Minesweeper is murder.

Last Updated on December 8, 2023 by Dave Farquhar

Minesweeper is murder. An activist group is asserting that the Windows game Minesweeper is disrespectful of victims of land mines and should be removed and replaced with a game about flowers. I have no idea if these guys are serious or not. I never liked the game anyway and just always wanted an excuse to say “Minesweeper is murder.” So now I’ve said it three times. I’m happy.

Let’s say it again: Minesweeper is Murder. Sounds like a Morrissey song, doesn’t it?

Mail servers. I started building my mail server last night. I spied an old Adaptec 1542C adapter on a coworker’s shelf and asked if I could borrow it. Then, on the way home, I remembered that Laclede Computer Trading Company, a local used computer store, had moved to just a few miles from where I live. So I stopped there and bought a 1994 vintage Adaptec 1542CF and a clackety IBM Model M PS/2 keyboard for myself.

I got home, installed the 1542CF, and had problems. I installed the borrowed 1542C and did better. It turned out my DEC Etherworks 3 NIC was conflicting with the 1542CF. That may have been the problem with the other adapters I tried. The important thing is, I got TurboLinux down and it runs decently on my Frankensteined 486.

Incidentally, this is the ultimate Frankenstein box. I had an old IBM PS/1 486SX/20 in a 5-bay case. That motherboard’s been flaky for years. Meanwhile I’ve got this Compaq 486SX2/66 in working order whose case uses those awful Compaq drive rails, the case isn’t easy to work inside, and it only has three bays. So I ripped out the PS/1 board and dropped in the Compaq board. Yes, it fits great. LPX is LPX–truly proprietary motherboards actually are really rare. Old Compaq 386s did it, some mid-90s Compaq midtowers did it, and IBM PS/2s did it, but normally what appears to be proprietary is really LPX. Anyway… I added a DEC Etherworks 3 NIC. So we’ve got IBM, DEC, and Compaq fraternizing. Then I connected an NEC 12X SCSI CD-ROM to the Adaptec card and installed TurboLinux.

It smokes. Well, as much as a 486 can smoke at least. It’s surprisingly quick. TurboLinux boots in 60 seconds, once the PC finishes with POST and scanning all the SCSI ports.

And what can I do with a mail server? Well, for one, I can run a cool package called MHonArc. What’s that do? It archives e-mail in HTML form. I could create a mail account, CC it on all my correspondence I want to post, set up a daily cron job on that account, and it’ll post all my mail to the Web for me, formatted nicely and threaded and sorted by the month and even using a template so I can keep my unified look. That’ll save me a ton of work.

Learning Unix takes time, but man can it ever pay off in the time and effort it saves you.

The only problem is, this system’s got a flaky Western Digital hard drive in it. I’ll probably replace it with a better quality drive in pretty short order. This’ll be fine for messing around with, but when a Western Digital drive failed on me 600 miles from home last July during a convention, I decided on the spot I’d depended on a Western Digital drive for the last time. It hadn’t been the first time a WD had let me down, but I wanted it to be the last.

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2 thoughts on “Minesweeper is murder.

  • June 22, 2001 at 9:39 am
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    Dave,

    I still think you have an enterprising opportunity to form a company using your knowledge and all of those "obselete" parts found throughout the world. The name of the "new" computers you’ve coined–Frankenstein. I may even contribute $10 as part of the capital stock. 🙂

  • June 22, 2001 at 9:53 am
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    Learning Unix takes time, but man can it ever pay off in the time and effort it saves you.

    Ah ha! Truer words were never spoken (and very succinctly, too) This one is worthy of appearing in my quotes file 😉

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