr"): 7499 i 160 idea 107 youtube 14 shit 2692 my 159 modern 107 posts 13 games 1134 i'm 158 server 106 best 13 loving 1126 me 157 great 103 nobody 12 kill 1074 you 155 he 103 documentary 11 taxes 896 i've 154 system 103 build 10 excited 822 their 153 home 102 text 10 fans 690 people 152 data 102 projects 10 hating 623 old 151 page 102 cheap 10 happily 531 gopher 148 thinking 101 worked 9 amazing 500 new 148 online 96 job 8 girlfriend 481 free 145 party 89 country 8 boy 473 internet 145 nice 86 human 7 girls 437 use 144 read 84 hate 7 hacked 471 work 142 government 75 pay 7 super 428 make 140 problem 73 man 6 baby 422 want 138 works 62 love 6 bills 416 think 138 started 59 dream 6 girl 281 need 138 client 53 playing 6 hungry 276 good 138 buy 52 bad 5 birthday 262 world 138 australia 52 tax 5 debt 251 space 137 state 50 pain 5 hated 251 pretty 135 laptop 41 family 5 happier 250 thinker 130 night 43 happy 5 proud 244 web 130 late 38 he's 5 sad 243 software 130 built 33 children 5 wife 243 power 129 war 32 woman 4 dick 242 trying 129 file 31 game 4 loved 239 money 129 content 31 her 4 penis 236 stuff 128 writing 31 she 4 ridiculously 224 his 127 business 28 friends 4 sports 222 working 123 house 28 died 4 sweet 212 your 120 weekend 28 paying 3 daughter 208 computer 119 reading 26 engineering 3 horny 207 running 119 files 25 economy 3 lust 206 life 117 water 24 mother 3 team 194 fact 116 technology 23 tomorrow 3 rent 193 phlog 116 public 22 metal 2 cute 193 keep 114 oil 21 bloody 2 sexy 189 start 113 road 21 father 2 sexually 189 making 113 film 20 sex 2 yay 189 found 113 design 20 shopping 1 360 188 website 113 cost 18 himself 1 bitch 188 doing 112 write 17 fucking 1 boyfriend 187 instead 111 electronics 17 fuck 1 chocolate 181 we 111 building 16 freedom 1 ps3 175 tv 110 photos 16 win 1 she's 174 today 110 past 16 wonderful 1 son 173 car 110 email 15 born 1 sweethearts 173 australia 109 source 15 die 1 sweetheart 173 aussies 109 social 13 president 1 thankful 171 linux 109 phone 14 bullshit 1 wishing 171 finally 108 services 14 cleaning 1 xbox 169 someone 108 makes So yes I indeed fit into the male introvert counts for words like computer and government. Actually I wouldn't use the term introvert to describe myself because I often hear people who in comparison to me are very extroverted describe themselves as introverts, but I guess I'll submit to the terminology of the study. At least it seems my language isn't quite as aggressive as the study seems to paint the average man with all the swearing and fighting talk, though the word 'war' quite a lot. I'm certainly not as lovey-dovey as the women though. Some highlights are that I apparantly 'hate' (84) more than I 'love' (62), but I talk about much more 'good' (276) stuff than 'bad' (52), and more 'happy' (43) than 'sad' (5). I talk much more of 'he' (155) and 'his' (224) than 'she' (31) and 'her' (31 as well). But talk about 'people' (690) in general a lot, and 'you' (1074) and 'your' (212). The 'old' (623) gets a lot of discussion, but the 'new' isn't so far off (500). Finally, for all the time I do spend thinking about 'women' (32) / 'girls' (7), 'loving' (13), 'sex' (20), feelings of 'lust' (3), and being 'horny' (3), I, perhaps mercifully, don't really mention them all that much. The paper talks about how some of the different associations might have misleading implications, and in my case 'party' (145) is, I'm sure, much more associated with my political party reviews posted here than any social gatherings. In the end, t does make me wonder if I should try to be a bit more upbeat in my talk like those women of Facebook. Though in a way I'm glad that I don't fit any group from the study perfectly. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2026-06-27.1Clouded_Thoughts.txt CLOUDED THOUGHTS I haven't been able to find time for writing phlog posts lately, in part because I've been wasting so much time getting distracted by thinking about topics for them, and about everything else in my life. My mind's been running away with itself constantly for the last week or so. So I've been building up a list of topics to write here about, but then I'm behind on everything because I've been daydreaming all day so I don't commit to actually writing about them. At least one idea is really quite productive because I think it's an answer to a problem I've been pondering for a couple of years now: how to cheaply contruct a safe ramp to the garage/service platform I built for my car (hoping to find a cheap used car loading ramp online later, which hasn't happend). From no memorable source of inspiration I suddenly came up with using walls of car tyres with compacted earth (a technique used for building "Earthship" houses or retaining walls) and lining them one behind another, each row one tyre taller than the last to make steps, then use concrete over the steps to form a slope I can drive over. I found one study which shows a tyre wall should easily be strong enough, and they're one of the few things that are free in life because tyre shops usually have to pay people to dispose of old tyres. I just need to devote quite a few days to compacting earth into a total of about 70 old tyres, since I'm not a hippy who knows lots of long-haired people to come over and help for free like the Earthship builders seem to. At least I think if I can borrow the motorised fence post driver my father recently bought, that will help out with the compacting. Anyway I'd be lying to say it was that sort of thing I've mainly been thinking about. A good 80% is probably just dreaming of women again. I've talked about all that before though, nothing changes, I still don't really know how to meet them, and I can't really get into talking about most of the nonsense men and women babble on about anyway, short of creating a completely false character to act out. But it does really piss me off when I see on TV some guy who'se been caught defrauding people, or addicted to drugs, or broke from compulsive gambling, or even convicted of rape, and THAT GUY has a girlfriend/wife. I mean, OK I don't know what the latest Facebook meme is, or the latest guy who kicked a ball to the right end of a field, or which celebrity did what to who, but surely I've got some edge over those guys, no? Well, I guess, evidently no. But that gets me thinking I should at least try harder. Though it's tricky without really knowing anyone my age to begin with, and I gather those online dating services are basically built around exploting sexually frustrated guys like me for cash in exchange for sexy talk with women who are probably mostly AI-generated by the company itself these days anyway. Trying to chat up store workers is one opening, but it also seems to be considered harrassment now. Moreso at the nudist beach, when there are any women there at all, though usually some more do walk through fully clothed, but the younger women kind-of actively don't look at anyone, just straight ahead, which kind-of makes me wonder why they walk through there in the first place. Then there's the indirect walk I take to the beach, where I might smile and say hi to women walking the other way, and maybe get an acknowledgement, but nothing progresses from that either. Even if it did, I'd surely run into the same lack of things to talk about convincingly which keeps me from finding friends at social occasions anyway. In a way the nudist thing is the closest I come to an interest shared by some relatively meaningful number of women, as opposed to all my nerdy topics, but it's an awkward one in its own way I guess. I did start feeding all these thoughts I suppose, since I downloaded some videos of naked women. I still don't really get into porn, but I just like to see them naked and leave the rest to my imagination, which has probably become over-fed now and increased the problem. Looking the P2P networks it's surprising how much male porn there is too. I assume it's mainly watched by gay men, but one silly thought I had was to video myself walking through my house naked and briefly talking about all the endless things I've imagined talking to a women about if I ever actually got one through the door, and maybe some of the places I've thought about having sex. Then say vaguely where I am in the world and put an email address on the screen where interested women can contact me and arrange a date. Even if it's 90% shared by gay men via P2P or porn websites, that keeps it out there on the internet for free and maybe besides them and fraudsters asking for money so they can catch a plane to see me etc., I'd eventually get a response from a girl I could practically meet? Pretty long odds, but maybe no worse than my feable attempts to chat up strangers, or getting led on forever by a dating site for a monthly fee? I'm probably on the internet naked somewhere already since I've seen gay men on the beach clearly filming or photographing me with smartphones before, and figured "who cares" (I've got no real public/professional/social image to be ruined by public proof that my penis exists). My mind filled with all this nonsense, a day or two ago while I should have been working I ended up on a Wikipedia binge looking into the history of online dating sites. After all, maybe I'll start a trend for anonymous naked date-request videos and can set up my own dating website based around that? Yeah, I know that's crazy, but this is the way my thoughts have been going lately. Anyway I ended up going full-circle back to male-female interests with Wikipedia's page on Sex differences in social media use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_social_network_service_use gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Sex_differences_in_social_media_use It's an interesting summary of, mostly dated, studies into the differences in social media use by men and women. The thing that intrigued me though was the word cloud at the top of the Web version, comparing words most frequently used by men and women on social media. Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791 This inspired me to have a go at analysing my own word usage here in the phlog. But altogether I've spent most of my Saturday on that and writing this post now, very much affirming my original point, and I'll spend hours more presenting and analysing that data, so I'm calling it quits at this point and there might be a follow-up post tomorrow, or in a week, month, year... - The Free Thinker