10 Minutes Into The Future

I thank my lady for the title of this article! It was and is apt.

For many the concept of cyberpunk dystopianism was first introduced in Max Headroom, seen in the Max Headroom series on ABC from MAR 1987 to MAY 1988.  With fourteen shows produced, 13 were aired in the US and the 14th was aired as part of the Australian run of the series. It is a blended-season program much like The Prisoner by Patrick McGoohan which ran 17 episodes. Both programs had a first and second season squashed into a limited production run.  Max Headroom had an abbreviated first season and second season while The Prisoner was scheduled for a second season but had that cut and McGoohan wanted to wrap up the entire thought schema in one season a bit longer than normal.

Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future was a tv-movie in the UK, and the tagline '20 Minutes into the Future' was seen at the start of each episode of the series. Many of the elements seen in Max Headroom draw their lineage through cinematic productions of dystopian futures.  The most notable of them is Blade Runner (1982) directed by Ridley Scott, and the entire look of the city of Network 23 and Max Headroom could fit seamlessly into that dystopian future without missing a beat.  The same low level social dynamics of a post-futuristic world gone to ruin is part and parcel of both, down to fires in oil drums and the real lack of cars at street level.  So, too, are the social interactions between levels of society similar from the highest corporate level (Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner and Ped Xing in Max Headroom) through the techno-geniuses that support them (J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner and Bryce Lynch in Max Headroom) all the way down to the lowest level operatives of Matt Deckard and Edison Carter, who are the draw and appeal for their differences in being perhaps not human and more than just human both at the same time although in starkly different ways.  One can picture Matt Deckard confronting Roy Batty and then having Edison Carter land in on the confrontation with the help of Blank Reg and Big Time Television.

For all of that there are other precursors to cyberpunk television beyond just Blade Runner, although it hands off so many visual cues that the relationship is hard to miss. What makes it distinct from the 1980 made for TV movie Brave New World, is that the Aldous Huxley dystopianism is one of anti-septic neatness which is reflected by the anti-septic nature of thinking.  That world is a world which, however, bears resemblance to both Blade Runner and Max Headroom in that books are absent not because they are repressed or destroyed, like in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 which was made into a BBC film in 1966, but because they are unwanted by a population now beyond learning.  Like in Fahrenheit 451, however, television now plays that central role which makes for the dystopian Max Headroom vision, and it is far more powerful than the multi-wall arrangements in Bradbury's work and closer to the Big Brother two-way dystopia of Orwell's 1984.  Much of the television movie adaptation in 1954 or the regular movie adaptation of 1984 in 1956 carries through as cinematic reminders in later works, often with the stark external scenery updated to cast a pall in colors that are dark and muted in modern works, of which Max Headroom takes part.  Coming from that lineage of Big Brother, two-way television, corporations blending into the State, and the removal of knowledge media from the world, Max Headroom gives us a glimpse of the cyberpunk pathway.  This is a pathway that has an endpoint in other films like Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) complete with mohawk haircuts and lots of leather jackets and leggings.

It is amazing to think that in the span of 1979 to 1982 the entire cyberpunk dystopian future was encapsulated visually and thematically with the decaying and corrupt State with corporatism (and one can't help but see Rollberball (1975) as a precursor to this). From a 1984 collapse through the time of Max Headroom and Blade Runner is a part of this arc.  After that then goes through a further decay because they depend on resources that are failing, until the world falls into complete ruin in Mad Max and Mad Max 2.  The relatively anti-septic dystopian vision of an Aldous Huxley requires a system that is, itself, so highly dependent upon automation and resources that it cannot last. The enforced ignorance and numbing of the senses are preludes to the ideas later reviewed by other dystopian works,the outcome of which gets a transition phase seen in A Clockwork Orange (1971) where Anthony Burgess juxtaposes wartime lack of morality with everyday life and puts them together.  Stanley Kubrick in many ways sets the tone for the later dystopian works in that film to show a highly decadent society with highly authoritarian State on the verge of internal collapse as the State comes to embrace barbarism fully.  In Max Headroom those who see such barbarism are in the minority, but have Edison Carter to intrepidly risk life and limb to get the story of how the corporate world and utilization of State power by Network 23 is going wrong.

If there is anything that Max Headroom does represent it is that cry against the dying of the light, the collapse of the civilized State into its corporatist system which is, itself, not sustainable without a civilized population at its core.  That State has already removed the off-switch from televisions and utilize two-way technology to track ratings and, thusly, power.  Blood games (ala Rollerball) are not embraced while shrugging off the deaths of citizens due to commercials is seen by the new generation of elites as the price to pay for ratings.  From that and the body banks, lifted nearly directly from Larry Niven's Known Space works, comes a lowered valuation of life even when the birth of a baby is still seen as a special event even though the backdrop of the life that child will have is a grim one.  This is dystopian fiction with a bite to it and the slow degradation of man to becoming viewer in the hands of the media is one that begins to overwhelm, indeed not just co-opt but buy out, the State.  The adoring media of the Left today becomes the controlling media of politics and society tomorrow.  Big Brother is Network 23, indeed Orwell only lacked putting the BBC behind Big Brother to complete that circle in 1984.

For all of the darkness of a world sliding into Mad Max realms, there are glimmers of a future that doesn't need to be this bad.  First and foremost is that the Tyrell Corporation, Big Brother nor the Fordian State of Brave New World all lacked an older cohort that remembers not just ethics but displays them.  In this Network 23 has a person that is unlike all the others in a position of power in those dystopian futures: someone who has qualms about what he has helped to create and sees it as toxic.  That person is not Edison Carter, per se, nor Theora Jones his controller to get him to stories, nor Murray their producer, all of which are front-line functionaries to the programming for live shows which can be replaced or interjected at a moment's notice.  That person who is so different is Ben Cheviot who demonstrates ethical underpinnings in pulling lethal commercials and allows for the complicity of Network 23 working to get blood sports into the line-up even against the pull of ratings. For all the fun (or not so fun) parts shown for everyone else in the system, Ben Cheviot has a keen awareness of just what can and cannot be done to start showing the problems of the system that he has helped to promote.  Edison Carter would be a top, and soon dead, journalist as seen in the first program if not for Ben Cheviot willing to back him against the rest of Network 23's interests of the moment. While Ben Cheviot got to the Board of Directors of Network 23 he must have demonstrated competence and ability to deal with competitors to a large degree as it is a cut-throat position just to be on that board.  By having a better 'feel' for viewership and how ratings work, he is able to become the Chairman of the Board and allows Edison Carter to start showing the underbelly of Network 23, the State and corporations... because it is good for ratings.  Ethics sells.  Ethics are power when chained to moral certainty.

Edison Carter, Theora Jones, Murray, Blank Reg and others also show this form of moral certainty and ethics that go with them.  In many ways Blank Reg (a Blank is someone who has gotten themselves erased from all records to be truly free) lives that life of moral and ethics, live or die, continually and is an energetic force to be reckoned with.  Although pirate station Big Time Television may not get the ratings, it does work a wedge into television of an older sort that he still remembers.  In this way Blank Reg is the counter-part to Ben Cheviot, although the two could never be mistaken, their firm standing upon what they see as right and wrong is not only similar but their requirements have put them in crucial positions on either side of the Network/public divide in which the State is part of the Network.  Blank Reg isn't just hitting at the television level but at the level of a Blank, which is to say trying to get people to actually ingest more than television as part of their thought processes.  Like Brave New World books aren't burned, just not circulated or used, they are seen as relics of a past long gone and no longer needed.  Yet it is Blank Reg who tries to get people interested in reading (are they even literate anymore?) and touts books as 'a non-volatile storage media... you should have one'.  In our modern age of e-readers what will become of books?  Not text on screen but printed books?  That non-volatile storage media is immune to EMP and CME effects, they will survive them while your e-reader, your PC, your laptop, the servers that serve up text, and the rest of the modern infrastructure goes away.  Hardcopy back-up can be burned but cannot be erased, cannot be changed once printed, and if carefully tended can last many life times.  Your PC is obsolete the day you buy it.  Ditto your cellphone and all other digital media.

The people of that digital media are represented by Bryce Lynch, late teen techno-nerd, and his work for Network 23.  Bryce is somewhat detached from the goings-on around him and in his own self-created world of technology.  He is more than willing to create commercials that kill (although only as a side-effect of those who no longer exercise ANY), more than able to take a brain-dump of Edison Carter for the old Chairman of the Board to protect him, and then willing to help Edison Carter at various points throughout the program.  In many ways a family style dynamic between Edison, Theora, Bryce and Ben form, although it is very underplayed it does have effects on Bryce to both humanize him and show that he does care about people close to him.  He takes part in the creation of digital personalities from direct brain dumps, starting with his pet parrot (who shows up in the first episode and then is replaced by a screen of the digital parrot thereafter in its cage) and ending with Edison Carter which yields the namesake of the show: Max Headroom.

Max Headroom is only tangentially the star of his own program, with Edison Carter (the source for Max's altered ego) being the real one.  Max is a completely digital being (although there were no digital effects when the series was produced to make him, so it was done through SFX with make-up and only a digital background done for later episodes) who is born in the lab of Bryce Lynch.  Max's home is the Network 23 internal network which has external feeds to two-way televisions.  Thus Max starts out with the ability to grow in capability and, when he is threatened with erasure, he can leave Network 23 for the rest of the external system.  Max, as Edison's altered ego with far fewer inhibitions, is in turns smarmy, insightful, comical and devious and a total creature of the Network ratings system.  Yet he is also its critic beyond mere critique, as he asks what are the effects of this visual pap that is pushed out to the world at large? 

For all of the sometimes juvenile humor of Max, he is also a person that grows beyond that rather shallow exterior of head and shoulders, giving insightful questions into the nature of authority, television, the State and the human condition.  While he may no longer remember much of what it feels like to have a body, Max Headroom grows into this larger system that gives him more than a physical presence and one that is at once as omniscient as Big Brother and as limited as the humor of a teenager.  Scary in one regard, yes, but he does not have a controlling nature and is as irrepressible, and yet open, as Edison Carter.  For an altered ego he is still learning about the Id and Super Ego, those parts necessary to create a solid moral view with ethics and compassion.  That he has that capability and shows it is beyond any doubt, because Edison Carter has them.  That these are skewed by his environment is also without a doubt as Max Headroom is at once more and far less than human, and for all the faux humbleness of a game show host he often displays real doubts about himself and who he is.

So if, when the show was aired, it was 20 minutes into the future where is it now?

My lady answered 10 minutes and she is absolutely right on that in many ways.

What would it take to subvert the modern Internet into a purveyor of Network 23 (and other networks in the power grab)?  The answer is very little: a government power grab in support of television over other forms of communication, probably done by 'emergency measure' as is hinted at in 1984.  Two-way television is, essentially, here in many regards but to be truly controlled as is seen in 1984 or Max Headroom would require a wholesale change of television sets... without off buttons.  And as the Internet now is part of the cellphone network, it would also control your two-way digital phone as they already do for emergency tracking.  Adjust the software and the 'off button' goes away.  As a 'government emergency' requires control of information, any information deemed 'subversive' or 'anti-government' will be removed as 'dangerous speech'.  Like the blog post you are reading.

To be clear the Internet is a threat to centralized power as it is a distributed, shared set of networks (a network of networks) that works via a set of common address standards.  Any government that can get a hold of the address look-up tables can, quite literally, partition the networks from each other.  By blocking off entire blocks of networks and then screening them, speech and thought that isn't sanctioned is restricted.  What happens after that is a promulgation of 'sanctioned' software that only allows for connections to sanctioned blocks of the network.  Like Network 23 and its cohorts in Max Headroom.  With that said there is a set of hacker skills that has permeated society as, from the very first episode, we see that Theora (Edison's controller for live feeds) has skills to get past common and everyday computer security not only inside Network 23 but outside of it as well.  In contrast Murray, members of the Board of Network 23 and various others do not have such skills to any great extent, but members of the Blank community do as it is a survival necessity.  Edison Carter has rudimentary security skills, mostly to deal with physical security, and his friends also have a range of skills from simple deception of security systems to skills close to those of Bryce Lynch.   

Getting around security blocks to get information is one of the skills necessary in the newsroom, necessary to criminals, necessary to the Blanks and only the elites can do without even the basics of them.  In a post-Internet segmented world the ability to get around the segmentation and through security routines: the very security that the Networks and others seem to think they need make common trespass against such systems widespread not out of malice but to just get work done and no one thinks anything is wrong about it.  Even when they go after the most secure records, it is done with an acknowledgement that there are penalties, but nothing morally wrong about it.  Pervasive security doesn't make anything more secure and, contrarily, makes going against security measures common place.  For all the security that Network 23 and others seek, they just add complexity to getting around such measures and get no real security against the mildly determined.

At the top of this realm is Max, although he is unskilled at security circumvention he is born directly into this cyberworld.  He can and does run afoul of security measures, yes, but he also demonstrates an ability to move from network to network, area to area, building to building without much regard for who owns what or what security measures they have in place.  If the centralized network headquarters are bastions of security, the outlying network is a hodge-podge of everything from insecure televisions to relatively secure private systems.  And make no mistake about it, in the world of Max Headroom all security is relative and no one has planned on a sentient cyber entity moving through systems, which raises a whole question of just what is security to such a being?

The physical problems of any of the relatively advanced, that is to say further along in the timeline of decay, worlds that are represented by the generic continuum that coalesced in the late 1970's and early 1980's is one that comes quickly to our civilization once basic maintenance and upkeep can no longer continue.  Cities like Gary, IN and Detroit, MI starkly show how entire sections of cities can go to ruin in less than a decade through depopulation alone.  The hints in Blade Runner and Max Headroom of A Clockwork Orange style elitist inculcation of barbarism leading to decay and retribution would leave our current physical infrastructure in such ruins as seen in those worlds.  Even with such relatively minor organizations (or lack thereof) like the current OWS movement (backed by Unions, socialists, communists and anarchists) the decay inside those encampments has shown rapes, murders and the spread of communicable diseases that are at a first point on a decay continuum.  If the goal of those backers is to get city blocks set ablaze with radical and relatively pointless intent and violence, then the dystopian continuum at A Clockwork Orange will be set and in place.  It is but a short transition through a 1984 regime that then seeks to restore some order and, lacking that, collapses back to corporatism of a Blade Runner or Max Headroom style outcome. 

This outcome is not hard to get to, at all, and while those who seek power may think they can get it permanently, what they actually get is transient power as no centralized system can run a complex world.  The problem in bringing on the moral and ethical decay necessary to get to that point is that it cannot and will not stop at the lowest levels, no matter how many are killed in the attempt, because the decay has already started by those who brought it on.  When you welcome in barbarism as a means to an end you don't find yourself civilized once you have done so as you have let go of the very support of civilization necessary to be civilized.  In the world of Max Headroom there is a desperate attempt to retain and spread the necessary morality and ethical backing is being done by a very few at Network 23.  We never learn much of how the world got to the point of the Max Headroom world, which points to just how unpleasant the transition was.

The trick is not to get to that point in the first place and to retain civilized habits and remind our fellow citizens of those necessary habits and costs to oneself as the price to have a technological civilization.  Civilization isn't free, and your freedom is without price.

First you get chronic illnesses...

...and then you get sick.

I am lucky in that the number of upper respiratory tract infections that I get have dropped from their extreme high in my teen years (anywhere from 3 to 5 per year with some of them lasting nearly a month) to merely 1 or 2 a year.  No matter how well I take care of myself, I still get the bugs... but taking good care of my diabetes allows me to track when something is trying to get a jumping off point and deal with it.  I may get a 3 day stint of relatively high readings and then my body will have gotten rid of the germ and I'm right as rain.

Still, once or twice a year I get something that isn't so easy to shake and I have one of those now.  I would well and truly not have survived my teen years without modern medicine circa post-1940.  One or two sulfa drugs I can stand but they never dealt with the infections I've gotten in the upper respiratory tract.  That is the ears, sinus, throat and, when things get really bad, the upper parts of the lungs although that hasn't happened since I was 16.

I can't really do much of anything safely with tools of any sort, although that doesn't mean I can't find things to do or things find their way to me.

My lady's laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1721 bought a few months after mine, decided that its problems with the battery system (that is it hasn't been recharging them properly) now needed to have a hard disc problem.  As I had been looking a bit deeper at the recharge problem and realized that it wasn't the batteries or the software, that meant that it was the hardware which is on the main board of the system.  Here is what I do when I see a major problem on the motherboard of a system that is over 5 years old: I get a replacement and build a new system.  I can't do that with a laptop and had to buy a replacement and decided on one of the HP Pavilion line of computers... refurbished, natch.

The Inspiron finally coughed up a major problem on the hard drive and it took half an hour just to boot enough of a system to see the drive errors that filled the error log.  Since I had already gotten the major apps installed on the HP, plus removed a bit of the built-in cruft (although I never got to removing all the games and other junk that came with it, but it sits quiescent, unused and, therefore, relatively safe) put in my favored AV (Avast!) and the Comodo free firewall, it was ready for use.  The first order of business was to take a look at the drive from the Inspiron on another computer, which would require that I get the actual hardware to do that, a USB to SATA/IDE drive connector.  Since I was doing that at NewEgg I also got a new drive for the system and scared up some freeware to copy a drive image if I could find it.  Those both arrived just as I was starting to get sick...fun, fun, fun!

A day after it arrived I put the old drive onto a system and did a basic scan, which didn't show much.  Then I took an image of the drive, and put an image of that on the new drive.  That drive wouldn't boot.  Thus I had to scare up a Live CD to see what was going on and that finally revealed that the drive wasn't being properly recognized by the system.  I put on an MBR and still, no dice.  Pull the new drive with image and then put a really nasty chkdsk /f on it.  An hour later... it was bad news for the old drive image.  The second chkdsk /f only took about 10 minutes revealing no other problems.  For S&G's I put it in the system and no boot, of course.  Two directories held massive amounts of recovered files, all unusable.  Thus it was time to pull out the old install DVD and get to work...

The new drive is functional and happy, the old image is mostly awful and unrecoverable, and yesterday I spent most of the day hunting down drivers, apps, and generally getting enough on the Inspiron to get it past the bootable stage and close to useful.  I slapped an AV on it and still have to put on another firewall, and then have to do a final clean-up, defrag and general getting it back into functional order and examine any NEW errors coming up.  Both of the Dell laptops are the same vintage and I'm guessing some minor thing like, oh, a cosmic ray toasted out part of the old hard drive on the machine I was working on.  A thorough low-level disc scan and sector map should figure that out and would make the difference between having a drive that had some minor but critical event and one that is wholly unreliable.  Since there are no cables I can easily get at involved, if its the cables then I'm to stripping the system apart and if I have to do that I will see if I can scare up a new motherboard from that old line of Inspirons.  Basically, by the time you put in the cost and effort to get an old machine up and running, you are at the cost of a low-end refurbished machine that will do more.

Until the economy truly tanks when we are seen as an unreliable spendthrift.

All bets are off, then.

I can do a lot more than just woodworking... a bit of firearms work... geology...

Actually it seems as if my interest in a lot of subjects has some dividend to it.

Another project I'm taking up... where do I get these ideas, anyways?... is an adsorption cooling system/refrigerator.

Basically most refrigerators around your house run on electricity and have a compressor involved.  Those running on propane or other fuels have a burner to heat up a liquid to its vapor point and then evaporating coils to get the vapor to phase change back to a liquid (thus cooling what it is in contact with) and then a final condensation set of coils to make sure the liquid gets back safe and sound to the heater.  You can make that into a solar system, and efficiencies vary.  These ones with minimal to no compressors are absorption systems.

What an adsorption system does, in contrast, is uses a medium to temporarily bind the vaporizing medium to the surface of it as a liquid.  That surface, when heated, breaks the weak surface attraction bonds and creates a vapor that then goes away from the region being heated.  Cooler areas will draw off heat to start and then, since the liquid is barely in a vapor state, the vapor condenses and removes heat from the area.  Since it is a phase change it takes more heat away than it puts in, thus chilling the area down.  This is a chiller, not a real refrigerator, but gets to much of the same ends.  The physics is pretty old, going back to Van der Walls force and the equations that govern this attraction between gases and liquids when they are in relation to surfaces.  It was not applied to chillers until... I think it was 2003 or 04 by Toshiba.  Amazing how 19th century physics can still be used today, isn't it?

Doing a bit of reading up on the subject the main elements for a solar chiller consist of a liquid that easily turns into vapor at a relatively low temp, an adsorption media that can attract a lot of molecules to its surface, a heating chamber with the materials in it, and a cooling area.  That is it, no pump.  Nature does the work both at the chiller area and, when the sun goes down, the liquid and vapor go back to the cooling region with the adsorption material due to the attractive force it has on its surface.

That's the theory, at least.

So what are the actual materials?

Methanol and activated carbon.

Methanol you can get from various sources, but you want it anhydrous.  Anyone doing biodiesel can point you to suppliers.

And activated carbon?  Used for filtering fish tanks.  Get it in the spherical, low dust version as you don't want carbon dust clogging the thing up over the years.  Some fine screening might be a good plus for the system.

I've ordered the basics for a rig to test it out:

- A length of 2" black pipe, 24" long with couplers and bushings to get the ends down to 1/2".

- Copper pipe in 1/4" for the chilling/condensing region

- Copper pipe in 3/8" for the heating to chilling region, thus giving the vapor a slightly easier path up to the 3/8" to 1/4" reducer

- Brass pipe fittings to mate all this up, I have teflon pipe tape

- Plastic boxes used for scrapbook making, which I will fill with brine and use bulkhead 1/4" connectors for, and this will be the chilling region... I may need to put a minor coating of something on the copper pipe, like shellac, say... dunno

Still to be made are a simple stand to hold the rig in place, and a couple of cardboard boxes so I can test the thing out.

For a simple test the black pipe gets mounted on black painted wood, perhaps in an open box configuration to help concentrate the heat, the copper runs up the sides to a platform with a brine filled box, and the 1/4" pipe has some gentle bends coming out of them (and some tighter ones inside the brine containers) to serve as condensers and a simple bend pipe trap to allow liquid to serve as a barrier to any back pressure coming from the heating area so the flow goes in one direction.

I am not expecting more than a few degrees difference between the box with brine and pipe and the box that will just have a brine container without pipe.  A couple of sunny and dry days will help this out no end once it is built.  If I can get any results then I will have the known factors for materials, sizing, volume and so on to allow for scaling up of things.  I'm figuring more heating chambers in a flat box with glazed glass over it, and a top and bottom vent to allow hot air to move slowly out of the system will be a final design goal.

That and an old refrigerator I can strip out and put in some better insulation to help things along.

In theory this all works, although size and scaling is unknown.

Getting to the practice part is the hard part... but even a small chilling box that keeps a constant temp for medications and other such items would be great to have.  Plus it is no maintenance once it is put together with a sturdy frame and always works so long as there is any sunshine at all.  Weatherizing it may take a bit, but that is another bridge to blow up when I come to it.

Just because I'm sick doesn't mean I'm out of it.

Operations just shift venues for awhile.

Some thoughts on computers

I've been into computers since the card era.  Not the smartcard, RF card or adapter card era, but that era which featured paper cards with data grids on them that were either punched or had a reader that would accept pencil filled in rectangles... that you filled in with a pencil.  My first computer interface was a paper-fed terminal.  My first computer language that I learned the basics of in 7th grade was APL.  Yes, I've been around to see a few things change, and gone are the days when the teacher said that you only got so many sheets of paper to do your work per month... and then my dad would bring in boxes of used terminal paper from his workplace as they only used the lined and colored back part of the sheets.  Amazingly at the end of the month I was the only one still using the terminals.

From time-sharing on a mainframe to my first almost PC to the first PC and then through the 386/485/Pentium eras all the way to today's quad core, LED display monsters with terabytes of drive space and gigabytes of memory, I have been around the block a bit on computers.  I am not, of necessity, retro on my computer use but it is purpose driven.  Purpose driven use concentrates on certain aspects of computing, such as document creation or gaming.  Back in the day it was document creation that drove the early days of computing for office use, and the gamers had to adjust to the advances that getting simple work done on a computer drove as it was the marketplace.  That changed just around 2000 and now the gamers and, increasingly, entertainment use of computers drives displays, memory and storage.  This means that usability has gotten much, much, much better from the paper terminal days and the systems are pretty 'user friendly' and have been for awhile.  Yet, because I have limited uses for computers, mostly in the document creation and research areas, that means that a stock, out of the box computer or Operating System comes with all of the fun, glitzy, entertainment stuff turned on.

Growing up through the era of the early PC and early Internet means that there are some credos and maxims that exist for computers that haven't changed much, although a few have changed greatly.  I'll go over a few of those as a personal look at computers, overall.

The first great maxim of computers from the mid-1980's to just a bit after 2000 has been: the computer you want always costs $2,500.  Add in an extra $500-$1,000 if it was a laptop.  For a few short years between 2001 and 2005 that dropped to $1,500 and it was in this era that the gamers finally took the lead at high end computing and office document generation dropped off the screen.  For general office work without glitzy presentations, you can get a computer at $300 that will do absolutely everything one of its mid-1990's predecessors did and much, much more.  The only thing that would be the same with this $300 Nettop or sub-notebook is the screen size, but the resolution today is much higher and the color rendition much, much better... do note you would be dropping from a 14" CRT monitor to a 10-12" LED display in that transition.

The second great maxim of computers that still holds (and may for about 5 more years) is a simple one.  The greatest resource of your computer is the screen real estate space and this dates to the Windows Icon Mouse Point concept of interface.  Your screen real estate (even in 3D) is limited and, therefore, it is the most precious commodity of a computer since it is the one that allows you to interface with it to know just what it is you are doing.  There have been a number of proposed solutions to this, but they all involve creative ways to compress or otherwise shift the use of the screen real estate while presenting more on it.  Getting a larger screen is the first and best way to increase computer functionality for a desktop machine, and while it is a pricey option, there is nothing as valuable as an extra 4 square inches of screen real estate space.  This is mandatory because of the 1960's WIMP paradigm and will not change until the interface space expands beyond the screen and nothing delivers information in such dense amounts as visual interfaces.

From Jerry Pournelle, the man doing stupid things with computers so you don't have to, comes a few key and essential concepts of computer troubleshooting.  The main one is: if it isn't the cables its the memory, and if it isn't the memory its the cables.  Most computer problems can be solved by taking out and reseating the memory and the cables of a system.  If you need to ensure good electrical contacts, use Stabilant 22A and an eyedropper bottle I got in the early '90s is still going strong today.  Unfortunately for sealed devices or those where your ability to actually get to anything beyond the memory is limited, like laptops, nettops, etc. you either have to have the basic confidence to strip something down and get it back into original condition or send it to a shop... or buy a new one.  When I was more actively building computers this set of advice meant that I could easily find the problems on a system and then ID it.  Early on I had problems with cables, and not just the low-end cheap stuff, either... and that was in the early '90s.  By the end of the '90s I had a few bad memory sticks that showed up during the era of the memory wars for pricing.  Since then has been relatively trouble-free computing, but the few problems I have had are right back at cables and memory.

Another Pournelle rule is that cruft builds up in the computer's disk system over time.  'Cruft' is left over parts of programs, bits that didn't uninstall or install properly, left over pointers in the registry that didn't go away properly, old drivers that interfere with new equipment, and the general slow scattering of data on a hard drive as bits and pieces of programs get fragmented due to poor disk maintenance on the part of the OS.  Every OS ever created has that problem, just that some have it to a lesser degree than others.  A system that slows down over time is due to cruft, and the cure is to either get a cleaning utility that will remove old parts of programs and clean up registry entries and then do a boot disk fragmentation on it, or get a back-up copy of your disk contents, wipe the disk and re-image the hard drive.  There are a plethora of things between those, including getting a new hard drive and ghosting the old one over to the new one with an optimization routine.  Depending on what you use your computer for cruft can start showing up in a few days (if you install and uninstall lots of software) or years.

Just after the beginning of the Internet era came ads.  Lots and lots of ads.  Mostly the 1-cent per click-through type that then dropped to tenths or hundredths or thousandths of a cent per click-through.  In the beginning there wasn't much to deal with, but as advertising for revenue increased the need for weeding out ads arose.  Why?  Simple: you own your computer, your screen and your screen real estate is the most precious part of your computer and if you don't want something on it then there must be a way to make it GO AWAY.  The Firefox browser has all sorts of nice add-ons for that, like AdBlock Pro and NoScript plus a few others to get rid of the tracking leeches and so forth that try to infest your browser. Users of MSIE have only recently gotten a semi-useful pop-up blocker that Firefox has had for some time, and unless you are using Avant as your MSIE shell, then you don't get much beyond that for blocking ads.  The alternative is to block the stuff before it gets to your browser via Privoxy, which has a plethora of geeky hand coding capabilities and a few free action scripts that you can modify to start getting rid of entire sub-domains of advertisements so you never, ever see them and they never, ever get to your hard drive.  For me Avant through Privoxy tends to be my main browser, but I use Firefox for a lot of work, and then things like Opera and Google Chrome to see if I can't get around user-hostile sites that don't like being weeded badly on the ad-side of things.  Basically, I don't see many ads... and when I do it is because I have temporarily gone to a direct connection or otherwise shut off the blocking capability so I can get to other content.  The moment I have the content (the wanted part) the rest goes back into place.

As I'm no longer in the gaming world of things (the rise of the FPS and the decline of my health basically leave me out of gaming now) I am not into the spinning, twirling and always there aspects of the modern OS that have started to become standard features.  Basically my computer screen real estate is devoted to simple document creation and, therefore, I don't want many features to clutter it up.  Thus there are no widgets or small apps infesting my screen real estate.  There are no transparencies enabled for the 'ooooo! neat!' of getting blurred material from around material I need to concentrate on.  I do not mind simple warnings from the status bar, and the clock there in simple text is useful.  The taskbar is small and permanent, I don't need it sliding around and out of the way or doing other fun things.  In fact I turn off anything that tries to fade in menus or otherwise do neat animations with them as when I want a menu I want it now, not in 3 seconds and when I get what I want it is to go away now, not in 3 seconds. 

As I can get around my hard drive pretty easily I have two directories I added after reading an article in PC Magazine back in the 1980's.  One is download and the other is TEMP.  When I download things I don't want an OS created place that you can't easily get to because they have decided to hide it on you, but one directly off the main drive (or data drive if I have one) called download.  Similarly if I need to expand or unzip material, or work on items they get a sub-directory in TEMP.  Over 95% of all my user generated material resides in TEMP.  And if I have to back up anything then that directory gets a priority as it is, by and large, data that I've created.  A final directory I have started to create is Programs Contained which are programs that do not get registered in the registry, run as standalones, and really should have a nice place to be contained so I can find them.  The first time I get one of those, I create Programs Contained to hold them.

I have witnessed people with their computing screen real estate taken up by documents.  Sometimes there are so many of them that it is hard to figure out where the important system level icons are.  There is a way to clean that up and it is by use of a desktop folder.  The best way is to store those documents in TEMP, of course, so they NEVER appear on the screen interface which needs to be clean so as to make it easy to use and not prone to click errors.  Simple desktop folders and saving to them would solve most of the problems, as would creating such folders and dragging and dropping the icons into them: problem solved.  But having a simple TEMP directory means you don't even have the folders to clutter your computing desktop.  And since so many documents seem to come from one or two applications, opening the application will be something that will have to be done and then finding the document you want from its place on the TEMP directory is an easier task... made easier by applications that keep a Most Recently Used list of the last 5 or 10 items you have most recently generated.  Mankind invented folders and filing cabinets for a reason, and even though I enjoy a physically messy desk, my computer desktop can be kept neat via a bit of forethought that I never have to think about again.

A good keyboard is hard to find.  I use an old clicky style that should survive through Armageddon and still work on my main machine.  For other machines... there are keyboards that aren't bad on laptops... and there are keyboards that aren't all that good, either.  If I could get a custom clicky keyboard for laptops, I would, but I can't so I'm stuck with what the designers have put on those types of machines.  I can use a mouse, touchpad, arrow keys, joystick or trackball.  I prefer a trackball since it doesn't require much motion nor actual desk space.  Mushpads...errr... touchpads aren't bad but, like some keyboards, they aren't all that good, either.  If you get the idea I have a very modern monitor, old fashioned keyboard and out of step pointing device for my main desktop computer... you are absolutely correct.

If you get the idea that I don't have much on my desktop, you are right.  In general there are a few items of necessity that end up on the desktop and they include: My Computer or just a C: drive shortcut, browser icons, one spreadsheet I use constantly, a writer application, one calculator that can do a few math shortcuts, an alarm app, and a folder of Utilities.  Bluetooth puts a couple of shortcuts I can't move on the desktop, as well, so they stay there by default.  I used to use the Quick Launch area of the task bar a bit, but have found that it is more a short-short menu of items I use a bit less often.   That's it.  The rest is a pleasant blue with high contrast to it and the smallest icons I can use for the screen resolution.  The status bar is the equivalent of the computer items of interest and letting me know that the network is connected, battery or UPS system is OK, and a very few other things to let me know things are working well.  There are a total of 12 items there and if I got rid of the Bluetooth I could move that down to 10 items.

What I know is sacrilege to many is that I also don't listen to music much any more so there are no music apps, no background music and the speaker is muted at all times.  Anything that must get through from the OS can go through speaker for beeps, very simple. 

I also don't watch much video and it is usually short items from blog presentations and if I want it I will click on it.  And if it auto-runs, well, the speaker is muted... its almost like there was a plan, there.  I do have the free software tools to do all sorts of video but they sit on my main computer mostly unused with just enough skill to do some transcoding if I need to.

I don't need a weather app as I have this thing called a 'window' that I can look outside and see what is happening.  If I want more weather related information I can go to a website.  I don't need an app to tell me it is daytime or raining, I have that capability built into this thing called a 'house'.

I also have zero RSS feeds coming in.  Yes, zero.  None.  No one is saying anything important enough to cause me to want to subscribe to them and I don't need an app on my desktop for it.

I am also on zero social media sites.  Yes, zero.  Since I have no wall to deliver messages on, I don't have that to worry about.  No Facebook, no LinkedIn and no Twitter.  If you see someone using a hashtag related to me, its not me.  I do have a cellphone, I turned it on and made one call that was free to make sure it works.  I turned it off after that.  I turn it on periodically to check its charge.  It will probably go in my medical bugout bag.

In no way am I a Luddite, and I love computers and the capability they have with them.  They are, as with any firearm or any of the woodworking equipment I own, useful tools.  A well maintained computer should last you five years before something critical goes on it.  Often it will last much longer, but the Mean Time Between Failure has you on the decreasing half of continued function that is now below 50%.  Just like you can still find Edison bulbs from the 1900's dimly glowing here and there, the majority of them didn't make it this far and out of the thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps million or two of them produced you now have a few left and their MTBF still holds.  Like any tool it is best when it is suited to your purpose and requirements and does what you want it to do... not what some marketer decided would be a neat thing to put on your desktop.

Building your own custom Pico ITX system

Alternate title:  the parts you will have problems finding.  A follow-up, of sorts, to this post about how I can find the strangest ways to kill time.

Yes I did, indeed,  decide to do something nuts: custom build a Pico ITX system using the Via EPIA PX10000G.  This is not the Artigo kit they sell, which is 'custom' in that you have to put the tiny, deck of cards size motherboard into a case and screw some screws in... no this is the 'hey wouldn't it be neat to put a computer in this?' idiocy of having a cute aluminum frame to put something into which sounds incredibly simple, but is extremely difficult.

This is not a 'case mod' custom job: the case is a piece of cast aluminum that used to house a Netgear SC-101 'network appliance' duly dubbed by many 'the toaster from hell'.

This means that I will need to do a bit of DIY custom fabrication of things like a motherboard tray, and finding ways to mount switches and such.  So the effort to find all the piddling pieces I need to actually do all this starts with the fabrication materials, switches and such.  Most of them I got from Performance-PCs, and much thanks to them for sheets of nice looking aluminum, nibblers, vandal resistant switches, assorted wiring, cabling and so on.  Really the Lian-Li case modification stuff is really quite nice with an aluminum case and should serve quite well once I get things rolling.  Also to be mentioned is Xoxide and their somewhat smaller array of materials which has some things that Performance-PCs doesn't have.

Going through my list of 'things a small system must have' includes such things as audio jacks, and you can get a nice board for the Pico ITX at Logic Supply, along with many other EPIA pieces and parts.  Also have to mention them for EPIA power supplies, and they are competitive in that pricing, too.  I bought the main board, itself, from Ewiz/NewBiiz/SuperBiiz and probably a few other names to boot.  They had a good price via Pricewatch.com on my sidebar, and it was worth saving the money as it balanced out shipping costs.  Speaking of which, my old standbys of Newegg and Mwave also get nods for some things like notebook hard drives and a nice dual notebook drive to 3.5" case bay adapter from CRU-dataport.  If you are cramming a lot into a small space you need notebook drives, and if you are going to sacrifice one out of three bays of the SC-101, you might as well get two drives in it.

But getting the major components - motherboard, memory, drives, bay adapters, switches and faceplates - that is only the *beginning*.  Yes you have all the parts and then find out that Via has decided to pull a swift one on you.

Not only do they use non-standard pin-outs for things like where you plug in the momentary switch on the motherboard, but they use smaller than standard screws for their motherboard.  And these two items begin the tale of woe...

 

The Quest for 2.0mm pitch wire to board leads

This is normally a *snap* as there are tons of places you can go to get lead wire that is pre-socketed so all you have to do is push the leads into the motherboard and then just do a bit of finagling with the tinned leads to get a solid connection to whatever it is you are hooking up to the motherboard.  Those usually use 2.54mm pitch connectors.  Via uses 2.0mm pitch connectors.

Everyone on the planet uses 2.54mm pitch connectors for standard motherboards.  I can find oodles of suppliers for lead wire that is already put into connectors and has tinned leads.  But 2.0mm pitch that isn't biased?  Bwahahahahahaha!!

I've tried all the major supply houses and can get the individual components, but a minor bit of cable assembly for 'one-off' pieces?  And, yes, you name it and I've checked it both in the US, UK, Germany, and Thailand.  Trying to figure out what I can get from China is a bit much, considering how their front organizations operate, and I've had it with enigmatic descriptions of what companies may or may not offer from China via these centralized sites.

After weeks and weeks and weeks of searching there are a few places where you might get the stuff, but so far I've found its no dice due to the wire sizing and board connecter size.  The prime one of which is SparkFun for all your electronic weirdnesses and parts you can't seem to find anywhere else.  A great place for robotics projects and such and you can find 2.0mm pitch lead wires there... just not the right connector size for the 2.0mm pitch.  If you want to really part it out and DIY and make your own lead wires, then Action Electronics is a good place to go.

Go ahead, go to GlobalSpec, Octopart, Mouser, or any of their equivalents for this stuff!  Knock yourself out!  I don't care to recount the DAYS I have spent going through them... verging on weeks at this point.  I really do not want to get into the 'strip the wire and crimp the sockets and tin my own leads' stage of things.  And I am still trying SparkFun and a few other places to see if the robotics community has this problem tackled.

 

You want *what* size screws?

Ah, if you don't know about screw sizes and never intend to build a custom rig and do it DIY, then you will never need to know this.  And if you are only used to working with full size PCs and never intend to do otherwise, this is also terrain you won't cover until one of the EPIA systems gets wildly popular, everyone wants one and no one will have the screws for them.  Fun was not had.

First the screws in the SC-101 were Torx screws.  They were *not* M4 screws.  Nor are they exactly M2 screws.  Nor M3 screws. Nor M2.5 screws.  They are just between M2 and M2.5 screws which yields no real easy English measurement, which falls on both sides of the M2 and M2.5 sizing.  My guess is that they are either fine thread M2.5 or coarse thread M2 screws.  My solution will be to use M2 screws with Blue Loctite (242).  My thanks to Henkel's Loctite folks for making a good solution for this sort of thing.  I had to find some Red Loctite for my Ruger and mounting the Weaver Scope Mount on it, and I finally chose the lowest end of Red Loctite (262) which doesn't need a heat application to get it off.  Yes!  I am going to cheat!  It is either that or drill and tap my own screw holes and hope I don't ruin the existing ones in doing so.

So where do you head for screws and associated materials?  Well there are two choices out zillions... if you want cheap and easy it is the Tools, Auto & Industrial part of Amazon.  Really!  You wouldn't believe the good stuff they have there, including super thin shim stock for doing case finishing.  What a selection of stuff... really, recommended.

The other place is McMaster-Carr, which has a great selection of everything from small parts to everything you need to outfit your home.  It is a bit more expensive, but if you decide on 'one-stop shopping' then it is worth checking out since it scales from the small to the large, equipment-wise.  Couldn't find 2.0mm pitch lead wire there...

 

Where is the project build?

I have all the major parts!

The wire to connect it all up and the screws to tighten stuff into where it is going to have to stay put?

Researching the Red Mafia or the connections of Monzer al-Kassar is a *snap* compared to this... on the plus side I did get to replace my electric drill that went missing with a nice rechargeable from Milwaukee.  It is their sub-compact driver and works perfectly.  Bought used from the factory with full warranty.  And I did buy the necessary taps for doing my own threaded screw holes from Amazon...

2.0mm pitch lead wire?

The Quest, unfortunately, is The Quest.

And that is what is killing my spare time.

That and blowing off steam writing a Star Trek story...

That one, special piece makes it whole

Building computers has always been a favorite past-time and hobby of mine since I first got my hands on some of the earliest machines for home use back in the 1980's. I started out on paper based terminals in the late 1970's, working on a timeshare account from school on an IBM 360/76 mainframe. While I don't date back to punched cards, I do go back to their successor: the #2 pencil fill in the oblong. With a few cards, or tens of cards, you could get a rather simple program put together and the paper-based terminal was seen as an amazing part of the future. By the end of high school the Apple II, Atari 400/800, Commodore-64 and TRS-80 were all available along with the first business class machine by IBM, the PC/XT. Although the Apple II, PC/XT and TRS-80 all had expansion capability, via add-in slots, the ability to actually modify the system were minimal. Mostly it was *just* modifying the exterior, the case, and putting in better expansion cards for new capability. My first PC/XT by the mid-1980's was a Taiwanese clone that was relatively inexpensive and already 'second wave' due the the PC/AT and then the 386 revolution. Actually modifying cases could be done, but fitting a computer into something less cumbersome than a 50 lb. piece of luggage was difficult, although the far too expensive laptop machines had started to hit the street for a few years.

Going forward through the 1990's and the computer industry saw a major expansion as the Industry Standard Architecture bus (or ISA) designed by IBM, allowed for anyone to make an expansion card for their machines. A few companies 'black boxing' the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) meant that '100% IBM Compatible' was in the actual mid-90's percent and 'good enough to just work'. IBM couldn't control that architecture, tried to shift to a proprietary one and slower processors and had its lunch eaten by Compaq, Dell and just about anyone who could get some sheet metal bent and had a source for cheap motherboards. That motherboard form factor which started with the XT and went to the AT (with oversized versions of each possible) soon shifted as the motherboard manufacturers hit upon a key size of the ATX. Plus they needed higher power, lower circuit trace lengths and some way to get things cooler inside the computer case. It is the form factor that makes the decision if you are not into high-end gaming and graphics these days: if you want a cheap PC to surf the net, do some word processing and spreadsheets, the cost of that machine and its size are now incredibly small.

Compared to a gaming rig, that is.

The form factor shift after the ATX, after a few false starts, headed downwards in size (with major exceptions for file servers and such). The Micro-ATX or mATX came next, being smaller than the ATX, but not as small as some embedded computers, like the PC/104 (which can fit in a computer keyboard). Movement on that front and the 'get a computer everywhere you can thing of' deal has moved form factors down in size as well as increasing capability and lowering cost. That is the magic of Moore's Law, where the number of transistors on a given size of circuit board is doubled every 18 months or so (there are variants of the Law), while keeping manufacturing costs relatively stable. Thus, for older capacity you can get more and pay less. Try *that* in the automotive industry!

This brings us to the modern era of the ITX circuit board, being smaller than the mATX but still able to fit into an mATX/ATX case (check the alignment holes before purchase). The ITX starts to hit into the realm of lower powered kiosks, interactive displays and all sorts of fun things and is both lower power and cost compared to a gaming PC. From there one market leader in the push to get computers into the smallest form factor that it still upgradeable (to some degree) is apparent. It is not Intel or AMD, but the company that has made chips to address some integrated capacity on motherboards that the other two may not do as well or as cheaply: VIA. If you want to see small form factor computers, VIA is the place that makes the motherboards for them. They are pushing down in size and cost, while putting more functionality into the motherboard, which holds the processor and graphics capability (at least on some integrated motherboards), so for your money all you need is a case and some memory, plus storage. And as these are somewhat older PC specifications you can often get that stuff on the cheap, or spend for what you need like memory or storage capacity.

Deciding to go where the big guys aren't going, VIA has set up VIA Initiatives to bring small form factor, cheap computers to the masses that seem to go a bit beyond the 'embedded' category. They can't do this on their own and need the help of manufacturing concerns, innovative system designers and just interested folks willing to do some of the 'just where can I put this thing?' sort of deal. This is seen at their Spearhead Initiatives page, and starts to get a good flavor for what is going on. The Mini-ITX moves the form factor down a notch, heading into the area of Personal Video Records (like TiVO's and such) for form factor size. The Nano-ITX starts to hit at the range of an oversize hardcover book. Their Ultra Mobile PC initiative looks to get fully functional sub-notebook to just a bit larger than palm size computers into the hands of everyday people at a low cost. The Asus company's Asus Eee is an example of that form factor. Currently the newest form factor size is the Pico-ITX, which, well...

That is a motherboard, with CPU and the memory slot is on the underside. It has pinouts for all the other things you need, like USB and such, but notice the VGA connector in back for your monitor is built-in. To get this thing rolling VIA is offering a 'system builders kit' called the Artigo, which allows one to get the experience of putting in some memory, attaching a connector or two, screwing a few screws to put the thing in its case and then figuring out what to do with it. It has space for a 2.5" notebook hard drive in it. To give you an idea of the size of the thing, installed, it looks like this:

Next to the monitor (17" I think) and the keyboard, just opposite the mouse is the Artigo. It has 4 USB ports, stereo in/out jacks, and VGA. Along with the small power brick that comes with the kit. Most resellers will bundle the Artigo kit with 512 MB of RAM and a hard drive, usually in the 40 GB range. While many of the boards, particularly Nano-ITX, are aimed at computing in vehicles, and a number of manufacturers make in-dashboard units, the Pico-ITX looks to be heading elsewhere, including the Open Source notebook area at the VIA OpenBook site. There to speed the adoption of this concept, they have placed the full engineering diagrams for public use out on the web, so that you can head over to a machine shop or plastic molding shop and get your very own notebook case made ready for parts.

And this now comes to the confluence of things that starts with a cheap piece of refurbished technology from NETGEAR: the SC-101.

Also known as - The Toaster from Hell. Quite a few people have made that and similar comment about its inability to stay on a network, keep integrity or even just plain old work. As I have a couple of old hard drives, due to the system rebuilds going on here, I thought it was worth a shot... and it is aptly named as the Hellish Toaster. But, on the cheap for refurbished, it was worth a shot.

The body is made of aluminum, looks to be cast aluminum, not milled. The outer parts are slide on plastic shells, with a steel front and back piece with plastic rim over them. It is, definitely, cute. It is not, most definitely, reliable nor even having stable drivers, with Netgear admits to and blames the suppliers of them. Stripped out it is a tiny circuit board made for doing not very much. I was hoping for some network filesharing amongst my machines, but that appears to be a lost cause.

With that said the form factor, internally divided into three bays (one each for 3.5" hard drives and the remainder for internal circuits) is interesting as it allows for 3.5" bay gear to fit into two of the three slots. Now the Artigo system kit is overlarge for that, as it would comfortably fit where a DVD/CD drive does in a regular computer system. Yes, you can have a computer in your computer, so to speak, with the Artigo doing some dedicated work while the main system is used for other things. The motherboard, alone, however, would fit neatly into the SC-101 and leave both other bays open... and there are a couple of better motherboards out from VIA...

If only there was a motherboard tray to do that.

I have looked at the bay components, and it might be possible to use a 2.5" hard drive adapter for a 3.5" bay to fit into the center slot of the SC-101. That is if you drill out holes for the motherboard standoffs (small devices put in to isolate the motherboard from the case that are often screwed in with a screw hole on the part jutting up, or just a plastic clip), but that requires drilling and tapping. Tapping is the process of threading a hole with the proper screw tap. I have, actually, done that in the far past for other things, and have since procured the necessary taps to do it again with hand screw. What that would allow is the 'down and dirty' putting in of parts, scrounging some faceplates and getting the thing functional. Hey, if you already have a drill, the right bit size and about $50 worth of taps and screw device it is well worth thinking about. You can even re-use the power brick that came with the SC-101!

Really, if I could find a custom metal bending shop in the neighborhood, I would just hit them up for a bit of work. In Buffalo that would be easy. In the drowsy communities of western metro DC in VA? Possible, yes, but someone who was trustworthy by the friend-of-a-friend network thing? Probably not. So that leaves the ugly look. Or does it?

In this modern era of computers, computer assisted or operated machines and all sorts of other fun things, there is one other way to go. Here the concept is 'rapid prototyping' of equipment via a shop that will do one-off work if you give them the CAD layouts with specifications and such. And since the actual ability to make Computer Assisted Drawings is relatively old technology, as well as 3D rendering, you would think there should be a way to do this pretty much online. A large number of shops will take in your design work if you already have the necessary programs, but you would really like a front-to-back sort of deal where you can do the layout work, specify materials and work to be done, finishing and get it pretty fast. Online price quotes a help!

The first place I have run across to do this is Online Machine Shop, which has a downloadable small program that allows for layout, custom specification, and an embarrassingly large number of things you can get done. It will even analyze your work and tell you when getting it all done on a single machine will keep the price down! For a one-off piece of work, I expect that the price would be pretty high... more than the cost would justify, really. Still, if you want something made to your specifications, and you can figure out materials, tool types and what you need done in the machinists parlance, this looks to be the place to go. The software feels like its from the mid-1990's, but running quickly unlike the 1990's.

So what am I wasting my time on? Yes, re-learning and dusting off some old skills from my teen years and having some fun with software and seeing just what I can make that SC-101 *into*. And if you ever needed just that one, special piece of something to make an overall design look *good*, be it woodwork, car, boat, home appliance... if you have time and patience to learn, you can actually get it done to your specifications within tolerances.

I expect that within five years or so the open source machining group will get it to where you can just get the equipment for your home and you supply the basic materials.

Of computers old and ancient

There is a very strange feeling one gets updating a piece of old computer equipment: you know it is old, that it works and that no matter what you do to it the thing will remain old. Old but serviceable and still useful as a Internet surfing machine or something for light duty office work. I know that is the case as that is what I used it for!

The machine in question is an old ECS A900i Desknote or 'i-Buddie' system which was mid-range way back when I bought it back in... hmmm.... 2001 I think it was. Early in the year which tends to get lost when looking at 2001. It was actually pretty nice, back in the day, even able to run some 3D first-person games and would stand me in good stead as my travel computer as I ventured out during my R&D days. After far too long running in good condition, it suffered from software bloat and so many updates to the operating system that you can't keep track. It needed a replacement, basically, for what I wanted to do, and it sat on the shelves once I got the refurb Dell Inspiron 1721 of much PITA suffering I have previously written about.

Now with family members who travel a bit and could use a relatively portable machine, I decided to do the end of lifecycle dance with the Desknote and give it the final upgrades it could take. Which, by reading the documentation, seemed to indicate: RAM, hard drive, CD/DVD slot, and CPU. I purchased those, I think from Newegg as it generally has low prices and a good reputation. So checked out the memory type as an old 168 pin SDRAM at 133 or 100 MHz, got a nice brand new Hitachi 160 GB Travelstar, one of the Samsung DVD burners for upgrading notebooks, and a 1.4 GHz Celeron.

I did check out everything that was easily check-outable, and as the stuff arrived I made sure it was, indeed, what I wanted and fit... save for that CPU, that is buried inside the unit. Still, the other stuff could go in waiting for that, and the memory worked out easily, as did the DVD drive save for lacking the cute faceplate, but this is a machine of function, not good looks. I did realize I had to move the old retaining pieces off of the old CD/DVD combo drive, but I have two sets of jeweler's tools which includes, at this point, two sets of philip heads, one set of flat head, sub-1/4" open wrenches, sub-1/4" allen wrenches (the savior of system builders of the old school!), plus regular interchangeable screwdrivers with magnetic heads and an assortment of left over tools purpose used to get into cases (like those case screws which really need a bit of leverage to get them started when taking them out).

As an old DIY builder, I kept all my tools as they are just far too handy to let go. Plus lots of replacement screws and such I accumulated over the years. Had to do that as I still had computers and enough skill to actually not want to send out to a repair shop for something I can still DIY. The fun, it appears, was about to begin.

By the time the Celeron had rolled around, system makers had been using a Zero Insertion Force socket system for placing CPUs. So, I thought, as the maker had put everything else into an easy-to-upgrade position, I would have thought that the CPU was likewise situated. Such was not the case, however, and I then proceeded to find every single screw I could take out of the back cover (after disconnecting said system, of course) and even find the last evil screw sitting under a sticker under the hard drive. That last took awhile to find. Slowly ease that plastic back cover off... and two hours later I do have it off all in one piece, which is a minor miracle of sorts... I am confronted by a sheet metal covering the electronics.

Which is kept on by two screws and gently inserting the small tabs into various parts of the assembly. With that off I was confronted by a cute little heatsink and fan unit, monopiece, which then came off, got cleaned and used canned air to blow the dust off of it. And do I see the much expected ZIF socket?

Oh, woe is you who believe that in the effort to shave a few bucks off of a computer that the manufacturer will actually put in a 30 cent part to make life easy.

I gently eased the circuit board up, shined the handy-dandy flashlight in and confirmed that the CPU was, indeed, soldered straight on the board.

Much imprecation was heard throughout the land!

Curses to cheap system builders!

Twits! Ninnies! Feebleminded idiots!

And so on, as I slowly put the thing back together. For the first time in I don't know how long I can remember I have had a zero screws lost ratio on that project and I carefully put each and every screw back in its proper place. The system still booted, too!

With a blank, brand new hard drive I wanted to put in the best end of lifecycle operating system which, for that machine, is Windows 2000. Remember, this is going to non-technically astute folks, so it *must* work without a single change to anything done via command line, scripts or such like. I did consider Ubuntu, and generally like its features, but not for non-technical family.

Previously I have introduced Nlite as a good way... no splendid way... to update a WinNT based operating system, with Vlite now its companion for things Vista-ish. It does, indeed, work with Win2K and I did the basic upgrade to latest Service Pack on it. That said there are a buttload of updates since then and I had to scout around a bit to get an auto-downloader for those. Likewise I wanted a handy 'use anywhere' Win2K disk, so a bit of work found a nice place with just about every 2K/XP driver known to mankind except, of course, those for the iBuddie which are neither modern nor nice. Those I found at the manufacturer's site. Finally the Nlite user community has a dedicated individual or two who put together Addons to install with your operating system during the install. Those were much, much appreciated and will have to send a donation their way for that as putting in all sorts of goodies like Open Office, Opera, K-media megapack, VLC VideoLan, and such is all to the good. All of that got slip-streamed, only awaiting installing of MS dotNet, its service packs and then MSIE 6.0. Plus service packs, hot fixes, security updates, malicious software removal tools... and on and on...

Worked, too! Unattended install so I could wander around the house and take care of other things and come back to a system ready for the post-install updates. That went smoothly and the system is now ready for family use.

Good job!

Now as I have a brand new 1.4 GHz Celeron I am going to do another end of lifecycle build with it, and strip out most of the junk in the dead-board SuperMicro 750A case. That will go as a back-up computer for family members. After that there is just one case and I am internally debating what to do with that... it has a fully functioning system, but a back-up game machine would be handy for another family member and it is not suitable 'as-is'.

That is what has been taking up my time: updating my old computer DIY skills, hitting the marketplace on-line, and slowly doing the update and out-cycle dance. At the end of it I will treat myself to a new flat screen monitor once the two ancient LGE 19" ones go to family members.

I am, basically, killing time to the election. I am dissatisfied with the two-party system, the 'third parties' which I have major philosophical disagreements with per-party (just like the two mainstream parties!), the candidates who are no better than Carter... actually worse in some ways due to the micromanagerial style of them or simple lack of being good at it (hey! who the hell vetted candidates who don't know economics, have organized crime contacts and both want more government?). Scratch that last: there are NO good micromanagers on the face of the planet.

At least the antiquated technology works within its parameters.

The antiquated two party system does not.

Microprocessors? Yes!

Micromanagers? No!

The US operating system is more or less ok.

The poor software needs to be stripped down to the core of the OS.

It is looking like re-install time to me starting with bare OS and a few good service packs.

The rest of the software needs to go.

Is it the software or the hardware?

Ah, that Dell Inspiron 1721 that I moved over to WinXP Pro x64 had a hard drive problem: the 'access of forever' problem where it spent hours thrashing on the poor drive and did nothing. At that point it was obvious that it would never stop and so the time was to admit that there was something wrong with it. Pull plug, pull batteries and let the poor thing rest a minute or two and then power-up.

"Disk Read Error Has Occurred" and the three finger salute to restart as the OS just doesn't show up.

The fun I have not had!

Thus I have been through the world of looking at hard drive recovery tools as this same drive has now gone belly up across two operating systems with the same problem. It *is* the hardware, just reliable enough to make you think its ok, and just unreliable enough not to be trusted. And this strange world is populated by high price, guaranteed data recovery services and the 'freebie' end where a bit of elbow grease just might get you somewhere. Maybe.

Normally I would go mid-tier with a relatively cheap set of tools, but free and time is always enticing. One thing I did note, is that Windows will not actually recognize the disks from the install CD... neither XP nor Vista. But, that is not the end of the OS spectrum, and when looking at diagnostics I hit upon the folks at Ultimate Boot CD which is a look at how to make a LiveCD with all sorts of neat recovery tools on it... and their follow up at UBCD4Win on the howtos of doing this, which is often less than obvious. The problem is, of course, that Win isn't seeing the drives. From there it was a check out of Knoppix, which has many neat distros including the one from INSERT which has a nice load of disk and forensics tools that can fit on a mini-CD, just in case you are the kind of person who needs that sort of thing on short notice. Linux has come a long way! And as soon as the folks at NTFS-3G get an equivalent chkdsk routine to run natively, things will be nice.

On the Win side there are many promises that a new, cheap environment that MS distributes for free to OEMs, Windows PE or Pre-install Environment will actually allow nearly anything to run on it... from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) which is Win PE built on Vista. It is, as they say, a fascinating area where a number of developers are now flipping this around and saying: 'Since MS doesn't want to make that more widely available and since so many of us have install disks, why not make a WinPE via the install disks?' Which is a damned good question, actually, if you want to have a very portable version of Windows that boots up from CD or from USB drives. Most of the installs are aimed at the low end of things: under 200 MB and many under 100 MB and a few aimed at 20-30MB.

For a full Windows install.

They are centralizing at winbuilder.net and are getting a set of automated scripts to lowball a lot of tools and capability into as little space as possible for portable Windows environments. Like the Asus Eee... luckily I don't have one of those, but at the rate I'm going... Most of the projects are over at boot-land.net your place for all sorts of fun OS projects beyond Windows and Linux.

From all of this I find yet more neat tools that I never knew existed, like MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD and its ability to mount an ISO image normally used to burn a CD as a virtual drive. Neat! Especially with the MS WinPE download, mount it and *boom*, insty-drive. Also a previously known favorite imgburn which is a down and dirty CD/DVD burner, with all sorts of goodies packed into it... found that with DVD Flick awhile ago for taking that video you found and burning it to CD or DVD. The folks at the Ultimate Boot CD have more free tools than you can reasonably want for everything you can imagine. Chock-a-block full of them. And a nice nod to DiskInternals with a suite of free and pay-for software for addressing hard drive issues.

So what I am slowly narrowing this down to is a Linux LiveCD distro that can handle WinXP Pro x64 in a Virtual Machine, on CD, and run the chkdsk from that. Or otherwise pull off that stunt.

Next path forward is to try and 'finesse it' with one of the WinBuilder groups, of which the one run by thuun looks the most interesting, although there are a couple of others to try out.

After that (assuming it doesn't work) is the other thing to do: hardware.

That path leads to a 2.5" SATA notebook drive enclosure for USB hook-up to my main system and then hitting *that* with disk diagnostic tools. Might work, too! As it is there is something broken where the files are not recognizable by the the Security Knoppix disk running the NTFS-3G system, so copying the files looks like a non-starter. Would have done that first and just reformat the things while looking for replacement (not refurbished, ie. used, drives). Software first, then hardware.

There is always Dell, but I have come to find them untrustworthy. YMMV.

Customer service follies

Ah, Dell!

The deal is that the reason, and sole reason I buy from Dell, ever, is integrated hardware.  My first Dell Dimension XPS desktop back in... when did that line start... 1996?  1995?... somewhere in there... well, I bought Dell for the integration factor, not for the lovely excess software.  And in no time at all I was quickly stripping things out, doing the DIY bit on system creation and after that left Dell behind for long years.  But when it comes to laptops/notebooks, you are getting out of the easy DIY territory.  Thus, after that initial, one-time buy, I decided to give Dell a try out...

Here is how I approached it:

Hardware - Could I get a decent deal if I stripped all the software off and started with a clean install (and yes that is difficult to do with Dell, but not impossible).

That was it, my only deciding factor was hardware integration.  Dell does that fairly well.

Thus my first Inspiron 1721 suddenly going non-bootable due to a driver update via Win Vista was disconcerting.  The second time I advanced my software replacement schedule by a number of months.  I found all the basic WinXP x64 drivers, did the nLite tango and soon had a *useful* and *stable* notebook computer.  With an OS I can stand, once I take the hedge-trimmers to it.  That system replaced my truly ancient Desknote that was slowly running out of disk space and was finding some software that had everyday use that was choking it.  Software bloat killed it, in other words.  Still trying to figure out what it can be used for, and will hang on to it for awhile yet, as it still has emergency, 'if you have nothing else left', utility to it.

Looking at the home computing situation to replace the absolutely ancient system I had thrown together for my lady way back in... 2002?  2003?... around then, based on an Asus board if memory serves... it is going through hardware death of its drives.  The floppy kicked the bucket a year or so ago and the CD just announced 'I have gone to meet my maker... which is Samsung', I started to realize I was heading into the long-term MTBF of the hard drives.  The boot drive dates back to 1999 or so, and while it still works the overall cruft is starting to get to Win2K.

At that point I was looking at two options.

First - The SuperMicro SC750-A  case is still one of the best cases I have run across, and it housed that system and my non-functioning back-up which had suffered the cosmic-ray death of one of the paired memory sticks.... until I swapped pairs and realized it was the motherboard that had suffered that death.  So I have *two* of the heaviest, roomiest cases sitting here and almost no energy to do any DIY stuff.  I could try to do it with a couple of reputable suppliers from my old days that are still going, and do the down and dirty of 'they test and I install' deal.  Possible, but that would eat my time and energy for anything else.

Second - Shift strategy, go light and modern, junk the cases and, possibly, the old CRT monitors, and do the 'notebook as desktop' deal for my lady and have a reputable screwdriver shop do me a custom back-up.

Astonishingly, the costs were the same.  Moore's Law and all that.

So a same day order: one to Dell for a second Inspiron 1721 and one to my reputable dealer from days gone by for a nice downsized system.

Amazingly, since the Inspiron was pre-made sitting in a warehouse, they arrived within a day of each other.

Thus the Inspiron, by arriving first, got the going over while I did the background software installs on the other system.  And, when it came time to update the firmware in the DVD drive of the Inspiron... Lo!  the drive doth not work as advertised. 

The courageous hero puts off contacting Dell trying to find *any* solution beyond that. 

The only thing worse than the catacombs of the MotherShip Knowledge Base is Dell Tech Support.

So on the screwdriver shop deal, I swapped out the cheapie DVD to allow them to install the OS there, and swapped in a real one pre-bought elsewhere.  Also a wireless network card.  The system runs *perfectly* as ordered.  Good work!

That shop is MWave and I have been dealing with them, off and on for various things, for some years now.  You just choose all the components, throw in the full construct, set-up, test, update for $45 and in a few days you have a well constructed system to your specs.  I went with the maker of my main system case, SilverStone Tek and their cute Evolution case.  Since my last construction for my main system was from MSI, I went with them and their K9AGM3-FIH board.  Went with a retail AMD processor but had the folks at MWave take off the mediocre heatsink/fan of retail box deals and had them put on a decent heatsink/fan combo which they recommended a better one from Thermaltake instead of the Zalman one I had chosen.

That left me, however, with contacting Dell Tech Support which I did through online chat at Dell.  And I was given the webpage to actually unseat and reseat the drive and that should do it!  They would phone me back in an hour....

Riiiight....

A day later, after trying 6 times to actually get the DVD drive to *budge* and *no* phone call, I got a bit peeved.

Today, nearly two days later, I was sending lovely messages to Tech and Customer Support.

A couple of hours later and, yes, a phone call from Dell which the nice Tech Support person had me describe the situation, which I had done on each and every message sent to them from two days ago, and finally did the DirectConnect ch-cha to let the remote Dell Tech Support person see that things were as I said they were.  And then promptly forgot that sending me a replacement drive when the current one was stuck in the system was a non-starter.  That took 3-4 times of repeating to finally get the message through.

Drive does not come out to be reseated.  Drive stuck.  Cannot replace drive with everything I have hear unless I start popping the case open and having fun with things.  Drive is fragile and did not want to bend or break it while it sat stuck in the system.

Stuff like that.

That finally got through and a nice little ship-back box will arrive in a couple of days to let it be shipped back.  Take out the power adapter, battery and hard drive because those things head towards sticky-finger land at the factory.

Thank you, to MWave!

And once Dell delivers a *working* system, and I thoroughly check it all out, then Win Vista takes a hike and I put a reliable OS on the thing.

 

Moral of the story: buy from Dell for hardware and make sure it works.

Find someone trustworthy for making *real* systems if you don't need hand-holding on every little thing that can go wrong on a computer.

 

I was thinking of putting an ITX system together... but that will await time and energy for a *small* build.

Just what have I been up to?

For those that may pass by, that question may arise, as my posting rate has gone downwards. I had predicted such, but for other reasons. Namely - moving. That got put off due to the health concerns of a loved one and that has kept me in the environs of NoVA that I do not adore, climate-wise. Along with those concerns comes having to get a bit more done around here, due to the problems of said loved one. Ahhhh... if only I were healthy, I wouldn't be blogging!

After that comes the lovely task of 'digital equipment refresh'. What is that, you may wonder? Well, due to the pace of change for computer equipment, the good things put in 3 or more years ago start to show their age as software and time start to take their toll. Beyond defragmenting hard-drives and such nice things, also updating of drivers may point to a BIOS needing upgraded which then ensues that overhead. When that is done you find that the system sub-components may have garnered some system overhead... which slows things down. And then there are the add-ons, 'neat things to try out', software updates (in which the software itself runs just a bit slower to be more 'secure'), and all the various little things that begin to encrust an operating system. This stuff is known as 'cruft' and after 3 years you either need to scrub it all down to the bare essentials and start over... which entails ensuring that re-installed software can, actually, re-install properly.... or... yes, starting over with a new system and moving data files over.

Another family member needed a new system for basic gaming, word processing, and such, plus net surfing, so I started out a few weeks back on that. In doing so I got refreshed on the current state of the art technology, which I had let slide since 2004. Before 2004 the entire PC industry had shifted from 'business' support to 'gaming support' for platforms with 'multimedia' growing up around *that*. Any system that could reliably handle games, would also have enough power to run any business application for the desktop AND have multimedia horsepower to spare. Gaming drove the PC industry on innovation, and still does to a large extent. The minimal necessary computing platform for all desktop business applications (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, desktop database work) was basically met in or around 2000 by the PC industry. By 2003 the force of innovation and change moved from those apps to games, and that would then meld with things like HDTV and wanting to watch hours of video driven by a computer, and that got added into gaming specs.

So, distracted from the rest of the world by computing happened with that system buy (which someone *else* gets to troubleshoot!), but that brought to my attention another problem that had been getting to me for the last couple of years: my sluggish Desknote. The Desknote concept is: there are a class of travelers who need a light, portable, all-in-one PC that is not a laptop or notebook. By eliminating 'on the run' usage and targeting 'in your hotel room' and presentation use, the Desknote came in handy for mobile computing with fixed point use. I got one of those to supplement my working life and it transformed into my 'kitchen table computer' for tracking my needs while my health severely deteriorated. By shifting my tracking of insulin use and such to a spreadsheet, with formulas used to balance blood glucase, carbohydrate intake and insulin use, even during the worse of my catalepsy, I had a good and solid way to maintain my health in that area. Without that, I would probably not be here as my ability to track much of anything during those dark days was minimal.

Realizing the good that the device did me, its ability to actually do simple things like switch between tasks, was becoming a problem. Additionally some applications that used to run on that older computing platform had met their end-of-lifecycle-support for it. As I still face moving in the near future, I needed something reliable, capable and able to stay more or less 'as-is' once it got put down. After looking at scads of options, I was faced with either a more expensive system from a Build-To-Order dealer or something like a refurbished Dell.

Now, as a DIY builder of PCs, I had experienced a Dell *once* back in the late 1990's and that entailed: removing every bit of Dell software put on the poor thing so that it could operate well. I looked at a neat and clean list from the BTO shop and the list from Dell...spec to spec equivalent (although pluses and minuses) both sides, but a refurbished Dell looked good and so I purchased that. An Inspiron 1721, with extra hard drive and a few options I didn't want but had no choice on with a refurb unit. I thought I knew what I was getting into....

The plus side is excellent: good, integrated set-up for updating drivers, BIOS (Wow! the world *has* changed as that used to be a boot to floppy with updates and pray that it worked sort of deal before things way back pre-2004), software... excellent work. Kudos for Dell on that, and for keeping up with the industry to do that.

The negative of that: the software is damned intrusive, constantly pestering, eats up processing time and deserves to be shot. I do *not* want to pay for an upgrade to ANYTHING, nor do I want my problems tracked or my location, or a myriad of other things to give me a 'Dell Experience'. After getting everything up-to-date, the good went out with the bad, and I un-installed the stuff. It still sits on their 'emergency recovery disk area' which I will look at ways to reclaim once it is out of warranty.

The ugly: McAfee Anti-Virus. Seven or so years ago I could recommend it, as it was relatively efficient compared to its competitors. Back around 2004-05 I could not recommend it as it became a resource pig and I sent it squealing from my main system and put in Avast!, as seen in my sidebar. Free for personal use, always hitting in the top 5 of AV systems and often #1 or 2, it is a proven winner. It has relatively low overhead compared to McAfee, and the slow-down of McAfee on my system took what should have been, at most, an hour's work to remove the unwanted Dell software to something like 2 days. Getting rid of IT took another hour. Banished and gone, save the recovery area, and I now know what to get rid of *first* if some strange disaster strikes to wipe out my OS.

The truly awful: Windows Vista. As a refurb I couldn't get a nice, old copy of XP on it and, as previously put forth by me, I will not be switching Operating System bases anytime soon. When Windows 2000 came out, I spent time turning off a few bells and whistles to make it a nice WinNT upgrade. When WinXP came out, I saw that the amount of pre-loaded cruft on the OS was large and installed that on exactly *one* computer and then removed the cruft, disabled the bells and whistles, and got it down to something closer to Win2K which I wanted to be more like WinNT. Windows Vista is the Phyllis Diller of Operating Systems: no matter how much lipstick you put on it, it will never be beautiful. Getting those things found, disabled, turned off, muted, or sidetracked to never open has taken more than two days.

A note to the computer industry: the Personal Computer should meet personal needs. No matter how *nice* a special effect is, it eats up processor time, and I say to thee NAY! If Microsoft wanted to *really* impress me, it would allow the individual to select an absolutely stripped down GUI with the ability to add on a function here or there. Let me decide on the level of glitz as your idea of glitz and mine are absolutely different things. Whatever you do, do *not* have them all enabled as a standard distribution setting: they eat up enough processor time to make a decent and capable system (if not speedy) no better than its compatriot that I am replacing with a technology benchmark that was middling in 2003... running Win2K.

Ditto that to Dell - if I want obtrusive hand-holding, let me decide on the service package, ok? And on the pre-installed junk so that at first-time start-up I can be given a choice of installing stuff or *not*. As you already dictate a section of memory for it to 'recover' a system, just leave it there if I don't want it.

After that getting software installed (almost all of it FREE!) was just time net downloading, installing and running. Transfer a few files to a little key disk and shut the Desknote down and put the Inspiron up only took a bit to figure out wireless networking...

That I am addressing *next* as the ancient Linksys wireless router has always (and I do mean always) keeping a decent signal in my townhome. I get a better ability to hold a signal from the guy next door on the other side of his place. The ancient Linksys, bought way back when 802.11g was new (and I have updated its firmware) has never been satisfactory and becomes less so over time. After years of buying Linksys (now part of Cisco), I will give their competitor a try and see how a brand new D-Link gaming wireless router works out.

As sidelights other equipment has come in for home needs for ease of access to sitting in the bathtub and to dehumidify the main floor on the house. Plus minor computer problems I have addressed previously.

A new thing to go after the remains of my treatment for the skin infection I had, I started to use Defense Soap. Normally I'm not so hot on 'all natural' deals, but for anti-fungal needs I had enough of the high end and wanted to try a different method. So far, so good! Along most of the area where the small amounts of intractable fungal infection have not left, they are going away. Plus I got the travel kit from the Defense Soap folks and will be using their products for the next few months and, at this rate, my guess is that it will do better than all the high priced skin stuff I have used for the last year or so. The only downside: you are left smelling like an aggressive herb salad. Also it is slightly soporific but I have been dealing with *that* since 2004.

Through all of that I was able to put up that piece on the Red Mafia, which you would not want to hear me bitch about the time *that* took, and a few other posts and scattered commentary. Yes I am rolling up another couple of posts... but they are still in the 'research and input' stage.

I have been massively impressed by the US Armed Forces in Iraq, and they are bringing about the fastest change-over in a COIN operation on record. The folks in Iraq will have Iran, Syria and various Islamic terror groups to deal with for the forseeable future...but that is their National problem, not ours. If the can get the violence down to levels seen in Turkey, then that will be something that no naysayer could ever have predicted and which will be the start of a massive shift in the Middle East. Getting rid of al Qaeda and JaM (supported by Iran) in Iraq does not end their threats on a global basis... but it takes a lot of wind from their sails and makes them vulnerable on that same, global scale. We are still left with all other forms of illegitimate warfare that are getting more vitriolic and deadly over time, however, and ignoring *those* will get us in the exact, same sort of situation we were in on 9/10.

We must learn that in this new era, we must honor victory, not celebrate it as a final end save to major conflicts. The support of civilization and Nation States is the good in this fight and those to come down the pipeline for the next few decades, at least. It, like piracy, will always be with mankind so long as we are human. If we forget that, we will get killed by it.