Work

I put together the 9u rack rails today and they look great. I just used a 2x3 that we had laying around chopped it roughly to size and used BriWax to finish it which was super fast vs all the waiting around for stain and varnish.

Unfortunately it's not quite going to all fit inside the 31" wide hole I have for it. So that whole cabinet needs to come off the wall like 1/2". Which means anything we care about hitting the floor needs to go. The server racks will be just fine where they are.

One thing I am going to do is flip the bolts around on the outside two now that they're not going to be visible. Anyone sticking their hand back there deserves their tetanus. I'll put some caps on them. Maybe. I'll also carve out the middle section of each 2x3 for cable pass through.

It will also be nice to have this henge/cabinet at least loosely attached to the wall since I'll just jam some corner brackets to it. It's not unstable, but now it'll never go anywhere.

Addendum:

As I was going through my go-to box of rack stuff for cage nuts I found this one bolt that I've had forever and really want to find another one of so I can do a thing or something. It's too nice to just toss and I do try to at least match so it's not like I'm gonna ever use it.

So anyway, I went hunting for captive cup washers and there are guys like turning them or water jetting them for like 35 cents a washer, which seems a bit. Extravagant. For me.

So it took me like 45 minutes to find that what I'm looking at is effectively this product:

So...Sell me them. How much man, gimme a checkout page. "Send Inquiry"? I don't want 40,000 of these things. Am I supposed to chat with the sales engineer? Miss Ting? Is this page a Ru Paul movie from the '90s?

Searching for the product only ever brings you to this page, so that's cool.

So oh hey 30 minutes later and I found the US supplier is...uh oh this isn't gonna be cheap.

Over $1 per screw, $4 per "thing I'm screwing in" We're veering into Fancy Lad territory again.

Tomorrow I gotta figure out if Graybar or someone has these.

Cool Walmart has the knock-offs for 12 bucks. Sold.

Here's the 30 second beer ad commercial for this monitor.

I can plug in every single machine I own and switch between them all with a remote. In basically two days I built a full isolation network mini-rack build right into the monitor chassis to allow seamless administration of an untusted network with Windows 95 and RedHat 5.2, NeXT, Mac all wanting file sharing service, name services, software and driver repos. That's all done. I can just grab drivers on my workstation, drop them right into a file share and pick them up on a Windows 95 machine. And I have loose VGA connections ready to go to configure servers and stuff that have VGA out. All that VGA video is going through two, passive $25 VGA switchboxes. Looks super sharp, and I was the guy with the 17" and 21" Sonys (as pictured below!). My big Trinitrons also just had tons of this switchbox stuff going on and never looked this good. I mean, chalk it up to better cables I guess, but I very purposely bought the "Standard '90s Beige Switcher" with the big chunky knob and yeah it just looks perfect.

Not only all that, but you can capture the screen through the crystal clear HDMI output.

I'm pretty sure streaming is a main intended feature of this monitor, but even for me, where that's not my primary use for this thing, it's so convenient. I can sit here in a Secure As I Can Make It VNC connection to a Windows 95 machine and capturing what's on the screen across the room in OBS. I find myself instinctively just watching progress on the display in OBS rather than turn all the way around just to see if my 57MB has copied over its 10Mb Ethernet yet.

Neat Indeed.

And yeah that modem is "10BASE-T" explicitly. The manual specifies Category 3, 4 or 5 UTP for 10BASE-T). This DOS only program really is how you set things like the duplex in the manual.(Not speed/duplex, multiple speeds didn't exist)

I could probably have left it at 10/Half and been just fine. I should get some 100Mb cards though. There's not gonna be a whole lot of bidirectional traffic on this thing. I mean I worked on plenty of office networks running 10BASE2 back in the mid '90s. Occasionally someone would have Novell and some twisted pair.

I thankfully got in toward the tail end of "new" 10BASE2 installs though I did my share of fishing that shit in several-hundred-year-old buildings.

SCSI also. I have like 2 bins of SCSI stuff plus enclosures I really want to build. That SCSI gear was Above My Pay Grade in 1997 when I was 22 and burning all the candles at once with a blowtorch. The Packard Bell I'm working on now is identical to the one I first played Doom on in 1994. Mine was an SX-33 that I upgraded to a Cyrix 80Mhz. This one is an Intel 50Mhz, so it's a "2052" rather than the "2033" I had. The P120 is also very age appropriate. This whole thing is basically an upscaled version of my 22-ish year-old setup.

The file modified datestamp on this photo is 9/9/1999 at 10:57PM. I think that game is Obsidian, which I did pay for and did own which came out in 1997, so I'd have been between 22 and 24 there.

I'm wrong, that's Starship Titanic, which was my other guess, which came out in April 1998, and I did buy it it's on my desk there!

*(Really, that's really what was in my playlist)

I've got a ton of video, all of it garbage, about making a dumb shelf and backplate for my "retro things Isolation Network" that I'm trying to get down to like 20 minutes.

I think the thing to do is watch it all through, then make notes and then go back and execute the notes rather than try to do it one at a time as individual tweaks.

To manage this I'm gonna try and use my internal Wiki with a link on the homepage to like my Blog Notes category so I can go update stuff as I watch, then check them off as I complete them.

We'll see. I just want to put up the dumb "Switch in a Monitor!" video so I can do the really cool stuff of "How I am securing this since no one else talks about this stuff.

But since I've been working on this in the last two days:

Bonus points for nice and beefy but non-ferrous objects. So if I could hit 'em with a magnet they'd probably be super easy to find.

Argh. I've got so much stuff to build and I just want to get at it already instead of wasting time editing nonsense that didn't even really work out!

This one might be sort of tricky. Hey Natalie, do you guys sell anything we could like taste test in the store? Maybe I should email the lighting place like what we used to do back in the before times.

I'm building a shelf in this cubby to hold that super un-weildy VGA switcher. It's awesome but I would have paid triple the price for just 5 ports in a row rather than this octopus nonsense. It was $30, what do I want.

I need to mount that radio too, it looks super cool. I'm also going to make that the home for things like the NeXT VGA breakout box and hopefully the first USB keyboard and mouse dingus they sell. And a bin-full of adapters and "general retro-ey converters and plugs"

So I have this vintage brass and painted woodgrain gooseneck lamp which is awesome looking and so perfect for exactly what I need it for. Imagine sticking like a flashlight on its end pointing up vs this thing. But hoo man this thing's going to burn my house down like that bulb gets scalding hot within a minute or two.

These are 12V bulbs so that base has a transformer in it that gets nice and warm but gives switchable low/hi which is nice. It uses GE 1156F bulbs, which are like automotive backup lights or in a garage door opener. So I want like a modern LED equivalent that is going to look warm and nice like this thing but searching I don't think I trust buying anything I don't see with my own eyes first or someone personally vouches for. Whatever it is I'm not buying four of them for $10 without seeing them lit for real with my eyes.

I want the pleasant light qualities of a 60 year old incandescent light bulb made for one of like 2 "warm ambient light" scenarios for this bulb.

I'd pay $20 for a single bulb if I knew it was exactly what I wanted. I'm sensing a theme in this post.

I said I would have paid triple the $30 for a better design, I've got $130 let's do this thing because these are perfect:

TL;DR: Here's why I don't want to see "legal firearms" at local rallies in my town.

I want to see a movement like '60s Black Empowerment and the Pettus Bridge and Kent State and Stonewall heroes. I do not want to live in armed-skirmish-Northern Ireland. We remember the names of the relatively few who lost their lives in the mid-century US, because there were relatively few of them. And look at all of what their sacrifice actually gained us. Voting rights, school integration rights, abortion rights, women's rights, LGBTQ Rights. Think very hard at the progress made in the last 70 years through persistent non-violent protest movements.

Yes, violent fascists are in power. But they've been in power before. The actions of their thousands of assholes is no match for our millions of Regular People who don't want to see their Regular Guy Suburban neighbors eyes burned out of their head with pepper spray or shot 10 times in the back. That guy they just hauled away still has my skil saw.

We can get it back (Not the saw, that thing's just gone let it go). We don't need to walk around armed to protest for peace.

I am not victim blaming. It's not my opinion that Alex Pretti had any role in provoking his own death. My opinion was that he only would have used that weapon in the defense of others facing violence. ICE pepper sprayed this man in the face, and never did he try to shoot them for that. He remained calm. It's unclear to me when they even noticed he had a gun. It seems it may have been after they'd already made their decision that he wasn't ever going to get back up. I'm not going to watch that man die so I can frame-by-frame figure it out.

This is in response to this video about which I have no context. But it's basically a MAGA prick who rolled in all Maga Prick-like and IRL PWN some Libs and then panicked like anyone would when they've mouthed off and decide they gotta go. My opinion is that Pretti would not have used that opportunity to unload his firearm in the MAGA guy's face. As a public servant he would have attended to the injured student. Because he's a regular, nice person who feels a duty to his fellow people.

It's shocking, but not shocking. This will be played by the MAGA right as "bad apples on /both sides/ guys remember that ANTIFA lady who tried to run down that ICE guy?" The civilian hard-MAGA right buys all that and so they feel like they can retaliate in kind when they try and trigger some libs and things get a little too real. Regardless of what an asshole he is, think about this guy's state. He's all jacked up on adrenaline because he braved marching into the lib crowd and talked some smack. Hurries back to the truck. People are gathering. Decides it's Time to Go.

It's a case study in "there's suddenly a crowd of people around my car yelling at me I better get outta here, oh god did I hit one of them I better GO!".

The difference is the ICE agents unload in your face you when you panic under those conditions. As any Regular Person would panic. The Libs do not do retaliate with firepower, and must not IMHO. We are not the violent ones here. This is what non-violent resistance looks like to me. Everyone can do what they can. When the violent fascist government marches straight into us with riot gear, we remain peaceful. And we remain there. There are Trump Flag waving pricks at the No Kings rallies in my town. They get jeered. But they don't get shot at. And I don't want armed Regular Libs in my town square ready to "protect" us. This lady didn't die did she? Would it have helped anyone if this guy got lit up for that?

There's a lot of power in the moment when a peaceful resistance movement is met with state sanctioned violence, and they're not armed to respond. They're just a bunch of regular people being gunned down. And things start moving really fast politically when regular moms in a mini van full of cheerios are being gunned down by feds armed like a military. From 100 angles. On the nightly news. Like you're watching Idi Amin.

The optics works. Most people are disgusted by the national guard having to protect a little kid walking to school because of her color, whether it's in the 50s or now. Churches were bombed and community aid workers murdered then also. But there wasn't a race war because you can't really have a "war" when only one side chooses to use force.

If I take one in the face while peacefully gathered in my literal town's square my final thought isn't going to be "damn I wish someone was armed so we could shoot back".

I would hope I'm thinking of John Lewis.

This isn't Crips v. Bloods ca 1987. It's LAPD v. All of Regular Guy LA in the '90s.