Electronics, computer hardware and software, general aviation, automotive, and related sundry.
While messing around with different themes and fonts, I came accross a cache of PC text mode fonts at int10h.org . It inspired a light re-theme of my initial, basic style for this site that is a nod towards the good old BBS days. After some experimentation, I settled on this corrected EGA font. I haven't seen EGA text in a long time; it really takes me back.
A few weeks ago, I started looking into what it would take to convert this WordPress -based site back into a static site using a static site generator. My main motivation was to end the update treadmill, constant security threats, and the fire hose of comment spam (unless I also pay for Akismet , of course). I post to my site in bursts and it can go years without any updates. This does not mesh…
One particular part has always been a problem in the after market for these: power steering racks. Parts stores have always done a poor job of keeping track of the different types and their applications (Rock Auto is no exception). For the mid-late 80's and early 90's L and K-based stuff, this has been my understanding: there were two main manufacturers: Saginaw and TRW, each having a few variants…
It is starting to become a little tricky to find certain parts for these cars and the overall quality has been in decline for a long time. While Chrysler's parts-bin approach has been helpful to keep the unique part numbers for major components down, we are still talking about 30-40 year old cars at this point. The market is drying up, so it makes sense. I've been collecting various parts that I…
The CSX, which has been slumbering in the garage for the past dozen or so years, was slowly entombed in boxes of stuff and donations and whatnot. I recently cleaned most of that out with the goal of getting the CSX up and running again. It needs body work and while I have everything I need to fix it, I intend to just bite the bullet and pay a shop to finish it properly for me. Despite my best…
So I finally bit the bullet and stood-up a MythTV front end on this Raspberry Pi 4 that had been hanging around the office for years. I had back-ordered one during the post-COVID supply chain crunch and it turned up many months (possibly more than a year) later, but I hadn't had the motivation to tackle the project. The Raspberry 5 announcement reminded me, so I ordered one and decided to try to…
I've been using MythTV for more than two decades now. I have separate front and back ends, as I've always had some sort of server running in the basement that is on all the time. Our first front end was an original Xbox with a Cromwell BIOS running Xebian. It was just powerful enough to do the job at standard definition and we already had the DVD remote accessory, so it was the perfect choice. The…
I recently switched back to Cinnamon from MATE on one of my machines and found I needed to reapply this patch again. I've updated it a bit to support all three modes of operation (workspace desktop preview, workspace labels, and the original useless numbers), selectable from the configuration dialog. You can also specify the button width in label mode, which can be nice if you want control over…
This is a brain-dump of what I ended up doing to setup an "Eaglercraft Server". I've been running small Minecraft servers since around 2011. It was just for myself and a few of my work colleagues. I enjoyed experiencing MC coming out of beta and eventually growing up. We ended up with two servers, the original that started in Beta1.3 became a creative server and a "newer" 1.4 server running in…
Wow, so it's been almost a decade since I last posted here. I've switched hosting situations multiple times in the intervening years and this site has suffered its fair share of bit-rot along the way. I actually took it down at one point, as I assumed no one would notice. It turns out there are a number of forums and whatnot that direct links to files in here, so I brought it back after receiving…