Sometimes you need to put two internal hard drives in a system, but only have a single 3.5″ bay available. This is common in small computers, like HP Slimline and whatever Dell’s equivalent is.
There are two ways to do it. Both have tradeoffs.
Apple’s first CEO speaks
Business Insider has an interview with Apple’s first CEO, Michael Scott. (Not the guy from the TV sitcom.) It’s interesting reading from a historical standpoint.
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How not to do business
I contracted out some work recently. It involved a large sum of money, at least to me. It amounted to about a three weeks’ worth of take-home pay. He wanted the money for the materials up front. I didn’t really want to do that, but other people had told me he was completely honest, so I did it.
He had trouble getting the necessary permits and other paperwork. I had trouble keeping his story straight. I gave him some time to sort it out. After about a month–which might have been too long–he concluded he wasn’t going to be able to do the work, and told me he’d give me a refund.
Then he quit answering his phone.
RIP, Paul Splittorff
What’s wrong with my 6502 machine language article?
It occurred to me this morning that writing about what was wrong with my 6502 machine language article from the early 1990s might be useful. Or maybe that was just whatever the dentist was injecting into the roof of my mouth talking, but I’m going with it.
Should I cut myself some slack on account of my age at the time? Sure. But teenage Dave would have welcomed the critique of mid-30s Dave, if either could find Dr. Emmit Brown’s DeLorean.
Run DD-WRT on an old PC
DD-WRT is an extremely popular firmware upgrade for wireless routers, and for good reason. It’s extremely powerful, and allows you to use a cheap wireless router to perform the function of costlier hardware.
A commercial wireless router takes up a lot less space and consumes a lot less power than a PC, but sometimes you might find yourself needing a router for a short period of time. You could go spend $50 on a router, but if you have an obsolete PC and a pile of NICs laying around, why not just press that pile of junk into duty to get the job done and save 50 bucks?
That’s what DD-WRT x86 lets you do.
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Writing Tight 6502 Series Machine Code
This article appeared in the final issue of Twin Cities 128/64, published by Parsec, Inc. of Salem, Mass., sometime after April 1994. Parsec never paid for the article, so under the terms of Parsec’s contract, all rights reverted back to me 30 days after Parsec failed to remit payment.
So now I’m re-asserting my rights to the article. You’ll find the editing poor–all my semicolons appear to have been replaced by commas, for instance–and the writing full of cliches. But I would have been 16 or 17 when I wrote it, and I don’t think it’s a bad effort for a 17-year-old. And the article had some pretty clever tricks. I have to admit I’d forgotten 90% of what was in the article, but I recognize my own writing when I see it.
I’d like to thank Mark R. Brown, former managing editor of INFO magazine, for finding the article and bringing it to my attention. And one final word: Although I wrote this with the Commodore 128 in mind, the same tricks apply to any computer or console based on a 6502 or derivative.
Windows, ARM, emulation, misconceptions and misremembered history
I keep reading stuff about Windows and ARM and, well, I think people just aren’t remembering history.
I’m not saying that Windows 8 on ARM will save the world, or even change it substantially. It probably won’t, since Microsoft tends not to get things right the first time. But will I automatically write off the project? No. It could prove useful for something other than what it was originally intended. That happens a lot.
But I’m more interested in clearing up the misinformation than in trying to predict the future.
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Disadvantages of Windows 98 and 98SE
Many years ago, I wrote about the disadvantages of Windows 3.1 because I started noticing people searching for that. Now, I see people asking the same question about Windows 98. I spent 9 months of my life ripping Windows 98 apart and putting it back together again and writing about it, so I know it well.
As much of an improvement as Windows 98 was over Windows 3.1 and even Windows 95, it, too, is feeling the effects of time. Windows 98SE was the best of the Windows 9x series (better than its successor, Windows ME), but there are better things to run today.
How to secure a computer like a spook
A link to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) guidance on hardening operating systems has been floating around various blogs today. But the NSA’s guidance on configuring Windows 7 and other recent operating systems is, to put it mildly, a bit incomplete.
What one government agency doesn’t do, another probably does. That’s usually a safe assumption at least. Enter the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). If you want to harden recent Windows operating systems, visit http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/index.html for guidance.
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