Geekerama

Electric Dreams

/ masher / 12 Comments

Those of a technophobic disposition should probably look away now.

As with so many others at the time, my very first programmable computer was the ZX81 from Sinclair.
I can remember the stir caused by its predessor, the ZX80, which had me excited to get one, and when I did, in 1981, I wasn’t disappointed. This was all so new and exciting and opened up so many possibilities for someone with a technical bent, like myself.  The ZX81 itself, though pioneering, was a limited machine, especially with its very limiting 1k of memory. It wasn’t long before add-ons came out – one of the most useful of which was a 16K RAM pack that plugged into the rear of the computer.  This made a big difference, as it allowed larger and more useful programs to be run on the machine. However, it was also very infuriating, as the edge connector wasn’t the best at making contact and the slightest knock or wobble would cause it to lose everything. Hours of painstaking typing on that ridiculous membrane keyboard could be lost in a split-second if you weren’t careful.  I purchased a proper keyboard for mine – made by Maplin (RIP), I think – which was so much better.  I then took the computer apart and rebuilt it into a project box – also procured from Maplin – fixing the RAM pack directly onto the board to eradicate the wobble problem and fitting the power supply inside. I then had to fit a small fan to the top, as I found it would get quite hot.  I learnt a quite a bit from playing with that machine.

Inspired by Sinclair’s success in the field, it wasn’t long before other manufacturers started to flood the marketplace with their own machines. My next purchase was a Sharp MZ80K, Which I bought from Lasky’s (RIP) and which had a proper keyboard (well, almost) and a built-in monitor and also a built-in cassette deck for saving and loading up programs. With its huge 48KB of RAM, it was a big step up from the ZX81.  I think it was possible to run programs in Pascal on the MZ, but having cut my teeth on BASIC, I struggled to learn it. However, it didn’t hold me back as I became quite a whizz with BASIC and would write some fairly impressive stuff… if I do say so myself.  I spents hundreds of hours glued to that machine – sometimes even taking sick days from work, just so I could finish writing a program. It became quite an obsession.

The BBC Micro was quite ubiquitous by now, but for some reason I bypassed it completely… maybe I didn’t want to switch from the Z80 processor that I had been using so far?  I don’t know. Anyway, next along for me – and sticking with that same processor –  was the Amstrad CPC6128: a colour machine with a whopping 128KB of memory and – more importantly – a built-in floppy disk drive. Oh yeah!    Loading and saving to tape was slow and laborious, so again, this was another seachange.  This had a better keyboard than the old Sharp and the disk drive was a joy to use in comparison to the old cassette tape. As such, I spent even more hours seated in front of this, than I did with the MZ. This machine introduced me to Word Processing, via a program called Protext that I had on a selectable ROM and an Epson FX80 dot matrix printer which used tractor-fed fan-fold paper. It was bloody brilliant… for those days. The CPC6128 was the last complete desktop computer I ever bought.

In the second half of the 80’s, the Personal Computer (PC) was becoming the standard and I thought I’d have a crack at building one. I’d read about what was involved in one of the computer magazines of the day – and weren’t there some computer magazines back then? Hundreds of different titles. Our local WH Smiths barely had room to stock anything else.  Anyway, by phoning the proprietors of various adverts in these magazines (there was no real ‘online’ yet) I ordered all the bits to build an AT 286… what was commonly known back then as an IBM Clone.  I remember receiving the Hard Drive in the post: a secondhand Amstrad 20MB unit.  Twenty Meg! That was huge! I’d never be able to fill that up!  It took me an evening to figure it out and put it all together, but it worked first time.  Once again, the speed and the convenience over what I’d had before, was a revelation. And I just loved the 5¼ floppy drive.  A ‘proper’ floppy!

From then on, it has all just been a series of upgrades: 286 to 386; 386 to 486; 486 to Pentium, etc, etc. All housed within the same desktop case, so they all looked exactly the same, but each came with a performance improvement.

And then I switched to AMD processors and haven’t looked back: more bang for your buck.

My current desktop (in a newer and bigger case) runs an AMD Ryzen 5 with 6 cores; 16Gb of RAM and a 1TB Solid State Drive.  She fair flies along and has four external USB drives permanently plugged into her, as well as a NAS drive; an inkjet printer; a laser printer/scanner; an SDRPlay RSP and a Kenwood TS-590 HF radio tranceiver.

I currently have no need to upgrade, but with 16-core processors now on the market, and large SSD drives getting cheaper all the time, it probably won’t be too long before I get out the screwdrivers and the thermal paste.

 

 

 

 

Back To The Future

/ masher / 4 Comments

I was walking the dog through the woods last night, when my phone rang.

It was the current Mrs. Masher and so we had a bit of a natter for about ten minutes.

Nothing unusual about that telephone call, other than the fact that I was walking in the woods and Mrs. M was nearly 4,000 miles away, on a cruise ship in the middle of the Arabian Sea.

And it got me thinking: when I was a kid, that kind of thing was the stuff of science-fiction, but today’s generation… well, they take it for granted, don’t they?

And I wonder if, in forty years or so, my kids will be thinking along similar lines:

“You kids have got it easy! I can remember in my day, when phone calls were restricted to on-world only. “

Twelve minutes

/ masher / 11 Comments

The home phone rang yesterday morning.  I looked at the CallerID. It showed the dialing code for Sheffield. “Ooh, this could be interesting”, I thought.

I answered it and waited a few seconds for someone at the other end to pick up.

A strong Indian accent told me that it was Andrew calling from Microsoft.

“Hi Andrew”, I said, “are you calling from the Indian office?” The delay on the line indicated that it was definitely long distance.

“No sir, I am calling from Birmingham in the UK.  I am calling because our servers are picking up error…”

“So you’re not in India?”

“No sir. Our servers are picking up…”

“Or Sheffield?”

“No no, I am calling from Birmingham. Our servers are picking up error messages from your computer which indicate that someone is trying to hack into it and we would like to help you fix this”

“Hold on! A hacker, you say?  In my computer? That’s not good.  He could do untold damage in there!”

“Yes sir, that is why we would like to help you fix it. Are you in front of your computer?”

“I mean, he would gain access to all of my bank accounts and could steal all of my money. I’ve read about this sort of thing happening. What should I do?”

“Sir, I will help you fix this.  Please press the Windows key and R at the same time. Now type CMD. What do you see?”

“A black window has opened. I’ve never seen that before. Is that right?”

“Yes. Now please type…” He proceeded to give me several commands to type in, but somehow I kept spelling them wrong. We tried this for several minutes before he decided he should pass me to his ‘supervisor’.   A few seconds passed then an even stronger Indian accent came on the line.  He identified himself as Richard and explained that he would help me by showing me the problem.

“Please open your Google browser and type…”

“I don’t use Google”

“OK, open Internet Explorer and…”

“I don’t use that either”

“What browser do you use?”

“Brave”

“Huh?”

“Brave”

“Er, I… please just open whatever you use and type in ‘support.me’ and tell me what you see”.   I followed his instructions, but of course, this took several attempts because I kept spelling it wrong. Eventually I got there.

“OK, I have a page with a box asking for a six-digit code”

“Good. Please enter the code that Microsoft gave you when you bought the computer.”   Hmmm, OK, this was a new twist.

“Sorry, I don’t remember Microsoft giving me a code”

“If you don’t have it, I can generate a new code for you”.  Ahh, I see what you’re doing. Clever.

“No, hold on, I have the paperwork here somewhere, if you will just give me a minute.”

“Sir, I will generate a new code to save you time. Right, our server has now generated a new six-digit code for you. Please type in ‘q… 3… capital D…”

I looked at the clock and – fun as this was – I only had five minutes before my 10:00 meeting.

“Hold on”, I said, “how can you generate a new code for me when you haven’t even asked for my account details?”

“Our server is able to do this sir, we already have all your account details. Please type q…”

“OK then. if you have all my details, what’s my name?”

There was a few seconds pause, then “Oh go fuck yourself!” and he put the phone down on me.

I’m thinking of writing to Microsoft in Birmingham (or Sheffield) and putting in a strongly worded complaint about Richard.

Nerds Day Out

/ masher / 9 Comments

On Friday, a couple of mates from work and myself, took a day off and visited NPL – the National Physical Laboratory – in Teddington.

It was this:  most excellent.

It was also this:  wondrous.

Friday, as I am sure you are aware, was International Metrology Day and is the one day a year that NPL open their doors to the public.

We hadn’t realised that the place was so big and had so much to see.  In the nearly four hours that we were there, I doubt we saw half of the stuff that they had opened up to the public – there were still plenty of doors marked as No Entry.  But the stuff that we did see, was fascinating.

Mostly.

We saw so much, that I can’t remember a lot of it, but one of  the highlights for me was seeing the actual laser(s) that defines (for the UK)  how long a metre is.

And we also saw* a single ion trapped inside an Ion Trap.

But my personal favourite was seeing the Caesium Fountain device (well, a replica, as the real one was behind one of those locked doors) that provides the standard that UK time is derived from.

It was a great day out and I would urge anyone with any scientific curiosity to go visit. Next year.

And yesterday, we had our long-awaited (cancelled for the past two years due to Covid) local Amateur Radio Rally, where hundreds of radio and electronics nerds gathered together in a field and bought a load of old tat from each other.  I showed great restraint in only spending twenty-five quid – thirty-five if you include the three cups of tea and a sausage and egg roll.

A fun weekend.

*we couldn’t actually see it

Happy Birthday Hedy

/ masher / 6 Comments

Today is Hedy Lamarr’s 107th birthday.

Or, at least it would be, if she were still alive.

But, it’s a birthday that is still celebrated throughout the world – albeit, in a rather low-key fashion – by radio amateurs.

So, why would a load of nerdy radio hams celebrate the life of a 1940’s Hollywood actress?

She became most famous for her role as Delilah, playing opposite Victor Mature’s Samson  in Cecil B DeMille’s masterpiece “Samson & Delilah” and at the time, she was touted the most beautiful woman in cinema.

But, what many people don’t realise, is that she was also an inventor.

She invented several things, but is most famously known (among the cognoscente) for inventing a radio guidance system for torpedoes during the second World War.

The system used a technique known as Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum and was developed as a way for the Allies to remotely control their torpedoes without the enemy being able to jam them.

Although they patented this system in 1942, the US Navy only started installing an updated version of it in the 1960s, after the patent had run out, so Lamarr never received a penny in royalties.

More importantly, the principle behind FHSS went on to become the basis of more modern radio techniques that we all use today, such as Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and mobile phone transmissions.

So, perhaps it should be all of us wishing Hedy Lamarr a Happy Birthday, and not just a bunch of nerdy radio hams.

Rip Off Britain

/ masher / 10 Comments

Many years ago, I had a Psion Series 3 handheld… remember them?

I loved anything gadgety and the Series 3 fitted the bill nicely.

When it was superceded by the Series 3A, I immediately went out and bought one, even though it wasn’t that much of an upgrade.

As I remember, it cost about three hundred quid at the time.

And I was amazed, when Mrs M and I went on a shopping trip to New York just a few weeks later, to see the very same device being sold for almost half the price!

I wouldn’t have minded so much, but the damn thing was designed and built in Britain, so how can it be so much cheaper in a different country?

Fast forward to today: I was mooching through some ham radio videos on YouTube, and in one of them, someone – an American chap – showed how to build an interesting project using a Raspberry Pi, and in his video, he showed how all the parts could be sourced from Amazon. He even showed the actual Amazon pages, so one could be sure of buying the right parts.

Intrigued, I noted them all down and then went to the UK Amazon site. I then found all the parts and totalled up the price.

It worked out to be fifty quid more than what this guy paid for it in America!

The Raspberry PI itself made up over half of that difference: 64 pounds in the UK, but only 37 in the US… 27 quid cheaper!

Again, the Pi was designed in Britain.

It is a hugely successful British product.

And whilst some are made in China and Japan, the bulk of the forty million or so that have so far been sold around the world, have been made in the UK.

So why the hell are we that live in the UK having to pay so much more?

Let there be light… after a short while

/ masher / 9 Comments

A few weeks back, half a dozen of us took a ride up to a café, on the A10, near Royston.

It’s a popular haunt for biker’s and – on a sunny Sunday morning – it was pretty busy, even with the Covid restrictions meaning that we all had to eat outside on the limited number of benches available.

But we did.  And it was good.  And then we left.

Except that we didn’t. Because my bike refused to start.

CLICK, it went. CLICK.

I had to suffer the ignomy of being pushed, in order to do a bump start, in front of dozens of fellow bikers.

This is only the second time this has happened in the nine years I have owned the bike, but even still…

Doing some research into this problem, I learned that it’s a well-known (not to me it wasn’t!) issue, within the Triumph Bonneville community, which is generally referred to as “The Dreaded Click”.

One suggestion I found, was to fit a switch on the headlights to save on current draw when starting (I think many modern bikes aren’t fitted with an on/off switch nowadays, as having the headlight on permanently is seen as a safety feature, so they have removed the ability to turn it off). I saw several examples where people had fitted a switch onto the headlight housing.  There was no way, I was going to ruin my beautifully chromed headlight housing, by drilling a hole in it. There is a headlight cut-out relay fitted to most bikes nowadays, for this very reason, but it seems they don’t always work.

So, instead, I made a small timer board. That’s it in the picture at the top of this post. Wrapped in self-amalgamating tape to keep it dry and also to prevent any shorts against the metalwork, this fits easily inside the headlight housing and keeps the headlights off for about fifteen seconds from when the ignition is switched on.

The circuit is simple and I built it onto a small scrap of stripboard that I had lying around. The rest of the components were from my bits box, apart from the relay. I decided to by an automotive relay as they are water-resistant – a fiver from my local auto parts store. Also, they can handle higher current than the piddly little relays I have to hand – I measured the headlight current draw at 4A.

The positive connection to the headlight main beam was cut and put in series with the normally closed contacts on the relay. I decided to do it that way, so that the headlight would have power, should the circuit fail for any reason.

Power for the circuit was taken from the sidelight, using a couple of Scotchlok connectors to tap into the wiring.

Total cost?  Well, I had most of the parts, but I reckon about six quid.

On a ride up to Jack’s Hill last Sunday, it worked perfectly.

I thought I’d post the idea here for anyone else having the same issue.

Of course, I can’t be held responsible if you bodge it and blow all the fuses on your bike!

Archive woe

/ masher / 8 Comments

At the top of this page, just below the header, are several links.

One of these links says “Archive”.

This takes you to my old pre-2017 pages, should you wish to read drivel older than that which I am writing at the moment.

Problem is: it doesn’t work properly anymore. It used to be OK, so I don’t know what has happened.

Clicking on the link initially looked like it took you nowhere – just a black screen – but I found the posts were actually there if you scrolled down.

However, they were a right mess, with “Get Magic Quotes is deprecated” written all over the page.

My ISP provider confirmed there was nothing wrong server-side, and there was little they could do except roll back to a daily backup from last week.  Problem is, I think this issue has been there for several months, so that wouldn’t be any good.

With the help of Google, I spent several hours yesterday, tinkering with my wp-includes file and that has improved things and has removed most of that deprecated magic quotes nonsense, but it’s still not right.

On top of that, when I log in, my Dashboard has disappeared, meaning I can do bugger all with it, pretty much.

And I can’t even remember how I set this all up – OK, I know it’s only just over three years ago, but with my memory being what it is nowadays, that seems like eons.

I think – assume – that I would have set it up on a separate MYSQL database from the main blog. It did have it’s own theme, so that seems logical.

Captain.

But then, it would have had to have it’s own sub-domain, surely, and I can’t find any evidence of that.

I am at a loss now and will need to seek expert help, so if anyone out there is a bit of a WordPress guru…

 

 

 

Under attack

/ masher / 7 Comments

In recent months, the software that I use to protect this site from malicious attacks, has seen a marked increase in the number of attempts that have been made to ‘get at it’ – to use a term I am sure is often cited in the computer tech world.

Why anyone should want to get at my humble little site, is a mystery to me.

But it is concerning.

Our resident expert in such things, assures me that there is most likely nothing to worry about. as it’s probably just bots doing their thang.

I have taken relevant precautions: changed the default login name and password to something which would be far more difficult to crack and stuff like that, but it still concerns me, as the attacks seem to be on the increase. Was it something I said, I wonder?

And then yesterday, I got the report shown in the pic above.  342 in ten minutes! This is getting silly.

Dave, as you can see, it’s over your way, could you have a word?

 

 

What a packet

/ masher / 5 Comments

Whilst rummaging about up in the loft the other day, looking for… I can’t remember what, I stumbled upon my old AEA PK-88 Packet TNC.

You remember them, right?

All the big boys were running PK-232 units, but they were too costly for me. The cheaperPK-88 served it’s purpose well, though.

Back in the late 80’s, I’d gotten very interested in the X.25 protocol used to send data packets around a telecoms network and so, when some bright spark developed a version that could be used in amateur radio in the early 90’s – AX.25 – I of course decided to get involved.

Back then, packet communications was all the rage and hundreds of us set up nodes and digipeaters at home, forming a radio mesh that allowed packets to travel up and down the country, in much the same way as companies like BT were doing.  Our packets tended to be just routine messages (like an email), rather than the commercial data that travelled over X.25. Of course, our amateur network lacked the millions of pounds that the telecoms companies were able to pour into it: it was slower and prone to failure… but it was fun and we learnt a lot about network routing.  Looking back at it now, I realise just how much I have forgotten, over the years.

But anyway…  amateur packet was pretty much killed off by the internet and so I wondered what I could use my old TNC for.

Not much, according to Google.

But, a version of amateur packet is still alive, in the form of the Automatic Packet Reporting System.   Unlike the old system, APRS tends to be more localised, with guys broadcasting beacons, detailing local weather and shit like that.  All a bit pointless, but I wondered whether I would be able to use my ancient TNC to pick up APRS packets and decode them.

And so, after much fiddling about with RS232 cables and PuTTY and a bit of soldering, I was rewarded with the picture on the right.  Success!!

I am pretty chuffed at having figured out how to get it to decode the packets, after nearly thirty years.

Next step is to see if I can actually transmit any.

Watch this space… if you can be arsed.

It took it’s time

/ masher / 3 Comments

Some of you may remember the post I made six years ago, about the proposed mission to the asteroid Bennu, and how I arranged for my kids names to be engraved onto a chip that travelled with the spacecraft.

Well, for those of you who may have missed it, Osiris-Rex made contact with Bennu yesterday, making an extraordinary smash ‘n’ grab of the asteroid’s surface.

It has now started it’s long journey home… not arriving until 2023.

It blows my mind to think that the names of my children (and many others, but I’m not really interested in them, to be honest) now exist – however small – two hundred million miles away (that’s further away from us than the Sun) and will quite possibly outlast us all.

Guess what…

/ masher / 5 Comments

… I got up to this Bank Holiday weekend.

Well, we did our bit for the economy, by Eating Out To Help Out and then spending a further couple of hundred quid on footwear – new walking boots for Daughter and myself and then a stupid amount of money spent on new sandals (yes, the old faithful’s have had to be replaced: still plenty of years left in them, but sadly, our trip to Cornwall left my increasingly debilitating feet crying out for something more comfortable and so I have finally given in to the family’s wishes).

But, I aided the economy further still – well, I added to the lining of Jeff Bezoz’ pockets – by doing a complete PC rebuild.

Having been rock solid for years, Deep Thought 7 started playing up a little while back… I even dismissed the occasional Blue Screen Of Death as a minor inconvenience: “It’ll sort itself out”.

But, it didn’t, and once it started happening more often, it became evident that something needed to be done.

And so, I spent several hours updating all my drivers: far too many were out of date.

All that seemed to do, was aggravate it and prompt further and more frequent BSODs.

And then it failed completely; refusing to boot up at all, or allow me to reinstall Windows.

I initially diagnosed the SSD hard drive as the culprit, but a new one (my word, haven’t they dropped in price?) proved me wrong.

Several runs of MemTest86 declared the RAM to all be in order, so that left the motherboard or the processor.

So, time for a complete upgrade, methinks (any excuse).

Three hundred quid later, I have a nice new machine, that seems to run a lot cooler than the old one and is almost silent in operation.

And she’s fast.    Eighteen seconds from pressing the power button to Windows loading and waiting for me to enter my PIN number. 18 seconds!

OK, I know that will slow down quite a bit, once I add the four external USB hard drives; the NAS; the printers; the SDR radio, and the HF radio (Oh god: I’ve got the nightmare of getting all that working again!), but right now, I’m absolutely loving my new toy.