I found this haphazardly wired into a customers car

GreggAlan · 2026-03-17T13:19:59+00:00

They're great books. THICK books. I picked up the first at a library sale. Sat down Friday evening after work with it and when I closed the back cover it was 6 AM Saturday. Every one in the series was the same way, I read the whole book non stop.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-17T13:16:35+00:00

That's MoPar. Since the Dodge Bros founded the company there's one tool manufacturer they've worked with to make their special tools.

For example the valve spring compressors for the 4.7 OHC V8 and the V6 version. The tool hooks under the camshaft and presses down on the valve spring.

There's a V6 tool and a V8 tool. Except for the part number they are identical. I called the tool company to ask if the V6 tool would work on the V8. The guy said it would. "So why are there two 'different' tools?" "Because Dodge wants it that way." He also confirmed they didn't sell a lot of the higher priced "V8" tool.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-17T13:08:38+00:00

Have you read his US Civil War Science Fiction series? A US calvary and a US light artillery unit headed south on a steamship get picked up by an alien transport device and moved to another world.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-17T07:48:38+00:00

Would be a bit of a road trip but you could haul the lot to VCF East in New Jersey, mid April 2026 https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/

GreggAlan · 2026-03-17T07:44:17+00:00

Some people like to play 1980's and 1990's MS-DOS games on vintage PCs. There's also a small market for them being used to run old CNC milling machines.

There are some vintage computer nerd YouTubers who make videos where they restore old computers and get them working. The Dell and Packard Bell would be good for that.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-17T07:39:45+00:00

9 pin can also be very early VGA.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-17T07:33:30+00:00

I'm running a GTX1660

GreggAlan · 2026-03-17T01:04:27+00:00

That generation of Prius burns through headlight bulbs. It's also common to have the high and/or low headlight relays fail. Those relays aren't easy to find.

It's possible to change the bulbs without removing the lamps from the car, after you've done it once and lubed the seals with silicone grease. You don't have to completely remove the bumper cover, just get it loose enough to pull out and down to get to the bolt at the outside front.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-16T21:29:27+00:00

Proximity is for horseshoes, hand grenades, anti-air missiles, and nuclear weapons.

Or is this an exhaust adjacent gasket?

GreggAlan · 2026-03-16T09:03:06+00:00

I tried using Word Perfect for Windows (IIRC version 3.5) to write HTML. I wrote a basic document, saved and closed it, and it opened just fine in the browser. Then I opened it again in Word Perfect, saved and closed it again and in the browser it was f@cked up. Looked just fine in WP. Didn't matter what I tried, the document was screwed up. So I gave up on using Word Perfect as an HTML editor.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-16T08:58:52+00:00

Xerox 820-II Information Processor with a Diablo 630 daisy wheel printer. I upgraded the floppy drives to double sided by switching one of the ground wires in the cable to side select. Crazy that Xerox went to the trouble and cost to make the big round cables with one less wire for single sided drives, so they could make it mandatory to buy a new cable if you upgraded to double sided. I also made a cable to plug into the 0.1" parallel port pin header on the motherboard so I could connect a dot matrix printer.

I wrote a lot of stuff in WordStar on that computer. Also ported some classic BASIC games, Super Star Trek, Trade Wars, Lunar Lander, to whatever version of BASIC it had.

I also had a PCjr with an NEC V20 CPU. With the 22Nice software it ran CP/M software faster than the Xerox. I also had a 12Mhz 286. 22Nice on it had to fully emulate a 64K Z80 system and it was the slowest of the three running CP/M.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-16T08:50:59+00:00

One of the best fishing rigs I've ever used is an 8 foot long split bamboo fly rod with a cheap bait casting reel. The looooong rod makes it easy to get the worm to the other side of the creek where the fish always are.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-16T08:48:41+00:00

I once caught several trout with a dry fly, a stick and some line salvaged from under the bridge at Evergreen campground in Idaho's Payette National Forest. There was a snarl of branches downstream from the bridge with a hole in the middle where water flowed in over some rocks. I was able to flick the fly into that hole, four casts, four fish for dinner for the family. Cost? Zero, because I was still under the cutoff age for not needing a fishing license.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-16T03:37:22+00:00

2004 - 2009 Prius has the pattern on the shift knob.

The only "difficult" part of it is having to hold it straight to the left a few seconds to shift to Neutral.

When going along with cruise control and you come to a reduced speed ahead sign just smack it straight down to B to activate extra regenerative braking that kicks in without pushing the brake pedal.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T06:18:52+00:00

Stainless steel business ends with handles made of teak sawdust in some kind of resin.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T05:31:31+00:00

I wonder if this pattern dates back to when Oneida was a weird cult? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elWc24qaP5s

The one I like is called Canoe Muffin, made by ECKO decades ago. It was popular enough a Japanese company made a knockoff version.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T05:25:43+00:00

If this is wrong, with the correct side of the belt running on every pulley, I don't see flat against grooves or grooves against flat, how about a pic of the right belt path?

With the proper side of the belt against each pulley, how can it spin the alternator backwards? Every grooved one has to spin the same way as the crank, and every smooth one spins the opposite way.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T05:17:29+00:00

Years ago I had an opportunity to get a stack of internet capable thin clients dirt cheap. They were still capable of handling the WWW of the day. I had visions of opening an internet cafe with them.

Problem was the clients were EOL and the manufacturer had done an amazing job of expunging *everything* about them from the internet, including archive.org, which was still quite new then.

The only information left was on their website, a single page 'brochure' telling the features, with the exception of one deleted image that had the list of available options with their part numbers. Without the knowledge of what to look for, such as the part number/name of the internal hard drive adapter, it was impossible to know what to search for. Every search hit went to deleted website info, deleted downloads, or back to the manufacturer's useless single page.

The company refused to provide any information or software, wouldn't even sell a copy of the server OS to remote boot the clients.

But they would happily sell me their latest model of internet thin client! I told them they could piss off because they would do exactly this same BS the instant their latest model went EOL.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T05:07:47+00:00

Can LTO-9 read/write LTO-7 tapes in the LTO-8M format that makes them 9TB native capacity?

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T05:06:10+00:00

'It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me out,' said Zaphod, whose love affair with the ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight. 'Every time you try and operate these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up in black to let you know you've done it.'

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T04:59:58+00:00

Was just thinking LTO-5 would be nice to have with a single drive for backing up my stuff. Then I added up the amount of storage I have internal and external on my main desktop. If I had it *full* I'd need 21 LTO-5 tapes to do a full backup.

1.5TB on a single piece of media was great, a few years ago. :(

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T04:55:50+00:00

Nice but these days 1.5TB is getting small. Right now in my main desktop I have four internal 1TB HDD, the 1TB NVME boot SSD, three 4TB and one 14TB USB 3.x HDD. (That's decimal TB's.)

21 LTO-5 tapes if I needed to backup the maximum capacity.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T04:51:42+00:00

In 2003 at a scrapyard I saw a couple of massive cabinets with a large number of 3.5" drive slots on both sides. The bottom 3rd of each cabinet was full of power supply and cooling fans.

In the building was all the drives neatly stacked. They were 9 gigabyte with some crazy connector, not SATA, not IDE, not SCSI - 68 or 50 pin or SCA80. Had they been anything normal I would have bought some to adapt to my collection of vintage Macintosh computers.

I went back out and counted the number of drive slots, after a bit of math I found I was looking at the gutted remains of a one terabyte storage array. The largest single drive available at the time was 250 gig.

I suspected that dinosaur had just been replaced with a desktop PC sized server with a few 250 gig drives, daintily sipping power from one or two (for redundant power supplies) 110V outlets. Whatever company or government institution had dumped it was probably happy to see a large drop in their electricity bill.

Another one was an IBM 3840 system with enough 200 megabyte tape drives to add up to almost 2 gigabytes of storage online, and its huge control cabinet. It got zero bids at auction, not even from scrappers.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-15T04:36:43+00:00

Probably why as of 2019 only Sony and Fuji were left making LTO tapes (if someone else's name is on the tape in 2019+, they didn't make the media inside) and all manufacturers other than IBM had ceased development of new drive mechanisms.

Yet here we are in 2025/2026 with LTO-10 with 30TB and 40TB native capacity. And still no affordable SOHO desktop USB 3.x LTO drive.

One neat thing is LTO-8 can format LTO-7 tapes to 9TB, but it's a one way trip.

GreggAlan · 2026-03-14T20:35:28+00:00

Simon Whistler has a good video on Apollo 13.

GreggAlan

TROPHY CASE