Jump to content

Frank Hagan

Administrators
  • Posts

    3,919
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    22

Posts posted by Frank Hagan

  1. 9 hours ago, PAR said:

    I never owned an XT, though I did use one (256k RAM). The 286 I had was an AT (DOS 3.0) and the good old days of hair pulling and cursing while you cold booted after a freeze up. I never got Win8, not having a need for the touch screen stuff. I've also learned to wait until the bugs are sorted out, before making an OS upgrade. It takes about a year, before any new OS is sorted out well enough to consider. FWIW, I beta tested Win 3.1a and still have those 3.5" disks around some place. I wonder if they're worth anything. What I remember of these old machines was unreliable hard drives and controllers. I lost a lot of data before I realized how important backups (remember the old tape drives) actually were. My first backups were on cassettes, yeah the same ones used in the WalkMan. Damn we're old . . .

    I went from a Epson Equity II pc-xt to a 386sx that I built ... if I recall, the 386sx didn't have the math coprocessor or was still 16 bit instead of 32. I remember paying $400 for a 40 MB hard drive then too, and was amazed it was a half height drive (about 6" wide by 8" deep and 2" thick - but just from memory on those dimensions). Now I have microSD cards that can store 1,600 times that drive's capacity, and they cost about $30, but I lose them if I'm not careful because they are about the size of my fingernail.

    Yeah, we are old.

  2. 7 hours ago, PAR said:

    This was a painful lesson I had to learn some years back. A stable system is a happy system, so once you've got a machine in a place where it works well and doesn't give you the blue screen or death or similar, don't screw with it. 

    I learned my lesson as well, back in the days of the PC XT. I learned quickly that upgrading an OS is an exercise in futility. The only computer since those days that I've done an OS upgrade on, without also upgrading the motherboard, is my wife's laptop that had Windows 8. Horrible OS. Windows 10 is a great improvement on Windows 8 because, like you said, it retains most of what made Windows 7 good. 

    If I want to upgrade to a new OS I buy or build a new computer. Safer that way. 

  3. 22 hours ago, PAR said:

    Hey Frank, what's this new "Leaderboard" thing? Most popular threads?

    Looks like it's most popular and most active. One of those "gamification" things to make you more interested in the forum. Like any of that is going to fool us. 

  4. 22 minutes ago, Chick Ludwig said:

    Not complaining! Just noticing another little "bug". I tried to "italicize" part of a post, and it wouldn't do it.

     

    Thanks again Frank. We all love what you all is doing!

     

    That's what this thread is for ... all of you are my guinea pigs in testing this. Actually, I held back upgrading for over a year as the software vendor ironed out most of the kinks, but the old software was reaching the "end of life" status soon. So security updates would not be forthcoming sometime after that. Let's see if I type some text and then try to italicize a word in it. (That seemed to work by highlighting the word and clicking the I button). Now let's try clicking the button and typing ... that works too.

    What OS are you using (Mac, PC, etc.) and browser?

  5. We are finally updating the forum software to the newest version. This change will take several more hours. I anticipate all the database work to be completed by end of day Thursday, January 26th. Until that time you may see "bugs" in things like post counts, etc. Other changes:

    Usernames (log in names) and display names have been merged in the new version:

    Most of you use the same name in both places. The updated software will use your username or log in name as your display name.

     

    No more "Friends":

    Instead of friends, the new version features followers. You can follow another member without that being automatically reciprocal, so you don't have to agree to be friends first. Because automatically changing your friends to people you follow will result in an avalanche of notifications for every post that person has made, I will not be converting your Friends into people you follow. This is something you will need to do yourself after the change. 

     

     

  6. I use Google to host my files. It used to be Picasa. For some reason I get a "not supported" when posting. Is there a list of approved hosting sites?

     

    Thanks!

     

    That's not on my end; it sounds like Google prevents the images from being displayed by forums. We provide each user the ability to upload them to our server, so you can do that, but other than that ... maybe someone can chime in on the service they use to host photos. 

     

    Testing Amazon S3 photos:

     Sites+-+ONTRApages+-+Style+-Edit+Page+Ba

  7. Uploading them from my hard drive directly to our server here. To do that, you have to click the "More Reply Options" button at the bottom right, then in the Attach Files section choose a file to upload, then click the "Attach this file" button. After uploading you have the choice to leave it attached to the bottom of the message as a thumbnail or position the cursor and click the "Add to Post" link to insert it into the post at the designate spot. 

     

    post-2-0-80097700-1483333032_thumb.png

  8. That would be the outside weather freeze and not a software freeze, right? :rolleyes: 

     

    I think the larger files were timing out, so I upped the execution time to 20 seconds (a very long time for software). That seems to have done the trick.  

  9. I can't figure it out so far. I have PHP set to allow up to 20MB files, and the forum software set that way too, but I have to believe it is with the server software. I just moved servers over the last few days, so it has to be the new server. Maybe I'll recompile Apache with PHP set for the higher file limit.

     

    Initially I had PHP 7 loaded but that version won't work with the software, so I have the server set to use PHP 5.x (5.5 and 5.6 I believe). 

  10. Thanks, Frank. Not even a big deal. That just means I'll wait to post the pics of me being goofy.

    I'm actually impressed as heck with myself that there really are such things as instructions in the picture file. Am I a hacker now?

    :)

    Thanks, brother. I may have mentioned it before, but this is quite a unique and wonderful forum. I do love it here, so. Thanks, again, Frank.

    Peace,

    Robert

     

    Next time it happens you can point to the image, turn to the person next to you and say "The software is not reading the orientation tag in the EXIF information." If they ask what that means roll your eyes and say "It's pretty technical." Then you will be like every IT guy I have ever met!

  11. It's not your fault. The forum software doesn't recognize the tags in the image that tell it how to orient the image so it blindly posts them. The image tags are a relatively recent thing so that people can take pictures in their phones, with the camera set nearly any direction left, right or portrait style, and the computer displaying them knows which end is up. The forum software has the "new" feature but they aren't adding it to the older version I'm running. I haven't had time to do the upgrade but hope to do it before the end of the year. 

  12. Disney has been pretty authentic with their original ships in Disneyland, the Mark Twain Steamboat (that is really a steamboat) and the Columbia sailing yacht that is a a full-scale replica of "Columbia Rediviva", the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe.

     

    Brion Toss, author of the book "The Rigger's Apprentice", is supervising the replacement of the Columbia's rigging and has some pics of that, and some other ships recently rigged, at https://www.facebook.com/BTYRPT

     

    14107731_1075113592525206_12181561174285

  13. Looks like you have put her through her paces! I grew up near the Dunes. Over by the airport, really, on the other side of the Back Bay, but we used to walk to the Dunes to go swimming. 

     

    I found it hard to get back in a kayak the last time I capsized one. I've decided it's better to stay in the boat, with the water on the outside. Too much work the other way!

  14. You are using it, so you're nothing like the guys I call tool collectors. Nothing wrong with that but it's not what I think of when I think of woodworking.

     

    When my dad passed my brothers and I were all horrified by his tools. We never really paid attention to them but always admired his work. He had cheap tools. That's OK, he was a carpenter by trade, but we thought he must have bought the best because of how good his work was. We realized it wasn't the tools he held so much as who held the tools. He had a lot of little put together tools, including a few we don't know how to use. 

     

    He did tell me once that his favorite tool was a little Japanese hand plane that used a single edged razor blade. "Japanese" as in cheap stuff when they were the China of cheap tools. I have it and can't do a thing with it. 

    • Like 1
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.