Windows 3.11 revisited

After that System 7 emulation, the obvious question is "Well, what about Windows 3.11?".

Well, Yer'tis.

Click through from the screen above to the Internet Archive to install and run the emulation. I've just run it on my Mac.

Minesweeper and the other games all work as do the original Write and similar programs - er- Apps.

System 7 revisited

Continuing my recent post's look at some old technology, here's another one.

This time it's Macintosh System 7 which later came to be known as MacOS 7. This emulated version from The Internet Archive self installs on a modern Mac in a couple of minutes (subject to line speed etc). The original version came on 15 floppy disks.

A small tip is to disable any adblocker for the archive.org domain to make it work properly.

You get a functional version of System 7 (Big Bang) complete with the once revered Hypercard and a copy of Microsoft Word, complete with templates and some games including -er- Risk.

It starts up with a proper system bleep and the whole thing runs in a Safari browser window, and looks surprisingly tiny on a modern Mac.

beebomb and #bringthebeesback

Back at our last place, we used to have plenty of lavender in the front garden. During the summer months it literally hummed, being filled with industrious bees. I'd guess that there were thousands of them, happily going about their business.

This year, I'm beginning to spot the occasional bee, including a queen that was bumbling about on our grass. Overall, they say there's less bees around and I was thinking of the ways to encourage a few in our new, and as yet relatively unplanted, garden.

Cue the bee bomb. It's a singular initiative to #bringthebeesback. The hand-made Beebombs are a mix of 18 British wildflower seeds, sifted soil and clay. The seeds are designated by the Royal Horticultural Society as "Perfect for Pollinators". A chap called Ben makes them in his Beebomb laboratory, somewhere in Dorset. I acquired mine from an altogether more local supplier, the zero waste Nourish of Topsham.

It's also akin to zero energy waste gardening. The individual Beebombs contained in the Beebomb bag just need to be scattered onto cleared ground to create a wildflower area.

Now, I won't fib. My attraction to the bee bombs has created a slight pushback. Along the lines of "won't the seeds go everywhere?" and similar comments.

I'm more sanguine. Firstly, a few wild flowers in the garden will look good. And, in any case, I still need them to turn from little blocks of bee bomb clay into actual plants. Not to mention that I've currently only got enough for a couple of square metres.

Although, to appease doubters, I've planted the first tranche in little pots. Stand by for bees. Vroop Vroop.

back up the backup

I've used Acronis True Image to backup PCs for years and will continue to do so.

It's akin to a Mac-style Time Capsule backup, simple to implement, incremental and occasionally creating a fresh full copy.

I've recently tried it for the secondary backups of my Mac servers. The theory has been good, but the execution isn't. I already use Chronosync to make copies of everything to a first line backup, so the Acronis copies are supposedly another level of safety, replacing a set of Chronosync 'batch' jobs.

When the Acronis works, it's fine, even adding some compression to the files.

But, if it goes wrong then there's no easy way to put things back together. It's simplicity defeats it.

As an example, I had a circa 3 Tb backup file in Acronis. I want to add increments to it, but the backed-up entry isn't showing in the left hand pane of the Acronis system. I can still mount the image as a .tib folder to copy things out of it, but I will otherwise have to run the full backup again to get back to where this one is, but in a form that allows the increments to work properly. That's a few hours.

Separately I've some backups which started, but then stopped and restarted. They now show as Incremental, but there isn't a Full baseline copy anywhere. Can I trust these if I ever needed to use them, or would I be better to start again? That's another few terabytes to rebackup. Another few hours.

I think I'll revert to Chronosync for all of the non-cloud backup.

tribal and vacant?

My voting slip arrived for the upcoming council election.

It's tribal. There's no useful documentation about the candidates anywhere.

I looked up the one I was thinking of voting for. It gave a local address and I wanted to check that it was real and not an address of convenience. That's when I thought of the old punk song.

Pretty Vacant.

I decided to look around at another candidate from a different party. Nope. Nothing there either.

"There's no point in asking
You'll get no reply
Oh just remember no don't decide
I got no reason it's all too much
You'll always find us
Out to lunch"

It can't really be like that.

tweezers

I've had that thing where the iPhone stopped charging again.

A tiny piece of its protective leather case had broken away and wedged into the charging port.

The air canister and toothpick wasn't enough to remove it this time.

Time for the tweezers. Not any old tweezers, but these ones designed for electronics, which are a delight to use, yet cost less than a tenner.

backup regime

The recent hard drive swap on one of the Drobo devices created a domino effect of re-organisation. Like buying a new bright red toaster and putting it in the kitchen.

My Drobo NAS storage devices were all set up for the largest available storage at the time they were originally initialised. Back in the day that was an insane 16 Terabytes. Nowadays their firmware supports 64 Terabytes.

Put another way if that were paper it would be around six times the capacity of the complete US Library of Congress. Yep, all three Jefferson, Madison and Adams buildings.

I'm not sure exactly how I got to needing such large amounts of space, but re-arranging it somehow reminds me of the later days of diskette.

Anyone remember the old version of Microsoft Office, which came on 33 1.44M diskettes? I know Microsoft Office has more functions, but I'll bet there's still plenty of people who don't even use the full capabilities of that ancient version.

The copying isn't as labour intensive as using those old diskettes, but it has still taken about three days to move all the files around. And no, I haven't sat and watched it. I'm now at the last stage of the streamlining, with all new volume names, simpler directories and a whole new backup regime.

Fingers crossed?

risk 5?

I wasn't going to delve further into the recent missile attacks on Syrian targets, but then this picture popped up in the Financial Times, via Associated Press. It's the aftermath of the attack on the Damascus target. It's the location I predicted would be a target in my earlier post, with a specific block targeted by the missiles.

I compared it with a close-up of my earlier picture and it definitely the same location, albeit rotated around 90 degrees. Use the roundabout for orientation.

The whole zone is home to the HIAST university and the targeted block across the street is separately designated as Centre D'Etudes et de Recherches Scientifiques (CERS) or, as the Americans refer to it, Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC). Since around 2011 this has been quoted as a possible place for chemical weapon research and warhead loading.

Since it's destruction, there's been footage of people walking around the wreckage; no-one is wearing HAZMAT suits, so I assume it's been deemed toxically safe. It's also one building complex out of several at the site. Why this one? It seems fairly surprising that a chemical facility creating dangerous substances wouldn't have security cordons? And what about the wider site? If I wanted to hide something, maybe I'd pick an underground facility, or one away from everyone else? Perhaps like the one leading out at the back of this complex? Or out in the desert instead of adjacent to housing?

And thereby the challenge. Various press sources look at all of this, but the official Pentagon statements are the ones getting quoted.

Along the lines that this location could be a source of banned chemical research and fancy creation of warheads.

I'm still wondering about the reports of terrible chlorine and organophosphates being used.

This would imply other evil pragmatic sources. Barbaric but easier to assemble chlorine in barrel bombs and repurposing concentrated and accelerated forms of insecticides.

But that wouldn't serve the talk show host assisted, so-called president's agenda. And I can't see how this is solving seven years of Syrian crisis.

parking aggregation: one ring to rule them all?

I've a separate folder on my iPhone with all the parking apps that I use.

It's already tipped into a second page.

Worse is that some schemes get locale branding.

Some years ago Westminster (ParkRight) started that trend. Underneath its system was one of the others, rebadged to only work in the Westminster area.

It's a similar story crossing county boundaries. The area where I live has at least three systems, although one of them is also available if I park in, say, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. It also seems to forget my 'local car parks numbers' if I go to Newcastle and then return.

And there's that troublesome nearby car park with no phone signal by the payment machine. I usually pay in advance and hope there's a space if I go there.

And Wavepay. Great when it works, but often it doesn't. Or the car parks like that one on the South Bank that still only take cards and use wet string for the communications to check validity.

"Pay Slow, Fine Fast" could be a good motto, with the gangster-like computerised chase-up systems kicking in instantly if the time overruns. No need for those yellow and black chevroned bags under the windscreen. A photograph of the car, and its number plate mailed direct to the registered keeper.

"That'll be a £120 fine, reduced to £60 for fast payment"

"Sir."

risk 4

Last night's events filled a news cycle and provide plenty of speculation for the weekend media. The Syrian civil war has already suffered over 400,000 deaths, according to the United Nations and Arab League envoy to Syria. Alongside the recent chemical weapons, there's been widespread cluster and incendiary bombing, which reaches back to 2011.

Now, 5 days into his job, we see ultra hawk National Security Advisor John Bolton and White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders watch the US announcement of the strikes in Syria. Bolton appears to want stronger action and Sanders has to untangle the ramblings of the so-called president.

Someone gave Trump an autocue for his last couple of announcements, notice his changed accent and pauses in. phrasing after every. few word. (s).

My guess is that the air strike targeted the area adjacent to the Higher Institute of Applied Sciences, which is out on the boundary of Damascus and adjacent to desert. There's that big messy processing complex of some kind right next door.

The other targeting appears to be of the rather dilapidated complex along the road from the military Al Tiyas (T4) airstrip. My picture shows the T4 runway foreground and this other possible target slightly further away (to the east actually, the runway runs east to west).

Aside from the inevitable political and party political squabbles, no one-one really knows what will happen next. We've just prodded a dragon with a stick.

Trump could, for all his rhetoric, still be running diversionary tactics away from his attacked and erratic ego. Comey's book. Mueller's investigation. Stormy's revelations. Cohen's extending payoffs. The son-in-law. That awkward background of money laundering in Trump Tower. Melania's displeasure. The list goes on.

We had a power cut just after the news came in. Radio 4 suddenly stopped working. I checked the fuses. No, it wasn't a nuclear alert signal.

risk 3 ?

It's impossible to assess any accurate position through the hail of non-diplomacy in current US interactions related to the Middle East. The so-called president is blasting out on twitter and the White House Press Office is blustering about his words. More ridiculous than episodes of a box set.

Now we are also waiting for Theresa May to describe a UK position and whether or not Parliament gets to vote on any action. Even that's partly about whether the Tories lose a vote in the house.

Meanwhile, like one of those movies, the Russians appear to have access to the tunnel hangars at the airfield near Latakia, Syria as well as the Syrian owned S-400 missiles which have an air defence range beyond Cyprus. They are surface to air, but there's be other options around.

The American 6th Fleet is based in Naples, so we may have a lull whilst available missile carrying ships chug into the area. I took a look and there seems to be about half a dozen U.S. warships around the Mediterranean, although any aircraft carriers would probably need to move across from Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia, although I reckon this would take about 17 days in a fleet formation.

The whole Syrian regime may be horrendous, but missile escalation didn't work for the last Trump endeavour. 59 missiles used yet the runways were tokenistically back in use the next day. And it's not just one airfield. They are scattered all over Syria and generally well-stocked with planes and armaments.

I generated a quick indicative list and although there's still some ageing MIGs active, there's also a fair few modern planes.

However despicable the actions of Syria's tyrant, there needs to be a plan above gesture politics for this knife edge.

Experiments with Drobo 5N during a spot of housekeeping

I needed to swap out a hard drive on one of my Drobo 5N. It all went smoothly as I swapped in a new 6 Terabyte drive. The whole thing only took a few minutes and I left the drive running to hot-swap the WD Red 6TB. No drama.

It reminded me that one of my backup disk packs has 5 x 6 Terabyte drives, but that the available space is only 16 Terabytes. I know, it sounds a lot, but well, there was around another 5.7 Tb of unallocated 'blue' space.

Drobo changed its firmware a couple of years ago to support up to a 64 Terabyte image, but although I use the latest version, my original disk pack predates the 64 TB limit. Time for some reconfiguration and a little experimentation too.

The whole WD Red 30TB pack was a backup of a backup, so I decided to try a couple of experiments before rebuilding. These are kind of 'worse case scenarios' and the kind of things that meander along unanswered on forum posts. I was more interested in the latitude of the Drobo against a human error than in really exercising these varied disasters.

Experiment 1: Reset the Drobo (which should cause it to lose everything) and then re-insert 4 of the 5 disks. Would the Drobo still find the remnants of the pre-existing pack and attempt to rebuild it? Yes, it did, although it estimated around 60 hours for the rebuild. Despite the reset, the revised pack would still be a maximum size 16 TB. Useful to know.

Experiment 2: Shuffle the still existing 5 Pack of disks before re-insertion. The Drobo figured this out too, and attempted to rebuild all 5 of the now jumbled disks. Interesting.

Experiment 3: Erase the 5 disks, one at a time in a USB3 caddy using OSX Disk Utility. Then reinsert four of them into the Drobo and see if it would attempt a rebuild. Yes, even this appeared to work, although I didn't let the 60 hour rebuild run.

Experiment 4: Take 4 of these good disks and another Mac erased WD Red 6TB disk, which had previously been defective in another Drobo. See whether this 'reset' Drobo also decided the disk was defective. Yes, even after the reset I got a red light on the duff disk. The disk works fine in a stand-alone caddy, but in such a mode it isn't subject to the same level of duty as it would be in a server pack. Implies that Drobo maybe marks the disk as well as storing a defective drives table.

Finally, another reset. No drives in the unit. Put in two and wait for the proper re-initailisation to start. New space offered, 64 Terabytes, of which my 30TB pack with redundancy has 21TB to use. That should keep me quiet for a while.