Rubenerd

It’s been a couple of months since we hit the Wikipedia Random link. Today we got this building on the Sea of Japan:

Toki Messe (朱鷺メッセ, Toki Messe) is a multi-purpose international convention center in Niigata, Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The center was opened on May 1, 2003, and contains a hotel, restaurants, an art museum, conference rooms, and the offices of several international organizations.

The photo by HIRO bears a striking resemblence to the United Nations building. The layout of the building bears the resemblence I mean, not the photo. Though the photo is the device we’re using to visualise said resemblence.

Toki Messe is the tallest building on the Sea of Japan, and has an observation deck on the 31st floor where one can view the areas in and around Niigata. Depending on the weather, one can also see Sado and Awashima islands.

I live for observation decks! I’ve informed Clara that it’s made The List™ for this reason.

The building is in Niigata, which looks like a great place to visit. It has the largest urban rice fields in the country, and is connected to Tokyō by the Jōetsu Shinkansen. Those two facts were unrelated, save for their relation to Niigata.

This is a bittersweet post, but it has a good ending. Today I bid farewell to a piece of Commodore kit I had since I was seventeen. She’s off to live with Josh Nunn of The Geekorium and Mastodon to help him troubleshoot another C64 he’s been trying to restore for a while.

I first got into 1980s tech back when I was in high school in the 2000s. It’s wild to think that the time between those decades has elapsed again now that we’re in the 2020s. I was lucky that I had parents who always encouraged and supported my esoteric hobbies, so one year for my birthday they gave me an small eBay budget to spend on vintage tech. Commodore stuff is trendy and expensive again now, but it was going for bargain basement prices in 2004.

My Commodore 16 and Plus/4 came from someone in the United States, but I also had my sights on a combo from a gentleman in Australia. He was selling a Commodore datasette (tape drive), a 1541 disk drive, and his breadbin Commodore 64. He was selling the lot even cheaper because the C64 had been heavily modified, and he didn’t know how to test it. I suspect it was an estate sale.

The first thing I noticed was how many additional switches and ports had been added to the machine. This machine was used by someone serious, which I appreciate. On the top was a red button with a plastic shroud to prevent it being accidentally pressed, and next to it a red metal flip switch. The right-hand side included an aftermarket fuse caddy, and on the left was what looked like an RCA connector with a (+) sign.

I figured out what most of these things did over time, but I was too nervous to poke around inside. Even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to look for. Now that I have electrical experience troubleshooting and repairing my Commodore 128, I finally had the guts to open up this machine and see what was done.

The breadbin Commodore 64, like my beloved C16 you can see next to it in the first photo, pivots opens with three screws along the front of the case, and three plastic hinges at the rear. The C128 is my favourite 8-bit machine, but there’s no question the C64 is easier to work on!

After unclipping and moving the RF foil/cardboard shield aside, I immediately saw how the fuse was wired up. Two thin leads were run from the internal fuse clips, which ran to a fuse caddy that protrudes from the side of the case. The chap who used this machine presumably lived in an area prone to power surges, and got tired of opening the case up to replace the fuse! It works, but that exposed wiring makes me antsy; Josh should probably insulate it with tape if he wants to keep it.

The switches on top are more interesting, pictured below. The left button is wired with white cables to pins on the user port. It’s a reset switch if I had to guess, to save you detaching and re-attaching carts like a VICMODEM that are causing problems. The right toggle switch is connected to an aftermarket ROM attached above the factory MOS ROM. The circular, white label says 1/4/93, which I’d guess was the install date. It’s been a while since I’ve had a working C64 power supply, but I remember this toggled JiffyDOS. I honestly never really used it; in part because it disabled the datasette. The switch on the case let you toggle it on and off.

And as for that RCA jack on the left with the (+) sticker, it’s connected with a sinister-looking orange and black cable to pin two on the datasette port, which I now know from troubleshooting the C128 connects to the 5V rail. This was likely added to power an external peripheral or cart; thesedays you’d use that for something like an SD2IEC to read SD or MMC cards. I’m not sure what people in the early to mid-1990s were using.

This has been fascinating, but it’s time to bid her farewell. I have good reason to; Clara and I have limited apartment space, and I want her to be able to have space for her sewing machine and cosplay stuff. The Commodore 128 Josh sent me has a near-perfect C64 mode, so it makes sense to use that machine for both. It also feels right in a karmic sense to send this C64 to him in return :).

In the future I might try and source a 64C, the gorgeous later revision of the 64 that would match my C128 and 1571. But for now, I think this is the best possible outcome for this machine, and to thank Josh for his generosity. Check out his blog if you want to read his adventures with Commodore hardware too.

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Emily Carr’s beautiful Odds and Ends made it to Wikipedia’s image of the day yesterday. It depicts her concern over European deforesation of British Columbia in the 1930s.

I know nothing about art, but they way she depicted such rich colour, depth, and detail with broad strokes was so unique and powerful.

I rasied the impending Chromium monoculture back in August last year. I raised the issue about why monocultures are bad, why it is the same thing we dealt with during the dark IE days, and what we need to do to address it again.

The feedback was mostly sympathetic, though I still had a few people claiming Chrome is better placed than IE (which I already addressed), and that the number of Chrome-specific sites are too insignificant to matter. As my old man says, I wish I shared their optimism!

What’s the situation half a year later? Mixed, but the trajectory is clearly downwards. Three new sites that Clara and I frequent either mandate Chrome, or recommend it. Two further sites don’t mention Chrome, but specific functions no longer work. We raise complaints with the bank or site operators pointing out the accessibility concerns of their exclusionary designs, and how they’re in breach of their own charters and industry guidelines. But this needs to be a concerted effort, just as we all did before.

Be wary of people making excuses for this state of affairs, just like they did in the 2000s. This is not the direction for a healthy web.

I overheard this at a coffee shop this morning:

My favourite thing about movies is not knowing what’s going to happen!

I assumed that was the entire point of seeing movies until I met Clara, who enjoys reading spoilers before seeing them. That makes no sense to me, but then our relationship would be boring if we understood everything the other person did.

I’ve also got my own weird disposition when it comes to moves: I generally don’t enjoy them. Sitting still for hours at a time, not being able to think about anything else, and leaving the cinema into the bright light of day feeling fatigued and lazy… the experience isn’t something I’m in a hurry to repeat.

I don’t have ADD—and people joking they have it demean those who do—I just feel like I have a gigantic and ever-expanding list of personal projects and fun stuff I’d rather be doing.

A part of this was also realising I don’t like being a passive consumer. One of the great things about indie YouTube video creators, podcasters, and bloggers is that I can financially support them directly, answer questions they ask, screenshot and share their ideas on my own blog, and so on. You can’t do that with Hollywood. That feels a bit like a game changer!

With all this Commodore talk of late, you’d think I have no interest in any other vintage tech. I have namedropped my Pentium 1 tower a few times though, and as a Centronics parallel project (ah, so good), I’m restoring that machine as well to run an assortment of 16-bit OSs. She was my first computer, and restoring her to full working glory has also been a fun and rewarding journey.

The machine’s 1997 Rhino 12+ board is fascinating. It was released right on the tail-end of the AT standard, with most peripherals requiring ISA or PCI cards. It has a physical toggle switch for power and an AT keyboard port in lieu of PS/2, but it also has USB which is bizarre. I can’t imagine there are many boards with this specific combination, like finding an electric car dashboard that can deliver WAP via IR to a PDA.

For one evening exercise, I wanted to know if the Rhino 12+ board supported a few different things, and funnily enough the Data Sheet Archive had a copy of the technical guide for the VIA VT82C586B PCI controller. The pinout diagram is fascinating, and eye-opening after looking at Commodore 6510-compatible ICs from a decade earlier:

I also learned some surprising things:

• The USB 1.0 headers on the board also supports HCI v1.1. I’m interested in learning the difference between the two versions; I know back in the day we didn’t really care which one a peripheral was.

• It does support ACPI in addition to APM, which makes it the perfect consolidated nostalgia machine. APM is required for proper power management in Windows 3.x, and can be invoked with POWER.EXE in your AUTOEXEC. But ACPI means a newer BSD could also run on it.

• It has distributed DMA, for supporting ISA DMA over the PCI bus! I’m not sure if that was a common on earler boards, or whether there were seperate controllers for ISA and PCI before inevitable consolidation.

My Commodore projects are taking priority right now, but I hope to write more about this beautiful old DOS/Windows 95/NT/BeOS/Red Hat/FreeBSD computer at some point. I’m coming to 8-bit computers after the fact; this machine was my first one :).

Remember all the news swirling around Twitter and the blogosphere (yes, I’m bringing the term back) about RSA being broken? Bruce Schneier:

I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: “Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms.” It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.”

It does not. At best, it’s an improvement in factoring — and I’m not sure it’s even that. The paper is a preprint: it hasn’t been peer reviewed. Be careful taking its claims at face value.

I still encourage people to generate and use the unfortunately-named ed25519 keys in lieu of RSA given they’re smaller and faster. But I’m more than a little relieved to hear this, and not just because I wrote an implementation of RSA in Perl for a second-year university assignment when everyone else was using Python and Java. factor_THIS.pl.

Edgar Gardner had the best response under the story:

[..] if Schnorr could “destroy RSA”, he would have destroyed one of the RSA Challenge problems to prove it. He did not.

To be clear, is a phrase with three words. It’s an intrinsic good for research demonstrating weakened cryptography to be published publicly, not least because there’s a chance a malicious actor, state-sponsored or otherwise, has done it privately and might already be exploiting it.

What a great compilation! I’m still feeling the excitement from fulfilling that childhood dream last weekend. What a stunning locomotive, and how great it is knowing she’s fully operational and looking amazing again.

As an aside, Hales emailed to say he now understood why he kept hearing whistle sounds in his neck of the woods!

In my ongoing Commodore 128 series, today I’m talking about something I didn’t ever expect to be: how I can set up my desk to use these machines properly!

Whereas the Commodore 64C is bigger in real life than I expected, the Commodore 128 is surprisingly smaller. But it’s still quite deep relative to its width, which pushes the monitor I want to use with it too far back. This is compounded by all the peripherals and cables that are plugged into the back of the unit, which leaves only a small off-centre gap for the monitor.

With limited table space, a Commodore 1571 drive on the way that just arrived, and my surprise fixing of my C16 and Plus/4—posts coming!—I wanted a nice way to use these machines. I’ve always been intrigued by the Apple IIe’s monitor stand, which let the machine sit underneath while still preserving airflow over the vents. I thought I could try getting a similar setup for the C128.

I borrowed an IKEA SIGFINN from the office, which was listed as 53 cm wide and 10 cm high, which should have been ample space for the machine. It’s a bit snug, but I thought it tied the whole setup together well.

(Again, don’t worry about the missing keycap, I’ve got a few replacement springs and plungers in the mail, and a new keycap for that broken one).

But then I realised a few problems. The biggest was that I hadn’t centred the monitor for the photo, which bugs me more than it should. And worse, Ami from Sailor Moon was the oldest character I could find to pose on the 1571. I need to get a Lum the Invader fig, or someone else from the 1980s, to be period correct.

Jokes aside, is a phrase with two words. The IKEA website measured the stand’s width from the base, and I hadn’t accounted for its upward tapering. This results in less clearance than I thought, which isn’t a problem for the machine fitting but I’m concerned about air circulation.

But it turned out to be worse than that! Veteran Commodore users could probably tell immediately why this wouldn’t work: there’s no space for the chunky power connector! Not only is the connector itself long and bulky, but the cable that comes out is stiff and difficult to route around.

This sent me down the rabbit hole of right-angled Commodore cables, of which I could only find examples for the C64. The C128 has a bizarre square power connector like the Plus/4, so I wasn’t even sure if I could wire up one myself. At the very least I’d need to source a new C128 connector which might be hard, and even then I’m still very much a soldering novice. I’m fine with signal cables, but I care too much about this machine to subject it to a Ruben power cable at the moment.

The other issue was my 264/TED machines. The Plus/4 fits beautifully, which isn’t surprising given its diminutive size. But alas the C16 breadbin just pushes against the upper-edge of the stand on both sides, so a VIC-20/VC-20 would too if I’m ever able to source one of those (cough).

(I have more posts about my beloved TED machines in drafts which should come out soon. The C128 is my favourite 8-bit machine of all time, but I have a real soft spot for these as well.

IKEA have a few other monitor stands, but while they’re all the right external height, they include drawers which would either rob it of sufficient vertical space, or cut off airflow to the vent. Likewise, OfficeWorks have a ton of monitor stands, but they’re either black which wouldn’t match anything else, are either way too wide or shallow, or are made of cheap plastic.

Clara and I live in an apartment and without access to power tools, so building one is unlikely. I could go down the VESA mount avenue, but I’d prefer the look of a wooden shelf of some sort. I see them in so many photos of people’s C128 and C64 setups from back in the day, and I want to emulate it :).

I’m going to keep looking, but if anyone in Australia has any ideas, I’ll all ears.

I made the mistake of reading one of those “you’re doing grammar and punctuation wrong” posts last year, and internalised one of its recommendations. The author claimed that readers ignore words between brackets when written in the middle of a paragraph, so you should use em-dashes instead. You can probably tell when I started using them here.

(Here’s an example of brackets used around an entire paragraph, which that author tolerated. It makes more sense to me to include optinal text inline and in context, rather than having people jump around between footnotes and back, or reading text in tiny popup bubbles. To each their own).

Here’s an example with brackets:

The anime Hyouka (that Clara and I watched when we started dating) is among the prettiest I’ve ever watched.

And with em dashses:

The anime Hyouka—that Clara and I watched when we started dating—is among the prettiest I’ve ever watched.

I read the second paragraph differently in my head. There’s a pause and change in tone between the dashes that’s omitted with the brackets. But I also didn’t skim what’s between the brackets. The text is still right there in both cases, akin to someone telling you not to think of an elephant.

So many of these style guides seem to be based more on writer opinion than verifiable evidence about human behaviour. Which is fine, but it shows how such edicts handed down to the plebeians under the guise that you’re doing something wrong are so often… wrong.

I have so many thoughts about brackets, including why I think the Japanese and continental Europeans have it figured out better than us in the Anglosphere. But I’ll spare you those ramblings until next time.