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 Sat, 20 Dec 2025 08:49:02 +1100 gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-12-20The_Timewarp_Web.txt THE TIMEWARP WEB I've had various ideas for posts lately but I never quite get around to writing them anymore, which might be for the best since this was never the most productive of my passtimes. Anyway here's one I can easily put together piece-by-piece over a few days... [he says a month ago] The Web is really horrible these days. It wastes your internet data pointlessly at every opportunity, wastes your CPU time via Javascript, tries desperately to learn any scrap of information which might come in handy for manipulating you later, and accuses you of being a robot every other minute. Not to mention it only really works in Web browsers which are funded by Google, and exhibit similar problems of resource wastage and privacy intrusions themselves. Then even if you accept all that and try to play along, they're often coded so badly and rely on so many fragile moving parts that they still won't do what you want, or go down all at once when one of the major Cloud hosts breaks. Once upon a time it was better. Not that much better mind you, the modern Web was after all born from the same forces that brought us "Best viewed in Internet Explorer", "Get Flash", and animated GIF advertisments. But compared to today when half the websites you find won't load without at least some Javascript from any of the twenty different servers each webpage wants to run code from, and the other half are now increasingly AI generated rubbish that tell you everything you already know plus a little nonsense you don't, I think it's all gone downhill fast. But of course those websites of the past are all gone now, only echos on the Wayback Machine remain. Or are they? Deep in its darkest corners, some ancient creatures of the 1990s and early 2000s still haunt the cyberspace of today. Journey with me down the dark alleys where the infrared lights of internet surveilance don't shine, and through the doors of the rickety abandoned servers that the Web developers of today dare not enter. Join me for a tour of the Web that time forgot... THE FIRST WEBSITE http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html A bit of an obvious one, but I don't remember browsing the first website properly, as archived from 1992, before myself. It's all very unpretentious and friendly compared to any official Web websites of today, but in some ways foreboding at the same time: "Now the web of data and indexes exists, some really smart intelligent algorithms ("knowbots?") could run on it. Recursive index and link tracing, Just think...". Hmm, yes... BUSINESS WEBSITES The Web has always had something to sell you. These days online stores are often my most feared places, requiring countless random scripts to be let run wild just at the point you're handing over all your personal information. Company websites are also often singularly focused on their latest products and eager to 404 any page that dares to speak of something that came before. Often early business websites revealed at least a slight sense of pride in their past work, and a touch of individuality that's very much lacking with their equivalents today. https://ioiscsi.com/ The 1990s were a bizarre time for computer hardware. A seemingly infinate number of Tiwanese computer brands appeared and disappeared, many barely referenced anywhere but in the old catalogues of computer stores long gone. Today one finds their long-forgotten names on the peeling stickers of the scarcely-identifiable surviving devices they produced, and the curious might sometimes manage to track down the original manufacturer's website on the Wayback machine from before it suddenly disappeared sometime in the 2000s. But for one ISA SCSI card I was looking to set up, the Internet Archice didn't need to save my day. IOI Technology Corporation might not have had anything new to say or sell since their homepage was last updated in 2002, but it remains online with a table-based page layout presenting their product line-up from two decades ago. http://mosaic.mcom.com/ Mosaic Communications Corporation reckons this internet thing is really catching on: "According to industry estimates, as many as 25 to 30 million people are on the Internet today, with the number growing at 10 to 15 percent per month. Today, the Internet spans all seven continents and every developed country. While more than fifty percent of current Internet users are in companies or organizations, the number of home users is growing rapidly.". Geeze there's a company to watch, imagine how important they'll be in a few decades time... https://www.ward-engineering.co.uk/ I've spent a lot of time hunting down parts suppliers for old Jaguars. Since they're in the UK the heavy parts this company specialise in would be way too expensive to have sent to me in Australia, if indeed they're still operating. But I love their early-2000s Web design. http://oldsoftware.com/ Until recently it wasn't that unusual to find a forgotten section on the websites of old independent computer stores where parts left over from the 1990s and earlier were still up for sale. In one case I even succeeded in buying such a part from a Melbourne store a few years ago, but they've since gone. The secret for "Computer Bargain Store of Utah" seems to have been to lean into it and keep trying to sell their left-over 1980s inventory for so long that it became desireable again by retro enthusiasts. Their website itself has remained a perfect throwback to the early internet era, GIF animations and all. https://www.ti.com/sc/docs/msp/irda/selguide.htm Sometimes a small sub-section of a huge company's website just gets abandoned. This webpage from the massive American semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments describes their IrDA tech within the styling of their website as last touched in 2008. Presumably nobody at TI has really cared about IrDA since then, though someone out there is probably still buying those chips. NON-COMMERCIAL WEBSITES There are still a lot of old-fashioned style personal websites online, but here I'm mainly highlighting the sorts of collaborative websites you don't see so often in their 1990s or early 2000s Web clothes. They're probably all just run by one guy these days, but they have the authority of a 'real' website thanks to all the people who contributed to them in the past, and sometimes still today. http://home.mcom.com/ The cooler, general-public view, of Mosaic Communications Corporation from 1994. Less corporate speak, more "It may not look pretty, but it works!". I love that these worlds sort of co-existed somehow back then! That quote is from the Mosaic "homepages" list, containing the the personal webpages of some nerds who were about to become very rich: http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/mcom_docs/homepages.html http://www.ais.org/home.html The University of Michigan Computing Club website is a classic old pubnix site like the tildes today try to emulate. It opens to a good old 1990s image map homepage which even includes a, sadly broken, link to their Gopher server. User homepages are indexed and mostly appear untouched for as long as the main website has been, but one surprisingly active corner is the homepage of The Amateur Computerist Newsletter. This publication running since 1988 seems to have a focus split bizarrely between the early history of the internet and current Korean politics. The current issue is rendered in HTML from a PDF converter or something, which doesn't work well in old/lightweight Web browsers, but you can replace ".html" with ".pdf" in the link to download a PDF copy from the otherwise 1990s-style website. Somehow the current, "Summer 2025", issue still reads like it's only half-way out of a 1990s timewarp, all about a "Netizens" movement born in, and still quoting from, 1990s USENET. I've got to wonder if anyone actually still reads it... http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/index.html http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/ Started in 1996, the Doctor Who Ratings Guide continues today to add new reviews of Doctor Who episodes and many things related, now presenting over nine thousand reviews contributed by users through good old-fashioned email. Although I have a bit of a mental block around composing reviews of fictional narratives myself, I read a great many reviews here while I was collecting copies of Doctor Who VHS releases, and thoroughly enjoy its straightforward 1990s-style design. Above the classic links for "frameless" or "framed!" versions of the site on the entry page, the one design element that does change is the logo, updated for every new Doctor since the TV show was relaunched in 2005. Some of these logos have been really exceptional for a fan site, and the old designs are presented along with the guide's history (first written on a 22MHz 468SX with 2MB RAM!) in the "About the Guide" section. http://xfree86.org/ There are a lot of software projects with dated websites, many even as abandoned as XFree86 which hasn't made a release since 2008. The project was forked into X.org by the main commercial sponsors and developers of the X window system which runs the Linux/BSD/UNIX GUI (for those of us who say no to Wayland anyway). I thought I'd include this one in particular because I find it far easier to navigate this site and find things than on the complete mess of X.org documentation spread between www.x.org and www.freedesktop.org. I also wonder if a lot of the changes X.org introduced which I dislike wouldn't have been taken by the allegedly stubborn XFree86 lead developers if it had continued, but that's hard to know for sure. http://repairfaq.org/ http://greyghost.mooo.com/repairfaq/ http://www.walshcomptech.com/repairfaq/ In those heady days when people actually USEd USENET, often that use would consist of new people asking the same old questions over and over and over. This beloved internet tradition continues today on Web forums and probably on social media too if I ever dared to look at that. The FAQ post was the original solution to this problem, posted on a regular basis, eg. monthly, in the hope that smacking answers in the face of new visitors would stop them asking so many boring questions themselves. When everyone's internet surfboards started crawling with spiders, some noticed that this new thing called the Web was really better suited to hosting these FAQs, which by now were often reaching obscene lengths for unhyperlinked plain text. Unfortunately the Web, compared to USENET, turned out to be almost as fragile over time as the weavings of a real arachnid, and almost all of the websites hosting these often extensive caches of information have dropped offline. Thankfully the Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ is an exception. Even while its namesake newsgroup echos with emptiness today, its FAQ remains a testament to the frantic activity that once overwhelmed it with questions both frequent and obscure, all archived in this capsule of knowledge spanning numerous long webpages. When you still can't get your stuff to work after reading all that, there's even an extensive Laser FAQ to help you build something to burn it to ashes instead. The Web design is a classic from USENET's boom era, amateur pixel art GIFs heading up waves of text including many ASCII-art diagrams. In essence it's raw information with minimum fluff, so rather the opposite of many modern websites. It also has a couple of mirror sites still alive, so I've included those URLs too, just in case the main site does go the way of most other USENET FAQs. http://telecom-digest.org/ http://telecom.csail.mit.edu/ The Telecom Digest claims to be the oldest mailing list on the internet, started in 1981 as a news and discussion platform for American telecom workers. In fact at some point it became a weird hybrid of a mailing list and a moderated newsgroup, in an effort to get involved with this newfangled thing called USENET. The newsgroup at comp.dcom.telecom still sees a little activity. Unfortunately since the previous editor retired in 2023, the website, hosted by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, doesn't seem to be getting updated anymore. But it remains a lovely example of early web design, built from basic HTML with just some token 1990s telephone GIFs to pretty things up. With over four decades of telecom-related talk under its belt it's definately a deep site, and poking into the archives can quickly unleash a torrent of forgotten techology history. http://www.afana.org/ As a documentary addict hooked on the stream of old doumentaries and educational films slowly finding their way onto the internet, at one point I followed a trail back to The Academic Film Archive of North America. They host their film downloads at the Internet Archive, but their website presents background information and serves their preservation efforts, from a Web design that's looking like a historical artifact itself now. I actually think it's a really nice website, which does have a little Javascript on the navigation buttons but works and looks fine without it, but I only really like websites that other people consider very dated. AUSTRALIAN WEBSITES Some bits of 'down under' from down under the modern Web. http://gutenberg.net.au It's sad to see that new additions of ebooks at the Australian branch of Project Gutenberg stopped at the end of last year. Still the author promises the website will remain, and probably forever retain its lovely early 2000s layout. It features nicely presented ebooks in different formats, including HTML, of works that are out of copyright in Australia, which due to a quirk of history already includes those where the author died before 1955, even though copyright duration is 70 years. When the copyright duration in Australia was increased from 50 years in 2005 (to keep the govenment in the USA happy, grumble grumble...) it wasn't retrospective, so lots of works that were still copyrighted overseas have remained in the public domain here. I only read printed books myself, but it's still handy to have digital copies for more easily finding quotes I've read before, such as recently from Seven Pillars of Wisdom. https://www.ozatwar.com/ Australia @ War is a typical sort of special-interest website made by a devoted individual in Microsoft FrontPage, which used to be part of Microsoft Office until it was dincontinued in 2006. FrontPage tended to like specifying specific fonts and encouraged using lots of tables complete with background colouring painted copiously on the homepage of this website. But it's all far preferable to the horrible mess that modern website creator tools create. The website itself offers a deep dive into many specific aspects of Australian WWII military activities, cataloging individual units, events, and locations. I find the section on "Bunkers, Tunnels, Fortifications In Australia during WW2" particularly interesting, and I hope I'll get around to visiting some of those sites myself one day. http://www.all-electric.com/ I found this website via its scans of circuits from old Australian ETI circuit books (which I've since collected myself, and I should upload some of my own scans at some point). Beyond electronics it's a varied and fun place to explore with everything from 90s synth music, to 3D-rendered artwork, to dated Australian political commentary heavily referencing the male genitalia. The scattered links also give you that great feeling of exploration you don't get from reading just another blog. All of this is wrapped in a fine example of turn-of-the-century hobby website design complete with frames, tables, multicoloured text, and lots of cool custom graphics. There are also some downloads for music made by the site's rather depressed and grumpy author, Batz Goodfortune (who's either part of, or all of, The All Electric Kitchen), which I think is great, and indeed I eventually bought his/their CD, Elementary Urban Sanity, a few years ago as my one and only new music purchase. Well, "new" as in not second-hand, it was released in 1997 and showed some signs of kicking around the indie music publisher Transmission Communication's inventory all that time untill I bought it in the 2010s. Anyway it sort-of amazes me that the website is still online since in the last message on the homepage he was debating turning it off after ten years online in 2008. Uniquely the all-electric.com FTP server still works too, and actually I just discovered there's an earlier AEK album "Cyberblade" hiding on it, along with EUS! There are lots more of course, and I've even linked to other qualifying websites in my past phlog posts or at the end of my History Snippets entries. Such links are going dead all the time though, or being replaced with modern redesigns which sadly often fail to include most of the earlier content that made the websites interesting. It's fun to explore the random selection of these websites that are still left, although as proven by how long it took me to finish this post while revisiting them, they can be quite a time sink! - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-12-16Something_New_in_the_Cupboard.txt SOMETHING NEW IN THE CUPBOARD There's a phlog post I've been failing to finish for weeks, and while writing it I was reminded of the collection of Electronics Today International (ETI) circuit book scans that I assembled about a decade ago. ETI was an electronics magazine which, in spite of the name, seems to have been mainly an Australian pulication. Alongside Electronics Australia it was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when they got into the habit of publishing circuit/project books compiling past articles and submissions. I've built some of the circuits, and it's also quite thought inspiring just to read through. I do however have a habit of forgetting about these books and instead finding half-baked electronics projects on the internet for which better alternatives are already in them on my shelf. Years ago I had the idea that I should scan the contents pages and most interesting articles, so I could look at them from the computer as easily as websites. So about a decade ago I obsessively scanned in a whole lot of them, and... completely forgot I'd even done so. Yeah it didn't work at all, and indeed I see now there are again some projects I scanned which would be good alternatives for projects I've since copied from sketchier online designs. But, always keen to find some content other than my own moanings to fling into the Gopherspace, I've now decided they're a good fit inside The Cupboard: gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/cupboard/ETI_circuit_book_scans/ Although ETI hasn't been on newsagent's stands for decades, I do know that the rights were bought by Silicon Chip magazine which has made some effort at getting ETI and EA magazine scans taken down from websites in the past. It nags a little at my law-abiding nature to share them here, even though I think it's really dumb that documents like this that are 40-50 years old are still under copyright protection for decades to come. But since the government changed the political party minimum membership rules and killed off my ability to vote for the Pirate Party and similar democratic representatives of better copyright laws at recent elections, I now feel less inclined to respect the system. By the way, any names written on the corners of pages aren't mine. Like most things of mine these circuit books are all second-hand. Requests to scan in articles I didn't bother with but are listed on the contents pages will be considered. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-12-07No_Time_to_Type.txt NO TIME TO TYPE Well I've been busy getting nowhere for too long, and now I'm starting to get somewhere with a few of the things I've been trying to achieve, which only makes me busier trying to get further with them. Still plenty of things that needed to be done a long time ago which haven't been started. Still no extra financial reward from any of it. Oh no that's not true, I made $1000 from the AI bubble. Since hypocrites win in this world, and I keep losing, I figured I'd invest $2000 into some semiconductor companies a year or so ago and sure enough the value went up by almost 50%, so I sold almost $1000 worth of shares. Now to see if the bubble lasts long enough for that to happen again and I can earn back my full initial investment and still have shares in some major companies (indirectly via an ETF)... Actually when the bubble bursts and the price does crash I'm hoping to put a lot more money in as a long-term investment, since semiconductors aren't going out of fashion anytime soon, AI or not. I finally got my free Jag started after many weeks trying to get black sludge out of the fuel tank (well one of the fuel tanks anyway). Also bending one of the mounting points for the body back into shape since I discovered it was bent (not good!). Now that I can finally drive it out of my "service bay" I can try and do some jobs on my other Jag. But then the service bay is needed for something else for the summer, so I've only got this weekend to do those. So I should stop falling into the trap of wasting my time typing this BS instead. Not talking to you is probably the only reason I've started getting things done again! In fact besides that I've started viewing my writing here as more of a symptom of loneliness than any cure for it, and although a cure seem less forthcoming by the year, I might as well not indulge myself in displaying the symptoms. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-10-31Sock_in_Glove.txt SOCK IN GLOVE Although I tend to fail, I try my best each summer to avoid getting sunburnt. One tricky aspect is driving in the car with the sun shining on my hands. Ideally I don't want to put sunscreen on them every time I drive (and recent revelations have pointed out how figures for comparing the effectiveness of Australian sunscreen brands have been widely meaningless anyway due to dishonest testing labs), so in an extra mark of strangeness I've taken to wearing gloves when driving. Yes I'm the last man standing who actually keeps gloves in his glovebox! But still there's a problem since while turning the steering wheel my long shirt sleeves get pulled back and reveal a gap of exposed skin between the glove and the cuff of my shirt. So I spend whole journeys pulling my shirt sleeve back or trying to hide my arm under a shadow. What I need are gloves with a long neck to cover my sleeve. Unfortunately there are few enough places that sell you regular gloves these days, let alone specialty ones. In theory there are gauntlet gloves, very thick things now sold to motorbike riders rather than medieval knights. Or masonic gloves, so you don't get your cuffs dirty if the secret handshake goes too far. Or American cowboy gloves which, for those of you thinking I'm a sissy, show that coyboys are sun-safe too. The almighty internet will of course supply all those things, but without the rather essential ability to try them on first and see if they'll really work for me. So, always afraid of wasting my money, I've been looking and comparing and procrastinating all year about what to buy. As is often the case I eventually settled on the ideal answer of "none of them". All I need is to add an extension onto an existing pair of gloves, and in Alexandra on my holiday I actually found a second-hand pair for $5 in a junk shop that perfectly suited such abuse. I just needed to try and guess how to sew again, or cheat by threading with small steel wires as usual. But it occourred to me last night that I don't even need to extend the gloves, just wear something under them that extends back up my arm. In fact a sock with a hole cut before the heel for my fingers to go through, and then the rest cut off after the heel leaving another hole for my thumb, seems to work great. I can even just about slide them on at the same time as putting on the gloves, and the neck of the sock pulls nicely back up my arm. Worn-out socks even come with the finger hole pre-made! So this summer I'm going to exceed my existing strangeness of wearing gloves on my hands to drive, and wear socks on them too. Others might prefer getting their car windows tinted, but I never quite liked the feeling of isolation from outside that you get behind tinted windows, and they only make it harder to see the things you're running into. At some point all these neat little ideas of mine must add up to madness, but so long as nobody's around to judge, I might as well be a happy madman. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-10-30Pleasures_and_Pain_in_the_Neck.txt PLEASURES AND PAIN IN THE NECK It took a full week for my neck to get right again to really start doing things again, so typically I went mad doing all sorts of physical jobs that were digging at me all the time I was stuck propped up in positions of slightly less discomfort on the couch. Now a few days later of course it's sore again because I've been busy doing all the things that probably hurt it in the first place. But such is only to be expected. It really is frustrating because I've been getting more determined with my many and varied DIY projects lately, and with the weather warming up and drying out it's finally practical to attempt more of them. But then trying to do that is exactly what breaks me. I called my father to see if he could give me a hand with something yesterday and he couldn't until Friday when the weather looks bad, so I even ended up moving another one of those heavy sleepers on my own again, which might well be what's set my neck off again. It's like I always say, the only peace in life is to sit on your bum and attempt absolutely nothing, trying to achieve things is hopeless, but I keep trying anyway. My weekend time limit doesn't help. I kick myself about doing non-money-earning things in work hours during the week, then Saturday comes and I'm too tired out to be bothered, or distract myself with something silly on the computer like writing for this phlog (which I've been trying to cut down, this morning I woke up early so I have some extra time). Then it's suddenly Sunday and I have a year's worth of things to rush into, none of which quite get finished, but a few things get close enough that I get distracted trying to make them work or packing up on Monday, which I kick myself about for the rest of the week. At the same time there's a certain peace to just making/packaging/posting things to sell when that's what I'm doing during the week. When it's not another thing making my neck sore, there's something enjoyable about just doing the same basic task without all the failures ever-present in attempting to design or do something new. Yet I manage to stuff up doing the same basic tasks often enough too, in new and innovative ways, and that's even more frustrating. I mean how _can_ you do something litterally 2000 times and then suddenly start stuffing it up completely one day? Like I keep yelling at myself in frustration: "I know what to do, I just don't do it!". Mind you there's also my other little motto of frustration muttered to myself: "there's a solution to every problem, and a problem with every solution". Last sunday I did finally get around to finishing replacing the fuel injector hoses I talked about before. First step was to cut the ($40/meter!) fuel injector hose to length. So I tried to measure it against the hoses I'd removed. But I didn't match all thje bends in the stiff old hose quite right and cut them all too short, which I only discovered after installing all six. So I pulled that all apart again and set to with my much-smarter new solution of bolting the fuel rail in place first, pushing one end of the new hose onto the injector, and cutting it off at the length required in-place. Much smarter, and it worked great until the last hose which was a smaller one looking just like one of the spark plug leads. No worries, hold the leads all out of the way and cut the one that's left. So I went ahead and cut through the lead to the ignition coil instead. On Monday I thought I'd quickly rig up a new lead from an old spark plug lead from another car, but I eneded up spending about half an hour just trying to get the old one out of the distributor cap where it had corroded in place with a strength that superglue would envy, and ended up making rather a mess of that distributor cap too. So that's off until this weekend, if my neck's not out of action again then. On the up side the vehicle I'm working on is all very exciting. I think I mentioned that for years there's been a promise that I might be given an old Jag by a relative of one of the few people I know, and amazingly enough it actually happened. It's the model earlier than mine, which was actually the model I originally went looking for when I ended up buying my first car/Jag a decade ago, but far fewer Km and apparantly with a fairly recently rebuilt engine. But of course, a few faults, the first of which being a preference for spraying fuel out of those injector hoses which had hardened and cracked over the years it spent sitting after its last real owner died. The body and interior are actually in great shape, so it's just a case of working through mechanical issues and braving all the bureaucratic hoops of the roadworthy process. The latter is really what I fear most since it was an expensive and annoying run-around for my other Jag. But first I just need it running because it's taking up the place where I was already meant to work on solving a mystery knock sound from the suspension on my other Jag, put off over winter when the floor of the shed floods (the solution to which is of course another slow work-in-progress weekend job). I've also been trying to learn MIG welding, which was going well enough (in spite of a dodgy wire feed motor on the cheap welder I'm using) I thought I'd rent a bottle of gas to use to try sheet metal welding, with the eventual aim of more Jag-work - patching up the bits of bodywork that are rusting away. Of course since then I haven't had time to use it at all and now it's $120 down the drain in monthly rental fees for the gas bottle I haven't even used. It's not all car-related stuff I've been doing, but I'm tired of talking about computer things here for one thing. Out of time now anyway. - The Free Thinker. gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-10-20Neck_Test.txt NECK TEST Was it lifting the wooden sleepers which were a bit too heavy to handle alone? Was it bending over an engine bay while removing some old fuel injector hoses supposed to be replaced last weekend? Was it bending over a laptop I had out to duplicate my backups when I was too lazy to grab the stand to bring the screen up to a comfortable height? Or was it pushing through the initial discomfort while doing my pre-bed push-ups the night before it got really bad? Or countless other possibilities? While waiting for my neck to heal these thoughts to the origins of its agony have been circling around in my head constantly for the last four days while I moan around hopelessly, alternating from silence in bed, to the still-tiring noise of entertainment on TV, to the shrieks of pain as I thrash around trying to use the kitchen. Just a sore neck, nothing new, but an extended case, and now the old dilemma of when to go back to trying to do things. I've kept up sending out orders, but I was supposed to return to a project I put on hold to deal with my tax return and applying the tariff charges to orders from the USA (which has turned out to be proper pain in the neck all of itself). After this weekend I really hoped to be back in action, and indeed it seemed the constant pain was reduced this morning to just constant discomfort. But here in fact is the test, typing this on my laptop, one-handed with the other supporting my head, and again the pain is creeping up along with my 9AM start-work time. Am I being undiciplined? I'm a bit out of passion for this project - in seeking to make something other people want to buy these days it's all about working on the firmware code rather than real electronics designed on paper and with logic tied together by solder alone. Is it an excuse? No, I can't stand much more of typing this whinge, so thinking properly about code would be way out. Away with the laptop for another day, or at least until I'm due to prepare those orders and shriek my way into the car to drop them at the post office. - The Free Thinker.