Nov 30, 2017
10 locomotives at the head of this Union Pacific freight on the ex-SP line between Portland and California. Not all on line (I think the train was being pulled by the first 4) but an impressively long chain of motive power nevertheless.
—orc Thu Nov 30 22:31:39 2017
Nov 27, 2017
The working Eng! was switching in the industrial park just south of Portland while I was on the way out to Henry Higgins for some bagels, so I had to grab a few pictures en passant. It’s hard to take pictures one-handed with an iPhone (no camera-power button, so turning it on is push-button-then-swipe-with-one-hand, then working my hand around so I can use the volume buttons as the shutter release, and all this without dropping it and converting an expensive computer into a pile of broken electronics) so this was the only one that actually came out.
—orc Mon Nov 27 16:20:40 2017
Nov 24, 2017
Building a throne out of spare clipless pedals
—orc Fri Nov 24 23:17:31 2017
Nov 21, 2017
In the light of economy digitization, I propose you to invest in a unique innovative blockchain platform of economy of tomorrow….
—orc Tue Nov 21 17:21:58 2017
Or at least the primer. It’s drying now (for about 48 hours) and then I’ll go over it with steel wool and (as needed) sandpaper to take out any drips before I do the topcoat (magenta/blue.)
I think that when I make my next personal frame (other than the xtracycle replacement frame) it’s going to end up being painted this color.
—orc Tue Nov 21 16:57:21 2017
Nov 18, 2017
A Coast Starlight (led by a pair of twinkies) waits for a green signal before heading south. You can’t see it in this picture, but there’s a very slow moving container freight about ¾ths of a mile south and the nearest crossover is about half a mile past that point. I was on the way to the store, so I couldn’t stick around, but by the time I passed Brooklyn Yard (two miles south) on the way home from the store the container freight was mainly in the yard, so I’m presuming that by that point the Starlight was south of Milwaukie and ramping up to 70mph to make up time before Salem.
—orc Sat Nov 18 22:42:53 2017
Nov 17, 2017
Needs smaller shoes & a lot more of them.
—orc Fri Nov 17 23:48:15 2017
Nov 14, 2017
Back to the vet’s for a second followup for the ear infection (and, ugh, there’s a polyp in the ear canal as well – this is apparently the result of a long-lasting ear infection) and not at all happy with the whole idea. When we went back home, Buckeley scurried willingly back into the cat carrier, even though it meant I’d be belting him back onto the xtracycle for the trip home.
—orc Tue Nov 14 20:27:55 2017
Nov 11, 2017
I ported chedit to Minix 3.3, which meant I needed to replace a getsyx() call with getyx(curscr,..) (I guess that getsyx() is an ncurses or curses-but-not-Berkeley-curses joint?) to make it compile. Version 9 – a trivial update for a trivial (and ancient) piece of code, but probably useful if you’re running Minix and don’t want the hideous default font staring back at you while you’re trying to port software (or rip out effing GNU configure so you can port the software in question.)
—orc Sat Nov 11 23:06:40 2017
Ps-etc has been shoved up to version 0.7 to support Minix 3.3 (there’s a stock pstree that you can get for minix 3, but it doesn’t actually work) and to catch a couple of cosmetic bugs that were occasionally biting me (displaying the process vs command line when I passed the -a option) on other platforms but which made the output on minix pretty much useless.
Behold the final product (cut short to fit on an 80x25 console window):
—orc Sat Nov 11 22:45:00 2017
Postoffice has been pushed up to version 1.5.10 with a single bugfix (a spooler problem where it would write duplicate message-id’s into messages that were first given to postoffice w/o a message id), a small handful of configure.sh tweaks to improve portability, and a couple of small code changes (using waitpid() instead of wait3() and changing the prototype for the local setproctitle() function to use const char*) to work around miscoded features in Minix 3.3.
Will it explode? Probably not; the two code changes are very minor, and in a world where waitpid(0,...) actually works (the real world, I hope!) shouldn’t impact any machines which the previous versions already work on. So you should download it and see!
—orc Sat Nov 11 22:21:28 2017
Nov 10, 2017
A cozy nest for a Dust Mite
—orc Fri Nov 10 22:42:42 2017
Nov 04, 2017
A first generation Apple TV (picked up at Goodwill for $20) that I’m poking and prodding into being our stereo system. They keyboard looks pretty, but the kernel on this particular Unix box doesn’t have USB support so all it’s just decorative (and even if not, Frontrow – that is not a UI that deals well with keyboards.)
My long-term goal is to trawl the web to see if anyone has figured a way to drive the iTunes on this thing from a shell; if I can play music from a command line, then I can do it from a tiny web server and get an interface that’s not quite as klunky as the Remote app on the iPhone.
—orc Sat Nov 4 23:41:08 2017
Nov 03, 2017
—30—
![[rss feed]](/~orc/feedbutton.png "Atom + RSS feeds available here"){kind=small}