Category: Kentucky Fried Geek

Tinkering with FreeDOS

For the past couple of days I’ve been playing with FreeDOS–trying to get it to behave with a couple of different modern-ish computers. Actually it’s been more like a week or so, but, meh. It’s been fun getting things to work, but I’ve discovered that the computers I’m playing with are really at an odd age where they’re a little too new for FreeDOS, but not new enough for anything else, other than the pre-installed OSes and almost any flavor of Linux. The computers being new enough to still get around using Linux is awesome and all, but I really want to have a DOS machine. My results have been mixed. The best memory handling and such coming out of running FreeDOS off a USB stick on the XP laptop–or motherboard–I wrote about a few posts ago. The best overall performance–counting things like networking, graphics, and audio have come from having it installed on an old thin-client that originally had embedded Win7. Unfortunately, neither has a BIOS doing what I would like, nor do they have PS/2 connections–so playing with USB has proven impossible for now, as both controllers go to “legacy mode” in order to run a keyboard, and I haven’t found a way for FreeDOS to steal the controllers back–which would be even more fun to try on the XP machine, as I’d have to figure out how to regain control of the thumb-drive.

As for that thumb-drive thing, if I’d gotten to where I could steal the controller from the BIOS, the solution would’ve been something like loading FreeDOS, creating a ram-drive to toss the drivers and kernel into, switching to the ram-drive, steal the host, then switch back to the drive. So, yeah, already thought that out; but it didn’t matter as I couldn’t even get that far.

Sigh.

Anyway. Just wanted to post a note about my latest tinkering. Meanwhile, I’ve discovered a few awesome little DOS programs that I really want to play with on the regular instead of just in this haphazard trial and error mess.

I dunno.

I hope to come back soon with a story of successfully getting a more appropriate machine running DOS. 🤞

Playing with Windows XP

A few weeks ago I decided to set up an old, broken netbook on the desk and just start playing with it as a normal, everyday use sort of PC. Nothing exciting or all that special–and really nothing worth telling anyone about, I guess. But, sharing some of my useless tinkering and nonsensical ramblings is what this whole journal/blog/whatever is all about, so, yeah.

Sitting on the desk–or table, rather–up against the wall is the motherboard out of an old Acer Aspire One A150–check it’s info and Geekbench scores here. I’ve only the board sitting there with the power supply plugged into it, as I’d removed it from the shell a few years back to retrieve the hard-drive, and I never put it back together–the LCD and keyboard on the poor thing were destroyed by children a very long time ago. For a display, I’m using a Vizio E24-C1 television. The TV had been a sort of “smart tv” back in the day, but advances in technology have rendered it just another television–the only “smart” features that still work are YouTube, and Yahoo News & Weather; all other apps and services have died over the years.

Since I’m tied down to the desk, I’m using ethernet rather than wifi, and have plugged an old Creative Labs ED2400 in just for the fun of playing with optical media. The keyboard is an Adesso ACK-540UW–not my favorite, but it works.

Side note–I just went searching for a link of some sort to offer for the drive, and could only turn up results for people selling them second-hand (of course). Anyway, I picked up mine while “thrifting” at the Lexington Peddlers Mall for five bucks; I found two on ebay–as of now, there’s one for $140 and one for $200!

And, as the post title suggests, I’m running Windows XP–updated with every patch it could get, of course.

Yes, you read right, I’ve got an old XP machine connected to the Internet. I’m here to catch and spread as much digital disease as possible. (Doubtful, of course, as I did grab as many updates as I could force upon it–including the POSReady ones, plus I’m running firewall on the machine, and am sitting behind two other firewalls. I mean, it’s possible, but I doubt it. Besides, with what vulnerabilities the system still may have, what are the chances I’ll actually trigger a malicious web script, or download an infected file?)

Anyway, I’m tinkering with a laptop on life-support, and I’m loving it.

One of the odd things that I’m most proud of is finally figuring out how to mess around with cygwin. A lifetime ago when I learned that having a Linux-like layer of compatibility on Windows I was excited and wanted that functionality; unfortunately, when I tried, I kept running into numerous issues that I just couldn’t figure out–that, and the issues of Internet accessibility I faced at the time didn’t help. Now, having a slightly better understanding of Linux and a better grasp on what I want to accomplish with using a computer–plus “high-speed Internet”–I’ve finally gotten a working installation of cygwin on an XP machine. It only took me about twenty years to get here. (If you want or need instructions for getting cygwin on XP, check out https://superuser.com/questions/1132000/is-it-still-possible-to-get-cygwin-for-xp)

I guess one of the silliest things that I’ve done with the machine so far–other than bringing it to life–is probably my getting it to run irssi. I would’ve preferred to have weechat running on it, but I still haven’t found a way of making it compile and don’t believe I ever will. Irssi works just fine, though. Since I haven’t completely weened myself off of using multiple windows and haven’t fully trained myself on IRC commands, I had to make irssi more weechat-like, and found a decent tutorial for that. The next thing was getting an easy way to load URLs–I’m really only using IRC as a live newswire sort of thing and not chatting it up with people (I’d need friends for that to happen). I found the “openurl” script, changed the call from w3m to links–I know, w3m was the better choice, but I’m still learning console stuff–and, boom. I can now open the full text link of that weather alert from the iembot on mastodon; now I just need to view the images in links.

I tried to see if I could compile sxiv or fim like I had on my Linux machines–as I wanted to have animated gif compatibility. Unfortunately, I kept running into different incompatibilities and requirements that I just couldn’t seem to satisfy; then I remembered–I’m running this on a Windows machine, why not just have it call an actual Windows program? After a little searching, I finally found the program I was looking for–JPEGview. I downloaded the last version that dkleiner released, put the 32bit exectuable right in the Windows directory, launched it, let it create an empty ini file in the Documents and Settings folder, told it to save the opened defaults to that ini, and then I went back to the ini to tell it not to go fullscreen, and–boom. Now I can launch JPEGview to see images in an instance of links launched from irssi in a cygwin terminal–after associating image extensions with JPEGview in links, of course.

Yeah, I know. That was a whole bunch of useless nothing to write about, but I’m having fun, and I think that’s what’s important, isn’t it?

Forgotten Google Photos

Chances are that you know about Google Photos–you may even be a user of the apps and service. I, for one, am a Google Photos user–and quickly digressing, have been since before its odd birth from Google+ and Picasa. Anyway, since Google Photos came along and eventually offered automatic backup to the cloud from Android devices I’ve been full in. That means, however, that I’ve collected quite a few different photos, memes, and screenshots along the way and had them disappear into the dark recesses of my photos archive, never to be seen–until now. See, while I may go back and view photos on occasion through either the app or on the web, I usually only go looking at things by using the albums that Photos creates for me–or if I’ve got a specific image in my mind that I want to view I might use the search to try and find it. Rarely, if ever do I take the time to go scrolling back through the decades of photos I have stored online. Yes, decades–I can’t believe that I’ve actually been a user of the service in some fashion for that long; and, I’ve honestly got photos from decades prior to Photos inception–remember, I said I was a user of Picasa, and when I was I had been using the service to not only store digital photos of the then present day, but uploading and organizing older family photos I scanned into the software.

Anyway, with all that said, you might guess I’ve got a slight bit of an archivist or digital information hoarder in me. As such I’m always wanting to try and play with the odd program or tool to save and organize the digitized portions of my life. One tool that I had discovered over a year ago was a python app called Google Photos Sync (gphotos-sync). Once I discovered it, I started making regular local backups of my photos from the cloud, onto an old netbook I have. Yeah, I know, you’d think I would already have local copies of these memories, wouldn’t you? Well, once upon a time, I did; then a nasty divorce happened, followed by depression, and then finding an awesome new love, followed by a very demanding job–I kinda just let that part of me fall to the wayside. Now, I’ve had more time to tinker and rediscover my computing and archiving interests. Still, I’ve only been syncing what I’ve had go into the cloud with a local hard-drive. Today, however, I went a bit further.

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a lot of geeky things–including attempts to get myself into writing here more often, as has been mentioned in numerous previous posts. Well, along with all of that has been the on-again, off-again with getting my desktop PC set the way I want it. Today, I reached a point where I thought it was time to try and bring the photos from the aforementioned netbook over to the desktop, and start syncing things over there, as well as start getting back into the more hands on approach to photo album management. So far, everything from Google Photos is synced to the desktop–down-sync only–and imported into what had been my previous goto on Linux for photo management–Shotwell. My next steps will be to see how to have Shotwell and gphotos-sync cooperate in uploading any changes I make back to the cloud. This is where I’m unsure how much of a headache I’m going to give myself. I would like to use Shotwell to make potential simple edits, like crops and tags, as well as helping me identify “junk” photos that have been saved in the cloud. I’ve just got to see if when I upload via Shotwell from one of the pre-existing gphotos-sync directories and then perform a gphotos-sync if there’s going to be a conflict. Unfortunately gphotos-sync doesn’t currently support upload.

And there is what sparked me on writing this entry in the first place–“junk” photos. All those screenshots, memes and other non-sense that Google automatically backed up for me, that I completely forgot about.

After Shotwell imported everything into its little database I took a few minutes to scroll through my collection and noticed there’s quite a few images that I really don’t care enough for to keep–at least not as a part of what would have once graced a family’s shelves of photo albums. There are several images, however, that I wouldn’t mind keeping in a scrapbook–or something akin. So, for the next few posts, I think I’m going to share those oddities here so that I do still have a copy somewhere once I delete them from my collection. I will try to include a story–if I can remember one–to go along with whatever images I end up sharing.

This could be a fun little journey.

Movie Collection

## Thu 15 Jun 2023 11:55:55 AM EDT

How many movies do you have in your home? What formats? Have you watched them all?

If someone were to ask me those questions, I must say that my immediate answer would be a quick, “I don’t know. But, if the same person were curious enough to say that they would let me check to see, I could actually give them an answer relatively quick, as I have spent way too much time cataloging our collection.

And if by some weird chance you are the type of person that would want to walk up to me and ask me about the collection off videos I have at home, let me go ahead and beat you to the punch, and drop a link here to a spreadsheet:

=> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iVpG9tIs_F8Db4KMd9QbASrbhBA8ZO94FUx-pH_DlCA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iVpG9tIs_F8Db4KMd9QbASrbhBA8ZO94FUx-pH_DlCA/edit?usp=sharing

That sheet lists every title that’s currently on the shelves in my home. There are a few duplicate titles listed, but you should notice in the “media” column that duplicate titles are usually due to having it available on another format. And, yes, there are quite a few unpopulated cells and a few cells that might contain bad data; while I did take quite a bit of time cataloging everything, I have yet to take the time to make the data perfect. For the most part, I simply popped a title in, hit a button, and let the program i was using do the rest. As for the software I used to catalog everything, I used GCstar, a neat–nearly defunct–little program that was built for cataloging just about any collection a person might have.

=> http://www.gcstar.org http://www.gcstar.org
=> https://gitlab.com/GCstar/GCstar https://gitlab.com/GCstar/GCstar

I would love to sit and write more about the little program, but I think I’ll save that for another day, just like all the other random bits of software I would love to review. For now, though, I can say that I like the program and it suits my needs just fine. Oh, and I guess I’ll go ahead and share another neat little trick that it can do; imagine that for some reason you’re running a small library or a mom and pop video store–or that you’re just that protective and proud of your collection. Well, guess what; you can publish a listing of your collection on a webserver for browsing–exported from the program, it doesn’t do the serving–and within the program you can record people borrowing titles, and when you agreed to have them returned.

As for the web display of the catalog, I do have an example using my collection running on my home server. There’s several different templates that the program had included–and you could, of course tweak any of it to suit your tastes–but I’m just going with one of the simpler looking ones that had a search functionality built in.

=> https://kg4vma.duckdns.org/collections/movies https://kg4vma.duckdns.org/collections/movies

I dunno. Anyway, there’s a list of the different things we have to watch at home–which gather dust, mainly, as we’re usually streaming something.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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# Untitled
## Thu 16 Mar 2023 10:02:00 AM EDT

Been a little while since I’ve written anything–I’m not entirely sure how long, as I haven’t bothered to look back to find out. I’m pretty sure it was before the Mrs’ vacation that I’d last written anything–which is what partially led to my writing hiatus. So, a small, week-long stay-at-home vacation was had, where I tried to devote much of my time to the wife being home; all was nice, calm and relaxing–then we received our tax refund. After realizing we’d been returned a decent chunk of change we did a little bit of shopping, of course, and also bought a few parts for a car that we’ve been needing to repair for a couple of years–and that’s where the remainder of my time went. I’m still in the process of repairing that car, though I have managed to return it to a somewhat road-worthy state. Basically, if it *really* needs to be on the road tomorrow, it can be; otherwise I still need to figure out a wheel noise, maybe redo the brakes, and replace the timing belt.

Since then, we’ve also aquired an ’87 AMC XJ which is in need of a lot of attention. The Mrs has been in search of an XJ of that vintage for a very long time, and this was the first to crop up that hadn’t been without a title nor destroyed by being turned into a “toy”. It is suffering rusted out floors and one section of the driver frame rail; it’s also had some weird hacked together modifications due to a previous owner having to deal with theft. There’s several other small issues that the thing has, but so far the main issue keeping us from at least getting the thing to run seems to be the need of a fuel pump.

I dunno. I can’t think of anything else terribly important that I want to take note of… Until then,

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Wed 15 Feb 2023 02:16:48 PM EST

I really need to figure out a solution for my Instagram posts, soon. I’m pretty sure I mentioned before that I’ve got things set to post Instagram shots to my WordPress installation, and I would love to have that sort of functionality here; unfortunately, I haven’t the smarts to whip up any sort of code on my own to do it, so we’re talking me trying to see if I can find either something whole or bits and pieces where a few have attempted things simlilar, and then I try to figure out how to cobble it all together.

Anyway, the past few days have been fairly nice with regard to the weather, so I’ve snapped several pics of the kids and posted them to Instagram. So, yeah, I just came to the realization that I better start thinking of something soon, before I have a ton of photos that I’ll have to import manually instead of automagically.

blah.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Mon 13 Feb 2023 09:19:10 AM EST

Had kind of a late start to this morning, unfortunately. I did get up at 5am when the alarms went off, then I proceeded to the kitchen to make the Mrs. some coffee and her lunch for work, then I laid back down in bed beside her and gave her a nudge at each following quarter hour alarm until she rose at 5:45; then, I apparently fell back asleep. So much for that idea of thinking about the dog in the morning to keep me up and moving. Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow morning.

Speaking of the dog, she’s still giving troubles when it comes to the ideas of being housebroken. After I finally woke–for real, this time–and had breakfast with the kids, I went to get the dog from her crate to take her outside. After letting the dog loose and putting her harness on I went to grab my jacket–and, of course, the dog urinated in the family room. So, first mopping of the family room is now out of the way. I only had to mop it four times yesterday.

In other news, I fired up weechat for the first in–I dunno, a week?–and it appears that things are working just as I’d hoped. I got dinged with a ton of bell notifications thanks to the buffer playback. I lightly scrolled through to see how it looked; I approve, though I wonder how much larger I can raise the buffer limit. Not that I’d want it to playback a week’s worth of messages should I be away that long–referring mainly to my twitter feed–but that would be kind of cool.

The dog is nibbling on my shoes.

I fired Rivendell back up yesterday evening after having my music machine sit dormant for a few days. Unfortunetely, I discovered that while the machine had been running my Riv daemons had not (I’d thought I’d left the backend stuff running and just not started up rdairplay, etc.). So, after restarting the chain of services I took the time to create a log for yesterday and today; I’m generating logs for tomorrow through Thursday as we speak–the cron job I’ve set for generating day 4 fired without a hitch and has Friday already waiting.

Well, there you have it–one of my random tinkering things that I want to talk about eventually–Rivendell. There’s just so much that can be said about the collection of software that is Rivendell–and so much that I honestly do not know or truly understand. I would love to write something about it from a layman’s sort of perspective, I guess, and introduce it to other people that would be interested. Rivendell is a radio automation system just like the big boys use–actually, the big boys do use it–it is professional software; but it is FOSS! The company that provides it does charge for professional support and installation–and offers (or at least had–I’m not sure of now, as I’ve not looked at that stuff in years) fully installed machines for installtion in broadcast environments. As for me, I just tinker with it, and run my own little personal “streaming radio station” at home. Presently, I’m running one of the 4.x betas on kubuntu 22.04. I think I saw that Fred–chief developer of Rivendell–said that they’re going to stop with further development of ‘buntu friendly versions, so I might have to change distros in the future–we’ll see.

Riv had been running with primary development for CentOS up until it became too dificult to rely upon it after it’s death. I think Riv is now primarily coded for Suse–but they explored Ubuntu due to the high install base. I think Fred said they’re going to explore Mint now (Mint is a ‘buntu variant, right?), which would figure, as I had been running a painful 3.x build on Mint prior to my realization that there was a 4.x beta centered on Kubuntu. I say a painful 3.x build in reference to my experience in getting whichever 3.x version it was to compile on Mint, thanks to having to track down dependencies that were compatible, as the code was centered around a different distro. I did eventually get it to compile, and I did get it to work after a ton of fuss–mainly with JACK, as I recall.

I dunno. Anyway, I’m halfway keeping an eye on what’s coming up down the road for Rivendell and will likely change my setup when they begin playing with pipewire, unless some other new killer feature or change comes along first.

Well, now that I’ve gotten completely sidetracked and attempted to geek out on something that I like playing with, yet know nothing about, I think I’ll abruptly end this post here.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 01:26:56 PM EST

A drawback to when I had placed my computer in a very accessible location was that I was constantly able to go back and write anything at any time, which would lead to multiple short posts about nothing, such as this one.

Meanwhile, the kids are playing Ms Pac-Man on the 7800 and I’m about to go sort and fold laundry. It’s a beautiful day outside, and I’ve got blinds, drapes and shutters opened to allow as much sun in as possible. It’s kind of looking like for a few days next week I might be able to open a few windows and let some fresh air into the house. I can hardly wait.

Oh well, back to work, I guess.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 11:32:02 AM EST

One thing that I used to do that kinda helped me write more in the old days was keep my computer accessible–which really wasn’t hard, considering the bulk of that period had me living in a townhouse-style apartment with the living and dining rooms open to one-another. I took advantage of this layout and had a desk splitting the living and dining room–and on that desk my computer sat. So, for the most part, I would be passing that computer throughout the day as I cleaned–so a quick stop by the keyboard to punch out whatever randome thought I’d had while cleaning house was very, very easy.

It was very therapeutic, though I’m not entirely sure if it did much to help anyone else in my life–especially as I would frequently write without a filter on my thoughts or audience. I did eventually start filtering things…

…and then I started to filter out everything.

…and then I simply stopped altogether.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Sun 12 Feb 2023 10:24:35 AM EST

I’m not getting to write as frequently as I would like to. Honestly, I would like to try and write something at least once a day. I’m halfway hoping that with the introduction of the pup into the family [see footnote] that I can alter what has become the everyday timeline and establish a new routine and new habits that can include me sitting down for a little bit and writing things.

With the pup in the house I’ve got to get myself up and take care of it–and beginning that much earlier than when the kids wake makes things a lot easier. So, if I were to begin waking at around 5am, I should be able to take the pup out in the morning before the kids wake–so that they don’t end up begging to go outside with me–and then have a couple of hours in which to fully wake and get my morning rolling with a few cups of coffee and the news followed by my commentary on the news or life in general.

I mean, that’s essentially how I did things long ago–minus the taking care of a dog part.

I think I can do this.

blah.

Thanks for reading;

–J

[footnote]
=> 2023-02-12-we-got-a-dog.gmi We got a dog…

=> ../ Go back to the main site