I'm living in rural Florida (USA) with my wife, son, two cats, and quite a few computers. I actively work in several areas of interest but still find time to manage several websites, execute home improvements, ride the Harleys, and play with cool toys. I'm reasonably fit for an Old Guy, equally comfortable wielding a keyboard, torque wrench, or spatula. I've got a scary-low tolerance for bullshit.
I’ve rocked Samsung Galaxy phones since they made their appearance in the marketplace, and I’ve always protected them with those awesome Otterbox Defender cases. I tend to keep phones a long time and this one’s no exception. My S-8’s over 4 years old, my first with a “non-removeable” battery. I figured the battery would be its weakness but still charges easily and coolly and runs through my longest days with plenty of charge left over so never gave it much thought.
This particular model of Defender case has a weak point. The plastic catch that attaches the case to its holster tends to break. There are two of those attachment points so when one breaks, I tend to call it in for warranty. I use the unbroken side until they send me a new unit, usually just a few days.
The stage set, the pictures show what I found as I un-cased to collect the Defender’s serial number.
The S8 battery had swollen enough that it forced the back of the phone right off! You can see it’s even broken the retainers that hold the Defender’s inner clamshell together.
In case you didn’t know, damaged Li-Ion batteries can be dangerous! They’re inherently unstable to the point that it takes active circuitry – built into the pack – that manages them. Thermal runaways happen. A cute way of saying that they can catch fire or even explode.
I wasted no time in replacing the handset.
What’s next? Part of me just wants it outa here. It’s got no cash value, too old. Throw it into recycling? But it’s a good computer! I may try replacing the battery myself. They’re available. It’s already 90% open – the hardest part, according to the Internet. If that goes well it’ll become a dedicated screen for the drone controller.
While I ponder it’s in a thick-walled ceramic box outside the house, nothing nearby but concrete.
Could this be the beginnings of a workaround for legacy applications like Eudora? Does this even matter? I’m keeping my eye on it anyway because of Eudora’s dependency upon the “Microsoft Viewer”, when it’s selected to display messages.
The article is focused on the aging browser itself but then these sentence appear.
It’s clear Internet Explorer doesn’t have a place in Microsoft’s online efforts with its clunky old rendering engine. After the shutdown, Internet Explorer will no longer be available on any consumer version of Windows 10.
Isn’t that “clunky old rendering engine” what Eudora’s using when Microsoft’s viewer is selected for viewing messages? As it happens, the answer is yes.
So, what will happen in 2022? Only Microsoft knows for sure. I suppose it comes down to whether or not Microsoft will actively remove the files that make up the rendering engine.
I raised the topic this morning on the Eudora for Windows list and some discussion is beginning to take shape. As someone there said, it’s not time to panic.
If you haven’t already, meet Imperialstar Wiley Raz-Ma-Taz.
Good ol’ Wiley’s been around since April 21, 2007, making him 5,032 days, or 13 years, 9 months, 9 days old today. Not too shabby!
Wiley on June 1, 2007 – 42 days old
Wiley on December 20, 2020 – 4,993 days old
Every day’s an adventure, eh Wiley?
Longtime readers may recall that Wiley’s been on Prozac for about four and a half years. There’s more about that here and here. He’s still doing quite well with his meds, thanks for askin’.
Today I’m introducing something a little different – at least for me. ‘Slices’ are another way of highlighting subject areas in a way I think will be better than Categories or Tags can do.
The first slice? The good ol’ Eudora email client.
This slice is off to a pretty good start with plenty more to come on that topic. Other slices – interests, I suppose – are in the works. Let’s see where it takes us.
The other day I was invited to participate in a related class-action suit involving Google+. This is excerpted from the Summary of Litigation section of the email:
Google operated the Google+ social media platform for consumers from June 2011 to April 2019. In 2018, Google announced that the Google+ platform had experienced software bugs between 2015 and 2018, which allowed app developers to access certain Google+ profile field information in an unintended manner.
Read more at the website that’s been set up for the lawsuit. I might stand to win as much as twelve dollars. That’s a little bit less than the lawyers are guaranteed to win. I haven’t decided but it’s likely I won’t bother.
WordPress 5.5 released the other day. It’s always a mad scramble to make sure that all the customer sites are operating as they should. They are. For some reason I found myself I turning my attention to my own little bit of space out here…
And here we are. So I was messing around with a back-burnered mini-project I had in mind – adding a collection of Eudora-related stuff… and for just a few minutes a bit of content went ‘live’ quite unintentionally.
Tip o’ the lid to Peggy for being the first in my inbox!
So I guess I’m committed now. I need to flesh this thing out a little bit more but it’s on the way now, promise. I’ll try to make the first Slice worthwhile.
It all started with this picture. It had come around with some bit of advertising or another and reminded me – a lot – of a 1950 Chevy my dad drove when I was a little kid. I took the picture to social media to see if anyone could provide a proper year for the picture. The consensus was 1942, before production stopped for the war.
Chevrolet estimated to be 1942. Maybe you’ve got a better idea?
The 40s estimates make perfect sense. The starter is on the floorboard, for one. Dad’s had a chrome button on the dash. Before relays got cheap enough the floor switch was a necessity. Of course, the floor switch was actually a lever arrangement that actuated a ‘Frankenstein’ switch behind the firewall that could handle the amperage needed to run the starter.
So one day dad and I were headed out somewhere. The car was backed into the driveway, facing the street. WTF – or the 3-4 year old me’s equivalent of WTF – I thought, and asked if I could drive. I guess I figured it’d be easy, facing the street and all. Way easier than backing out. To my surprise he said ‘sure’ and dropped the keys in my little hand.
He got out, walked around, got in the passenger side while I scooched over behind the wheel. I could barely reach the pedals, perched on the edge of the seat.
I put the key in the ignition, like I’d seen him do a brazillion times. One hand on the wheel, the other stretched toward the magic starter button on the dash… and pressed.
And nothing happened.
I pressed again and again, but nothing happened. Major disappointment.
He probably said something to the effect that maybe I wasn’t ready quite yet. We switched seats again.
He gave the key a twist, hit the starter button, and the engine fired.
And there I learned that you had to twist the damned key, not just stick it in the slot.
Dad wasn’t worried, and rightly so. There were no safety interlocks or anything of the kind in that car. Anyone competent with a manual transmission knows you always leave it in gear when parked. Had I worked the key properly and hit the button there would have been a jolt of movement that likely would have brought my finger off the button. Even if not, there’s no way the starter motor would’ve been able to fire the engine under load. I didn’t know what a clutch was, I couldn’t hardly reach the pedal, let alone press it to the floor.
I never did get to drive that car. Like I said earlier, I was only around 5 or so when dad got rid of it.
First thing you notice – it costs to park. “Welcome to America, land of the free. That’ll be five bucks to park.”
Kidding aside, those rectangles in the crown are windows and if you climb up there you’ll pass right by ’em. They’re really tiny, about a foot by a foot and a half. And they open!
Anyway, the climb from the pedestal to the crown is made via a double-spiral staircase, one up and one down. The steps are about a foot and a half wide and a railing that just about meets your right hand with your arm hanging straight at your side. On the steep nose-to-ass climb you can see how the statue is constructed, the iron armature, the attachment points to the copper skin. It’s awesome. It’s a quick walk across the crown and then you’re on your way down.
Incidentally, they stopped allowing public access to the torch long, LONG before my time. Probably a good thing. That trip from the shoulder up the arm isn’t much more than a ladder and the walk around the torch is only about 7 feet or so in diameter. The railing around the torch is much shorter than comfortable, too. (I didn’t climb it, of course, but the original torch was on display in the pedestal for a long time. I’ve touched it. Today it’s in a museum somewhere, I think.)
The descending climb is where gets interesting. It’s as steep as the ascent. Remember where that railing is? Roughly mid-thigh? Without an ass in your face you clearly see all the way down to the pedestal floor with nothing but a railing not much more than knee-high to stop you. Each steep step requires strength – and some faith.
I took Pam up there once, “It’s something you just gotta see!”
Ya gotta understand, Pam doesn’t do heights. Uh uh. Not at all. The ascent wasn’t too bad but the descent had her seriously tensed. She made it through the day but the next day she couldn’t stand up. And stairs – which we had in the house – were damned near impossible without literally crawling.
It was several days before Pam’s legs were sort of returning to normal but one knee hasn’t been the same since. We call it her Liberty Knee, pronounced li-ber-tee-nee with the emphasis on the third syllable. Ask her about it sometime.
So it used to be you could just show up, park, take a ferry to Liberty Island and go on up. Today you need to book a reservation. There’s probably a hidden screening process involved, thanks to 9/11.
Absolutely worth it, though, to visit this iconic symbol of freedom.
(Written as a Facebook comment August 16, 2019, in response to someone’s post.)
[Originally published in a newsletter I edit. They’re my words, I can use ’em as I wish. I’ll buy myself a beer as a royalty.]
Ah, these summer afternoon rains… I wrote a while back [in that newsletter I mentioned] that my clean-bike luck had run out. The other day I had a few errands to run…
As I donned my riding duds and loaded my pockets I checked the weather app for my planned route. It’s a good app. I had 38 minutes. That seemed tight but do-able. I might hit a little wet stuff, I thought. I hustled up, pulled the cruddiest bike from its chock, ran through the pre-ride checks with haste, and set off. I treated the limit signs more like suggestions, as the afternoon traffic permitted.
Well, at every stop things… took… a little… longer… than anticipated. I fumbled and dropped my tiny eyeglass case behind the candy rack at a register, it took a minute to find. (Glad for my flashlight!) A couple o’ traffic lights went red when they should have known better. An inept guy at the ATM had stepped out of his car to feed his card into the slot, over and over, without results, while the darkening clouds gathered overhead. Would I ever finish what I’d set out to do?
About a half-dozen miles from home the skies opened. It didn’t take long for visibility through my ridin’ glasses to become dangerously poor. The lightning was last bit of encouragement I needed to roll into a station. I took a moment to cover the exposed intake element before ducking under the convenience store’s overhang for some shelter.
Before long there were six other like-minded riders standing with me. The furthest was out of Titusville. We passed the time. One smoker must’ve lit about ten sticks in a row before giving up, his fingers drenched by the wind-blown rain.
Much sooner than the weather app was now predicting, the cell had passed. It was moving in the same direction I was headed. Of course it was. The drizzle of the back of the thing was my companion the rest of my ride, my speed quite a bit less than when I’d left home quite a bit more than 38 minutes earlier.
On most bikes you simply lift from under the parallel frame members and get to work. But in this case three of four contact points are at one height and one is a fair bit lower.
Service Lift Adapter. Click for larger image.
Sure, you can cut up some 2×4 blocks to fit. But when I bought the bike I took the easy way out and bought the gen-you-wine H-D Service Lift Adapter. WTF, it was only $25 or so and offered some distinct advantages over crude wood blocks. See image.
So where am I going? Oh, yeah, the night before Biketoberfest I needed to change out a rear tire. When I finished I dropped the bike to the floor, kicked the tools aside, and went inside to eat. This tire change was unscheduled work and we were hungry. The burgers off the grill tasted oh, so good.
The next morning we were off and a fine weekend was had by all.
Some days later I was cleaning up the tools and discovered that two of the four Lift Adapter parts were missing. I scoured the shop – nope, they were gone. I was about to give up when Pam suggested checking the bike. “Uh huh, yeah, right,” I thought, “it’s been hundreds and hundreds of miles, if I’d left ’em in place they’d have fallen off, long gone fer sure.” But I looked anyway and waddya know, there they were!
So, it’s product endorsement time. Service Lift Adapter # 98965-99 is easy to place, exactly the right size for the job, and grips the frame members well enough that they’re hard to lose. Not that I’d recommend ridin’ with ’em in place. But if you do, perhaps after the stress of some unscheduled work, they probably won’t fall off at the wrong moment, maybe hurting you in the process. Two thumbs up.
[Tip o’ the ol’ lid to Marjorie over at Thunder Press for catchin’ my transposition of a couple o’ digits in the part number!]
For the longest time I simply wheeled the bikes into the garage and dropped the side-stands on plywood squares. Easy and cheap, but it wastes space and… well, we’ll just leave out the story of the rainy day and too much front brake as the tire rolled over the plywood. Gravity’s a harsh mistress.
Enter chocks. Chocks  aren’t only for your trailer, they can go a long way toward neatening up your garage and making bike parking a breeze.
I’ve got 4 of these (Harbor Freight #61670) bolted to the garage floor.
There’s not a lot that can go wrong. The first thing that I usually recommend for stuff from Harbor Freight is replacing the hardware (fasteners like bolts, nuts, etc.) with a better grade. But that doesn’t seem necessary in this case. The hardware isn’t great but it seems adequate for the forces involved. Just don’t over-torque the support arm bolts on assembly.
The support parts attach to the frame with through-shafts secured by spring retainers. The pivoting cradle (left side of image) locates front or back in the frame to accommodate wheel diameter differences.
Manufacturing tolerances for the support parts within the frame are another matter – they’re awful. Without modification they’ll can shift laterally which could cause a bike to drop, probably ruining a wheel. You must eliminate this lateral movement and align the pivoting cradle behind the front support to solve the problem. I used the lathe to fashion custom spacers from spare stock but a stack of washers would do just fine. Measure each of the four locations to suit your specific unit – the measurements will vary greatly. My four chocks ranged from about a quarter-inch to over an inch!
I turned some custom spacers to make up for poor manufacturing tolerances. A stack of washers would do the trick, too.
The chock is designed to accommodate fairly thick tires. It’s a perfect fit for a Dunlop D402F MT90B16 72H. But a narrower tire like a Dunlop MH90-21 54H isn’t thick enough to give solid support. For my bikes with narrower front tires I built up the tire contact areas with two pieces of quarter-inch plate, using machine screws (countersunk to avoid tire contact) to fasten them to the front support. I used Everbilt flat head Phillips #10-24 x 3/4″ screws. I drew a template for when I need to make more in the future.
Build-up to accommodate narrower tires/wheels.
After double-checking for proper placement, bolt the unit to the floor with concrete anchors – the Red Head 3/8″ x 1-7/8″ sleeve anchors (part # 50114) worked great for me.
The additional fasteners I used.
One last thing. If you plan to strap your bikes down for extended periods then I strongly suggest another anchor at each end of the arm with the eye-bolts. Those arms are thin-walled rectangular tubing that don’t take much strap tension to deform. In fact, I’d use flush anchors beneath the unit and run the eye-bolts right through the tubing into the anchors. That way the straps would anchor directly to concrete for greatest support.
Watch the coupons and sales. You can often get these chocks item for well under the regular price.
Safe, convenient motorcycle parking. Bonus – this arrangement provides easy access to battery tender cables and can even help with maintenance chores!
Addendum
In the time between this post being written and the post date I sold the two motorcycles furthest from the viewer in the illustration above. In their place is a trike – no chock needed. I uninstalled the year-old chocks and posted them to Craigslist where they sold within a couple of days for a price near to their original (discounted) cost.
Flip-flops are pretty much de rigueur footwear for Florida. There are exceptions, of course: work boots for lawn work, riding boots for motorcycling, sneaks for walking/running  are good examples that come to mind. But I take my flip flops kinda seriously.
Back in July of 2014 I wrote about the de-lamination failure of a pair of favorite flip-flops. The gist of the article lamented how the Florida environment seems to destroy just about everything. The failed footwear had lasted about eight years before succumbing, and Pam ordered replacements which arrived that day. I expected ’em to last a similar amount of time.
Flipflop failure. Inset shows failure point, earlier duct tape hack for comfort.
They didn’t.
July 27 they fully died. I say fully because the between-the-toes part of the right foot stretched had some and became uncomfortable sometime last winter. Pam addressed that emergency with a commodity plastic pair – I think she spent a dollar. (Still, I wrapped the stretched between-the-toes part with a bit of duct tape, which helped the comfort just a little bit. Â Then I dedicated them to poolside use – they were too new to throw away.)
So, let’s see… Retail cost was $59, on sale for $29.99. Sales tax, Land’s End has nexus in Florida, $2.28. Shipping was $8. Total cost was $40.27. They arrived July 16, 2014 and, setting aside my duck tape crutch, they totally failed July 27, 2017 – that’s 3 years and 11 days. That brings the cost-of-ownership for those suckers to a whopping twenty-five and a half cents per week!
Contrast that to the earlier pair, which were $30.95 (with tax and shipping) and lasted 7 years, 11 months and 10 days. Only 7 and a half cents per week.
Lets put that into perspective, you bought a new Harley for thirty large in 2006. Eight years later you bought the same bike and the cost had jumped to a hundred. And the motor blew up three years later.
Planned obsolescence? Degradation of quality of manufactured goods over time? Product abuse? Or just Florida killing stuff?
This is a story about Hydra. Hydra’s a box, a computer, that up and died the death that old machines sometimes do.
Hydra, dead, stripped of all innards save the CPU and motherboard, awaiting transport to the parts shelf. Click for full-size image in a new tab.
I’m not 100% certain why Hydra’s dead, but pulling everything except the CPU still won’t elicit so much as a measly POST beep from the aged motherboard. I meter-tested the power supply. (I had another box on the bench for a PSU replacement, so I briefly stuffed the new PSU into Hydra just to make sure.) There’s nothing left to die except the mobo or CPU!
“So what,” I hear you thinkin’, “who TF cares about yer old box?”
Well, I do.
See, Hydra’s served the house in various capacities for a long, long time before retiring to the un-insulated sun room by the pool deck – most definitely an unfriendly environment for computers. The moisture, for one: Florida’s humid. The there are the temperature swings; in winter it can drop to near freezing and closed up in the summer it might reach 115F – or more. Environmental extremes have been the story of Hydra’s life. Finally, Hydra’s kinda remarkable in that it’s one of the oldest processors that Windows 10 will run on: the AMD Athlon 64 3200+.
So yeah, it’s worth taking a few minutes to write about little Hydra’s uncomfortable life.
Dex (left) & Reptar, circa 2002, about four years before Hydra.
For that we have to go back to Monday, October 16, 2006. That’s the day I walked into a local Comp-USA (remember that name?) with the idea of upgrading the house servers. At that time there were two. A more-than-10-year-old Pentium Pro box named Dex running Win2K Server, and a slightly newer Pentium II box named Reptar doing file server duty. Dex and Reptar were simply running out of gas.
I wanted a 64-bit CPU, a couple of GB of RAM with room for some future expansion. Remember, memory was considerably more expensive than it is today. I wanted the ability to use my existing IDE drives plus some SATA ports for later. I wanted a PCI bus. Overall, just something a bit more modern, something that would run VMware so I could segment the family’s workload.
Plus assorted support stuff like a cheap case, power supply, optical drive, and so on. Came to about six hundred bucks. Sure, I could have done better online but WTF, that’s what retail’s all about; getting it now. I assembled and IPLed the box that very afternoon and Hydra took up residence in the dusty, dark basement. Right next to the furnace. So Hydra’s twenty-four seven life began.
Hydra survived much abuse. The second phase of the basement refinishing project comes to mind. The drywall work deposited a coating of dust on Hydra’s innards that called for a weekly blowout to keep it from burning up. The un-insulated NJ basement was a harsh home.
Over the years came more memory, a couple of hardware RAID cards, more drives, and still more drives. That little case became dense and heavy. And ugly, as I cut more holes for fans. Yeah, it got loud, too, but in the basement it didn’t matter.
Win2K Server gave way to a bare-metal hypervisor for a while. Fast like shit through a goose, but tricky to administer. Bare-metal gave way to Linux. Hardware RAID gave way to software. The years passed.
In December 2012 we moved to Florida. We unceremoniously tossed Hydra into a U-Haul trailer with the rest of the stuff we didn’t trust the movers to handle and pulled to its new home.
Environmentally the new network closet was an absolute step up. But Hydra screamed like a jet on full afterburner with all those drives and fans. In the old basement it didn’t matter but the closet’s just off the office, quite distracting…
By the end of the first quarter of 2013 Hydra entered a much-needed semi-retirement. The replacement, named dbox, was a quad-core box from the parts shelf, with way more memory and fewer, but higher capacity drives. By then all the server roles were running as virtual machine guests. The migration was super-fast and super-easy.
In the garage, Hydra rested on the parts shelf before being called upon to support a Facebook project Pam had launched. I don’t really remember exactly when that began. Hydra was much quieter, stripped to a single drive running Windows 7. We shoved the headless case under the healing bench near the door and Pam ran her project from her Windows desktop, logged in using the Remote Desktop Connection tool. It wasn’t the highest performance configuration in the world but it got the job done.
Without the benefit of a proper UPS poor Hydra suffered a new peril: power glitches. We got used to looking for the power light under the workbench as we passed. If it was dark anyone could thumb the power button and go about their business.
That arrangement lasted about a year. Pam’s project wound down and Hydra went back into retirement.
Meanwhile, in the real world Windows 10 was getting legs. I’d come to like the Tune In Radio app. One can only take so much country and classic rock from the local stations and I’d had my fill. I wondered… could a Windows 10 box and Tune In Radio bring superior tunes to the pool deck? Was there any spare hardware around that could run Win10? Microsoft took great pains to exclude older hardware, even while offering free upgrades. Would Win10 run on Hydra’s CPU, now approaching twelve years since its introduction?
It turns out the answer was yes! Well, there were issues to overcome along the way, but yes.
A Win10 license costs more than the budget for this venture, which was exactly zero. Microsoft was still offering free upgrades from Win7 so the plan was to follow that path. Hydra had a Win7 Pro 64-bit OS from Pam’s project so we got that upgrade started. The several-gigabyte download took forever over the crappy ADSL connection. Then the upgrade failed.
That’s how I learned that Hydra’s Athlon 64 CPU doesn’t support the CMPXCHG16B instruction. This instruction, commonly called CompareExchange128, performs an atomic compare-and-exchange between 16-byte values. And 64-bit Win10 (and 64-bit Windows 8.1) requires this instruction.
CMPXCHG16B isn’t required by a 32-bit Win10. The path became clear. Install a 32-bit Windows 7. This meant giving up any installed memory over the 3.5 GB mark. Fine. Get Windows 7 activated. Install all the service packs and patches. Finally, upgrade it to Win10. Remember that crappy little error-prone ADSL connection? That, along with the lengthy downloads and general slowness of the ancient hardware… there went a couple of days. Thankfully it didn’t need much attention.
But it worked!
And that’s where Hydra lived out its days. Providing great radio out on the pool deck. Enduring temperatures from near-freezing to well over a hundred degrees.
The evening of May 15, 2017, I attempted to kick Hydra to life to collect the latest Win10 updates. I thumbed the power button, and heard it starting up as I walked away. Later I noticed it had gone down. Hydra never booted again.
A few interesting observations…
Hydra began and ended life on a Monday. (Watch out for Mondays.)
Hydra ran ten years and seven months. 10-7. If you remember the old 10-codes the cops and CBers used to use, 10-7 means “out of service”.
Hydra ran 24/7 for most of its life. If we assume about 9 years of total running life, that works out to about three-quarters of a cent per hour against its original installed cost. Absolutely worth every nickel.
Hydra died on its side, on the floor, in an overheated room, alone, behind the bar. A noble death.
And that’s where today’s story ends.
Maybe you’ve got an old AMD Athlon 64 3200+ floating around in your parts bin? Maybe you’d like to give it a new home? If it resurrects Hydra then it’s mine and I’ll give you a nice, fat mention in this story AND a link in the sidebar. If not, I’ll send the chip back to you with my thanks for a noble effort.
But wait! What about the tunes out on the deck? It just might be resolved. Well, at least some preliminary testing seems to show that it can be resolved with a little bit of creativity.
So that part of the story needs to wait. But I can promise you that if this scheme works it’ll be even weirder.
Enter chocks. Chocks  aren’t only for your trailer, they can go a long way toward neatening up your garage and making bike parking a breeze.
