Computer Log

For the last month or maybe longer Firefox has been giving me problems. Problems that don’t exist on Google Chrome. A few biggish ones lately. A few days ago it just stopped loading pages even after restart. Today after watching many YouTube videos, sound stopped working on one…just one…so far. It almost seems like selective targeting. We’re going to show you how crappy Firefox is.

Just watched a YouTube video that touts the Synology 4-Bay DiskStation DS923+ for backup. He points out that removable hard drives are great…but they are a single point of failure. This maybe true however for me the the Synology solution…or others like that…are expensive! If you have the money it could be great. But there is no one size fits all solution. Personally for me just buying multiple removable storage is probably what I can live with. Yes I won’t have…to the minute backup. But the Synology is $600 without any drives. This 1TB Crucial drive I just bought was about $60…I could buy 10 of those for the same price. If I was writing a piece of code or working on some project that would take many hours or days to recreate then it’s up to me to pause from time to time and do a manual backup. Not to mention I could also copy it to another physical internal hard drive for a short time. Even if I have a physical HD failure, it’s highly unlikely that 2 HDs would fail at the same time. It’s also up to me to find some off site place to keep a backup. Which I don’t currently have. You can never (at least I can’t) plan for every “What if” situation.

Squashing the Last N Commits into One Commit Here!

I’ve been using computers for more than a few years. But I never bought a laptop. Always wanted one…never had one. I’ve put Linux on other peoples laptops though. Obviously my laptop would have to run Linux. Lately I’ve been interested in the Framework Laptop. I like that they say “We love Linux at Framework” and “We designed the Framework Laptop from the outset to be a great Linux laptop”. Their modular laptop philosophy only makes me more interested. Add to that they’ve recently offered a AMD option. I always thought the prices on a decent Linux laptop were high. I threw together a quick build for an idea of price and…

Still a little high for this cheap old guy. So I have to look at alternatives. One thing I really like about the framework is Built-in hardware privacy switches give you complete control over access to the camera and microphones.

Quickly looked at the System 76 Pangolin and was surprised at this…

A better processor, twice the memory, however not much default storage. I’d like to downgrade the processor (which doesn’t seem to be an option) and add more storage to keep the price lower.

So this caused me to consider their cheapest model…the Galago Pro 14″ which comes in at $1023 with a Ryzen 5, 16GB and 1TB storage (it appears there is only 1 single storage option, so OS and /home are together). I could probably live with this, as I could offload data to a external drive.

If I went up to their Lemur Pro I could add additional internal storage.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, author of ‘Moore’s Law’ that helped drive computer revolution, dies at 94

I’ve written Go programs before and thought I understood integers better than I did. The instructor said “just use int”. And I was going to prove him wrong because of overflows. Sometimes I make an assumption based on what I know from another language.

var i int16=32767 (OK)
var i int16=32768 (Not OK overflow)
However I didn’t realize (just int)…
var i int=32768 (OK)

Similarly (for unsigned integers)…
var i uint16=65536 (Not OK overflow)
var i uint32=65536 (OK)
var i int=65536 (OK)

I paused the video to write all the above the went back and unpaused where he described the other integers,

I didn’t realize I could use backticks for strings. Makes building a string with double quotes easier. A small but useful feature. Especially when I can’t see many circumstances where I need to use backticks in a string. Single quotes are for one character.

s := “This is a string”

s = `This is a “string” with double quotes using backticks`

s = `This is a ‘string’ with single quotes`

s = `This is Bill’s string`

Also you can do this…

func main() {
s:= This is a test
fmt.Println(s)
}func main() {
	s:= `This
	is
	a
	test`
	fmt.Println(s)
}

I’ve noticed this for a while. Thunderbird has this feature (pause) where you can pause updates. I have several feeds I am no longer interested in so I paused them. However the feed still shows the new articles. However the feed is dimmed out…pretty stupid.

Similar to Startrek being ported from a PDP-11 to a TRS-80. Scott Adams who saw and played Colossal Cave Adventure on, as he called it the DEC mainframe (probably a PDP-10 later marketed as the DECsystem-10) created a very successful Adventure series, inspired by the Colossal Cave Adventure, for the TRS-80. Here is Scott talking about it.

I opened a issue with the guy who supplied the RSTS/E games pack…here, describing my problem. After I created a [100,102] account with REACT [it’s been so long that I didn’t remember REACT]…I followed his instructions with a slight change. Below is his response…

Because of the way the support files are opened by ADVENT – you’ll need to copy one of the files into your account.

The following copies the main executable to your account and the game text and creates the index and saved game files –

PIP SY:ADVENT.SAV=DL0:[100,102]ADVENT.SAV
PIP SY:ATEXT.TXT=DL0:[100,102]ATEXT.TXT
RUN DL0:[100,102]ABUILD.SAV

Then to run it just do

RUN ADVENT

The documentation files included with ADVENT are not very clear as regards running it under RSTS/E. If you have the Fortran compiler, you can adjust the filenames in the source-code to point to the ATEXT.TXT file in a specific directory (using for example, a system wide logical name like ADV:) and then install the ADVENT.SAV program as a CCL command (like ADVENT). Since the program is large there’s not enough memory to do the set-up from the main executable image, so a first-time user will still need to run ABUILD only once to build the index files ATEXT.DAT and AINDX.DAT.

Tony

Below is my change

I simplified it slightly by creating as I said above a [100,102] account. Thereby eliminating the 1st PIP. Now I can just login to 100,102 and…

RUN DL0:ADVENT