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wizardfromoz
Phew, almost missed it. Happy Birthday Charlie. Hope the ticker is still going strong since the remedial procedures. Chris
tinfoil-hat
The news articles are burying the user posts, I think user posts don't get so much attention anymore
T
theLegionWithin
i ignored the bot and now the page looks normal. not the best solution but it does work
f33dm3bits
f33dm3bits
I brought the point of with the other staff. You could have created a topic in "Forum Assistance" than it would have been noticed easier.
Brickwizard
I am losing the will to live, this morning i tried to order online a Christmas present for great-granddaughter, I found a shop with what we want [had to tick the I am human box] found the item page click add to basket, went to the bottom clicked check out, and nothing happened [My normal set up is Linux with Firefox, with ghostery] tried several times and nothing, so installed Chrome, went to the site, yes Im human, found the item, added to basket clicked for checkout and got 2 pages of Captua , and woo hoo im on the check-out page, i fill in everything go to the bottom and click buy now, and everything goes up the shoot again, it showed a union flag next to it is said phone number, so i entered my landline, and it froze with the message this is not a mobile number, IT didn't ask for a mobile number it just said phone number.as most of you know I don't have a mobile phone, so now i have to waste half a day to drive to their nearest shop in hopes they haven't sold out.
tinfoil-hat
tinfoil-hat
You're really suicidal? Can we help?
T
theLegionWithin
that's odd, you'd think a business would be happy for money from any source and wouldnt try too hard to verify a phone #. maybe an oversight?
Brickwizard
Been having problems with the Internet dropping out [5 times over Tues and Weds AM] rang EE, lad at other end ran a few tests, I got him to run some extras they didn't usually do, found nothing wrong except the logs that showed reduce speed and drop outs] I will send you an engineer, why I asked to check your set up he said, nothing wrong with my set up i told him, still they insisted and he came this morning and found nothing wrong my end. Came to the conclusion BT had a fault which someone else reported, and they fixed it yesterday
KGIII
KGIII
Speaking of connectivity, I noticed that a new set of lines bridged a gap. Electricity doesn't bridge the gap, but the telephone lines and fiber lines bridge the gap.

I'm not too concerned with the electricity. I can go a long time without mains connectivity. But, it appears that my fiber might be on two different grids. We'll see how it holds up this winter.
PhantomShadow
PhantomShadow
My area deals with a absurd amount of throttling but of course the first thing they do is blame the client's router, OS, hardware ad nausium..

sometimes the pebkac error is actually on the service provider side

in such a situation you should ask to speak with a higher level professional because you are dealing with a very serious ID-10-T error
J
chasing ghosts for the last week. I have spent 30 years troubleshooting network issues. I went into the classic when your a hammer everything is a nail. Culprit was cloudflare cache throwing poop at my wall. im tired...
J
Well I have been predicting the latest and greatest AI was going to implode. Buckle up hype is about to meet financial reality. If you thought AI was going to cause end of day I assure you it makes a better movie script than reality
T
theLegionWithin
and yet literally every fortune 500 company is jumping on the AI bandwagon - that includes all banks. food for thought...
MikeRocor
Thinking about a new project...

Seems I have too much computer junk floating around and need to find a place to stash some of it. Oh, wait! I could move some of it into the living room... but I'd have to pretend like it belonged there. Hmmm...

How about an electronic picture frame? Yeah, that'd do it.

I have an old HP laptop floating around that hasn't been powered up in a couple of years. It's a decent old machine - I upped the RAM from 4 to 8 GB a few years ago but it does have one little drawback - the built in monitor doesn't work. At all. But I also have a selection of old monitors of various sizes, any one of which would be much more out of the way in the living room.

And, as a bonus, I've been toying with the idea of setting up a "server" to be used as a file dumping/sharing point for sharing files (mostly photos) between Win11, iPhone, Linux and android devices. Aaaanndd a web server for sharing a big collection of recipes (Mr. Food). This machine seems like it could kill all three of those birds with one stone.

So... a Linux picture frame but -not- in full "kiosk" mode. The machine will have access to the internet, but not be externally accessible - no service ports forwarded from the internet gateway to any of the internal systems.

The only issue I am foreseeing is that the battery in the old laptop is almost certainly shot and there's no UPS in the living room. The power's not too bad here but there are drop outs a couple of times a year. Well, that and the HDD will no doubt crap out as soon as I start depending on it for anything - but that's what they make USB sticks for!
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MikeRocor
MikeRocor
The machine:

HP 2000-2d60DX notebook (F8Q67UA) (2013 vintage)

CPU: AMD A6-5200 (4 cores / 4 threads, 2 GHz, w/ Radeon HD8440 graphics integrated)
RAM: 8 GB DDR3
Disk: Western Digital 500 GB SATA @ 5400 RPM
ETH: 100 Mbs ethernet
WIFI: 802.11b/g/n
Video: It has VGA and HDMI ports, up to 1920x1080 resolution on external monitor

So: Certainly not a screamer, but not really a slouch either. And I know it's "in it for the long haul" - This machine has had uptimes of over a year with no issues whatsoever.

It has mic in and headphone out ports (which I don't expect to use),
3 USB2.0 ports,
1 SD card reader

It's been a year since I last fired it up. It currently has Tiny Core Linux 13.1 - x86_64 installed, which I'll update to 16.2 to get this show on the road.

I haven't actually hauled it out of the closet yet - gotta free up some desk space first.
MikeRocor
MikeRocor
Soooo... getting the hardware out isn't all that high a prioritiy ( 'cause the desk isn't getting any tidier!). I don't expect to use any software that needs specific hardware so, even if the old HP laptop doesn't work this year, there's always the other old HP laptop... or the -other- old HP laptop. So I think I'll fiddle around with the software build on something that's already in front of me, installing to a USB stick so I can just pop it onto the target host when I'm ready and do any necessary tweaking after that.

Advanced Software Systems Hosted On Legacy Equipment.

Using Tiny Core as the OS is pretty much a given - I don't think it lacks anything I'll need except maybe some scripting to glue everything together. I can't think of a good reason to use any version prior to the current one, which is 16.2. If we get a version 17 before I'm done then so much the better. I also can't think of a good reason not to use x86_64 unless there's some software that's only packaged up for x86. If I actually had a Raspberry Pi laying around in the way, I'd likely use that and Tiny Core for ARM, but the point here is to repurpose one of these old doorstops (and I -don't- have a Pi).

I'll use the standard collection Xorg-7.7, Xprogs, , aterm, and jwm to start with, though I may opt for some other WM. One of the display methods I'm considering doesn't work all that well with wbar (icon bar), so I'll install that but probably not run it "in production".

Some of the secondary functionality will need openssh (for remote login and for sftp) and apache for (recipes, and postit notes).

Even though this system will probably not be used interactively very much, I'll probably install a file manager (emelfm2, no doubt) and conky. Probably -not- libreoffice (though you never know). The box will have internet connectivity so it's not like I can't add stuff later.

Up in the air are still "Exactly what will I use to actually display the photos?" and "What kind of user interface, if any, will the picture display have?" It almost seems like there will need to be a way to pause/resume picture cycling and set the display order. It would be neat if the system had a touch screen but even if it did, the external monitor wouldn't (and I don't want an open laptop hanging around). Adding and removing individual photos will be manual and there will be room for seriously many of them.
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MikeRocor
MikeRocor
So the picture frame thing is under way. I did get the relevant hardware out of the closet before going any farther with the software... primarily because, for unrelated purposes, I had to move all of the shtuff that was pile in front of that particular closet. Got the thing out and plugged in, fired it up headless. Updated the OS from Tiny Core 15.0 to Tiny Core 16.2. While it was downloading fresh copies of all the usual software, I scrounged up the little monitor I had in mind for the project and a spare keyboard and mouse.

Rebooted to the new OS and checked that the hardware hadn't decided to go south without me while it was in storage. Memory, disk, ethernet and wifi all ok. The little monitor still works too. The laptop's built in screen failed to heal while resting these last several months, no surprise there - it still doesn't work. Now that I think of it, I seem to recall physically disconnecting it in order to allow the bios to recognize the external monitor. Whatever.

I already had a nice directory full of photos from a family event on the HD so I just fired up gpicview and set it to use its slide show functionality in full screen mode and just that simply, I have an electronic picture frame. But that was a little -too- simple. I want to have some user input to
  • allow random or sequential viewing of pictures
  • allow pausing the slide show in order to take a longer look at a picture
  • allow skipping forward or back in the picture sequence
  • add or remove pictures from the slide show while it is running
I can do a lot via a remote login (ssh) but I think some kind of convenient user interface would be useful. Of course, that will mean having some kind of input device - perhaps a wireless keyboard and mouse tucked away somewhere unobtrusive.

I haven't installed the sftpcomms scripts yet, though sftpd itself comes right along with openssh, which is there and working.

I haven't fired up httpd yet either, though that will be a secondary function, so it can wait until everything else is finalized.

So far, it's a fun little project.
M
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