Computer Log

I want one…someday! The PDP 11/70 is what I started my computer career on. I first used a PDP-11/40 (or45), in college, where I also ran it as a tutor/operator. The front panel looked very similar to the PDP-11/70. Here is a nice article about running RSTS/E on it. The PiDP-11 is a replica of the  PDP-11/70. It’s smaller but the switches, colors and even the block “digital” brand recessed into the panel plastic…look to my eyes/memory exact. Here is a great picture. It uses a Raspberry Pi to emulate the PDP 11/70. I remembered the toggle switch settings to bootstrap the OS, probably at least 10 years after our company moved on to an IBM mainframe.

Hadn’t done this in a while. Thought I had already ripped most of my CDs that I liked years ago. However was looking for some Molly Hatchet, and none to be found in my collection. How can that be? I listened to them a lot back in the day. I loved Southern Rock. Also no Lynyrd Skynyrd. Crazy! Anywho, I used Asunder CD ripper to rip them. For the MP3 tags, it defaulted to a service that has shut down. Googling seemed to hint I needed to use MusicBrainz…or is it MusicBrainz Picard. WTH is with the Picard part? Was the author a Star Trek fan? IDK and IDC! This seemed to be software with no way to point to tell it to look at the CD. I could point it at a folder after I ripped the CD and then after identifying the files, it would identify the CD files. Which in it self was flawed, as it identified more files than were on the CD. Ripping and MP3 tags obviously something I rarely do these days. Not interested in reading all the how-to’s and Wikis. I just want to get it quickly working so I can get to my music and move on. To make a long story short finally informed Asunder to use the CDDB server gnudb.gnudb.org info here. May elaborate more later, but probably won’t.

Oh yeah…one last thing. I had to install lame to rip to MP3’s.

Found out pCloud has 2-factor . So enabled it. Something to note, is it gives the option to use Google Authenticator. Shouldn’t it instead say a 2-factor app or an app like Google Authenticator? Because I don’t use Google Authenticator I use FreeOTP, which implements open standards: HOTP and TOTP. Which as of this date is sponsored and officially published by Red Hat.

Needed to install easygui in Python 3. So…pip3 install easygui. Then it reported that tkinter was missing. First off I thought tkinter was included with python…I guess not…maybe python 2? So quick googling suggested pip install tk. which ran but still “reported that tkinter was missing”. More googling suggested pip install python-tk. WTH? I guess so you won’t accidently install Cobol-tk in python. Evidently the fact that I’m using pip doesn’t imply python? Anywho still reported that tkinter or something was wrong/missing. Finally pip install python3-tk worked!

Being that Python 2 is no longer supported it’d be nice if the defaults were for Python 3!

I hate them! If I’m aware that a product uses them I try to find a similar product that doesn’t. This is a highly unscientific rant. Totally based on my own opinion based on my lifelong experience using them. They are relatively expensive, they are often awkward to install.

Why the rant? Because I just found a missing electronics meter, that was ruined because the 9-volt battery leaked and one of the posts totally deteriorated, to the point where I wouldn’t be able to replace the battery, because of it. Now that could happen to any battery. However in the case of a AA battery often there is still a nub remaining to provide some contact. Because of the length of time it has been missing…to some degree I expected it. So this rant isn’t so much to do with it leaking, but more to the fact as the necessity of this battery. Why is a 9-volt battery required for a device that is mostly off? You turn on every now and then for a brief test. Certain devices seem to require them. I think most of my old answering machines used them to provide backup memory protection, also electric clocks for the same reason. I think smoke alarms also often use them…and you are warned to replace them every year. If my memory is right…a lot of toys required them,

Why could my old CD player that had to spin a motor to spin the CD and had a LED display, run on 2 AA (rated at 1.5volts each) batteries. I admit it couldn’t run very long, but the operating requirements seemed pretty steep. Why can my analog clock that has to turn the hands run 2+ years, using 1 AA battery…last so long? The minute hand has to advance 1440 times a day. It also has a second hand that has to move 86,400 a day. That’s 2,635,200 movements a month. But an electronic meter that only has a LED display and is used very infrequently…in my case…require 9-volts? Is there anything that my electronics meter using a 9-volt battery could do that 2 AA batteries (3 volts) couldn’t do?

Is there a 9-volt consortium, convincing companies to use them?

In all likelihood there is some reason. Perhaps 99.999% of the parts could work fine with 2 AA batteries, but one specialty part requires a higher voltage for some reason? On the other hand I took out another digital multimeter I bought a few years ago, to replace the one I just found, that has largely been sitting for a few years. I didn’t have to open it up because I found a YouTube review video of the exact model and it showed installing 2 AA batteries. The review was very positive.

With my desire to change my backup distro from Manjaro to something else and recently considering Fedora because of Manjaro removing any 3270 offering…now may be a good time! Their latest release 34 has been getting a lot of good press. My tendency is to stick with KDE but I have seen many positive mentions about gnome 40.

Fedora negatives or concerns? Wayland does not work and play well with NVIDIA graphics. Pipewire which replaces PulseAudio and Jack is fairly new.

I’ve complained about this before, but it’s a problem I have with Mint’s mystery downloading. Because of a new HD I recently reinstalled Mint and Manjaro. So both distros should be fairly fresh. And Mint is still doing this crap! Below is shortly after I logged on and haven’t used any programs. WTH is it downloading. Why is Mint using the bandwidth I pay for to download something of size? I could understand checking for updates, a returned list would be very small…a small spike on the graph. The bandwidth used could and perhaps is actually doing some type of update. I disconnect for 10-20 seconds then reconnect and before long it’s doing this again. If I let it continue it maintains this for many minutes. This isn’t an simple query to tell me my system status. This is many many megabytes. Possibly a GB or more.

And how does Manjaro look?

Like this while watching a YouTube Livestream at 480K

Or like this while doing a big update…

A Manjaro big update…that I started looks like Mint’s mystery background download.

I need to dig into this more.

I just had a Eureka moment…running it batch like the installation tests did. Even if it didn’t lead to a solution at least it would be quicker for me to write (then test) locally using an editor I’m familiar with. On the ISPF side I’m constantly pressing home to go to a line beginning, only to end up on the command prompt at the top of the screen. Then I can’t enter text because of invisible stuff at the end of the visible text, and press end to go to the end of the line…with no results! I think I read somewhere that, that is a 3270 emulation issue, that can be fixed in the settings.

Then after editing I have to swap to another screen to test it. I’m aware also that the ISPF editor has quite a lot of features (F1 to see them). And if I was familiar with them I’d be more productive.

OK, I guess this idea is sunk also…”TSO REXX functions are only available in TSO environments (online or batch) not in plain batch.”, which explains why my “ALLOC” command failed. Although I don’t understand “(online or batch) not in plain batch.” however I assume I’m attempting plain batch.