don't make any noise peter
[Laughter]
welcome to category 5 community coffee
break
i'm bp 9 and i have doug
on the top left hand corner on my screen
and i have peter
on the top right hand corner of my
screen
and then i'm over here so welcome
to the coffee break it is
sunday the 1st of november 2020 if you
can believe that
and yes we had a hurricane blow through
here
and i lost power for two days so
that was fun um
i i i'm just i'm just boggled that we
had a hurricane
in at end of october that just i i
just can't get my head around that it
just it's just
crazy to me but it is what it is that's
what happened
i lost all the stuff in my freezers so
um
i elected to go ahead and leave the
freezer
off and let it defrost and it took me
a day and a half to to complete the
defrosting
and i had to do that because um uh
because there was so much ice all over
the um
uh the cooling um uh
elements that um i couldn't get i could
hardly get any food in there
but happily there was nothing major um
lost so i'm i'm okay well i was okay
with that
um let's see
what else pine phone uh
not much progress there i still can't
connect to um
cal dab or card carddav um i could keep
checking for updates and they still have
no way of
making that work uh talked about the
power outage
you remember a couple of weeks ago i
talked about that client server process
that i was doing encrypt and decrypt and
all that fun stuff
yes i never did figure out how to how to
fix that i still get
intermittent errors all the time i still
haven't figured out how to fix it
i even looked at the test harness that
they use you know the testing
uh uh the test code that they use to
verify the library
i'm doing exactly the same as what they
do so
i don't know how their test harness
passes every time because it doesn't
pass
much my my code doesn't pass every time
so i don't know what the deal is with
that
um we've talked about we talked about
code coverage last time did anyone have
any questions about that has anyone
tried any of that
no okay
um last last week i think we talked
about
this this is a um
it looks like a dsl filter i know that's
what it looks like but it is actually a
network
to usbc
ah okay connector okay and the reason
i got it was to be able to connect that
ah their cell booth
was to be able to connect up the um
uh uh the reason i got it was to be able
to connect up the pine phone
to the internet oh sub who's gone all
retro
he'll be back i'm sure um so
that was the reason i i i got it but
unfortunately
the uh the pine phone will not activate
this device so i don't know what the
deal is with this oh
what's going on with it it doesn't light
up when i plug it up to the uh time
frame yes
hello hey sol boo a little
better late than never how about that
you know you're only five minutes late
so you're fashionably late welcome
yes that's true that is true you'll
slowly get back into time
um yeah i was talking about uh i was
talking about the power outage that we
suffered here
sobu um we had a hurricane blow through
here
at the end of november which just
boggles my mind
and i lost power for nearly two days so
uh
did i say what did i say end of november
yes oh sorry end of october thanks peter
you're washington's a little bit there
bp oh yeah
well right and i was i did not enjoy
having
having no power for nearly two days that
was not fun
not funny no no you're in indiana right
uh i mean i'm in central usa oh so
so sobu i've got here the um
i don't know whether you've seen this
this is the usbc to
um ethernet connector that i tried to
use for the pine phone
well it's nice it works it works when i
plug it up to my regular pc
but it does not work when i plug it up
to my um
i do what it could be for my
[Music]
only two of them are used to connect the
signal
and you have to get the right tool
because they have problem with vt we
have this problem you know
you mean you mean this thing yeah they
into it yeah yeah they
they end up about to i'm not about to
take it apart to check this out
but but your double maintenance is
yeah i get what you mean but it works
when i plug it up to my regular pc
but maybe maybe the prophet's wild upper
and use a different combination of wise
yeah but i'm not i'm not about to
disassemble the wife
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i guess
i'll just have to do
um ssh over wi-fi or something like that
i was hoping to avoid that but
um if this thing won't fire up under the
pine phone there's not much i can do
so i still cannot make cal devil card
that work on the pine phone so i'm not
real happy about that
so you know the pine phone is is a great
as a
great unit it has with the sim card
that's in it's got better coverage than
my regular phone
because it's using a different provider
a different telecom provider
um yeah we talked about that peter right
on discord but
did you understand what's going on bt
runs the line that basically they call
the shots as well
yeah oh yeah yeah telecom australia is
the same
they um uh uh uh they've they lay the
wires so
you know they if somebody needs
telephone service from a competitor
you know they can say yeah yeah we treat
everybody the same but they
can easily just sort of slow down when
they have
a competitor did you get a comment about
uh
dial up a few years ago yeah again
australia was the same i don't know if
there's anybody that there may well be
i'm sure there are
even rural areas here in the us that
have um
uh that have um uh uh uh
issues with their with their telecom you
know i have to dial in
but i don't know that there's that many
now
in australia they they did this thing
called nbn
national broadband network the
government decided
we're going to provide broadband for
everybody and of course you know
what happens when when a government run
yeah
i think happens that you know it it's
all booked up and
sure enough that's what happened so then
there's uh
that is a little different here in
norway because uh
there is um we used to have one uh phone
company that was owned by the state
in the 90s it was uh split up
um uh it was the market was opened up
yes and the national telecom the current
company was
uh listed on the on the stock market
uh with the um and they had um um
they had um
the condition that still applies um any
compa
competitor who wish to compete on uh
providing phone services
um the phone company are legally
legally obliged to uh
sell them and access at uh at a fair
rate
and the uh national government uh
the national watchdog agency um
have uh a few times intervened and
said bluntly that uh the rate is too
high you have to
lower it down yeah interesting who lays
the actual physical wires
who lays the physical wires to the
customer and
now it's um is it the same national
company
no it is an international company and
privatized but the company still owned
and still owned the old copper wires and
because they own all the copper wires
and it was the government who paid for
uh the installation of all the copper
wires because it was nationalized
um they had the government
are dictating what terms they are
allowed to
have for competitors who wish to use for
access but
now when the various competitors
install wires and the fiber wires
these days they can set their own terms
unless they are
a major um unless they are or um
a high percentage of uh of the market
then their government will um can
intervene and dictate what term
that they are a lot they must allow
other um
access to their fiber networks and at
least one or two
networks um have those
terms as of now interesting so
so telecom australia used to used to own
it was a
government-owned entity back in
australia
30-40 many many years ago now
used to own all of the infrastructure
and then uh
same thing happened soul boot as um as
did um
uh in australia that what happened in in
norway
from the sounds of it and that is that
uh
that said all the copper wires
that were laid all belong to telecom
australia but as far as i know
even though the network was opened up
for competitors to be able to install
uh their own or provide their own
services
telecom australia still owned all the
copper wires and therefore had to
provide access to the competitors to
allow them to provide the services
to my knowledge and and maybe somebody
from australia can come in and let me
know
uh because it's been several years since
i've been there
um all of the uh um
all of the wires are still maintained as
far as i know by telecom australia
even though there are at least two
competitors now um who
who bring in uh who provide services
um i think it's the mobile market that
that tends to uh
get all the market share because i took
with it i i saw a program yesterday uh
or the other day before
television i never talk about australian
chuckles
and i rally and what truckers
are these [ __ ] okay i don't know it's
fine yeah
yeah yeah yeah yeah and uh they were
delivering a uh a school
to throughout the aborigines out in the
ipad somewhere
and they had to set up a dish
with the internet on and i was going to
get uh
they just pressed the button off
obviously it was finding the uh that's
the light somewhere you don't think
about
do nothing about that what freaks i
don't but i do know that um satellite
uh satellite internet is is not as good
as cable internet
but remember that the continent of
australia
is about the it's about the size of the
continental usa
in terms of land space right but the
population is it's probably
grown now it's probably 22 21 22 million
now
and what's that the population of new
york right you probably live around the
age
you live around the edges of australia
that's right yep all the cities are on
the coast right
they're on the coastal areas
and especially the south east that think
that that's where the population
seems to be centered
interesting about australia is that it
is the only country
that has a road who goes from the north
to to the south somewhere i think
where trucks have
the right of way at any condition if
they are coming
you have to get off the road because
yeah yeah yeah they take um
almost two kilometers to uh uh to do a
hard stop
well you know why because of the weight
those trucks
uh they're called road trains there's a
there's a prime mover there's a tractor
at the front and then there can be up to
like four or five trailers behind
it yeah they call it a road train for a
reason that's because it's so long and
so heavy and that's why it takes so long
no not really how that
coming map better get out of the way
because he's not stopping
yeah because in norway we have um what
the uh
the usa i think and uh they are called
big rigs
um it is a tractor and
one trailer in norway we call that a
road
and really
yeah no here in the u.s we just call
them trucks
yeah but in australia you'll have like
as i said four or five trailers behind
the tractor
that's a road train in australia so in
the us
they can tow two trailers in tandem okay
yeah i have seen that i have seen that
on the on the interstate
so a documentary of some i'm not sure
um maybe it was the uh
in the 90s there was a show
rescue 911 it was called where yeah
and in one of the episodes they had uh
one of the accidents that they were
talking about
they were meeting um one of these
truckers it was a trailer who had
i think four other trailers attached to
it so it was um
the front wheel was attached to the um
point where um
the trailer normally would be fastened
and he was pulling
four additional trucks
in this slightly illegal i think in the
us right
yeah i'm not sure what the rules are
doug do you know for sure is it two is
the maximum
yes two is the maximum as far as i know
right i i don't have a cdl but i
was about to say it's about exactly the
same i don't have a cdl either so i
can't tell you
but i've i've never seen more than two
pulled behind a tractor
but this was anyone was in the early 90s
or maybe even the 80s
when they were showing this uh tv series
so the rules may have changed since
since then uh yeah yeah
has anyone used nfc near field near
field communications
at all on their phones yeah uh
i used their food connections
okay i was curious because i've i've
been looking for a way to configure the
phone whenever i leave the house and
come back to the house
or get ready to go to work or whatever
like when i leave the house i would like
to be able to
configure the phone to shut off um
shut off wi-fi turn off gps
turn off bluetooth you know whatever
whatever i need to do
use tasker tasker yeah and what does
okay do you want this this is exactly
what it sounds like
but how does it have what drives it
though
download it's an app you can get from
the google play store
i get it but what does how does tasker
decide
um when to turn on or turn off is it
programming well you program it
but you can do something you can use gps
you can use
time you can set it
whatever way you want it's very
configurable oh well i'm going to look
into that
it's called tasker t-a-s-k-e-r
correct okay excellent thank you
appreciate that
look what i got
i got myself a dinky tiny little
a big white screen yeah yes
no no no no it's a seven inch screen
for uh remember uh i've i've been
dealing with um
cpm cpm on my model 100.
oh yeah and it needs a uh a vga
input so something like 30 bucks
off amazon wow i have a screen
dga on a 7-inch screen i know
i know that's kind of incredible drive
it
you drive it with this i've shown this
before
right this is the uh this is a serial in
on this side
that's the power and this is the vga out
on the other side
that's the board you showed us last week
that's right yep that's right
and then of course it's all driven by
cpm on this uh model 100
right yeah yeah yeah yep so
what i was hoping for was a
um was a nice easy
portable solution but
uh i don't i don't think that i can do
that not with all the wires hanging off
and all that sort of stuff
i was hoping to sort of attach it all to
like a
a perspex like this let the model 100
sit here
and then attach the base of the screen
and the um
and the mvt 100 here
but um if
it's not going to work it's just not
going to be a good portable solution
which is what i was
which is what i was hoping for so i
don't know what i'm going to do about
that yeah
it reminds me of one of the uh
andy rooney who used to have the last
three minutes of
60 minutes each week up until he died um
in i think it was 20 years ago now uh he
had a
video that you saw sobu yeah on twitter
[Music]
the point of his talk the three-minute
talk was a
portable computers as a laptops but uh
you have to have all these other
additional stuff in order to the first
to make it work
and then you have them here automotive
to print this also you
you have this uh little laptop on a
bigger
bag with all their peripherals and all
the cabling yeah
yeah yeah there's a there's a fella by
the name of
i think his name is stuart chaffey
is his name and he ran a tv series
called the computer chronicles
yeah um on pbs and he also talked about
laptops
you can see them on youtube these days
it's it's kind of fun to do that
it's it's fun to look at just for the
retro computing stuff it's so much fun
particularly fascinated but in one of
the earlier programs uh
they were showing uh
cpm um oh yeah yeah
and um uh was it killed all
yeah what's his name gary kingdom
gary killed all thank you he was a
co-host there for a while for digital
research yeah
up until he died he was the co-host for
12
and i didn't know that his
operating system it was uh multitasking
and it was mpm is
cpm not so much but mpm was yeah
absolutely
now i am curious about how it would have
developed if it had stayed around if
microsoft hadn't shouldered their way in
and
and walked everything up but um
i was i'm curious to see how cpm and npm
would have developed
with directories subdirectories all that
because you can't
you actually don't have directory
support in cpm as it stands
as it stood then nearly what 40 years
ago now
and as it's as it stands now you only
have user numbers
you could you have 16 user numbers
ranging from 0 through 15
and that's it that's all you have in the
way of directory support
so yeah and then the first uh the first
one or two versions of ms-dos didn't
have a
folder support either it was the router
yeah and that was it
i did not know that huh okay well
you have to be very careful you still do
with cpm you have to be very careful
with the
um uh uh with the directory
because when you build a disk you
specify how many
blocks um your disk your directory took
up
on the um on the on the disk
and if you didn't specify enough blocks
you ran out of directory space before
you ran out of space on the disk
i'm having that problem with this model
100 right now it's a four megabyte
floppy disk and i'm rapidly running out
of
directory entries well before i ran out
of space on the disk itself
okay one of the uh things i did after
starting watching the
all the computer episodes was that
i discovered that uh the uh
the host um here appeared once on
their tweet networks uh uh triangulation
um oh yes i know the show
yeah and one of the things that they um
he was only in 2013
and one of the things that uh he was
asked by elio
was
[Music]
the actual story behind what
everyone know or think they know what
happened when uh
microsoft got their the deal um
and at the end the popular story is that
he was out flying
but they don't say why he wasn't flying
and yeah
yeah and they had they had a computer
chronicles me uh show
all about that particular episode yeah
about the entire thing yeah but and even
leo didn't know that uh
what actually happened because he was um
he and uh
gary and the host um talked this in
private uh
two or three times and he said that um
he had
[Applause]
he realized that he had already promised
his wife that he would um take her a
plane because it was her birthday
and it was more important to him to keep
their promise to her
than to uh uh meet with the ib and he
got it on the meeting
on them on the next monday but by then
it was too late so
interesting that was not the way it was
described in the computer chronicles
show but before we talk about that
peter what what did you want to show us
um i did a video and you probably will
not know
and i posted on that measure
the uh that's the unit uh i'm gonna plug
it in the middle
if i wanted to but uh it measured the
fuel strength
of wi-fi in dbm decibels from
milliwatts and uh it goes up to 10
and don't go down to about behind the
seven to six dbm
it's very yeah it's very nice what's
good on hf as well
you posted the link to that uh youtube
video in discord didn't you
is
that was a few dollars as well uh which
is basically a login for that
fire and then it gives you a dc airport
to log off the uh
of whatever they put in and uh i
read the ritual box like a grey box
which used to be it was better lee plug
and ain't just a diode
and and resisting the battery to
metrophile strength for antennas and
things
but it would embrace it it was a very
sensitive you know
you have to perform the what's up with
the material to get the thing to move
anything you know
yeah yeah but that you just have to
tickle it and it goes
so i'll i will make sure peter to get
that
youtube link out of discord and i'll
make sure it goes in the notes
on uh below on youtube and on cat five
so that
so that they can go anyone who's
interested can go find it it's
very useful yeah i mean i mean for all
sorts of products and things you know
i've got great law ideas for it
that somebody could could get put
together themselves or not
or whatever it was okay and then and
then you get a
a leader as well the usb lead
at the back of it which you plug in
which it gives you your five volts
there's also a blue
a connector which is also connected to
the usb
leader as well and yeah and uh well
that gives you five volts you could put
five volts into there
uh i i would use a voltage regulator
uh if you're running from twelve uh and
uh
and some sort of protection dial across
the regulator to
have you heard of the uh ubik voltage
regulators have you ever seen those
before yeah yeah yeah popular in radio
control from what i understand
yeah yeah yeah yeah they're good for
drone flying and stuff like that they're
good for
reducing your 12 volts down to 5 volts
or whatever it is you need they're
adjusting
i use a low droop one you know uh ones
where
you can run it on the battery you can
always say if you did five volts
output you can almost run six volts
input to it and uh they still give you
five volts
because it's a user pnp transistor
peter we've got two or three minutes
left i want to give
dug a chance because
bit a bit cynical around there you know
because yeah i know
yeah we talked about that last week yeah
anyway
uh coming in next week go come in come
in monday or
sometimes i'm so glad to hear that be
good
[Music]
i don't program i'm not a programmer i'm
not an electronics tech
um so i don't really bring that anything
like that into this discussion
um i just go to work basically yeah
well for for programming one of the
things that uh
that i was considering doing for that
model 100 was
installing a z80 cpu so i could run
turbo pascal but to be honest
i don't think i'll do that i think i'll
leave the 8085 in there
and i already know by the way i'm pretty
sure i think last week we talked about
the 8080 85
8086 and all that and i thought that it
was
you know continual lineage
not sure that's true so what else has
been going on with you doug
um if not technical what else um
back to work though right everything yes
i am back to work
yeah i'm back to work i wanted to ask
you though you're um
little computer there your trs computer
yes sir
does that have a serial connection on it
oh yeah it sure does
yeah okay that's what drives that's the
serial connection that drives
the
what you connect your board to yep um is
there a possibility of getting a
splitter for that so you could connect
like a
a serial hard drive to it no
but there is a uh a bcr a barcode reader
port that you can bang
to actually produce serial output and
that frees up your
regular serial port for so you can
connect a serial hard drive to it
uh i can and i don't i don't have it
with me
right now but i actually use that
already it's called a
it's gonna sound rude peter so be quiet
it's called a nad's box
in a ds box new age
new age digital storage box
so stop it peter
peter would react i knew peter would
react like that
so and what it is is it
it connects to the serial port just like
the
the disk drive does that comes that you
can buy
with that unit okay it uses the serial
port
and instead of using a three and a half
inch floppy disk um
you use this sd card reader instead so
yep that's how it works and it works
like a charm
like a 256
sd card in that i've shown them all the
memory you wanted
well 256 meg i don't really need much
more than that
oh well i forgot what you were working
with but yeah
yeah because remember those discs are
only 100k
size right they only hold about 100
we're running out of time folks oh wow
who didn't know we've been
going for 30 minutes already did
everyone get a chance to talk that's the
important thing solveo i know you did
i'm good good thanks doug i'm so glad to
see you so because i know we didn't get
to catch up with you last week so i'm
glad you're good
and uh peter same uh same to you thank
you for fixing your audio
peter you did a great job this time
around i appreciate it
and doug did the video that you would
peter showing off the uh gadget that we
did
and the video audio was excellent
that's what i heard i haven't seen it
but that's what i heard so
that's why i said please keep that set
up exactly the same
for coffee break please
all right we're done have a great
afternoon everybody
and so glad to catch up i'm so happy
i've got power again
and i will catch up with everybody next
week take care
bye bye
you