Hit me with your favorite dialup BBS still in operation. I've tried a few from the 'net, but so far they're all disconnected or a human answered. I don't want to be flagged as a prank caller!
Ethan Blanton
boosted
TI Silent 707 to IBM PC 5150 via local line simulator https://toobnix.org/videos/watch/b8093dc1-753d-4ee7-b534-e4d48c27e9aa
A demo of the homebrew line simulator allowing an IBM PC 5150 to "dial in" to a TI Silent 707 printing terminal:
https://toobnix.org/videos/watch/b8093dc1-753d-4ee7-b534-e4d48c27e9aa
Enjoy!
For clarification ...
This is a TI Silent 707, a 300 baud telephone terminal (it has a built-in modem) with an RS-232 adapter plugged into the back.
This is the smallest portable printing terminal that I'm aware of (aside from the Silent 703, which doesn't require the adapter as it has RS-232 built in!). It's rather slow, partly because the carriage return is very slow.
It's logged into a Pentium 166 MMX running Slackware 3.5.
How to Get Started with CP/M by Carl Townsend is the best CP/M introductory book I've seen yet ... by a fair margin. Thom Hogan's CP/M User Guide is also good, but Townsend is somehow higher density while still being very approachable.
From an email I received:
"United Parcel Service of America, Inc. UPS, the UPS brandmark, and THE COLOR BROWN are trademarks of United Parcel Service of America, Inc."
(Emphasis mine)
Wait ... what?
This is probably common knowledge, but Texas Zmodem (TXZM) is awesome. A terminal emulator + ZModem in under 50 kB that runs fine business on an 8088.
It's pristine, except that it has two ST-225s instead of a second floppy. I even have the front cover plate!
Ethan Blanton
boosted
"That reddit-killing distributed self-hosted tool you’re building probably won’t kill reddit, sorry. [...] Make something personal for a dozen people, because that’s the one thing those massive vendors will never do and never even understand that they could do."
- Graham: "My proposal for scaling open source: don’t"
https://www.sicpers.info/2021/07/my-proposal-for-scaling-open-source-dont/
So it looks like xpra (at least as of the current release, 4.2) handles a lot of what I want, although I haven't yet gotten it all _working_.
Virtual desktop: check. Run xpra start-desktop instead of xpra start, and it shares a virtual screen instead of individual apps.
Screen management: check. Use a system proxy and it will allocate screens for you. (Isn't working for me, though.)
Improved performance: check. xpra has always excelled at this.
Persistent desktop: check. Just reconnect.
Ethan Blanton
boosted
Unless companies face serious consequences for violating our privacy, they’re unlikely to put our privacy ahead of their profits. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/improving-enforcement-state-consumer-privacy-laws
Suppose you wanted to serve Linux desktops to remote users (DE is not critical, but full graphical desktops, persistent through network failure, but you can assume a ~decent network connection) who might be running: Linux x86, Windows x86, macOS x86 or M1, _maybe_ Windows ARM. There's budget for substantial computing hardware, but a full VM per user is _probably_ going to blow it.
What would you use?
My personal information has been stolen twice in the past couple of months, both times from third-party services contracted by professionals with whom I do business (one insurance agency, and one medical practice; in both cases I don't know which one).
Why does there not appear to be significant liability for this sort of thing?
I just (re-)learned that the first sentence of A Wrinkle in Time is "It was a dark and stormy night."
I'm not as disappointed as I was when I learned that Sputnik is literally the Russian word for satellite, but I'm pretty disappointed.
