#ossasepia | 2019-08-29

one one extreme, you'd generate and keep the private key on an air-gapped computer (i.e. never connected to the network, no wireless card on it and never connecting to it any device that was on the network

03:39

that includes usb sticks or external drives)

03:40

and anyway, air-gapping is not by itself a "solution" or something

03:41

shrysr: ref re air-gapping and some starter on the "how to secure" : http://trilema.com/2013/how-to-airgap-a-practical-guide/

~ 8 hours 49 minutes ~

12:31

ohooo i remember the diskette ! floppy disk ! and remember the tab ..literally figured out by trial and error about the read only state.

~ 54 minutes ~

13:25

shrysr: lol; did you still catch casettes too?

~ 47 minutes ~

14:12

diana_coman: yes :D. I can't remember using them much though. in particular i remember desperately desiring a 'zipdrive'... i think they allowed 250 mb of storage. it was terribly expensive. I would walk round and round the very few 'internet cafe's' (window shopping) the same zipdrive on display.

14:17

shrysr: when i was young i saved to buy one. ended up with the 100MB parallel port thing. it was fast compared to the floppy but disks ruinously expensive, so felt like ripoff

14:18

dun think i ever had more than 3-4

14:19

shrysr: there were other oddball drives in those days. at one point i found a panasonic 'pd disk' thing in a dump. was a kind of early equivalent of rewritable cd -- slow, but felt like major breakthrough, 700 whole MB !111

14:21

see also this archaeological piece re subj.

14:22

As i reflect now - i think the excellent thing was that I had access to a computer pretty young. and the bad thing was that I never broke it down and instead treated it like a precious commodity to find a way a get pirated software/games etc. It was pretty late --- about 1 year into slavery that I actively took efforts to gain 'practical' exposure to my work atleast. That prompted the first change in

14:22

mines, though it took additional 2.5 years. even there I was not 'supposed to go out into the field'... i forced that to happen and it literally made an ocean of difference even compared to guys who had been in combustion equipment in O&G for 20X the time I had.

14:22

iirc 'zip' wasn't a 'phase change' disk tho, but simply same tech as ye olde floppy, but with moar precise head alignment.

14:25

diana_coman: my older brother's sovok 'bk0010' wrote to cassette (he had to bring own tape deck to school). i didn't live long enuff to keep proggies on audio casette. but then in '90s found monstrous 8mm 'exabyte' in dump ! i think i still have a buncha ancient backups on 8mm...

14:25

housed 2GB / ea. which for mid-90s was notbad.

14:26

was a finicky/fiddly beast though, needed regular cleaning to work reliably

14:27

subj.

14:30

these were 'helical scan' mechanisms, sorta like miniature vhs.

14:31

(i.e. unlike audio tape, used the full width of the tape, by having a cylindrical head that turns, at a 30 or so degree angle to the motion of the tape)

14:32

recently i was astonished to find that one can still buy new 8mm tapes -- they are used ~somewhere~

14:33

BingoBoingo

asciilifeform: iirc 8mm's enduring niche is film making. Better thing to record to, but high quality recording tools that eat 8mm tapes survive.

14:35

BingoBoingo: at one time i had a camera that ate these, aha

14:35

iirc it recorded analogue vhs to'em tho

14:36

*

BingoBoingo atm breaking down absolutly schizophrenic US Majistrate Judge eruption

14:38

BingoBoingo: hey, schizo case deserves schizo judge, almost

~ 21 minutes ~

15:00

ha! schizo case and schizo judge ... would be fascinating.

15:04

asciilifeform: iirc what i saved, by walking to school instead of using transport i guess was barely 1/10 of the zipdrive.. .. lol. used to sleep with the money under my pillow after daily count and family still make fun of me for that ~20 years later.

~ 18 minutes ~

15:22

heh, nostalgia trip; I remember even more vividly the sense of wonder at various stages/changes; and the sound of those casette-games loading, lolz.

~ 1 hours 47 minutes ~

17:10

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/ossasepia/2019-08-29#1000789 << my family didn't get a proper computer until I was probably 13 or so (I was stuck using an electronic 'word processor' for most school assignments). Once we did my mom went crazy learning about it and getting the newest 'tech'; the 'zipdrive' was one of these things

17:10

Logged on 2019-08-29 14:12:47 shrysr: diana_coman: yes :D. I can't remember using them much though. in particular i remember desperately desiring a 'zipdrive'... i think they allowed 250 mb of storage. it was terribly expensive. I would walk round and round the very few 'internet cafe's' (window shopping) the same zipdrive on display.

17:10

funnily enough, these things were of ~0 use to me because none of the computers at my school would eat 'em! Was stuck with floppy disks until the 'thumbdrive' became a thing

~ 1 hours 56 minutes ~

19:06

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/ossasepia/2019-08-29#1000811 << oh yeaa! like tapes disappearing into the VCR. The ONLY gaming console I ever owned... Sega. probably 16bit. another reason I looking fwd to eulora.. have always loved games, but never got around to getting a good console. Just a bit on my laptop... probably just as well or I would not bother doing anything else.

19:06

Logged on 2019-08-29 15:22:55 diana_coman: heh, nostalgia trip; I remember even more vividly the sense of wonder at various stages/changes; and the sound of those casette-games loading, lolz.

19:07

the 8mm deck made amazing variety of sounds

19:07

had 4 or 5 motors to move the various doors of the tape, the heads, to spin the heads, etc

19:10

shrysr: heh, eulora can be quite addictive but on the bright side, it is made to NOT require constant supervision; i.e. more thinking than clicking.

19:12

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/ossasepia/2019-08-29#1000814 << other than the lab work, i think there was almost no need to use computers when i was in school.. a very small group of us were enthusiastic abt even that. it was impossible to not use computers in uni though. I guess it is completely different now right from nursery or whatever.

19:12

Logged on 2019-08-29 17:10:13 lobbes: funnily enough, these things were of ~0 use to me because none of the computers at my school would eat 'em! Was stuck with floppy disks until the 'thumbdrive' became a thing

19:13

shrysr: different yes but not better; it's usually touch-screens that they throw at kids from nursery, yes; + "learning to program by click-and-cluck"

~ 32 minutes ~

19:46

lol click-and-cluck

19:50

omfg i hope this is the last erp project i work on.... it is interesting but each thing i get done seems to generate more and more and more tasks... i hope the slave masters are satisfied enough to leave me alone for atleast a bit after the formal demo next week.

~ 3 hours 36 minutes ~

23:27

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/ossasepia/2019-08-29#1000822 << I'm not sure what is worse, the "pretense to programming" use for touch-screens or the "watch youtube channels that literally exist to sell to 3-year olds" use for touch-screens. You'd think the latter, but I'm not sure

23:27

Logged on 2019-08-29 19:13:57 diana_coman: shrysr: different yes but not better; it's usually touch-screens that they throw at kids from nursery, yes; + "learning to program by click-and-cluck"

23:29

shrysr: I have to ask: this isn't SAP ERP by any chance is it? I spent 4 years migrating data into the backend of that thing in various slave galleys

23:32