My visit to the Vintage Computer Festival SoCal

Vintage Computer Festival SoCal Logo

There were so many incredible computers from the 70s, 80s, and 90s!  Beautiful computers that might have just been taken out of the box.  I got to play with an Amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster! (My dream box from the 90s)  I used a Commodore Pet that is older than i am. Some of my favorite stuff is modern boards that work with the vintage computers like micro SD floppy drives and Wi-Fi modems.

Vintage Computer Festival SoCal - Amiga 4000 ToasterVintage Computer Festival SoCal - Amiga 500 DemoVintage Computer Festival SoCal - Commodore PetVintage Computer Festival SoCal - iBook Rainbow
Vintage Computer Festival SoCal - Analog TV Demo

I hope everyone is having a Super Tuesday!

super tuesday - i voted

I got out to vote a little later than i hoped and encountered a longer line than i have ever before (at least from voting).  Only 55 minutes, nothing like some lines i have heard about. I got to play with the new electronic voting system.  “It’s not connected to the internet” was the response that i received when inquiring into the device security.  I have high confidence of the paper trail on these units, but I imagine that these machines do some sort of tabulation.  Unless we actually count the paper ballets, it is those tabulations that we are expected to trust.  These tabulation are trivial to manipulate if the devices are tampered with.  “Don’t worry, it’s offline” dissuades none of these fears.  Here are some pictures i took.  Not pictured are the 2 broken units that were taped off at my precinct. Also, i was told that they should not have allowed me to take these pictures.  i don’t know if that is true, but they did not seem to mind at the time.  (i wasn’t wearing that shirt at the time)

super tuesday - electronic votingsuper tuesday - paper ballotsuper tuesday - electronic voting - bernie

Finally retiring my last legacy windows box!

Final transfer from an ancient windows

This particular ancient server has stood as the glue holding several ancient record keeping systems together.  Today marks the last day that it was operating.  I supported this computer for almost it’s entire lifespan.  This Dell ran consistently for over 10 years with very little trouble.  Now your watch is over.

I have been retiring or upgrading unsupported systems all year. it’s to know that all the critical systems are up to date.  Let this be yet another warning if you are running Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 2008 Server (or anything earlier), you should upgrade immediately if you are online in any capacity.  Same goes for macs older then 10.13 (High Sierra). Seriously, don’t let it become a problem.

Status update:

Data Transfer - Home Stretch

After almost 10 days of non-stop transferring, we have finally (almost) reached the bottom.  This makes it almost 16TB transferred.  It is almost time to plug the Drobo into the Synology and start using that 16TB volume as a backup!

Status update:

My ancient Drobo array is only maintaining 25MB/sec transfer while still operating in its usual capacity.  I had estimated that i’d see rates as low as 35MB/sec.  This is only one folder and it alone will take 2 days to transfer. See you on the other side.