Sorry for this page missing for a bit, I had a hardware failure. In yet another Amiga post, let’s talk about adding networking to an older machine. The “big box” Amiga systems, (2000, 3000, 4000) have the ability to add a Zorro network card. The 600 and 1200 allow for adding a PCMCIA network card, but there are some issues with those (we’ll get to that). But if you have anything else, you’ve been in a much harder task to get some networking. You can use a serial interface and good old PPP/SLiP but instead, we’re going to talk about something else. The PLiP Box and the GuruNet.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with the local Commodore nerds restoring my A1200, A2000, and A4000 systems. We’ve also been developing a piece of hardware to connect classic machines via their Serial interface to modern systems called the GuruModem - but I’ll have a lot more about that in some other posts. In the mean time, I wanted to share how to move larger files without the use of physical or virtual floppies: the magic of NComm.

The last few years, I’ve fallen very far down the rabbit hole of retrocomputing with classic Amigas. I worked with an Amiga 600 (I think) while I was volunteering at community television in the 90s. Sadly we had a very basic install, only a genlock and broadcast titler, but we longed for a full blown Video Toaster setup. I longed for it more than the rest of the volunteers. So, when the opportunity to build an Amiga 2000 with a toaster presented to me I grabbed it with both hands. I learned a lot, but running older machine has been harder and harder as technology advances. Fortunately the Amiga community is still very active so there are some wonderful new toys, but like everything in retrocomputing there are some bumps. Ideally I would just link you to a basic ADF that can have drivers added to suit your needs, but it’s super unclear to me if I can legally distribute that. So, I will instead walk you through the process of making it.

Now that Ernest posted his thoughts on DevOps Days 2018, I figured it was time to post mine. I’m happy to report that the video recording and audio for DevOps Days Austin 2018 was better than last year. By no means perfect, but better. Let’s dive into the details. For those who don’t care and just want to see the videos, they are posted on YouTube in the DevOps Austin Channel.

Ah, the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. Loved and hated by many. I fall in both camps. I have at least 20 of them currently, and several are in production use. I also spend a lot of time with the larger ARM community, including the Works on arm project, and 96boards Open Hours. Something that comes up a lot is people wanting something “better” than a Raspberry Pi, and I finally decided to start writing up a comparison of boards I have used and like, that are generally available, and how they are better. The goal is to update this on a regular basis, at least once a year. There is some great stuff coming down the pipeline. But for now, let’s jump in.

Many, many moons ago I pre-ordered the LeMaker Cello. It’s a 96boards Enterprise Edition Single Board Computer based on the AMD “Seattle” Opteron A1100 ARM Processor. I was very excited, because unlike many of the boards I already had it sported three key features: Native SATA ports, a full PCI Express 16x mechanical expansion port, and 2x SO-DIMM slots for memory. After many months of delays, we got some bad news: AMD had discontinued the processor and the PCI Express port didn’t work. LeMaker offered those of us who pre-ordered to swap our pre-orders for a HiKey 960 board instead based on this news, since that had a PCI Express expansion port. Unfortunately for me, the HiKey 960 doesn’t have gigabit ethernet or expandable RAM, so I stuck with my pre-order. I had planned to use them as a pair of Database servers for my hosting company, and the lack of PCI Express expansion wasn’t a big deal. Several months later, the boards shipped and then my adventure began.

I was kind enough to be selected to have a article in SysAdvent 2017. Feel free to go read it over there, and then we can discuss more if folks have questions in the comments here or on twitter!

You’ve thought about it, and you have decided you need a printer. Let’s talk about how to pick one.

I’m not going to sugar coat this, the streaming and video capturing for DevOps Days Austin 2017 was poor. It was also my responsibility. So I wanted to write this for two reasons: to apologize, and to explain what I am doing to fix it for next time.

After a long slumber, I’ve moved the site from Wordpress to Hugo so that I can start eating my own dogfood. I’m a huge believer in static site generators, and Wordpress can be a mess to maintain properly. The only thing missing now is Hugo has no way to auto-post to Twitter when I make a new post. However, I should be able to rub on some IFTTT magic and make that problem go away.