| Sysop: | Amessyroom |
|---|---|
| Location: | Fayetteville, NC |
| Users: | 23 |
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| Uptime: | 47:30:43 |
| Calls: | 583 |
| Files: | 1,138 |
| Messages: | 111,153 |
I'm afraid I can't be too much help on this exact point because I only really discovered BBSing post COVID. However I have noticed a marked decline in the amount I post these days and I struggle to work out why.
I feel like I just don't have anything to say or discuss for the most
part - but I have no idea why that would be any more true today than a
year ago. Possibly I was in the middle of restoring a couple of old machines then, really didn't know which apps did what and so on, so I
was probably asking a lot more stupid questions :)
I dunno, maybe there's less BBS-friendly news? Some of the amazing retro products that came out of all the free time you mentioned probably continued to drizzle onto the market for a couple of years after they
were prototyped by their bored-stuck-at-home creators but now the pace
is slower?
The only concrete thing I can say is that there has been way too much politics for my tastes the last couple of months...
The only concrete thing I can say is that there has been way too much politics for my tastes the last couple of months...Its natural to discuss politics on bbses just as much as facebook, but I try to keep it neutral as I can since I likely have the minority opinion.
The only concrete thing I can say is that there has been way too much politics for my tastes the last couple of months...
For the sake of maybe fueling a bit of conversation:
I never got to play with / use the science lab computers in school and
I'm still slightly annoyed about it. As it happens I rescued one of
these school computers (BBC micro) a couple of decades ago and so I
thought I'd make up for lost ground.
Experiment 1 - 3D printed a couple of horseshoe shapes, stuck on
matching pairs of infrared LEDs and photodiodes, wrote some crappy
software and: voila! Light gates to measure the speed of moving objects.
Experiment 2 - ordered up a couple of thermistors from Ali Express and stuck them on the end of some long fly leads (which definitely used to
be half of a cat5 cable). More crappy software and you have a dual probe temperature graph.
Old computers really made interfacing sooo much easier than modern
stuff. OK you can now pick up arduinos, ESP32s and even Raspberry Pis
for not a lot of money and do the same things - but there's something special about systems that can barely throw a few lines of text on
screen but are able to interface seamlessly with junk out of your bit
box :)
♦5
Wait, what? A Science Lab Computer? I must not have either. I do
recall the Apple IIe and Logo, and the "Big Trak" which was super fun
when I was in about .. 4th grade maybe? I'm not familiar with the BBC micro, I'll have to check it out! What are you able to do with it?
Politics are lame. Let's go back to thinking about tech and geek stuff,I am debating if I want to go Mac or get a 4070ti geforce windows box.
then we'll go back to talking about them more.
Outside of that I have been prepping my garden plans and getting myWhat zone are you in for gardening?
green house ready for the season. I plan on doubling my garden size
this year from about 15x20ft to maybe 30x40ish if I can come up with the energy to do so. If not, I have child labor, I mean children, I can
use, my children for clarity.
LOL!!! I think it was my SR year in High School when we finally
received the Commodore PET Computers. Wouldn't mind adding one of those
to my collection today!
What zone are you in for gardening?
I wrote a phone number data base and turned that in .. the teacher putI wish I had been in HS then. When I was in HS, there were no pocket calculators yet, only slide rules. I took a course in a recording studio when I graduated. Everything was analog, 16 track Revox or Studer, BGW power amps and Klipsh monitors. The reverb was a huge plate which lived in a concrete vault under the control room floor.
me in advanced coding classes :) I had had a c64 since about 1985ish
and had been writing in basic for my C-Net BBS long before that class in 1988 lol! But dammit, I don't remember the PET computer. I finally
have time to search all of this up.
I'm in central Indiana, Zone 6. Last year was odd, every time it wouldSounds like Cape Cod. I used to live in Maryland and had no problems with squash or tomatoes. Here the growing season is shorter and I have to use other tricks. I can usually start with multiple rows of lettuces however.
rain the plants would look sick as opposed to all past years vegetation "sprung" to life. So I am going to add a considerable amount of compost
to my soil this year. We have to turn it every year here as the clay is rather hard otherwise and carrots come end up looking more like
softballs. Still taste good but .. I mean .. they don't look like
carrots. lol!
when I was in about .. 4th grade maybe? I'm not familiar with the BBC micro, I'll have to check it out! What are you able to do with it?
Oh lol! Nice. What 3d printer do you own and do you like it?
I wish I had been in HS then. When I was in HS, there were no pocket calculators yet, only slide rules. I took a course in a recording studio when I graduated. Everything was analog, 16 track Revox or Studer, BGW
power amps and Klipsh monitors. The reverb was a huge plate which lived
in a concrete vault under the control room floor.
Funny - In 77 I was not permitted to use a calculator in any of my Math classes, but it was required in my Electronics class. Specifically the TI-30. That I still have, and YES! it still works great!
I couldn't wait to dump my 'slider' seems like it would be fun today though.
Heh... As I'm (barely) a child of the 80s it always amuses me how anyone *slightly* older than me remembers using slide rules in school but I
don't think I've ever actually seen one in real life. The migration away from them must have been incredibly fast.
I do have a little engineering pocket reference book which I recovered
from my grandad's workshop when he died, including metric to imperial conversion tables, thread pitches and the all important logarithm
tables. No slide rule, though.
Heh... As I'm (barely) a child of the 80s it always amuses me how anyone *slightly* older than me remembers using slide rules in school but IIt was an exponential increase in technology. Yet here I have a bass guitar amp that's has both a tube pre-amp and power amp... weighs a ton but sonically my 100 watt tube amp shakes the house vs a 900 watt class D amp which does not :O
don't think I've ever actually seen one in real life. The migration away from them must have been incredibly fast.
It was an exponential increase in technology. Yet here I have a bass
guitar amp that's has both a tube pre-amp and power amp... weighs a ton
but sonically my 100 watt tube amp shakes the house vs a 900 watt class
D amp which does not :O
I wish I had been in HS then. When I was in HS, there were no pocket calculators yet, only slide rules. I took a course in a recording studio when I graduated. Everything was analog, 16 track Revox or Studer, BGW
power amps and Klipsh monitors. The reverb was a huge plate which lived
in a concrete vault under the control room floor.
I'm afraid I've been neglecting the BBC micro for a while. I have had
more pressing concerns because I broke my Acorn A3020 which I use as my daily BBSing machine.
It's my son's, actually. Just a bog standard Ender 3 Pro but it has seen
a lot of use in random projects. Mostly from me, to be fair!
Anyway - I had been catastrophising that my beloved A3020 was broken in
the permanent sense. The mouse stopped working and they use a special
Klipsh is (was?) a great company. Love their speakers, I have theirThe engineer, Bill Mueller, used to work with Robert Heil who had Heil sound company. Pink Floyd did their "Dark Side of the Moon" tour of the US in 1973? Anyhow there was a stage mishap at the beginning of an outdoor concert. A curtain weight broke loose and fell into a flash pot causing an explosion that blew a section of stage out into the audience and nuked their whole sound system. Robert Heil sent several tractor trailors of speakers etc., to the scene and Bill Mueller set it up, replacing all of their drivers. Alan Parsons was the road engineer for Floyd and Bill remained on the tour as the concert engineer to trouble shoot and shape the sound. Bill told me he was not keen on Pink Floyd at first but when they played he was blown away. The small studio in Timonium Md. got to do a lot of production like Robert Palmer, Pressure Drop LP, Little Feat, "Feats Don't Fail Me Now" and later, lots of Winham Hill, Tori Amos, Michael Hedges etc. He is still producing and engineering to this day. Still teaching as well....
sound bars for my non main TV's, and their Reference speakers in my home theater space. I never heard BGW amps, Krell, Aragon, Sunfire, and
others I have though. The music was much better back then than what is available in most stores these days. It's amazing how devalued consumer electronics became, and how quickly price prevailed over quality.
Acron? Interesting, I downloaded a bunch of retro filez for my other
BBS that included a bunch of Acron software and OS stuff off the wayback
machine that pre-dates or ran in parallel with the 8088. The keyboard
input looks proprietary and of course the keyboard is missing, and no
hard drive so only 5.25 floppies, with no floppies, one day maybe I'll
have a reason to fire it up or repurpose it.
Indeed, progress at that time was insane. Today we have computers that
are more powerful than the average user needs or even wants and progress
is more pedestrian - a good laptop should fairly easily last you a
decade. One of the things that struck me going back to retro computing
was (after noting the lack of common parts / interfaces) "oh, yeah - remember the days when a 2 year old computer was basically obsolete?"
Speaking of that, I just noticed I can now get 2Gbps fiber Internet vs mycurrent 1Gbps. Now granted, I am a major bandwidth hog and run
several serversin the house. I'm still good with 1Gbps. But I will
also never say somethingis too much in the long run.
Heha - I work in the ISP space, basically selling the hardware /Because your nation is smaller than USA/CAN, internet is usually affordable. I remember going to Greenwich where I told a Vodafone salesperson, I would love those prices for internet in my country. I only have 600mb internet for my household.
software / services behind the fibre to the home networks used for residential high speed Internet.
Heha - I work in the ISP space, basically selling the hardware /
software / services behind the fibre to the home networks used for residential high speed Internet.
I've often discussed with my customers "who needs 900M?" - a lot of them agree but they're happy to sell it! The fact is the actual usage is way, way lower so actually whether you sell the end user 500M, 1G, 2G, 5G...
Heha - I work in the ISP space, basically selling the hardware /So, are you selling the internal devices to the consumers, such as the eero mesh-WiFi equipment? Or are you selling the Kalex (sp) equipment that the ISP is using? I am just curious. We have fiber to the house through Shentel (VA) and have 1 gig synchronous. Unfortunately, while they do offer faster speeds, the equipment (which happens to be Kalex) is older and cannot handle the faster speeds without an equipment upgrade. I was told by a tech recently that it is slated in the next couple years.
software / services behind the fibre to the home networks used for residential high speed Internet.
I've often discussed with my customers "who needs 900M?" - a lot of them agree but they're happy to sell it! The fact is the actual usage is way,
Because your nation is smaller than USA/CAN, internet is usually affordable. I remember going to Greenwich where I told a Vodafone
So, are you selling the internal devices to the consumers, such as the
eero mesh-WiFi equipment? Or are you selling the Kalex (sp) equipment
that the ISP is using? I am just curious. We have fiber to the house
through Shentel (VA) and have 1 gig synchronous. Unfortunately, while
they do offer faster speeds, the equipment (which happens to be Kalex)
is older and cannot handle the faster speeds without an equipment
upgrade. I was told by a tech recently that it is slated in the next
couple years.
I've often discussed with my customers "who needs 900M?" - a lot of them agree but they're happy to sell it! The fact is the actual usage is way, way lower so actually whether you sell the end user 500M, 1G, 2G, 5G... they're just going to use the same. What it does mean is that the end
user pays more (for a while, at least, until the value erodes over time) and / or the ISP has some competetive advantage against local rivals because they offer "more".
Yes to both. We don't sell Calix (I believe they are fully direct ratherInteresting. I am always interested in learning about this. I am not in industry anymore (used to be in the MSP arena for almost 30 years), but keep
than via resellers?) but we do sell Nokia and some others - both the
stuff for the street cabinets and the end user devices.
Interesting that they do gig synchronous, that would suggest that it'sYes, the tech told me they just set everyone that way (that is the "short" version). When I first got service, they provisioned my circuit to 1 gig synchronus, which was a big thing for me. (When I first got service we had
not GPON but either XGS-PON or Ethernet. I tried to have a look at their
web site to see what they offer but it noticed I was in the UK and
wouldn't serve me up anything other than a "we don't have service in
your area" page. So I've no idea what upgrade they're planning :)
When I switched to fiber, I elected to get the highest speed at the time andgrow into it. The price difference wasn't that much, which at theWe currently have 1G synchronous for $80 per month. I am sure we have a price increase coming soon. As I mentioned in my post with BobW, the current fiber equipment we have in the neighborhood maxes at 1G, so I will be on this until they do upgrades. (And, I may stay there with only my wife and I in the house. We are not, by any stretch, using that bandwidth).
time it was$59.99 for 500M or $79.99 for 1G.
They just raised my price a bit this past month to $84.99, but still not badfor my usage.
We currently have 1G synchronous for $80 per month. I am sure we have a price increase coming soon. As I mentioned in my post with BobW, the
current fiber equipment we have in the neighborhood maxes at 1G, so I will be on this until they do upgrades. (And, I may stay there with only my
wife and I in the house. We are not, by any stretch, using that
bandwidth). --Matt
Same speed I have, and even being the bandwidth hog that I am, will onlyThat is right. You never know what you may need all that extra bandwidth for. It is nice to watch downloads happen much faster. What I really need to do (but I am 100% sure the wife will NOT allow) is to run CAT5e/CAT6 to each room (or at least to MY office) so I can be hardwired from the router. I did check to see what type of cabling they builders used for the phones. They used CAT5e, but daisy-chained the damn things! No home runs. I was thinking if they did home runs, I could swap the ends and have a hardwired network.
max itnow and then. I know better than to say that "is the most I'll
ever need", butright now it is. You never know what is on the horizon - like 16k live TV,etc.
That is right. You never know what you may need all that extra bandwidth for. It is nice to watch downloads happen much faster. What I really need
to do (but I am 100% sure the wife will NOT allow) is to run CAT5e/CAT6 to each room (or at least to MY office) so I can be hardwired from the
router. I did check to see what type of cabling they builders used for the phones. They used CAT5e, but daisy-chained the damn things! No home runs.
I was thinking if they did home runs, I could swap the ends and have a hardwired network. Nope - and I know that running cabling in an EXISTING building is a pain in the arse. I will just have to live with what I have.
But network engineering is also my profession, so I have to have a high endhome network. :)Well, that makes sense. I am not going to be running cabling through my house. As noted, I was "hoping" it would be home-runs back to the main area and I could "convert" it. We have no drop ceilings and I do NOT believe they had conduit running to the rooms. My office is hardwired, but relies on a mesh WiFi network to communicate with the router, etc. It works well enough.