A Crummy Commercial

I was running out of room on a USB drive that I use for sneaker-netting files from machine to machine.  But looking at the prices of SD cards, they have doubled in price since last year ! Current Price, tax not included year ago price, same vendor, price includes tax I can't make my own SD cards but I do have tons of old USB drives.  It took me a long time but I finally realized that a lot of the trouble I had with backups and PVR recording were due to USB drives being SLOW.  The class 10 SD cards are just faster. So here is the plan, dig out the old USB drives (or SD cards) that have PVR recordings.  Then move those PVR recordings to rotating disk drives.  Finally reformat the USB drives or SD cards and bingo: almost new media for no out of pocket expense.  There is a lot of time involved but I got time (I hope :). And actually, maybe I'll just delete those old shows, they are mostly from PBS - after already viewing a murder show does anyone really need to...

Don't irritate me, computer, I'm already bugged !  Yesterday I started seeing this little star in the Firefox icon:  Apparently it is for profiles ?  I don't know or care what profiles are, I want this little star GONE !  I turned off profiles, no help.  I may have to give up and live with the little star. This is another thing that annoys me: Yes, gmail, I deleted something and now I want to bolt, why are you doing: "mother, may I" ??  I will probably just have to live with that as well. Another irritation is Hotmail.  Lately it stinks.  It will erase emails from the screen, I haven't deleted them.  So I have to refresh the screen and voila, the email is back.  But it's a waste of time.  Isn't time saving supposed to be one of the justifications for computers in the first place ? I had clicked on an email and then the screen blanked after a refresh the email appears Now possibly this is due to the Lenovo Ideapad memory going bad - ...

Yes, I sometimes follow the way of the weasel.  But no, not the right wing racist path of Scott Adams (who knew ?):    I got a request to print 30 (or more) poetry booklets for a local museum.  They haven't asked for anything in almost 2 years so I figured they had made other arrangements. I was wrong. I wrote back that my printer seems to be on it's last legs (true although a new, expensive toner cartridge would help) and that the computer I use for printing might not power up (hadn't been used in almost 2 years).  So I said I wasn't interested. Then the request came for the booklet files so I tried booting up the computer - it did "work" although there was an error I had never seen before.  Even in the past when I did do the printing there were problems that I wasn't able to fix.  I was able to scrape the files off after finding an old USB 2.0 SD card reader and getting it to work (for some reason one of my old 2GB SD cards only works in the Kodak CX...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/microsoft-adds-another-year-to-windows-10-extended-update-program/ Good news for once ?   Although I actually am typing this on a Windows 11 laptop, I do have a couple of other Windows 10 machines that I still use so this will be nice: Considering the chip shortages resulting from the AI bubble I can see why they might extend support, it's just insanely expensive to buy computer hardware.  SSD drives are twice the price they were recently. One thing: when Windows support does finally end the only nice thing is that a lot of stuff can be turned off which results in a faster bootup time IF you turn off the internet.  I have an old Windows 98 laptop that I use for printing and scanning - it never sees the internet and works just fine. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

Mentioned finding property boundaries recently: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/06/land-navigation-okay-surveying.html I did try Google Earth and another phone app but I ended up deleting them both.  Not especially accurate or easy to use.  There is another app called Landglide but it doesn't seem to be free and also appeared intrusive - I didn't even try it. Then I was looking up property stuff on the Door County gov site and voila, it has something that is probably as close as the apps, for example: This shows the border of my property near the tree line, the pictures are fairly recent because you can see the piles of birch limbs in the field from the big ice storm from spring 2025, the pictures must be from fall/winter 2025 (no leaves on trees) ?  I suppose a MacGuyver would be able to tell the date from the tree shadows or ?  :)  Mentioned the storm here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/04/a-few-pictures-of-ice-storm-aftermath.html Here's a slight crop of ...

A Roz Chast cartoon in The New Yorker - the bearded prophet carries a sign which reads: "THE END OF YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM IS NEAR": source:  https://media.newyorker.com/cartoons/6a0387dc4ca8f0266f755ca3/master/w_1280,c_limit/a61789.jpg I thought of this in connection with both Android and Windows (what'll Windows 10 users do when the extra year of support on Windows 10 is up later this year ?). I just got a new Android device, it had version 15 - of course right away it wanted to update to version 16.  And I *think* I might get another version updated to 17 - and that's it. But the problem is that the apps are jealous of the latest OS version - they want it to be a certain level or that's it, no dice.  With a previous Android device support ended at Android 11.  December 2025 this broke my banking app.  So I wasn't able to deposit kit checks via the app, I had to mail them in to the bank :(   Now I can use the app again on the new Android device versi...

It happens: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/byte-magazine-artist-robert-tinney-who-illustrated-the-birth-of-pcs-dies-at-78/ I didn't know Robert Tinney had a site with posters: https://tinney.net/product/1776 I *think* this is the cover of the first issue of Byte that I ever bought: I probably got it at Amateur Electronic Supply ?  Not sure on that. Unfortunately this is what the BYTE covers turned into after a while: I guess you can't blame them, editors are wordsmiths not artists.  They see a blank space and want to fill it with words (in sans serif type yet).  QST covers aren't quite the same since full color and large format, my own corny sunset cover: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/09/go-back-50-years.html Byte kinda degenerated from a hobby magazine into yet another corporate rag - I suppose that's where the money was, at least for a while.   I used to enjoy fooling with computers - now they are just another appliance. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY...

I was using the old Thinkpad and it seemed like things were kinda slow.  Checked the available disk space and it was pretty low, 20 GB. So why not upgrade to a bigger drive ?  I looked on Ebay and holy cats, the prices:  UP ! The current 240G drive from a couple years ago: current 240G price: Since I wanted a bigger drive, a current 500G drive price: So I also checked on class 10 128 G sd cards (I use them for backups), August 2025 price: Current 128G SD price: Since the $ 13.66 includes tax, the actual price was $12.95.  So the inflated reality in less than 1/2 year from the same seller is 19.99 / 12.95 => 54% higher ! Who knows exactly why the prices are up, probably a combination of the tariff tax, inflation and postage increases. I'm sure I could shop around and get better deals but with storage media I like to buy new from a reputable brand and a seller I know who uses the USPS.  Bottom line: I decided to dump about 100G of files on the Thinkpad that I w...

I heard the news that Stewart Cheifet has died: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/stewart-cheifet-pbs-host-who-chronicled-the-pc-revolution-dies-at-87/ https://obits.goldsteinsfuneral.com/stewart-cheifet I used to watch the Computer Chronicles a lot.  It was a good show but the thing I really remember was the Cheifet "cutoff" - when he was done interviewing a person he would just walk away at the end, no closing words, just an abrupt transition :) My last job was at a company called Powercore in Manteno IL.  It was a Windows "shop" but they were expanding into Mac software at the time - later the whole Mac team (3 people) quit at the same time.  The main product at Powercore was called Network Scheduler (see the video below for details).  This was before the internet had really arrived.  Powercore had a dialup BBS to deliver software updates.  If an important customer was having trouble getting into the BBS one of the guys would go in and just hangup ...

I signed into my Thinkpad and was able to enroll in Windows 10 security updates through October 13, 2026.  And it didn't even cost me 1000 Microsoft Rewards points, nice ! It was so nice I did it twice - second time on a different Windows 10 laptop, the battered and broken Toshiba, again at no cost. But I went for thrice on the big Sharp laptop and didn't see the offer extended - perhaps it was just not pushed out to that machine yet or maybe because that machine isn't signed in to Microsoft ? Well, I still have some time on that - I rarely use the Sharp anyway so it could be taken off-line without a big problem - which is what I'll probably end up doing in a year or so with those three Windows 10 boxes. Why have three Windows 10 machines ?  They can be handy in a pinch, I can use one as part of a printing station.  Another is handy for looking at video files on the TV (the internal video via USB on the TV isn't fast enough at times for certain codecs, the video and...

Bing has been mentioned before, most recently: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/08/bing-redeemed-itself-via-redemption.html  Today (Saturday) the limiting seems to be off ?  I was able to score all of the 100 mobile and 150 desktop points before 7 AM  -  when I was limited to 20 points every half hour it took until the afternoon to get to the limits. Why pursue these limits ?  I am hoping to get several thousand points so I can re-up Windows 10 for another year of security updates.   Got my fingers crossed ! Update: 2025-9-7, Bing is still OK, no limiting ! 2nd update: 2025-9-8, Bing still working ! 3rd update: 2025-9-9, working => this is a trend !   4th update: 2025-9-10 uh-oh !  Bing is limiting again ?   Whew !  no, it was just their news feed that was being limited.   5th update, 2025-9-11: oh fudge !     Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

I have resisted the install of development software on this Lenovo Ideapad.  It is an underpowered machine so I figured that I could always run those kind of programs on my other computers (Windows 10).  But I guess I've gotten familiar with this Windows 11 machine, the older ones seem a little "off" - especially the keyboards. So I decided to resurrect at least my old PIC "Burn and Crash" setup: the PIC development icons on the squiggly road desktop of this Lenovo Ideapad The idea is to use several programs to edit, assemble and program PIC microcontrollers.  The user "burns" a microcontroller chip with code and then plugs that chip into a circuit to see how it "crashes".  Then the cycle is repeated. The editor is either Notepad or Write, the simple text editors built into Windows.   The assembler is MPASMX: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/tools-resources/develop/mplab-x-ide  To save from downloading a buncha stuff I wouldn't use I just ...

In a recent blog post the Koss Headset with a built in USB port was mentioned: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/08/time-for-freedv.html  For no good reason I did look on Ebay and bought one: It was listed as NEW but really more like: "new ?"  and there was a slight "air" about it. it was out of the box at least once before I got it Oh well, the seller did mail it as I wanted.  The headset is comfortable although I'm not sure how much I can bend the microphone stalk.  It also sounds fine and it seems to record OK although with a little hum.  I'm not sure if there are any adjustments, there aren't any instructions in the box or on the Koss site.  It really was plug and play - after plugging in the SB-45 I was able to hear mp3 files and record a voice message without doing anything other than opening the mp3 player and voice recorder, nice. I'm partly prepared for FreeDV - it's already September, really need to put up at least some kind of antenna !...

I saw a link on the Piclist for a pdf file of: Linear Technology Magazine Circuit Collection, Volumes 1 - 5: https://pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/02_PEARL_Arch/Vol_16/Sec_53/Linear_Technology/Vols_I_thru_V.pdf  The amazing thing to me was that this is a little over 6 megabytes, for all those hundreds of diagrams and pages of text.  This reminded me of this: Linearview CDROM: https://archive.org/details/linear-technology-linearview-data-book-cd-rom-19960  iso image: https://archive.org/download/linear-technology-linearview-data-book-cd-rom-1996/linearview%201996.iso  The interesting thing about the Linearview 1.0 CDROM was that not only did it have an Adobe Acrobat Exchange viewer program it also had the Acrobat PDFWriter program.  Supposedly this was done by accident since the PDFWriter software wasn't a free download. I asked a friend who was working at Motorola in the 1990s to send me the CDROM which he did, thanks Mike !  One nice thing about PDFWriter ...

This actually seems like good news: source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/microsoft-extends-free-windows-10-security-updates-into-2026-with-strings-attached/  1000 Microsoft Rewards points per PC is no big deal:    Now hopefully I'll be able to keep the Windows 10 machines "on the air" for another year.  I do have pre-Windows 10 PCs that I still use for offline tasks.  They actually work better after getting rid of the security stuff, much faster boot times for one thing. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

I was watching this interesting Curious Marc video on fixing a Commodore Pet: source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxilekpLp6g Even though Marc has virtually every tool known to the electronics industry it struck me that: no chip puller no anti-static straps no anti-static mat They got the computer to work and apparently it was not any worse for ignoring the above but still, those three items together would cost less than anything else in that lab !   Although these guys are younger than I am, I would suggest having magnification at hand to help assist in not putting stuff in backwards - also I cringed at running the computer with an EPROM where the EPROM window was uncovered (they had a lamp shining on it).  Light plus semiconductors equals weird stuff happening. I thought the prop rod for the Commodore Pet was a hoot, I never knew they came with those.  Not sure what that says about the need for access - especially in these days of something like a cell phone where t...

An interesting video on an Altair 8800 that Curious Marc got running the original Microsoft BASIC: source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxU_3dEJ2nM Here is the part of the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics: source: https://archive.org/details/197501PopularElectronics/mode/2up After inflating the number I can see why I never got one - kind of expensive for what it did ! and you had to pay extra for the Microsoft BASIC I was in college then too just like Bill Gates, but I didn't drop out and end up a billionaire !  I will probably read his new book but I'll wait for the hoopla (and price) to go down :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

At least when they start doing this: The computer battery discharged way down and then zoomed up to 100%.  It is supposed to peak at 60 percent and start charging at 55 percent: I've spent a fair bit of time trying to get it back to the way it should be.  Why computer, why ?  Why waste my time ?  Aren't you supposed to save time ?  Can't you just leave things alone ? Full Rooney mode engaged ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm