You reached my personal web page and blog. I post on technologies, projects and ideas currently on my mind.
Using a static HTML generator now called Hugo. Before I used HTML and server-side-includes. Synchronization is done with rsync over ssh. If you ask yourselves, why no CMS, well, the two wikis/CMS I had before (I don’t mention names) were hacked in no time. And don’t want to spend any time doing security updates all the time.
Hosting is done on a Raspberry Pi 1 B+ (as of 20th of July 2019 it has been upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B) with ArchARM. I was simply fed up with the speed and the cumbersome user interface of nowadays virtualized web hosting solutions (I don’t mention names here again).
The Alix 2D.13 board in the black box underneath is running OpenBSD and is the newest and shiniest self-built router (with stealth master-DNS, DHCP, etc.) for my local network and my personal domain.
..and yes, the table is dirty.. :-)
This time the vintage computer festival in Zürich was held in the “EWZ Kraftwerk Selnau” for the second time. It was happening in freezing January and not in chilly November.
This year was special as there was quite a different set of exhibitors.
As usual I’m just listing new things or things which catched my eye.
This year was also special because I was there exhibiting my own IMC-2001.
This time the vintage computer festival in Zürich was held in the “EWZ Kraftwerk Selnau”. This is a former substation in the middle of Zurich which is a museum, event hall and coworking area now. The enterior is best described as a bunch of ship containers aranged in a middle of a factory hall. In the middle there is a bar now. There are corners with couches and a big room upstears which looks like the former control room (and most likely was one).
This is the last vintage computer festival in Zürich in the “Rote Fabrik” (which has to be restorated after a bad fire back in 2012) - at least for now. It was held on November 19th/20th.
It was back to what it was before the pandemic in terms of exhibits, the amount of people attending, the talks (which where held again this year).
It’s an ever growing community of exhibitors, most of them try to attend every year, so I’m just pointing out the new things, which catched my attention (the others can be seen on older blog entries of the series).
First of all, quite amazing it could even happen given the pandemic situation, thanks to all organizers and exhibitors. It was held on November 27th/28th in Zürich in the “Rote Fabrik”.
No talks were held this year, also for obvious reasons. There were not many people there presumably also due to the pandemic situation.
2019 I saw a PDP-11 emulator along with an emulated Tektronix 4010 graphical terminal. This time there was the real thing. Really impressive, and a phenomenal keyboard. (The image below is unintentionally blured due to the subpar photographic skills of the author):
With Archlinux32 reaching some terabytes of data to backup I needed something “modern”, like a tape. Now, big tapes like LTO-8 are close to unaffordable, LTO-4 drives and tapes on the other hand can be aqcuired on the cheap. They get thrown out of servers rooms at the moment.
An LTO-4 tape can take 800 GB uncompressed data and the drive can be bought on Ebay for 200 to 300 CHF. Media is affordable at ca. 40 CHF per tape.
My first visit to an exhibition of old computers. It was held on November 30th and December 1st in Zürich in the “Rote Fabrik”. Given my collection of not-so-old computers I wanted to see a collection of really old computers.
The first thing which catched my attention was a PDP-11 emulator with frontend also simulating a Tektronix 4010 graphical terminal. It’s running on a Raspberry-PI fully emulating a PDP-11 running BSD 2.11. I was aware of old Unix V6 or V7 versions running on emulators, but a BSD 2.11 with a TCP/IP-stack is so much nicer.
It was a beautiful day. My mailserver on the Raspberry Pi B was running without any issues for some time now.
In the evening of March 12th I got a nice email from my external DNS provider:
The BuddyNS janitor writing. A safety notification on your BuddyNS account:
Your zones reached 60% of your account's traffic quota.
Details:
* Total traffic produced this month: 181 Thousand queries.
* Current traffic quota: 0.3 Million queries/month.
Well, fine, I thought, finally somebody is checking on my web page and I went to sleep.
I got an old Mac from a collegue at work. Apple decided not to support those devices anymore, anyway, they date back to 2006. I think, it’s a pitty, because this Mac has a solid case, a pretty fast 64-bit processor (sorry Archlinux32, no test machine for you) and a graphic chip which is not melting away like in later models (I don’t name brand names here)..
Here the specifications:
So.. I removed my personal git repos from GitHub and I’m using now my local repository.
The reasons should be obvious:
Find my software on http://git.andreasbaumann.cc/cgit/.
If you want to collaborate or supply a patch, you can contact me via email.
I started to make exceptions to the rule above: when forking and working on existing projects which happen to be on Github already. Or when I push a read-only copy to Github from personal repos, just to increase the visibility of the project.
I saw a video on LGR and thought, this is a nice system to run my own operating system on.
The Unisys CWD-4002 came as a i486 DX/2, 66 MHz, 16 MB RAM and a 512 MB hard drive. sweet. And fits under my monitor, together with a Aten KVM switch and an Alix 1.E minicomputer:
Ok, I increased the memory to a whooping 32 MB. And I bought an IDE-to-SD-adapter as the 512 MB hard disk is not enough for a basic installation of Archlinux32 and I don’t know how long the hard disk would work anyway: