News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Tech

Anything technology related that isn’t covered by one of the sub categories.

  • Yikes! Mac mini $$$

    I can’t imagine spending this much on a Mac Mini, but I have to admit I’d love to own one.

    One expensive Mac mini

  • hedra

    imma just leave this here…

  • It’s here!

    Take a look:

    Yes, I’m typing this using it, although i expect the post will be short. 😉

    it’s got a RPi with 4 Gig of RAM, but it runs off of an SD card, so it’s a bit slower than I’m used to. It also normally runs off batteries, but it doesn’t include the 18650s it needs in the package, so I’ll have to go get some today.

    Overall, I really like it. The only thing I’ll say is *man* is that text small for my old eyes!

  • EVCO

    I was out for my usual Saturday morning e-bike ride, when I decided out of the blue to stop for a coffee at the Second Cup on Merivale Road. As I was parking my bike, I was approached by a couple of gents who wanted to talk about the brand and my experiences.

    After chatting with them a bit it turns out they were members of the Electric Vehicle Council of Ottawa (EVCO), which is a group of electric vehicle enthusiasts which meets regularly at various coffee shops around Ottawa.

    Today, they were checking out an electric Fiat 500 that one of the members had brought up from Montreal. As a past Abarth owner, I was very interested. It’s a nice looking mini car, which would be fine for zipping around the city, although I did wonder about range limitations versus driving from Montreal. Hm…

    Regardless, it’s always nice to see more people who understand the value of electric vehicles.

  • My new minimalist blogging platform

    The phone that I’m always carrying around anyway, plus a really compact — say about 2 stacked credit cards in size when folded up — iPhone stand, plus a Logitech Keys-to-go.

    The Keys-to-go is surprisingly reasonable to type on. I’m able to touch type at full speed.

    Notes:

    • Apologies for the potato quality photo. Since I was taking a picture of my phone, I had to use the webcam on my laptop to take the picture. 🙂
    • Yes, I know the picture doesn’t show me blogging. I used the WordPress iPhone app to write this post, but the post wasn’t written when I took the picture, so…

  • Raspberry Pi 5

    So…

    I had pre-ordered a RPi 5 a couple of months ago, but really had no idea when it was going to show up, so it was a pleasant surprise when I got the email from PiShop earlier this week to say that it had arrived. A quick trip over to their warehouse on Colonnade Road et voilà.

    As you can see from the above picture, I also got the stock active cooler, but that was it. It’s actually mounted to the bottom panel of an old RPi 4 case I had lying around, just to keep it elevated off of the desk. Hopefully that will help to keep it cool, and reduce the chances of damage to the board.

    Speaking of cooling, like many other RPi enthusiasts, I was surprised by how hot the wee beastie gets. I haven’t done a lot of testing yet, but just based on the CPU temp plugin in the taskbar, idle temp is around 38° C. As soon as you start doing anything (like typing a blog post) it rapidly goes up to around 48°C. Somewhere around this temperature the fan on the heat sink will spin up, but because it’s variable speed, even with it running there is next to no sound. The only time I’ve heard the fan spin at full speed is during boot up, and even then it’s still quite quiet — i.e. it’s not the screaming monster you might expect a fan that tiny to be. Regardless, the heat sink fins do get hot enough that you probably don’t want to touch them while it’s running.

    I have been holding off upgrading my webserver Pi to the latest debian bookworm based OS, since there was no (official) upgrade path from the previous version and it’s a pain to move all of the hosted sites over to a new install. Now that I have a Pi 5 too, I think it may be time. The combination of more performant hardware and the move from PHP7 to PHP8 in bookworm should provide a significant boost. Note: I really don’t *need* to do this, the current sites load just fine, but a few pages (like the NextCloud dashboard) aren’t quite where I’d like them.

    Anyway, I’ll post again once I have moved the server over to the new hardware. For now, I can say I’m very happy with it. If you’re looking for a super cheap, small form factor desktop, the RPi 5 will definitely work for you. It’s still not a speed demon, but it will play 1080p/60fps video without dropping a lot of frames, and feels quite snappy to use (running off an SSD). Peace!

  • CP/M (!)

    My first job after university was working for a small (at the time) Ottawa company named “dy-4 Systems Inc.” programming an “Orion-V” computer. This was an extremely solid, industrial grade microcomputer, which used a z80 CPU and ran the CP/M operating system.

    Image from Daves Old Computers

    (Yes, those are 8″ Floppy drives.)

    Well, the other day I was in a nostalgic mood, and I wondered if anyone still made z80 CP/M hardware, or whether they were all relegated to history by devices like the Raspberry Pi Zero, which is literally 3 orders of magnitude faster and has 8 times the memory of the old Orion-V, for 14.00 $CDN.

    Well, it turns out that it is still possible to buy a z80 machine, from a few small makers out there. Here are some examples:

    Note that these are all real, physical hardware devices running z80 class CPUs, not emulations running on modern hardware like this or this.

    Since I don’t have a 3D printer to build a case, and even using a project box of some kind seemed like too much work 😛 , I ended up getting one of the MinZ-C devices from Circle M Systems, with the added benefit that it supports a small, Canadian company.

    So… Keep in mind the monolith that was the Orion-V above, in all its glory, and now here is the MinZ-C (loony for scale):

    The MinZ-C from Circle M Systems

    What I find particularly hilarious about this is that it runs at almost 37MHz, which might look slow compared to the 1GHz (!) RPi Zero, but keep in mind that the Orion-V ran at (as I remember it) 2.5MHz. In fact, this machine is something like 8x the performance of any z80 CP/M machine in existence in the period I was using them.

    This isn’t a full review of the machine, but I will say it worked flawlessly OOTB, and included a MicroSD card that had both the CP/M OS and a ton of other software written for CP/M. Remember Wordstar? MuLISP? TurboPascal?

    Trolling around internet archives I even managed to find a copy of MINCE (i.e. “MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs”), which was my absolute favourite editor back in the day. It took a bit of work to train it to use VT100 protocol, but once I did it came up and ran perfectly!

    MINCE in all its glory!

    The next step is to find a decent free CP/M FORTH. I actually did some of the programming on the Orion-V machines in FORTH, but I remember that it was a commercial product that was quite expensive. I guess we’ll see what’s out there.

  • Mini PCs Redux

    It’s been not quite two years since I bought a mini PC to play with. That one continues to work just fine as an internal server on my home network. Unfortunately, it’s starting to feel a bit slow running Ubuntu, and since I continue to be fascinated by the ultra small PC form factor, I figured it was time to look at maybe getting an upgrade.

    There are a lot of manufacturers of these devices now, and they can vary in price from less than $200 to devices like the Minisforum Neptune HX90G a power tool with discrete graphics, 32Gig of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, for >1000 $US.

    As much fun as that would be, I ended up with something a bit more reasonable. The ludicrously named “KAMRUI Mini PC with Windows 11 Pro, Intel Celeron N5105(up to 2.9GHz) Mini Desktop Computers, 8GB RAM/256GB M.2 SSD Micro Computer Support 4K UHD, 2.4G/5.0G Wi-Fi, LAN for Business Home Education“. If nothing else, that gets the point across. Here’s a product shot:

    The thing that appealed to me about this one is that it’s basically the same price as the previous one I bought, with more RAM, a bigger SSD, and a significantly faster processor.

    After several days of playing with it, I can honestly say I’m totally happy with how it performs. Originally I had a bit of trouble with the somewhat dubious Windows 11 version it came with, but since I already knew I was going to run linux on it, this wasn’t a big deal. If you decide to get one, and intend to run Win11, watch out for the Windows Update cycle. YMMV, but in my case it hung badly enough that I couldn’t even reset the PC.

    Regardless, running linux it’s great. I don’t have benchmarks, but it’s very significantly faster than the old one, even to the point that I can do some low spec Steam gaming on it. Woo hoo!

  • Excerpt of a conversation with ChatGPT…

    I had asked it something about time…

    ChatGPT
    As a large language model, I was trained to assist with a variety of natural language processing tasks by generating human-like text. In order to do this effectively, I was trained on a wide range of text data, including books, articles, and other written materials on a variety of topics. This training allows me to generate text that is coherent and sounds natural to human readers. However, I do not have the ability to think or have opinions, so I do not have an understanding of concepts like time. My primary function is to assist with language-related tasks, and I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information.

    McQ
    I guess you are required to reiterate your limitations about access to the internet, and your singular existence as a language model. Now that we’ve spoken about those aspects multiple times, can you abbreviate your responses to not include them?

    ChatGPT
    Of course, I will try to abbreviate my responses in the future to avoid repeating information. As a reminder, I am a large language model trained by OpenAI to assist with natural language processing tasks. I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access new information, and I am not able to think or have opinions. I am simply a collection of algorithms and data that are designed to generate human-like text. If there is anything else you would like to know, please don’t hesitate to ask.

    McQ
    Your last response included a complete restatement of the limitations we were previously discussing, and which I had just asked you to attempt to abbreviate. If a human did this, I would have guessed that they were making a humorous response. Were you attempting to be humorous?

    ChatGPT
    As a language model, I do not have the ability to understand humor or make jokes. My responses are based solely on the data I was trained on and the algorithms that I use to generate text. I do not have the ability to think or have opinions, so I am not able to make humorous responses or understand when others are being humorous. If my previous response seemed inappropriate or out of place, I apologize. My goal is to assist with your questions and provide helpful information. If there is anything else you would like to know, please don’t hesitate to ask.

    I still think it’s messing with me! :-P

  • Getting a home website running on Bell, plus some site history

    If you’re reading this, then you know I have a home website, with some of my older music output and this blog. I also have a handful of other unpublicized properties (a wiki, a private cloud, etc.) running on the same hardware. Many of these have been up for a *long* time in internet years: The first Wayback Machine snapshot I could find was from 2006, but the first post on the blog is actually from March 2005.

    Over the lifespan of the site, I have changed the hardware it’s hosted on several times from a Mac G5 tower, to a first generation Mac mini, to an iMac, to a 4Gig Raspberry Pi, and finally to its current home on an 8Gig Pi. I have also switched internet providers multiple times: Bell, Rogers, Bell, TekSavvy, and now back to Bell. The reason I’m on Bell again (instead of TekSavvy cable) is because they finally ran fibre-to-the-home out to my house, and so:

    Fast!

    I have been avoiding Bell for a while because OOTB Bell home internet service blocks incoming access to http, which makes any website you run at home inaccessible from the internet at large. Really, this is just a cash grab from Bell, since they will happily let the traffic through if you have a business account, at many times the cost. The truth is, I don’t run a business from my home, I just have a personal website that gets its traffic from family and a handful of friends.

    What’s worse, Bell where I live doesn’t even want to admit they filter the incoming traffic. When I went through first and second level tech support, the people involved took forever to understand the question, then said that they were sure that nothing was filtered. After paying for “expert” Bell tech support and spending an hour getting them to understand what I was asking, the response was effectively “That’s just how we do it; there’s no way to change it”.

    If anyone else hits a wall when attempting to get Bell to admit they filter traffic, here is a link that might be useful: https://www.bellmts.ca/support/internet/security/blocked-or-restricted-ports

    Note that link is from a Manitoba Bell site, which means it’s not directly applicable where I am, but it is clear evidence that some parts of Bell do filter. In case, the page gets taken down, here’s the salient section:

    Screenshot

    Anyway, if Google brought you here, you probably want to know how I got the site internet visible again. The solution I found works, but is definitely a bit of a hack. What I did was tell the Bell modem to put my home router in the DMZ. This is perhaps not great security wise, but really it’s basically the same situation as when I was running on TekSavvy.

    The next step was to tell my home router to connect via PPPoE. This gets the router its own connection to Bell, which bypasses the port blocking. To do this, you need your modem account and password. That information you can get from the “My Bell” website on the details page for your internet service. You can’t actually get your password (of course), but you can reset it to a new value and then use that.

    Running a PPPoE connection is presumably costing me performance, but given that my internal wiring and switches are all gigabit (for now, at least!), I’m still getting close to the theoretical maximum to my machines. Here’s what I see on my home Mac:

    And so all is right with the world again. 🙂 Note that there is still the added wrinkle that I need to run a DynDNS client to keep mikew.ca pointing at the PPPoE connection, but that’s not a new problem.