I'm Chris. I blog here. I do it for me but if you enjoy it too then that makes me happy!
TL;DR (Too Long Didn't Read) These are my recommendations for the ideal therapist tech setup. Chromebook (Plus Model) Logitech C920 or Brio 4k webcam Used Blue Yeti Mic This USB hub A laptop stand for good camera height if your webcam is not mounted on an external monitor. Turn on HD video if available (off by default in Zoom) Turn on background noise suppression if available Be sure you are on a…
Milk Carton, Missing MacBook Preamble I used to worked at a place where they had an IT contractor that was stealing laptops and reselling them for over a year. This post is the story of how he got caught. Real names of people and companies will not be used, but the tale and screenshots (with redactions) are all true. When I Went Back to IT I was burning out on my position as a DevOps Engineer.…
ChatGPT on the iBook The Problem Accessing ChatGPT from the command line on various flavors of Unix like operating systems is nothing new. I found an interesting use for it today that I had not previously considered. That is to make researching from a retro computer possible where it would normally be not be so. For example, as previously discussed in my post NetBSD & iBooks & Python, oh my! , I…
Helm + OpenBSD Despite my best efforts, I could not find a single practical tutorial on how to install Helm for OpenBSD. It's not in OpenBSD's package manager nor is it in the ports tree. That leaves building it from source. Here's how. Build Steps pkg_add go git gmake bash git clone https://github.com/helm/helm cd helm gmake doas gmake install After that, helm should be installed to…
Meet Chonk Meet Chonk (Controller For Scale) As you can see, Chonk is a big girl. She is a Dell Inspiron 7000 from 1998 and weighs in at 8 pounds. Chonk comes with: Pentium II CPU at 366 MHz 320 MB RAM 4 GB CF card as its hard drive ATI Mobility 1 (removable!) video card 14 inch LCD at 1024x768 Floppy disc/CD ROM combo module 1 USB 1.1 Port 2 PCMCIA card slots I am showing you this large, slow, 27…
Windows NT 4 Server Boot Screen What? Windows NT 4 doesn't virtualise well. This guide shows how to do it with Proxmox with a minimal amount of pain. Why? I never got to use it and I only have so much room for old computers. You Will Need Proxmox Virtual Environment Windows NT 4 Server ISO Realtek 8139 Network Card drivers converted into an ISO file. My ISO converted copy Original driver source…
Would you believe it feels faster than Windows 11? Preamble NetBSD is my favorite of the "proper" Unix operating systems. There are many technical reasons one could point to, including its speed, simplicity, and small install footprint. My favorite reason, however, is in NetBSD's slogan: "Of course it runs NetBSD!" It is no secret that I am a fan of old hardware. My rule to prevent my collecting…
Retro LAN Diagram The Retro LAN I have a long time friend from college who got me into the retro computing hobby. He lives in Florida and I live in New York. This post describes how we're able to play on our 90s laptops together as if we were on the same network despite being in different states. Let's back up a little. What does "retro LAN" even mean? My definition is a network solely dedicated…
Removable, no. Fixed, yes. I recently acquired a Dell Inspiron 7000 Laptop from 1998. It's a beast of a laptop weighing in at 8 pounds! It has a Pentium II 300 MHz Processor, 320 MB of RAM, and a removable ATI video card! What it did not have, however, was a hard drive. I'm no stranger to using IDE adapters that convert relatively modern media like SD cards or SATA SSDs to work as a laptop IDE…
BusyBox + k8s = Love Using BusyBox to Host and Update Static Websites on Kubernetes Prerequisites: A functioning Kubernetes setup A BSSG site running locally on your computer A GitHub repo created that contains your BSSG output. Mine is at https://github.com/llamallama/blog If you haven't heard of it, BSSG is a new and very capable static site generator written entirely in Bash. It support posts,…
Hello and welcome to blog.pipetogrep.org. I started this to write about my misadventures in retrocomputing but I'm sure I'll have plenty of other stuff in here too. This post is here to prove to myself that I can manage a blog via BSSG . I love the idea of simplistic tools to do complicated tasks and abuses of Bash shell scripting and BSSG scratches both of those itches for me. Thank you for…