VICEs

Posted on by dubiago

So, one thing I’ve really gotten into over the years has been emulation. It’s the best way of going back to the things you used to love in computing without actually going back in time–and without having to put a boat anchor of a CRT on your desktop 😉

VICE is one of those emulators I really dig. Our first family computer was the Commodore VIC-20. Using VICE, I can run the very first software that I ever ran (and even coded).

While I guess I wouldn’t totally mind the notion of setting up a full VIC-20 rig, this sure is a great way of getting a blast from the past without 😎

Starlink

Posted on by dubiago

So, I don’t know if they’ll actually get as far as production…but, we’ve pre-ordered hardware for Starlink Internet service. SpaceX has been launching satellites like mad, and already have hundreds of them up there.

A brand new way to Internet

I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll see some pretty good speeds. Elon Musk is saying Gb with cable-like latency (~30ms), but we shall see. I find it compelling that I could, potentially, take this Internet service wherever I go. If we happen to move somewhere, I can stick with what I have. I’m pessimistic about how things will be in the heavy rains of spring. Definitely going to give it a whirl, though, and see.

Posted on by dubiago

“By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the social assistance state leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbors to those in need.” –Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus 48

Online Presence

Posted on by dubiago

So, of late, I’ve been playing around with Mastodon. I’ve stood up an instance a couple of times now. What has kept me from having it up on a semi-permanent basis has been that it is a drive hog; it will gobble up space, literally like a hog in a trough. The concept of it is a bit like Twitter, in fact its interface is extraordinarily similar. But, all of the data is in your control (as much as it can be on the Internet), and no ads–unless you choose to host ads, I suppose.

The instance has been mastodon.aether.us. I’ve taken it down, yet again. This time around, I played with the notion of using Google Drive as a file repository via a tool called rclone. The idea seemed to be pretty sound, at first. What I didn’t anticipate was that Mastodon, thankfully, makes very liberal use of hard links to save on space. Unfortunately, at this point, it looks like rclone doesn’t support hard links, at least in the way I need it to.

Ultimately, I think a Mastodon presence will be contingent upon complete self-hosting–my own hardware, where I’m not having to add space to my VPS copiously (and expensively).

I could go on mstdn.social or other instances out there, but that kind of defeats the purpose of keeping what I can in my control. I really do like self-hosting what I can, but there’s only so much I can do on a VPS without paying through the nose.

In the meantime, there’s always WordPress. Since that’s not federated, the way Mastodon is, it accumulates data at a fraction of the same rate. It’s good to play, though, and standing up my own social network has been an interesting experience. Maybe if we ever finally ever get fiber Gb Internet, or maybe even Starlink.

Another Way…

Posted on by dubiago

So, in my last post I outlined a method of packaging MS-DOS games for convenient usage in macOS.

Another method I had read of packaging in macOS, but hadn’t really played with much, had been using BASH as the launcher as opposed to AppleScript.

A friend of mine was playing around with it so I decided to, as well. My biggest difficulty was getting path straight. Ultimately, it wasn’t all that big of a deal (just a little grumbling here, maybe a little cussing there), and once I got that down I spent an afternoon fashioning a script to automate the process of packaging DOS programs. I’m pretty sure this would have been a bit steeper a hill to climb had I stayed with AppleScript. Another plus side of this method over the last one is that you don’t need permissions in Finder to get your favorite nostalgic games and such up and running. The structure of the packages are a bit more simple, too, lending to the slight decrease in total size.

It’s a living and breathing script, but I have it up on github. It’s pretty simple at this point, and I’ll probably go back in and bulletproof it a bit and make a few tweaks, but it helped me repackage all my DOS games just today.

Overall, I think this is a better method, definitely with simpler setup and a comparatively tiny BASH script driving app launching. The resultant apps are a good bit smaller, and I can even make them self-contained launchers with their own instances of DOSBox as I did before.

I’m bundling DOSBox with mine, but you can always install dosbox via brew and use one common instance for all of your packages in your execute script, thereby reducing size even more–saves about 11-12MB, which is a whole heaping amount of space in DOS terms 😉

Don’t get me wrong, though, it was really cool learning some AppleScript. Still, that one doesn’t need to be bothered by a lot of configuration on the user end definitely appeals. Plus, I do love me some BASH scripting.