A curse on all engineers who build stuff with non-polarised IDC connectors. May you also lose your important protrusions.

Hiring comics must be really hard; people seem to like outlandish comedians; but outlandish comedians often seem outlandish for a reason.

Eek! 'In 1873, he and his crew were on an expedition to obtain penguins for oil when disaster struck, and the Espora was shipwrecked, the study reported.'

https://phys.org/news/2026-11-archaeologists-uncover-19th-century-castaway.html

Yeh! My Sun3 is running Sunview OK! It's pretty rare I've seen this in colour, last time I ran Sunview was at Uni in ~1990. (This is just connected to a 15pin PC LCD monitor). Amazingly the keyboard and mouse still work (ahem except for the key which was lost to a vacuum a few years ago). The mouse is a 3rd party replacement and how I got it. Now I should try Openwindows. SCSI is waiting for me to find the converter from that cursed (3m long?!) SCSI cable. Hmm.
#retrocomputing

I could swear some great cabal is placing Fedi-polls to target people for something.

I'm trying to speed some code up; so far I've found two ways of slowing it down.

zygon login: root
Aug 3 06:11:08 zygon login: ROOT LOGIN console
SunOS Release 4.1.1 (GENERIC) #1: Sat Oct 13 06:05:48 PDT 1990
zygon#

It really helps if you get /etc/hosts right on an NFS disk free machine. On one hand having an init system which is almost entirely shell scripts makes it easy to add debug 'echo' - on the other someone decided a redirection to /dev/null made sense ?!
(Still nothing on the cg4 graphics, I need to try the keyboard)
#retrocomputing

Oooh; not quite got to processes yet, but nearly:

Boot: vmunix
.Size: 893160.. .. ..+189568+20
2104 bytes
Statistics:
rpc: calls 1069 badcalls 0 retrans 0 badxids 0 timeouts 0 waits 0 newcreds 0
le: ipackets 1073 opackets 1073 collis 0 defer 0 crcerrs 0 framerrs 0 missed 0 ofloerrs 0 ufloerrs 0

SunOS Release 4.1.1 (GENERIC) #1: Sat Oct 13 06:05:48 PDT 1990
Copyright (c) 1983-1990, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
mem = 12288K (0xc00000)

I asked 2 Sunsynk 'master installers' for #solar quotes; neither of them want to do synsynk. The one I spoke to on the phone earlier offered me a bunch of others and is sending me a quote; the one that came to visit on Tuesday just sent a quote for a Solis based system. Solis does look OK for Home-assistant from what I can tell.
Hmm.
(I asked for Sunsynk after @nprofile1q... suggestion and checking their manual which shows it has a nice convenient 9 pin D on the bottom)

Ahha, I found the interlace bug in my video capture hack; so I've recaptured my Master in 128 and 512 mode.

https://youtu.be/JJa3KTrlHWU and
https://youtu.be/exYsfYS_Ypw

(I'm still only sampling about the same frequency as the pixel rate so there's still some fuzzing side-to-side)

#retrocomputing

Corruption: Recovering old USB sticks has convinced me to use error checking/correcting filesystem on backups; one brand was particularly touchy, and in places it has random bit corruption in the recovered files. This was me wondering why some files hadn't been deduped by 'rmlint' (which is excellent).
Recovery1: 0066000 bf 19 b6 f5 92 c1 3e 92 45 cf 49 4c 56 c5 9f 1b
Recovery2: 0066000 9f 19 b4 f5 92 c5 3e 92 45 cf 59 4c 56 c5 9f 1b
These were jpg's the 2nd doesn't open.
#retrocomputing

There's a new 'linux-formal' mailing list being proposed; do you think people will have to wear a Tux ?