Frank Ridderbusch

Continuing the process of cleaning up the basement I found the original Nascom circuit diagrams. These diagrams originate from 1978 and I got the actual Nascom hardware beginning of 1981 second hand.

In my company I’ve basically completly moved to the Windows platform. My company is the typical Microsoft shop and since I’m doing more management stuff with slides and “official” documents Linux wasn’t simply an option any more. My company deploys a method to completly remotely install a PC/Laptop with all the required standard set of software. However there are those very nice to have programs like Notepad++, CCleaner or ConEmu, which make life under Windows bearable or if you want to add a programming language like Python or Ruby.

I’ve started the process of emptying my basement. There is still stuff there, that I’ve build during my apprenticeship years with the company then called “Nixdorf Computers”, basically my computer roots from more than 30 years ago. To remember everything I photographed every note worthy item. Then I will junk everything. My computer history started with a NASCOM 1 single board computer using the Z80 microprocessor. According to Internet wisdom, this board was designed in 1977 and then sold from 1978 onwards. The size was about a single A4 paper. I bought my system used from a friend of a friend in early 1981.

Darktable allows the export of the complete keyboardrc, which would create a roughly 80k file containing tons of lines like the following:

End of last year, I decided it was time for a hardware update of my desktop computer. I exchanged the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 motherboard and the Core2 E6350 processor with an ASROCK Fatal1ty H87 motherboard and an Intel i5-4670 quad core processor.

Out of curiosity I decided to compare the audio quality of a local radio station (1Live), which I can receive in analog and in digital via my local cable operator. The privately owned radios on the cable are encrypted and can only be received with the appropriate CA Module and a SmartCard for the DVB-C card. The publicly funded station are however available unencrypted.

I’ve used Inkscape on a couple of occasions. Inkscape is such a powerful program, but I think, it’s it’s not one of the easiest to use. Somehow, each time I’m using Inkscape I’m again struggling with the same basic concepts. I can’t really say, how things would need to be changed, to make it really more simple.

I’ve written about my issues with my SUN Type6 keyboard in the company. I’ve finally found a 100% satisfactory solution. In the end, all fiddling with xmodmap and setxkbmap didn’t really help. To really fix my issues I needed to edit the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/evdev to shuffle some keycodes around.

If you search on delicious for “paper cd case” apart from other you’ll find these two pages (1, 2), which present Web forms. The forms allow you to enter some text and after submitting offers you to download a PDF file, which, when printed, allows you to fold a CD case from paper. Another alternative is this page.

What follows is summary of the process of moving my Linux machine from the old style BIOS boot to UEFI boot. Moving to UEFI boot on Linux I’ve been booting the PC I build around the end of 2013 with the old, traditional BIOS way of booting, although I already had partitioned the OS-SSD with a GPT partition table. I even created an UEFI partition to keep the UEFI boot-stuff for the future.