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 The Tech My Dad Banned From Our House

Interesting read. I suspect her dad must have been an interesting fellow.

For some reason I find myself remembering Ma mentioning my father counting out a roll of a hundred stamps as one of his quirks; I’ve always wondered how he must have gotten screwed over or otherwise ended up so pissed off once upon a time to go that far. Everyone has their quirks, pa’s notion of cutting vegetables to uniformed size at least made sense, but I’d have to have been positively mental at some event to ever do the stamps thing myself, lol.

As for my childhood I was probably fortunate. We pretty much had a computer and some form of game console my entire life, not that I will ever really fathom how our mother afforded the Tandy. I know Nanny and the local pawn shops was often involved in my brother’s drive for expensive things.

But for the most part tech considerations weren’t really imposed upon me. We had to deal with a rather tight income, but my widowed mother did her best to make her children happy. More effort than I think she should have, or more than we should have received, but those were her decisions. My brother and I certainly benefited from that side of our mother.

Should we say the tech side had both sides of that. If we could afford a PC game that I wanted, I’d probably get it eventually. If I wanted new hardware I’d probably be better off asking for a used car fund 🤣. Such was life.

Our first computer was technically my brother’s, but I was really the only one that used it very often. What really got my family interested was the Internet. WebTV was very limited but also a highly effective gateway drug to modern computing. For ma and me: it was a pragmatic thing to end up with a PC.  For my brother I imagine it was the ability to play video games and surf the Internet, but he had moved out during our WebTV era.

Someone at church that taught computer classes and such, gave us an old Pentium/32MB machine and even took the old Tandy 1000 off our hands. When it died: we ended up with our pastor’s old Packered Bell with a Pentium II/64MB. After that died, my brother naught a Dell simular to his Dimension, and ma paid him back until it was paid off. A snazzy 2 GHz Pentium 4 and probably 512 MB. Whatever, it finally had a hard drive big enough to actually install games and the best graphics card we had seen since the old Tandy!

It was these Pentium based machines where I actually had any competition for using the computer. Which was both a good and bad thing, but mostly a good thing. By that, I mean the only way we got broadband is eventually phone calls screwing around with her email was the last straw, because if my bitching and moaning wasn’t enough to drive that decision: our combined grumbles eventually did, lol.

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 If you really want to know anything about the reMarkable 2: I’d suggest watching this guy’s videos.

I kinda wish that more people spent such time on reviews, but I suppose that’s a bit excessive. Fro the reMarkable it makes more sense: being a device less typical and more specialized than your average consumer’s taste in electronics.

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 Here’s Doom Eternal running at 1,000fps with an Intel Core i7 9700K

Being a kid when the original DooM came out, and first experiencing it on console, since our Tandy was more at home with 8088 based than 386 based software, I find that kind of amazing and insane. My old i5-3570K and GTX 780 need the settings tuned just to ensure that the frame rate doesn’t dip in more demanding segments of the game, but does manage to be perfectly playable.

It’s hard to imagine Doom Eternal reaching 1000 FPS on current hardware. Not hard to imagine the first three games doing so, but that’s the virtue of time. I guess if you totally and insanely clock the shit out of a computer until you need liquid nitrogen just to avoid a halt and catch fire condition, some amazing shit is possible, lol.

Also not my fault if I’m suddenly tempted to reach for the 1993 version of DooM…..

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 Once upon a time I used to keep a copy of CD-Keys on floppy disk. On the theory I’d be more likely to lose the slip of paper or the jewel case than the actual disc. Most are still in a container in my closet.

Finally got around to fetching the old diskette out of my closet, and I find the dates interesting. In any case it’s time to migrate the files to modern media.

$ sudo mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

[sudo] password for terry:

mount: /mnt: WARNING: device write-protected, mounted read-only.

$ ls -l /mnt

total 84K

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 Armored-Fist3_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 BF2_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 BF2SF_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 CoD_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 CoDUO_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 Commanche4_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DF1_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DF2_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DFBHD_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DFLW_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DFTFD_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 32 May 14  2006 DFX_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 Nov  7  2008 FEAR_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 30 May 14  2006 MW4-CL-MP_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 30 May 14  2006 MW4-IS-MP_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21 May 14  2006 Quake4_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 48 May 14  2006 README

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 24 May 14  2006 RvS_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 SWAT3_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 SWAT4_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 SWAT4TSS_Key

$

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 One of the side effects of shopping hungry: I bought a steak for the first time in next to forever.

I also had the genius idea to put the broccoli and cauliflower and mushrooms in the cast iron skillet with the steak before finishing it in the oven. And thankfully didn’t ruin the steak. Since the veggies were already steamed yesterday: they were ready for a quick trip to the oven. Lacking potatoes, the udon stand in for filler.

Willow of course just wished she could have my food instead of waiting for her own food, lol

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Faced with the clock telling me that I should cook dinner, and a disposition that feels more like going Barny Gumble on an Espresso machine: I opted for a plot involving fried rice.

I diced and pressed some tofu, something I’ve never worked with before. Interesting to me however the recommended way to prepare it for frying or baking is essentially the same way I was taught to prep eggplant for the same cooking methods.
But aside from that most of the ingredients were chosen based on leverage.
  • About 1/3 of the tofu block.
  • Half a can of peas and carrots, so that I can use the peas for flavoring something else.
  • A chunk of  steamed broccoli and cauliflower that leaves enough leftover for another meal or two.
  • About half a thing of mushrooms that were on sale when I did the shopping earlier this week.
  • Plenty of rice, and enough leftover for a meal or two.
Pretty much other than seasonings: everything was chosen because it’s something that’ll save time on another meal.

The dogs of course are always interested in food: but they love their extra special treat even more.

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 I find it interesting how readily Misty manages to find such napping accommodations on her own.

Willow, whose aptitude for reshaping her environment in the name of comfy is only exceeded by humans, of course plots down on top.

And then there’s the debate of what comes first: my lunch or their second walk, lol.

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 Various sad and comical things.

Decided to try an old SSD in my spare enclosure. But I found while my Linux machine blows away just fine on I/O performance: my NT partition maxes out at about 30 MB/s on Crystal Disk Mark and 11 MB/s on Windows time.

In fact every fracken’ thing I plug into my USB 3.0 port maxes out at that speed.

So decided to do a little poking around. My NT install comes from Microsoft, not from Dell, so there’s a minimal of their things tacked on. Looking for updated drivers, I was kind of just glad to see W10 well represented given the age of my Latitude.

Found a BIOS update and dared to do it. Going from A00 to A20 (2018) was a lot of versions.A001 I think was dated 2012, and the oldest available. Mostly it’s fixes and security updates. But low and behold upgrading my BIOS a terrifying number of versions forward: my USB 3.0 is working right.

That is to say, Crystal Disk Mark basically jumps from ~30 MB/s to 250 MB/s, and Explorer reports much more appropriate speeds itself.

Amusing to me, one of the features I kind of missed was the option of Secure Boot. Which was added in one of the many updates. Ironically, a cyber security report from the NSA actually has better descriptions of the new UEFI settings on my system than Googling them ^_^.