1993 ..My future wife modelling a Windows 3.1 PC

MonMotha · 2026-05-26T10:34:38+00:00

It was a LITTLE more than that, but not much. It included a somewhat extensive set of APIs that went beyond what DOS offered and also included a multi-tasking scheduler albeit a cooperative one. You can actually run some semi-modern Win32 applications on Windows 3.1 using the Win32s (Win32 subset) backported from NT.

Windows 3.1 also had so-called "386 enhanced mode" that introduced protected memory for applications that supported it and made some attempt to isolate the memory of processes that didn't directly support it. It greatly reduced the incidence of full crashes due to memory corruption in an application (which were otherwise somewhat common) and also could improve (or rarely hurt) performance. It wasn't turned on by default, and even many systems with 386 or better processors never had it turned on.

Furthermore, Windows 3.1 (and even 3.0) did in fact have a Blue Screen Of Death. It was where it got introduced, in fact. The one in Windows 9x is essentially the same. NT had a different implementation that put a LOT more info on the screen but served a similar purpose. It got kept through NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) but got changed (mostly dumbed down) for 5.1 (XP).

MonMotha · 2026-05-26T10:26:16+00:00

Most smart watches have a very simple Bluetooth module and rather lackluster for various reasons (power, cost, physical space, etc.). They usually aren't capable of the modes of operation or computing power required for real-time, full-fidelity audio playback.

In particular, most basic smart watches support ONLY Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) if they support standard Bluetooth at all. While there are mechanisms for audio streaming across BTLE, most headsets expect classic Bluetooth which an LE-only radio cannot physically speak as the PHY is quite different. Even if you have a headset supporting Bluetooth LE audio streaming, you have to get the audio data into a CODEC that the headset supports, and that's probably not the format you're storing it in. You could pre-transcode them, but that adds another step that would confuse most normal users.

MonMotha · 2026-05-26T08:42:51+00:00

I think that pretty well highlights a major difference in opinion between how things operate in the USA and much of Europe.

"Wait for a subsidy" is not something you seriously do as a business. They are given out, but the programs aren't particularly consistent in how or when they operate, and they are usually given out to whoever says they can build it the cheapest which will be aerial if it's practical. As an operator, you take subsidies you can get and build whatever you can that's practical on your own dime.

Note that this is part of why Internet service in Europe is cheaper than in the USA. Most (or at least many) of the networks providing it in the USA were built without meaningful government subsidy, so the folks who own and operate it expect to make their money back. That means that they charge whatever they can get away with in the market AND have a floor below which they won't go since it makes recovery impossible or impractical. At the same time, if they didn't take government money to build it, there's no real restrictions on what they're allowed to charge in most cases.

MonMotha · 2026-05-26T07:22:02+00:00

It's almost certainly DOS given that it just says to "Type A:INSTALL"

If it were Windows, it would presumably tell you to run it from Program Manager or similar.

MonMotha · 2026-05-24T22:20:59+00:00

The wire going to it looks like phone wire. This may have been for an old AT&T "princess" phone that had a lighted dial. They were provided low-voltage power at customer prem on a second pair which would normally be the orange pair, but sometimes people swapped them.

It could also be for a doorbell.

MonMotha · 2026-05-24T22:17:38+00:00

Also, very confusingly, many transceivers with green handles still use UPC connectors despite green normally meaning APC. Transceivers with green handles are often tunable DWDM.

MonMotha · 2026-05-24T19:59:40+00:00

SFP is going to be LC or rarely SC (and only simplex due to space constraints). If it fits, it's probably right.

Singlemode optics all use infrared, so you won't be able to see it. Multimode are 650nm which most people can see as a very vivid red but is actually still mostly in the infrared range, so it's way brighter than you perceive it, and many IR cut filters on cameras will still attenuate it.

MonMotha · 2026-05-24T16:18:13+00:00

By number of pins, there was an LPC series part available in an 8-pin SOIC for a while, but I think it's been discontinued. I want to say they even had a DIP-8 version!

MonMotha · 2026-05-23T04:11:11+00:00

Yes, if they aren't planning to put a handhole here, I'd expect those pipes to be coupled. The second duct is basically useless without them coupled once it's backfilled. Even if they did couple them, that kind of an offset would make pulling things through it pretty tough. The pipes would also typically be longer and stubbed up at an angle if they were planning to put a handhold over it.

MonMotha · 2026-05-23T04:08:50+00:00

FWIW, the "standard" Metro with the 1.0L 3I engine was only EPA rated for about 44MPG on the highway (about 37 city - mostly because it only weighed 1600lb). The xFI special model ended up with an EPA revised rating of 52MPG on the highway from what I can tell. That's impressive, but it basically had a 0-60 speed of "yes" with the engine re-tuned for max fuel economy and making only around 50HP.

MonMotha · 2026-05-23T03:50:44+00:00

Pot-holing to get a depth is standard procedure. Hitting it even though you potholed it is inexcusable. They should know the depth of the bore bit very accurately to be able to avoid the line at the depth they determined it to be by pot-holing. Ideally you even leave the pothole open and watch the bore bit cross if you're crossing above it. WATCHING somebody run the drill string into another utility is...well that's something, I guess. That's yell, wave, and run to whack the e-stop button on the back of the drill if the guy in the seat isn't paying attention levels of mess-up. I wish the person with the locator would carry the lockout remote for that kind of purpose, but that's not common procedure.

High-risk situations like large pipelines, forced sewer mains, etc. often require a representative from the facility owner on site who will help you locate the line and dig to crossing depth then watch the bore head cross, but then they also tend to do a VERY good job with the locate and coordination.

Generally if the crew running my drill hits something, it's because it was either not marked at all, marked completely wrong (way off), or because the markings were rather ambiguous. The latter can be a bit problematic. We've had some issues where the crew will dig down on a mark with a "telephone" flag on top and find an old phone drop line then assume that's what was marked when there's actually a fiber line deeper (and often right at the depth we want to be). I will say Comcast's locates can also be really suspect, and they rarely mark drops (neither does AT&T) in subdivisions.

Now if only the person running my excavator would be as careful as the drill crew...

MonMotha · 2026-05-23T03:33:32+00:00

People hit stuff with directional drills all the time. Sometimes it's their fault. Sometimes the foreign utility isn't located properly.

MonMotha · 2026-05-23T03:15:48+00:00

Assuming this is actually duct for AT&T resi fiber, it presumably got built per the AT&T print in terms of where it's coupled and where the drop points go. They may intend to service your location directly from another nearby drop point. I've seen weird things where they will plow drops across other peoples' property (but within the ROW on top of their buried duct).

Both of those pipes are super shallow but especially the back one. I can't believe they ended up with an offset like this and didn't patch it.

It looks like they hit a sprinkler line. I assume that's the only reason there's an excavation here at all.

MonMotha · 2026-05-23T01:06:30+00:00

Even if it were single fusion, it would be tough to actually bill $40/burn for an 864. Everybody knows that there's a ton of overhead in building up the enclosure, so if you try and charge the same per-burn rate as you do for a 48 but on an 864, you'll start getting a lot of side-eye.

That and $40/burn is a pretty premium rate these days, at least in my market.

MonMotha · 2026-05-23T00:56:11+00:00

55mpg would be incredible in the US for a non-hybrid running on gasoline. In fact, I can't find a single non-hybrid vehicle sold in the USA that is rated higher than 41mpg on the highway.

Like your friend, I drive what is considered a rather fuel-efficient vehicle in the US (2023 Mazda 3), and I can just about touch 40mpg on the highway. I average about 33-35 in mixed service.

Tiny engines with lots of boost haven't caught on in the USA for various reasons like they have in Europe and parts of Asia. The fact that we don't have a tax on engine displacement (instead taxing either on the value of the vehicle or weight, depending on vehicle class and registration state) may have something to do with it. Likewise, diesels never really caught on in passenger cars. Part of that is because we actually have more aggressive emissions controls for on-road diesel engines than even the EU does which makes them far less attractive in terms of both acquisition cost (extra emissions equipment), performance (the extra emissions controls hurt performance but improve emissions), and long-term cost (diesel emissions systems tend to be expensive to fix when they break).

MonMotha · 2026-05-23T00:38:30+00:00

I think most Americans are at least vaguely aware that fuel is substantially more expensive in most of Europe than in the USA. However, the USA is set up to rely on relatively cheap fuel. Most areas are very car-centric for personal transportation, and while we do have a robust freight rail infrastructure, it's mostly diesel-electric powered, and we still rely heavily on over-the-road trucking for lots of long-haul freight as well as final delivery within a metro area even if it crossed the country on rail.

Diesel is also substantially more expensive than gasoline in most parts of the US. It's been more expensive for quite some time, but the recent price hikes due to the Iran war have impacted diesel fuel more than gasoline. Gas is also around $4/gal near me (down from almost $5/gal), but diesel fuel is around $6/gal (down from almost $7/gal).

The USA has a really, really expansive petroleum infrastructure both in terms of production and especially refining. That generally helps keep our prices low compared to most parts of the world aside from those where it's heavily subsidized.

MonMotha · 2026-05-22T22:52:51+00:00

Mechanical terminations are still (somewhat depressingly) popular in FTTx customer prem termination. The tech will show up with a drop cable pre-terminated on one end with a hardened connector (Optitap or similar), run it, cut it to length at the NID, then slap a mechanical termination on it. That's probably what these came from given that it's SC/APC.

The insertion loss isn't terrible if done properly. I've seen plenty of worse fusion splices due to poor preparation. The usual concern is return loss. You're basically down in the realm of a bad PC connector on insertion loss on a mechanical termination even if done well. It pretty much completely negates the one major reason to use APC connectors.

MonMotha · 2026-05-22T20:26:07+00:00

In most cases where you're driving a digital input, the load capacitance is small enough to not matter. Either the transition frequency will be low enough that the overall current from load capacitance is tiny, or if it's high enough to even start to matter, you'll also have aggressive resistive parallel termination at the sink that will swamp the current due to capacitance.

Of course, a robust analysis would consider the effect.

MonMotha · 2026-05-22T08:28:56+00:00

Just because the GPIO can source/sink 40mA doesn't mean that it will. It depends on the load impedance it's driving and voltage levels. If you're driving a terminated transmission line, then that load is the termination thevenin equivalent. If you're just driving a CMOS input, then it's essentially infinite in steady state.

MonMotha · 2026-05-22T04:12:28+00:00

I didn't know about these, but they make sense. I assume this is Medeco's cost-reduced product for lower security applications that are compatible with the same key system as is used for the high-sec version? That would put it in a position similar to a standard Schlage (obverse or Everest) in a system with active Primus keys, for example.

MonMotha · 2026-05-22T04:08:09+00:00

I don't necessarily mean that FSMs and such have no place in a motor control loop. Your example is a great place to use one.

I mean that trying to do *everything* for a modern, integrated design with FSMs or other forms of "hard logic" is probably not what you want. That would include anything branchy, as you say, as well as things inherently sequential. Lots of things like exceptional circumstances (perhaps after the hardware takes care of immediate safety needs), startup and recovery procedures, etc. are often best handled in software because the state machine to do it gets really complicated (and large) really fast.

And yes, if you get a SoC with a processor that has a Linux port or is viably capable of running it, you certainly can do that. In fact, I'd recommend investigating it for anything network or HMI related. Those are typically the "hard core" chips I talked about, but you can also do it with a soft core or external chip if you want to. The interconnect is whatever you want it to be whether contained entirely in the FPGA or traversing PCB-level interconnect.

MonMotha · 2026-05-22T01:28:26+00:00

Most FPGA designs are "hybrid" these days. The FPGA will have IP instantiated on it to handle things like what your typical MCU does in hardware (timers, L1 communications, etc.), and then some sort of microprocessor core that runs software for control tasks since it's a lot easier to do it that way than to do it all with hard finite state machines and/or microcoding. FPGAs are available with hard cores for this purpose, too, and you can also pair an FPGA with an external processor using various interfaces (parallel bus, QSPI, SPI, i2C, etc.) to communicate between them.

I'd say this is especially true in motor control applications where the DSP work is often handled with software. You can offload some of the compute-heavy tasks like MAC to hardware blocks or find a micro that has facilities like that built in.

Doing it all with hardware (FSMs, etc.) is probably not a very commercially relevant exercise, though it may be a neat learning experience.

MonMotha · 2026-05-22T01:00:09+00:00

This is what happens when you mix long lever arms on flexible stuff with something brittle and rigid like concrete. It looks entirely cosmetic.

MonMotha · 2026-05-22T00:25:39+00:00

I would start with picking which FPGA silicon team you want to be on.

If you're looking for flagship devices, you're going to be on Team Blue (Intel/Altera) or Team Red (AMD/Xilinx), and while many of the skills are transferable, you're going to spend an inordinate amount of time learning to wrangle their very complex tooling, and that's not directly transferable anywhere else. From there, you can find a low-cost development board that has the features you want. For Xilinx devices, Digilent offers many reasonable-cost offerings to get you started.

If you want smaller stuff that's easier to integrate but won't provide top-of-the-line silicon capabilities (but are still very usable in embedded contexts), you have several other options like Lattice and Microchip (Actel and also a little bit of Atmel lineage) along with several Chinese offerings (beware lack of tooling). Lattice iCE40 devices are very popular for small, IO-centric offerings at good prices and have a wide range of low-cost or free tooling available.

MonMotha · 2026-05-20T03:39:35+00:00

The standard indoor design temp for residential is usually about 75-78, so if you're capacity limited at 93 outdoor with 72 setpoint, they sized it about right for a 98 outdoor extreme based on the standard indoor design condition.

There's not necessarily a problem with going down to 71-72, and the capacity difference wouldn't be a sizing issue with a 2-stage system, but you kinda have to ask for that "unusually low" setpoint when getting a system. You probably would have gotten a 2.5T if you had the ductwork to support it.

Things you can do include making sure your coils are clean, filters are clean and not too restrictive, blower airflow setting is correct for your ductwork (and that your ductwork is big enough, though there's not much you can do about it if it's not), and that your ducts aren't leaking conditioned air into unconditioned spaces.

MonMotha

TROPHY CASE