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Using Greaseweazle to make bootable DOS disks

Using Greaseweazle to make bootable DOS disks

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Have written previously about my experiments with the very excellent Greaseweazle; but that was reading things like my old Kings Quest 5.25″ floppy disks from my modern 12th Gen Intel PC running Windows 10.

Recently I acquired some old pc hardware and put together a retro 486-DX pc. To that end, I needed to create a DOS boot disk for this old system. That meant I needed to write a 1.2mb DOS boot disk.

Previously I used some boot disk images to create an old DOS virtual machine running Windows 1.0. For that, I used a bunch of archived boot disks images from WinWorld archive.

But how do I write these little beasts?

I floundered around with greaseweezle’s command line but this guide from Tech Tangents really helped out. There’s clearly a lot more I need to learn, but this got me a bootable 5.25″ 1.2mb floppy disk. I was able to test it on 2 different drives, and both worked. So, that’s pretty sweet!

Greaseweezle command line samples

How to write DOS 6.22 image to a 5.25″ 1.2m floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the cable twist:

gw write --drive b --format ibm.1200 Dos6.22-5.25.img

To write a DOS 3.30 image to a 5.25″ 360k floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the twist:

gw write --drive b --format ibm.360 DOS330-360k.img
3D from 2D photographs

3D from 2D photographs

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Emm used her iPhone 12 Pro + @Scenario3d iphone app to generate this 3D image of her daughter.

Scenario makes a number of products. Read more about Scenario3d here.

LumiLabs also has some of their own offerings to capture scenes.

Articles:

Introducing Scenario (3D scanning + 3D creation from your phone)
byu/Low_Cress_111 inphotogrammetry
Dean’s Scene Home Brewery

Dean’s Scene Home Brewery

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I recently found out about an old-Portland speakeasy. Dean opened up his basement in NE Freemont for people to come hang out and drink. He made some beers, ‘gave’ them away for a $20 door donation, and never bothered to get a liquor license or card people. People would come hang out in his basement and have some beers.

He got shut down in 2014 by the OLCC and it appears he died just a few years later, but not before he had tons of people swing by. He didn’t bother to card and it was apparently quite the little hangout.

It appears it was purchased and re-opened in 2018 after being under uncertain ownership.

Read about more legitimate undeground bars here.

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Amazing Photos and events during the 2024 Eclipse

Amazing Photos and events during the 2024 Eclipse

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Amazing Photos from the 2024 eclipse

PetaPixel collected some amazing photos of the eclipse.

Purdue/Indy 500 eclipse watching party

Purdue co-sponsored an eclipse watching party at the Indianapolis 500 motor speedway. There were science events, NASA gave several presentations, an Indy car racer did some demo laps, and astronauts were on hand to sign autographs. There’s some good pictures on the recap website.

Shatner comes to Indiana

William Shatner went to Indiana University for an eclipse event. He was joined by performers from IU’s musical theatre and dance programs, as well as an appearance by retired NASA astronaut Mae Jemison and a concert by Janelle Monáe. He’ll be performing a spoken word piece as part of the celebration’s program, with his last words ending just as totality is beginning.

NASA chases the eclipse

NASA sent two of their NASA Martin/General Dynamics WB-57F planes N926NA and N927NA to chase the eclipse at 50,000ft. You could track them on adsbexchange.

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YouTube Ad blockers

YouTube Ad blockers

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Old School Gamer outlines a long list of ways to get around YouTube’s recent fight against ad blockers. If you’re frustrated with unskippable ads or getting stuck in a stream of multiple ads, or ads that pop up every 30 seconds in your videos, this article might be helpful.

Two of my favorites:

  1. Set your VPN to a country that doesn’t have ads ( great for mobile devices )
    • Albania, Moldova, or Myanmar
  2. Use a Adblock for Youtube: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-for-youtube/cmedhionkhpnakcndndgjdbohmhepckk

He outlines a great number of other methods as well – definitely worth checking out.

Portland had the largest loss of employment in the country over the last year

Portland had the largest loss of employment in the country over the last year

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The unemployment rate in the metro area stood at 4.2% in March 2024 – which isn’t that bad. The problem is that from a year ago, total employment fell 1.5% from the same time last year. Portland fared worse than all other US cities.

Local companies are tightening their belts. There have been big layoffs at Nike, Columbia sportswear, Wieden+Kennedy, Axios, and VACASA. The commercial vacancy rate in Portland is now the highest in the country – and is not predicted to recover for about a decade.

So how can you still have a decent unemployment rate while actual job hiring is shrinking? People are leaving the metro area. The last 3 years Portland metro has seen a net SHRINKING population – for a variety of very predictable reasons.

This isn’t something people can wave off as just a fluke. It’s been a 3 year trend, and it’s one that’s got demographers sounding alarm bells. Especially when many other parts of the country are seeing very nice population, employment, and civic growth.

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2015 Crosstrek CVT servicing

2015 Crosstrek CVT servicing

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Should you service your Subaru Crosstrek CVT with a fluid change? There’s lots of conflicting information, but MrSubaru1387 gives us a great skinny. Long story short:

  • CVT fluid does not perform the same purpose as fluid in a regular transmission – so many arguments on the internet are not correct.
  • Subaru of America says the fluid is lifetime and you do not need to service it with a fluid change unless you’re doing towing or severe driving off-road
  • Some groups say every 30k or 60k. His shop recommends every 125k, my local shop in Oregon says 105k
  • He recommends not touching it until 100k miles and then changing it every 100k (unless you’re doing severe driving – which he would recommend every 50k-ish)

Here’s a video of him doing a CVT service on a Forester with 189591 miles that was having some hesitation off the line. Afterwards it

Crowds attacking self-driving vehicles

Crowds attacking self-driving vehicles

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A Waymo driverless taxi was attacked and burned to the ground Feb 10, 2024 in San Francisco’s Chinatown around 9PM PT. A crowd formed around the car, covered it in spray paint, broke out its windows, and set it on fire.

https://twitter.com/michael_vandi/status/1756550257851449372

The Verge couldn’t figure out who did it, but I have a pretty good guess where to go look first. It’s not like they’re being subtle about it since they talked about doing exactly this in the New York Times as well as publicly talking about destruction of property.

DREM – MFM/RLL hard drive and Floppy emulators

DREM – MFM/RLL hard drive and Floppy emulators

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Connecting old floppy disk drives to modern hardware is not easy. Resurrecting old MFM and RLL hard drives is even harder. The primary method would simply be to get an old PC with the legacy hardware to read the hard drives. But now there’s a few soltuions.

DREM:

DREM is based on the high performance FPGA platform and does not require the use of a PC for any file encoding operations. DREM is equipped with an VGA output, PS/2 keyboard input and file manager software. A user can browse the SD card and insert DSK images into virtual drives.

DREM uses DSK disk image files, which contain the raw dump of a disk. The raw image consists of a sector-by-sector binary copy of the source medium.

If you’re just looking for floppy emulation, I recommend GreaseWeazle or other solutions.

https://www.drem.info/drem

MFM Board Emulator:

Also available, but doesn’t seem quite as well baked, is the pdp8online MFM board emulator.