I don’t need another mobile game in my life, thanks to Fate/Grand Order. This isn’t from a lack of desire however; friends have tried repeatedly to get me into Arknights, Honkai Star Rail, Genshin, and Time-Strapped Ruben.
But I’ll admit, Blue Archive’s art won me over two years later, no thanks to reader Simon who told me I had to try it. It’s his fault, in other words.
The game dynamic wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but as I suspected, the art and immersive world were stunning, and the chibi versions of the characters were more than a little cute.
If they have an official artbook, maybe I need to get that. Cough.
This story of Space Karen’s physical data centre move has been drawing the ire and glee of many a sysadmin and project manager today. They did everything predictably wrong, and faced the consequences.
But this was the section that raised my eyebrows, emphasis added:
The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. “By the time we learned this, the servers had already been unplugged and rolled out, so there was no way we would roll them back, plug them in, and then wipe them,” he says. Plus, the wiping software wasn’t working. “F—, what do we do?” he asked. Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them.
This cavalier attitude pervades IT, whether it’s the latest generative AI trained on data without permission or recourse as required by law, or a company thinking it’s sufficient to use a physical padlock on a truck to secure personally-identifiable information (PII).
It’s not funny, it’s horrifying. Okay, it’s a bit funny, at least when viewed as richly-deserved schadenfreude. But it’s mostly horrifying. Your size, connections, or ignorance shouldn’t absolve you from responsibility.
Below is my new (to me), genuine, bonafide “Aldi” Commodore 64 that arrived in the post a couple of weeks ago under several layers of foam, wrapping paper, and tape. I’ve had new computers shipped with less care than this treasure, which is saying something.
I’d wanted one of these very specific machines since my childhood, because it represents such a fasinating point in 8-bit retrocomputing history. I’ll get to why in a moment, but first an explanation of where the machine came from.
Where this machine slots in
The Commodore 64 was introduced in 1982, and had several variants over its astonishing decade in production. It started as a groundbreaking device with better sound, sprites, and graphics than its competitors, before finding a niche later in life as a capable budget machine. I’m boring, so I’m most interested in the personal productivity, factory automation, and business tools people managed to run on the hardware! That’s a story for another post.
But back to this specific machine. Having been on the market for half a decade at that point, in 1987 the Aldi supermarket chain began selling a version of the machine in Germany. Jan Beta has talked about how his father picked one up on a whim, which ended up being his personal system. Aldi’s “centre isle” always has random curiosities, so I can absolutely believe this sitting there waiting for an impulse purchase!
This “Aldi” C64 bears superficial resemblence to the original Commodore 64, but it differed in several key ways.
The keyboard. The double-shot keycaps are beige instead of chocolate brown. This would be retained in early versions of the sleek 64C, before being replaced with cheaper printed keycaps.
The motherboard. It included the first cost-reduced “shortboard” with consolidated ICs, though it retained separate colour memory from the SuperPLA.
The case. This production run tended towards grey rather than brown, as I discussed in that post I linked to above. This is distinct from the later 64G, which had a beige breadbin case and a cheaper printed label.
Where it was made. Despite being sold in Europe, these 64s were made in the US, as evidenced by its manufacturing label. It also had a second serial number sticker on the right.
It’s this unique set of features that make it such a curiosity to me, and why it’s among the more interesting 8-bit machines from the time period. It represented a turning point in how these machines were manufacturered and released.
A confession
The title of this post gave it away, but this is where I admit that my Aldi 64 here is… empty! It has the original case, keyboard, and port cover, but it doesn’t have a functional motherboard.
I already have a “daily driver” Commodore 128 with 64 mode, and a Commodore 64C to play with period-correct hardware, so my plan is to use this case as a way to test parts through elimination, and experiment with modern reproductions.
Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement has his “ZIF64” which he uses to test old and new components, so I’m thinking it’d be fun to populate a reproduction board with zero-insertion force sockets. Wunderbar!
Australia was abuzz with this year’s R U OK? campaign, billed to:
inspire and empower everyone to meaningfully connect with the people around them and start a conversation with those in their world who may be struggling with life.
Clara had the best line about it:
They teach us how to ask if you’re okay. But not how to respond.
I’m not okay. I’m not sure most of us are, to be honest. But whatever noble causes or motivations were behind this movement, it’s interesting how it’s being met with such widespread cynicism now, even compared to previous years.
I suspect people resent it being used by businesses and other institutions to feign concern without addressing any of the root causes. Your circumstances are getting worse all around you, but don’t worry, you can talk about it.
Today in Tedium: One thing I’ve noticed with the recent social media diasporas that have emerged in the wake of Twitter’s decline is that the people who make up those diasporas don’t really seem to be pulling in new groups of people so much as giving the types of people that are already addicted to Twitter a new place to go.
We are not bringing in new members of the club, for the most part—we are instead doing the social media equivalent of a ’90s revival night at the local hipster dance club.
I don’t think that’s true. I’ve seen people attempt to “revive” their circle elsewhere, but there are social and technical reasons why it usually doesn’t happen, and why new communities invariably have a different mix of people.
The Network Effect is the one we all know about. It’s unusual to lift and shift an entire community or group wholesale onto another platform, even if the tech is there to make it happen. This underscores the hidden truth to so many of our problems: they’re not technical. As long as entrenched platforms exist, it’s rare to move an entire community intact.
But even if everyone in your extended group lifted and shifted elsewhere,the far more interesting reason why you don’t end up with a revival is that every social network has its own dynamic. Again, this is as much to do with social trends as it is technical features or limitations.
Mastodon is a useful case study here. The system bears a superficial similarity to Twitter, but its architecture, lack of advertising, longer character limits, content warnings, optional search and RSS, and the ability to self-host yield a fundamentally different experience. I have many former Twitter friends in my Mastodon circles, but there are plenty of new people too that have sprung up without my active involvement.
Different sites attract and retain different groups of people. I consider that a positive, especially if you’re coming from a sinking ship like Twitter.
Have you ever heard a phrase that hit your nostalgia centre with such devastating force that you had to pause the video or conversation just to get your bearings again? This often comes in the form of an advertising jingle from my childhood, embarrasingly enough for me.
It happened again recently. It would shock you to know I was watching a video about a 486 motherboard restoration, when the host expressed relief that it had “real cache memory, not those fake chips”. The words sent me back to Sailor Moon, iMacs, and Seinfeld. I hadn’t thought of this issue for years, and likely would have forgotten completely.
While most of our CPUs today contain their own L2 and L3 caches on die, it was common on early 32-bit x86 architectures for this cache to reside on the motherboard. You could get a nice performance boost by adding additional cache memory, or replacing existing ICs with better timings.
You can probably see where this is going. Disgraced former manufacturer PC Chips released a series of cheap motherboards at the tail end of the 486 era that were found to contain… Seinfeld bass guitar riff… fake cache chips. They didn’t have the capacity or silicon reported on their shells, and offered no cache whatsoever.
Casual Retro Gamer on YouTube did a video in which he desoldered and snapped a fake cache chip on his board, and found they were literally hollow plastic with metal legs! They didn’t even try to hide this scam.
Worse than even the physical trickery, the BIOS ICs on these boards were even doctored to deliberately misreport the amount of available memory! CRG was able to demonstrate this by using a third-party cache check tool on boot, which reported a complete lack of L2 cache.
This is why I don’t buy the caveat emptor argument that buyers should have known they were being scammed from a cheap board, as I’ve read on certain forums. It’s one thing to be given a board lacking certain features, but there’s zero excuse for lying about them. It fascinates me how certain people will always place the burden of responsibility on the customer, and not the businesses engaged in deceptive, unethical, or irreseponsible behaviour. But I digress.
Along with those Newtronics read head issues plauging certain Commodore 1541 disk drives, I see these sorts of boards for sale on auction sites and I want to tell people to avoid them! It’d suck to spend all this money on a retrocomputer build, only to realise your parts aren’t what you expected. Or I suppose you could do what CRG did and take it as a challenge to swap them with real cache chips.
This post is dedicated to Benedict Reuschling, who encouraged me to write about this again! Danke :).
I saw this question floating around the socials recently, and it got me thinking where I started. It was tricker to answer than I thought, though I was able to trawl through the archives to find some info.
My first BSD was Red Hat Linux. You read that right: practically every Linux distribution has BSD-licenced code, and they depend on tooling like OpenSSH from the OpenBSD project for secured administration. I like to point out examples like this whenever a GPL advocate claims their licences are necessary to ensure freedom. Pity that importing into a GPL’d project is a one-way transaction.
Taking a step closer to what the question really meant, my first BSD-like OS was Darwin in its Aqua clothing. Like FreeBSD upon which its userland was based, early versions of Mac OS X defaulted to tcsh(1) for user shells. I got pretty good at scripting in it, despite the indignant suggestions such actions were considered harmful! I’ve been on oksh(1) for the last few years, but I still harbour tremendous affection for the C Shell family.
ksh(1) is a nice seque into NetBSD; I believe 2.0? It was the first BSD OS I installed myself from scratch, because their PowerPC port was so easy to get running on my iBook G3. It’s where I also learned about pkgsrc, which I still run to this day on systems I administer. NetBSD remains a staple on my vintage computers, including a SPARCStation and my beloved Pentium 1, the first PC I built myself as a kid. It also runs a cloud server I maintain for personal projects.
The first FreeBSD version I ever tinkered with was 6.1, when I got it running in a series of Parallels and VMware Fusion VMs on my then-new Intel MacBook Pro. Much of the early history of my blog detailed my adventures learning about open source desktop environments, window managers, Xorg, and building a FreeBSD desktop. It was a lot of fun.
Funnily enough, it wasn’t until the FreeBSD 7.x branch when I first installed it on a server, at the time an old Athlon XP I used as a Netatalk box. Am I the first person to come to FreeBSD in serverland via desktops instead of the other way round? Not sure!
I’ve tinkered and build Dragonfly BSD and OpenBSD systems out of curiosity since, though I’ll admit I’ve spent more time on the OpenSolaris-derived illumos since. It’s long time I give them a proper try too.
Read or watch any advice about choosing a GPU, and you’ll likely be given one of the following pieces of advice:
AI-written spam with a vague comparison table, concluded with choose one that’s right for you. People don’t know what’s right for them, that’s why they landed on your article!
Those who say you should always buy the best graphics card you can for your budget. It’s the part of any build that will make the most difference to gameplay or graphics workstation tasks.
Those who say it’s important to find the best bang for the buck to not be gouged on price/performance. Diminishing returns eventually kicks in, making the added price unjustifiable for the added performance. On the other side, not much extra can often lead to huge leaps in performance.
It’s the latter I find most interesting, because it has the allure of being rational. Frames per second per dollar is quantifiable, testable, and devoid of marketing or other influences, so it’s the one you should go with, right?
Well, not so fast. As I wrote on my recent post about benchmarking, these sorts of comparisons come with their own implicit assumptions that may not hold true for certain use cases. Lies, damned lies, and statistics! For example, what about:
Power use? If electricity is expensive in your area, any money saved upgrading to a more power hungry card with more frames per dollar will be quickly eroded. This basic fact completely eludes certain US reviewers, and it baffles me!
Heat? If you’re building a mini-ITX computer, the card that delivers the most frames per dollar may be a thermal dead end for you. A card with a blow-through or impeller cooler design might also be necessary depending on the configuration of your case, which might not be available on the most cost-effective card.
Physical size? The best card for frames per second per dollar might not fit, which unless you’re handy with an angle grinder or nibbling tool, is a clear deal breaker.
Operating environment? I use a 4K panel for working at home, and I don’t have space for another. The 3060 Ti was touted as the best bang for the buck in the previous generation, but the 3070 delivered just enough of a performance improvement to make games viable on that 4K panel.
Features? If your rendering workload uses an AMD or Nvidia API, claiming an Arc GPU has the best performance per dollar is meaningless. This is the same as open source people saying Mac users who need Illustrator and Office should switch to a Linux desktop.
My advice for anyone looking to buy a GPU would be to use bang for the buck charts as a starting point, but to not get hung up on them. They’re but one metric in a sea of others.
We’re starting this series here with this gorgeous Sun SPARCStation 5 which has taken pride of place under the monitor on my retrocomputing table. I took it outside for some better SUN light. AAAAAAAAAAH! Thank you.
This machine was graciously given to me by Mike here in Australia, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. I made a remark that I adored pizzabox computers and used one of these machines in the Sun lab at university, and he literally drove up from Melbourne to Sydney to give me one. I still can’t believe it all these months later.
I’ve had a proper history of this beautiful box in my drafts folder for a while; I’ve been waiting on some better lighting kit to detail the internals properly. In the meantime I want to show this specific connector located on the back in the first slot:
This is a 13W3 (or DB13W3) video connector, with my ISA OAK card above it for comparison. It’s clearly larger than the 9-pin CGA/EGA D-Sub connector, and it has far more prominant pins than VGA!
13W3 connectors were ubiquitous on high-end workstations from the likes of Sun and SGI… another company who’s machines I badly wanted as a kid. The prominant RGB pins almost act as mini coax connectors, which reduced colour signal interference at the higher resolutions professional demanded. I do remember seeing a professional monitor with BNC connectors that broke out standard VGA signals into separate colours and chroma/luma, but 13W3 was certainly more elegant.
Shortly after receiving this box from Mike, I scoured my tubs of components and found a SGI DB13 to DVI-A connector. The latter carried analogue signals, which meant I could daisy-chain a passive DVI to VGA connector to it, and connect it to my NEC LCD. It didn’t work alas, because as I learned after the fact, Sun and SGI used subtly different pinouts. I since sent this connector to long-time reader Rebecca for one of her SGI Octanes.
This leads us to where I am today.
What has since proceeded is a comedy of errors with regards to shipping. I found a store that had one official Sun adaptor left, which I bought and had lost in the post. I found a store selling an aftermarket one, which I was soon refunded for because they couldn’t find it in their warehouse. A third connector also never arrived, though fortunately that time I learned to pay for insurance. Eventually I found a seller on AliExpress offering a new adaptor, which I’ve just ordered. I expect this to be eaten by a sea monster.
Mike graciously preloaded NetBSD onto this machine for me, so I can SSH in! But I can’t wait to see it too. When I do, it’ll be in a post :).
