Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

[Car Won't Crank]

You want accurate off-line time, just use a GPS like a normal person then. Looks like your RTC is only going to get you down to about 1 second per 10 days.

The GPS can also provide local NTP if you're networked. Also if you do use GPS I recommend ignoring the GPSD stuff and going straight PPS/ntpd. Maybe it's improved but when I first set it up with GPSD it was garbage.

I would go the GPS route but the pi is in a location with poor to no GPS signal. I tested the location with one of my drones and its GPS did not pick up any satellites even after 15 minutes of sitting.

 

[DavidS877]

I would go the GPS route but the pi is in a location with poor to no GPS signal. I tested the location with one of my drones and its GPS did not pick up any satellites even after 15 minutes of sitting.

You could go old-school and see if a WWVB receiver would work, depending on your country and how RF quiet you can get the Pi. Ok, done overcomplicating the solution now.

 

[AmpleApricots]

In central europe you can use DCF77. If you plan to turn the Pi off don't trust these RTCs, they drift like crazy and the datasheets are nothing but beautiful lies. You can also set the clock by hand, don't need an RTC then either. I know how you feel though, without an RTC it somehow doesn't feel like a real computer, even if it is kinda useless these days.

The problem is I need a capable computer that I can grab on the way out the door, because sometimes I am away from home.

Networking. I'm using an ancient Thinkpad tablet with an amazing Kaby Lake era 4.5W TDP CPU which yes is slow but can trade blows with most high end ARMs in power consumption and is still good enough for all the daily stuff while, unlike ARM, being x86 compatible. I have a higher end workstation which recently received a few GPUs for AI stuff and now recently I also added a NAS. I made the mistake for the longest time to replicate function (like storage space) in every computer I owned and also trying to build the "ultimate system" that covers all my needs until I figured out it solves a lot of my headaches and is much easier to have systems for specific roles and spin them up when in demand. I do all of my stuff from thinkpad (really, my workstation doesn't even have it's own screen. The thinkpad is the screen) and mostly sit at it (I love this tiny 2-in-1 tablet form factor with a nice mechanical keyboard, makes me feel all scifi and it's just very comfy to sit next to a device with no fans) but I still take advantage of the capabilities of the power hungry high end system that's off when not in-demand (while still having the thinkpad pretty much always running because 24/7/365 amounts to twenty bucks a year if we take it's idle power consumption) and store an endless amount of data on the 42 TB of space the fileserver has. (Which I also will always keep running because it has an electricity-sipping mainboard with a low-end AMD mobile processor from 2013) Trying to get a mobile PC to be good at everything to this degree is just a waste of time and nerves and usually, and as you already described, you don't get a good return on your investment, be it in build quality, expandiblity or performance. There's no way I could've stuffed 42 TB into any notebook for eight hundred bucks, nor would any high end notebook on the market be truly ever good enough for LLM stuff. If you think networking, you really do not need a high end system for your mobile. That said, my thinkpad of course still has a 1 TB NVMe (and why shouldn't it, a drive like that is like sixty bucks only now) when I'm somewhere where I can't stream my media library, that'd still fit thousands of books, entire libraries of retro games for many different systems, or all seasons of long-running shows and would be more than enough to entertain me for many, many weeks. Everything else like quick kernel compile or spinning up an LLM doesn't need high throughput and the home network is just one vpn connection away, even if it's via modem. I'm fine with my thinkpad having 8 GB of RAM because that fits my browsers and my workstation has much more.

I've recently also having an eye on Fujitu's more modern 2-in-1s and they still seem to be pretty well built. (It's mostly because the thinkpad's battery is kind of a cruel joke and the whole device is already kinda meh in the build quality department, although I've seen worse) I'd never spend top money on a mobile computer, though. Know their limitations and their role.

 

[seri0us]

Networking. I'm using an ancient Thinkpad tablet

What software do you use from the Thinkpad to connect onto your server?

 

[Pope Urban II]

Miss this cdrom writer. And this memory card

 

[AmpleApricots]

cdrom

I miss floppy disks and tape drives more. CD-ROMs I do not miss at all. They were garbage. From the noise of the faster drives to "whoops I looked at the CD wrong and now it has a tiny scratch and is forever unusable". And apparently, now they're just rotting away. Garbage media.

What software do you use from the Thinkpad to connect onto your server?

Spoiler: Linux spergery

Used to be openvpn but it's a bitch to configure. I use wireguard as VPN tunnel now and would only recommend using this if you don't need OpenVPNs features. (if you can't think of anything specific, you don't need them) On top of that simple version 3 NFS. It's fast but NFS is neither encrypted nor has it an authentication scheme by default so you shouldn't expose it without some layer in between, that's the role of wireguard in my setup. Since me and my wife are the only people on that network, I don't need further encryption, authentication or specific uid or gid access requirements. If you need those, I recommend nfs 4 which solves a lot of problems 3 has. (I mainly use 3 because it's so simple to set up) You can do much more with nfs than to just share a folder of e.g. videos. For example, you could mount the root of a remote, let's say, gentoo system on a faster computer as nfs share, chroot into it and have the faster computer do updates and compile the packages of the slower computer. (I favor Alpine now, but this would work) With kernel binfmt_misc feature and qemu, you could even make this work across architectures, e.g. have a fast x86 run and compile files of an ARM gentoo system. With normal gigabit consumer hardware, you can easily reach speeds in excess of 100 mb/s nowadays. Otherwise, for example my laser printer is hooked up to the NAS server and still speaks postscript via a simple usb interface, so my "printing server" is just a folder I can copy pdfs to which automatically get converted and printed via simple sh script and inotify. I have the advantage that my router/modem combo at home supports wireguard natively, so I could connect to it first and instruct it to send wake-on-lan packages to my other computers. If you don't have this, you could of course just get some cheap, low-end ARM SBC with very low power consumption to act as wireguard gateway and WoL-packet-sender. If you don't want to send WoL packages, most network hardware nowadays can also be configured to wake up on attempted connection to e.g. a port.

For desktop game streaming I used a combination of ffmpeg and uinput+scripts for input forwarding. Moonbeam and Sunshine software packages are all of that in a finished package and work a bit better but I don't play much from the desktop lately and most of the small games and emulation I do runs fine on the Thinkpad directly. I tried this from the road (I was traveling almost all of last month) and it worked ok, biggest problem really was that the places didn't have a good enough internet connection for low latency streaming. It was still fast enough to stream movies of my network shares though. (latency of course not mattering in that case) I think this is the general experience you'll get in any first world country nowadays.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I think I mentioned it before, but it'd be nice if DOS somehow was still around, but with better native graphic modes and support for current hardware. I think the best graphics DOS can natively support is 1024 x 768 at 256 colors (from an 18-bit RGB color space). What if there was somehow a 1920 x 1080 (or higher) and 24-bit RGB mode?

At least there's still DOSBox to run older DOS stuff on a Current Year OS.

 

[neverendingmidi]

LED lightbulbs are the only thing available nowadays, and they’re shit.

Put up a new light fixture last July. Bought LEDs for it. Fuckers are expensive. Says “13 year lifespan” on box. Fixture is in a bathroom, where the light is off 90% of the time. Had to buy new LED lightbulb this week… yeah that whole “13 year” bullshit was a lie.

This is why I will NEVER buy any fixture with a built-in LED light. I have lamps that with a new socket every 40 years have been heirlooms, the built-in LED stuff you’re lucky to get 5 years out of.

I just laugh when I see dumbasses putting fancy, expensive, all-one-piece lighting in their house because it’s programmable and pretty, especially when three days later it’s off color because one diode shit the bed.

 

[sweater_supremacy]

I think I mentioned it before, but it'd be nice if DOS somehow was still around, but with better native graphic modes and support for current hardware. I think the best graphics DOS can natively support is 1024 x 768 at 256 colors (from an 18-bit RGB color space). What if there was somehow a 1920 x 1080 (or higher) and 24-bit RGB mode?

At least there's still DOSBox to run older DOS stuff on a Current Year OS.

dos is still around at my dayjob the computers connected to the registers use some version of it. its still alive in the convenience stores that are too cheap to replace their technology friend

 

[ToroidalBoat]

And apparently, now they're just rotting away.

All of them or just ones built crappy?

dos is still around at my dayjob the computers connected to the registers use some version of it.

It's still somewhat rare these days. And they stopped updating it quite awhile ago?

 

[sweater_supremacy]

It's still somewhat rare these days. And they stopped updating it quite awhile ago?

it only crashes once per 7 hour shift, hangin there!

 

[AmpleApricots]

DOS somehow was still around

DOS was barely an operating system. There are few limitations because as programmer in DOS, it's basically up to you to poke custom registers of whatever graphics chip the system had, especially true if you knew the hardware your software would run on. There's e.g. nothing really preventing you to switch things up with the default text mode and e.g. put it in a high resolution graphics mode. (although it probably will be slow) Many a graphics chip (this was especially true for the EGA age) had a few custom modes (often with custom fonts) the manufacturer added as his special sauce and many users probably never even knew about.

The funniest thing about DOS was that it was stuck in legacy hell basically from day two, having absolutely ass memory layout because some machines that were barely relevant for 3-4 years demanded it. Paid that price for way to long. Other things back then just broke backwards compatibility as they pleased and all the time. Sometimes it was for the better.

The earlier posts about business-line notebooks really sent me thinking about it. It's amazing how shitty and cheap modern notebooks *feel*, not even talking about their equipment. The other day I was in an electronics store (my wife was looking for something) and we came by a row of notebooks on display and for trying out. One of them, I wanna say Asus but don't nail me on this, was around 1k so not low-end. While walking by I pressed the keys on the keyboard hard, not unreasonably so, but I hit them with the force of a heavy-handed typist. The entire thing flexed. Again, ignoring the stats, who pays a grand for this and feels good about his purchase?

Also the aesthetics of modern computers are shit. You ever watch an old movie or tv show and a protagonist sits on his 80s or 90s notebook or computer and is journaling in that classical IBM VGA 9 pixel width font, blue background optional? Or maybe he has an old pizza box Mac. It looks comfortable, the screen is an appropriate size for a human, the device looks elegant and professional, it makes the actor look like a writer. (of course they edited out harddrive and fan noises which were awful back then, point still stands) Computers nowadays feel downright garish in comparison, especially the desktops. (The laptops don't feel like anything, they're just cold, impersonal, cheap slabs of plastic/metal)

I mean look at this ancient convertible complete with dock, how does that not look comfy as hell? I wanna pen my novel on this.

 

[sweater_supremacy]

The earlier posts about business-line notebooks really sent me thinking about it. It's amazing how shitty and cheap modern notebooks *feel*, not even talking about their equipment.

and how they actually work, my parents gave me a new lenovo for christmas that already had windows 11 on it. i have never seen a desktop enviroment lag the mouse cursor when i moved it around, and there werent any background processes running except for spyware that it came with. i switched over to unbuntu because i thought it was just a windows issue, but my performance is still poor, i can only have 2 firefox tabs open before the performance starts to suffer so now im pretty sure its the hardware.

 

[Creative Username]

and how they actually work, my parents gave me a new lenovo for christmas that already had windows 11 on it. i have never seen a desktop enviroment lag the mouse cursor when i moved it around, and there werent any background processes running except for spyware that it came with. i switched over to unbuntu because i thought it was just a windows issue, but my performance is still poor, i can only have 2 firefox tabs open before the performance starts to suffer so now im pretty sure its the hardware.

Win11 to GN*ME? Sounds like lateral movement to me.

 

[sweater_supremacy]

Win11 to GN*ME? Sounds like lateral movement to me.

my mouse isnt lagging at 4 fps ona blank desktop, i have a proper pc on the way thats getting netBSD. but yes shame me for being dumb (not as dumb as the retards at lenovo who built this shitbox and installed win11 on it tho)

 

[The Last Stand]

I hate it when YouTube videos contain loud ass sound effects or these overly produced intros. Remember when every gaming channel would try to replicate the FaZe Clan intro with text graphics and techno music? I hate that shit.

 

[Stasi]

dos is still around at my dayjob the computers connected to the registers use some version of it. its still alive in the convenience stores that are too cheap to replace their technology friend

Not just convenience stores, saw this floating around the web, a recent job posting from Deutsche Bahn, Germany's train operator.

Fucking krauts running their trains on MS DOS and Win 3.11

Good luck finding anyone with a working knowledge of 30 year old systems, they all retired decades ago.

 

[Gargamel]

I have 24x8TB in disk storage and an LTO 8 tape drive to back it up, which is not all that much different from a high end server in the 90s aside from device capacities being larger and parts being more standardized.

I have an early 90s server too, it has a 486DX2 with the option to add a second one, and I think even a third, plus two dual channel SCSI cards each of which have their own dedicated 386DX, all possible with the machine's proprietary bus. It also has some EISA slots for things like it's 4 10BASE-T network cards. It can hold about 20-something half height drives, and it is about the size of a mini-fridge. The intended operating system for this beast is Novell NetWare, a product you don't see anymore from a company that no longer exists.

I think I mentioned it before, but it'd be nice if DOS somehow was still around, but with better native graphic modes and support for current hardware. I think the best graphics DOS can natively support is 1024 x 768 at 256 colors (from an 18-bit RGB color space). What if there was somehow a 1920 x 1080 (or higher) and 24-bit RGB mode?

At least there's still DOSBox to run older DOS stuff on a Current Year OS.

VBE was the standard for DOS above and beyond the IBM VGA modes. If your graphics card was capable, you could get at least 1280x1024 at 24 bit color depth by VESA standards. Some graphics card BIOSes could do 1600x1200 or even 1920x1200, but by the time capable monitors that could do that were commonplace, you were most likely running Windows.

Fun fact, anyone remember how Windows XP could do 1024x768 with millions of colors without drivers? Microsoft shipped a VBE display driver that Windows would automatically install if it didn't have a specific driver for your graphics card. Ever wonder why a fresh install (no drivers) of Windows XP was stuck at 640x480 at 16 colors on later hardware? At some point, graphics card manufacturers stopped implementing VBE support because nobody was using DOS anymore, which forced Windows XP to use the safe mode VGA driver instead.

LED lightbulbs are the only thing available nowadays, and they’re shit.

Put up a new light fixture last July. Bought LEDs for it. Fuckers are expensive. Says “13 year lifespan” on box. Fixture is in a bathroom, where the light is off 90% of the time. Had to buy new LED lightbulb this week… yeah that whole “13 year” bullshit was a lie.

This is why I will NEVER buy any fixture with a built-in LED light. I have lamps that with a new socket every 40 years have been heirlooms, the built-in LED stuff you’re lucky to get 5 years out of.

I just laugh when I see dumbasses putting fancy, expensive, all-one-piece lighting in their house because it’s programmable and pretty, especially when three days later it’s off color because one diode shit the bed.

LED bulbs made for Edison sockets need adequite cooling in order to have long service life. They're no good for enclosed fixtures. Tungsten lamps really didn't give a shit about temperature which is how you could have enclosed fixtures in the first place.

LED bulbs made from high quality components last longer than cheap ones. I have a couple Philips LED bulbs I bought 15 years ago that still work fine. The better designs survive longer in enclosed fixtures but the added heat still almost certainly limits their lifespan.

By the time LED integrated light fixtures became commonplace, the race to the bottom in manufacturing cost was in full swing, so the vast majority of these things suck ass.

It is possible to build a long life LED light source, but why do that when you can build cheap shit and sell more of them?

The funniest thing about DOS was that it was stuck in legacy hell basically from day two, having absolutely ass memory layout because some machines that were barely relevant for 3-4 years demanded it. Paid that price for way to long. Other things back then just broke backwards compatibility as they pleased and all the time. Sometimes it was for the better.

It wasn't feasible to even think about letting go of the IBM memory map until at least the Windows NT era. Breaking compatibility with early DOS and the IBM BIOS would have resulted in a splintering of the PC market. Developers would have to develop for multiple similar but distinct platforms and there would have been many failed attempts to standardize. All this for what, so you can have a flat 16 megabytes on your 286? Might as well have just abandoned the whole platform and built a better one on something else, like the Motorola 68000. You know, like a lot of other companies did? How many of them are still around? Also, who could afford more than 640k of memory in say, 1984? I guess Lotus users, for which EMS was developed. Who else though? A lot of PCs back then didn't even have the full 640k. The 286 had some flaws which limited the usefulness of it's 16 megabyte address space. In the real world it was a faster 8088 with a 16 bit data bus, more IRQs and DMAs, and a few new instructions and that is how people generally used their 286 PCs.

As 386 PCs became commonplace, and with the cost of memory coming down, we started developing our way around the 640k barrier. This is when it really started sucking balls, because you could get a computer with multiple megabytes of memory but your DOS application's executable size was still limited to available DOS memory (because DOS and drivers took up some of your 640k) even if it could utilize XMS. By 1991, 16-bit Windows had become competent enough to take seriously, and we now had an easy way to take advantage of all those megabytes new PCs were shipping with. You could even run multiple DOS applications at the same time and each one could have it's own DOS memory. There was a downside to Windows of course, and that is the fact that you can squeeze more performance out of the hardware if you run outside of Windows. So we developed things like DPMI to allow huge DOS executables to be loaded into XMS. That 640k memory limit really didn't matter now, so long as you were running either Windows or 32 bit DOS software. Your DOS and drivers easily fit into the 640k and DOS by this time could load part of itself into the unused regions of that other 384k between 640k and 1 megabyte.

The only sucky part is when you wanted to run a large 16 bit DOS application, because you're now dealing with the ever increasing size of DOS and drivers for things like mice and network cards chipping away at available DOS memory, even with the memory optimizations.

By the time Windows 95 took over, the vast majority of new DOS software were DPMI-enabled games trying to squeeze every last drop of peformance out of the hardware. Most everything else had moved on to Windows and that 640k barrier was irrelevent for the Windows user. By the time the design limitations of Windows 9x had been realized, Windows NT had become good enough for anyone (Windows 2000/XP). Even at that time, there was no reason to destroy IBM compatibility, as Windows simply bypassed it.

(of course they edited out harddrive and fan noises which were awful back then, point still stands)

The sound of the cooling fans, as well.

Hard drives at idle were quieter when new. The bearings get noisy over time. The seek sounds were definitely audible though, even throug the fan noise. But that is part of the charm of old computers. You didn't even have to look at your disk activity light to see what the hold up was. You could hear it.

I mean look at this ancient convertible complete with dock, how does that not look comfy as hell? I wanna pen my novel on this.

Nah, those things were weird and almost always limited in performance and expandability.

For the time period, I'd much rather have (actually did have) a ThinkPad X41 Tablet. That model was also pretty limited in performance and expandability, but the keyboard was at least permanently attached. It functioned like a normal laptop when you needed that, and quickly switched to tablet mode by simply rotating the screen.

The newer generations got better and better as time went on. The ThinkPad X230 Tablet, the pinnacle of this design, was just as good as a regular X230, and even had multi-touch in addition to Wacom pen support.

Not just convenience stores, saw this floating around the web, a recent job posting from Deutsche Bahn, Germany's train operator.

Fucking krauts running their trains on MS DOS and Win 3.11

Good luck finding anyone with a working knowledge of 30 year old systems, they all retired decades ago.

There are a lot of enthusiasts with working knowledge of early 90s Wintel, Me, for example.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

LED lightbulbs are the only thing available nowadays, and they’re shit.

A local grocery store stopped carrying incandescent appliance bulbs.

 

[AmpleApricots]

SCSI

I still have several clunkers. No idea what to do with them. Agreed about the bearings, that and much more efficient voltage regulation are really the unsung heroes.

Breaking compatibility with early DOS and the IBM BIOS would have resulted in a splintering of the PC market

Not disagreeing, that's what the modifier sometimes implied. When you came from one of the more enlightened (and mismanaged) architectures, (heh) the compatibles of the early 90s, as more useful as they might've been, still felt like a step back in many ways.

Nah, those things were weird and almost always limited in performance and expandability.

I had many a mobile computer starting in the 90s and they were pretty much all more or less useless up to the early 00s which coincidentally was the time where I got into Linux. That wasn't my point though, the point was style. Loved the optics of these things.

I still think when many people say "I miss DOS/68k Macs/whatever" they mostly miss the novelty and the distraction-free-environment. You still can have that today if you go look for it.