Notices by Denis Warburton (artandtechnic@digipres.club)

@foone ffmpeg: the joke that won’t stop giving

File under — The More You Know

The average sale price for a 5.25” floppy drive on the Bay of E’s is $36.

Today in ADS-B work…

I’m letting one of my machines convert the 26GB of captured flight data from the textual format it currently exists in, to a binary format. It’s ~13 hours into that process, and I’m not confident it will be complete by the time it hits the 24 hour mark… given that it has only generated 27% of the estimated final directory size.

You could say… that there’s a lot of data. 😂

Sure, there’s probably room for improvement in the conversion program … but it’s running now. 😆😢

It would have been running earlier, had I not forgotten to add an `fclose()` after refactoring the program to process lists of files, instead of just single files. Alas… I had to add additional error reporting to the program to discover that…. 😅😢

Since I found myself back in the part of town with the “new” thrift store (the stinky+dirty one, which had a VHS cache), I made a point of stopping in to see if they still had a VHS tape I forgot to purchase when last there… many, many months ago.

Amazingly, they didn’t. Someone had very clearly gone through it after I did. Since I was pressed for time, I wasn’t able to spend much time following up on items I previously discovered…

… although I did find these Blonder-Tongue NTSC RF modulators.

@avdempsey @foone 🔝

I see that when ‘they’ upgraded the GreaseWeasel, ‘they’ also made the ordering process as bloody confusing as possible.

Would it kill you to explain what the optional add-ons are and why people might want them??? 😂

What early work with Closed Captioning and Open Source has taught me, is that someone will do initial work, which will then be copied ad infinitum, in some type of modern version of the game of telephone.

Literal DECADES will go by in which outdated and erroneous information (and by extension, implementations) continue to circulate, while the industry standards - which in the intervening decades became FREE TO DOWNLOAD - remain untouched, ignored, and unreferenced.

Thought Experiment:

A question that may be critical for the Open Source movement going forward: What meaningfully differentiates it from the LLM industry?

The framing here isn’t necessarily in terms of business practices (monetization), but in terms of knowledge acquisition, generation, and dissemination.

There is an argument to be made that LLMs and Open Source are both parasitic, copying “what they find,” generating little new understanding, and liable to provide incorrect results.

I’m re-drawing the glyphs via “freehand,” since I don’t have grid lines or consistent ‘pixel’ sizes in the original character set illustration.

After a while, you internalize the designer’s approach.

Which, at one point, made me say to myself, “is that all that you [designer] did???”

Replicating the work of the TeleCaption’s font designer has only increased my irritation with their work.

This is a NEMA 5-15 outlet, found on location in an Atlanta, GA church. The red paper tape warning was left there by yours truly, after plugging a Kill-A-Watt into the outlet.

This is why I *always* test outlets on location before plugging equipment into them.

FCC: “WTB and OET Seek Comment on NextNav Petition for Rulemaking”

Seeking comment on NextNav Inc.’s petition, which involves reconfiguring the entire Lower 900 MHz Band for a “5G terrestrial positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) network” that “complements and backs up” U.S. GPS.

https://www.fcc.gov/document/wtb-and-oet-seek-comment-nextnav-petition-rulemaking

As a piece of trivia:

The precursor to the 1980 Closed Captioning system was intended to provide precise timing for potential use in positioning work… and had some testing in positioning applications. (It was one of many precursors to the U.S. GPS system.)

My wife in her violent, 3½” floppy years.

— TECH QUIZ —

Back in early 2020, I burned a live CloneZilla CD, which I used on a Pentium 4 system to back up a good number of IDE hard drives.

My problem, in 2024, is that I can’t remember how to mount the damn images >>> on my Macintosh <<<.

Important Note: THIS IS A FAT-16 FILESYSTEM.

Suggestions ????

… an error [“mount_msdos: Unsupported sector size (20487)”] which suggests I probably did something wrong, and need to look into it more later… but actually resulted in the partition successfully being mounted.

Kudos to the following Ask Different contributor for # 3 :

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/331566/mounting-a-single-partition-dd-image-in-macos

Ok, so I think I *may* have solved at least this issue.

What worked for me:

1) Using `cat` to merge the MBR, the data-after-the-MBR, and the actual sda1.dd.img file into a single .IMG file on another drive. Running `hdiutil pmap` on that image showed that it was recognized as a “PC Partition Scheme.”

2) Then running `hdiutil attach -nomount` which attached the “FDisk_partition_scheme” and “DOS_FAT_16” partitions.

3) Running `mount -o ro -t msdos` to manually create a mount point. This gave…

With another disk image, I noted that I could simply use `hdiutil attach -nomount` with the .img file that CloneZilla produced for a FAT32 filesystem… as it showed up immediately in my device list after running that command.

Additional fun:

Since CloneZilla creates filenames like “sdc1.dd-img.aa”, the Macintosh’s `hdiutil` refuses to accept them as valid disk images … because it’s a “.aa” file, and not a “.img” file.

Seriously.

You have to copy the file to another volume (since the source is read-only), rename it there, and then you can mount it.

Sigh….