One of the most memorable cycle touring blogs I have read is of Bill St Onge's tour down this road.
In addition to the natural difficulty of cycling this extremely remote road (both ways), he was dousing himself in so much bug repellent that his heart was constantly racing (he thought he was going to have a heart attack) and he was hallucinating (IIRC) a giant bear that was stalking him.
As soon as I read "gravel road" I instantly started thinking about what it would be like to cycle it. I think I'm going to have to get hold of that book.
> As of July 2020, there are widely geographically dispersed IAT-branded walking trails in Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Wales, England, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco
> ...
> eological evidence shows that the Appalachian Mountains, certain mountains of Western Europe, and the Anti-Atlas range in North Africa are parts of the ancient Central Pangean Mountains, made when minor supercontinents collided to form the supercontinent Pangaea more than 250 million years ago. With the break-up of Pangaea, sections of the former range remained with the continents as they drifted to their present locations. Inspired by this evidence, the IAT has been extended into Western Europe and North Africa.
A major factor was that early Java in the browser did not support.jar (really .zip) files. This meant every class (and every inner class) required a separate http request (on the much slower http of the day).
You used to have to put everything in one giant class to work around this.
Brave has written their own (open source) adblock engine (in rust) that is directly integrated into the browser (ie. not an extension, so is not affected by Manifest V3).
As long as you have access to a phillips screwdriver, you aren't stuck in the little ring - you can tighten the high limit screw to pick your one gear (at least from the higher ones).
Laplink had a really neat feature for when you didn't have your laplink install disk with you (or had the wrong size laplink install disk).
You could connect the two computers with a RS232 null modem cable, then type something like the following on the target computer:
mode COM1:2400,n,8,1,p
ctty COM1
This redirected the input/output for the terminal to the serial port.
Laplink on the source computer would then 'type' a series of console commands to create a simple transfer program on the target computer. It would use this simple transfer program to transfer the full laplink.
IIRC it used the msdos DEBUG.COM to build the transfer program on the target computer (but this is an old memory, so could easily be a reconstruction).
Composing this message is bringing back lots of weird memories about how we used to compute before the internet.
A few years ago I revived my xt clone. It was pretty much in the original state from the 80s, but since I got a nice isa 10mbit nic, I thought i should get this sucker online.
But how to get the drivers on there? Copy via netw- oh wait. 5.25" floppy? Doesn't seem my laptop has a matching drive for that. I had a core2duo running as my home server which actually had a serial port, so win? Not so much, I had no success getting Linux to talk to the xt clone in any way. No idea if the port was bad, or the controller, or linux, or minicom/screen. So I dug out a Pentium 200 from the basement which had nt40 on it and visual basic 6. So I googled how to set up the serial port with it, wrote a simple sending tool, then googled some more to figure out how to write the receiving counterpart in gwbasic. At first the received file got corrupted since I didn't immediately grasp the whole flow control crap and just ignored it. But that lead to dropped data when the receive buffer filled up while the xt clone flushed the data to its massive 20mb drive. So I lowered the baud rate further and further until the clone could finally keep up. After transferring the driver plus htget sucessfully, I could finally download and upload everything else directly. All in all, that was a fun little exercise for a rainy Saturday, plus a few more weekends trying stuff out on the xt clone, like 8088mph which just hit the webs, and might have been what inspired me to go on this journey in the first place.
Glad you succeeded in getting your clone working. Here's some speculation/information that might have been helpful.
1) The old XT clones used 8250 UARTs which had no internal FIFO buffer and triggered an interrupt each time received data became available (RDA). (That is, assuming your software used interrupt-driven queues vs. polling.) Either way, the maximum usable baud rate was determined by the inter-character timing vs. the system latency + ISR/polling timing. Assuming the 8250 is socket-ed, replacing it with a 16550 series UART would greatly improve your ability to operate at higher baud rates.
2) You mentioned flow control, but there are many variants of that in both hardware and software (such as ENQ/ACK, XON/XOFF, RTS/CTS). A common problem when dealing with serial ports is that hardware handshaking is enabled by default so the OS will not send/receive data without asserting CD/RTS/CTS/DTR/DSR to the proper levels. So you can either use a cable that correctly connects the hardware handshake signals at each end (assuming the OS on each end properly uses them), or disable hardware handshaking (via software).
For the Apple II, there's Apple Disk Transfer ProDOS[1] to transfer disk images from a Java program on a modern computer to a disk on the Apple; there's a similar bootstrapping process which is fun to watch. There's a video tutorial which shows the sequence: https://youtu.be/1xworYThmMI?t=157
I did something like that a few years back when I wanted to transfer a bunch of old floppies from my Apple ][ to a PC emulator. Eventually I worked my way to a IIGS with appletalk connected to a 68K mac with both appletalk and ethernet which FTP'ed things to my PC.
These days a far easier way to do this is to pick up one of the apple floppy->SD emulators. Replace one of the actual floppy drives with the emulator hardware and use Copy II+/etc to copy the floppy images to SD, which can then be plugged into your PC with them all stored as nice little disk images.
It’s pretty common to need this kind of bootstrap in the embedded world, and a similar technique is known there as the “three-instruction Forth”[1]. There is no actual Forth on the target, just a serial monitor with peek, poke, and jump, small enough that you can hand-assemble it in a pinch, but given a good dynamic interactive environment on the host you can build yourself a pretty comfy exploratory setup on top of that in a matter of days (hours, I imagine, for an embedded programmer who actually knows what they’re doing).
My (crude) version of the same thing requires that I go 1000 meters from my house to press the button to enable the DNS for another 30 min of browsing (button is on a custom phone app, distance measured using phone GPS).
One feature that I want to implement is to have the system randomly enable for 10 minutes - and to signal this by changing the color of light from a desk lamp (Phillips Hue). The idea is that when this happens, I would drop what I was doing and leap for my phone to get some bonus browsing in. Me being controlled by the system like this might be fun?, or at least illustrate something?
Before I read "custom phone app", I was imagining a mysterious physical red button somewhere up a telephone pole you had to climb, which through some abuse-of-job-privileges-or-connections you had wired directly into the telephony wires leading into your house. Or perhaps a comically large high-voltage pull switch labelled "reddit" which sparks a bit for no reason. Maybe a series of such pull switches, one for every major distracting website.
Just coming here down to note that despite, or because the lizard part, our brains are wonderful creation machines. All the comments up to this parent, including the mysterious physical red button, are great.
On my part, I think the trick is being selective with the addictions we indulge in. Exercise, reading, having sex, cooking, going on walks, writing, 3D modelling. A good mix of addictions is great in life!
People who still build magical red buttons and DNS blockers aren't that far gone, they can still build stuff. Most of us are completely paralized on our couches, drooling at the telescreen while a steady dose of soma is administered. Writing a comment is a chore and building a custom app is a distant dream project. We have plenty of daydreams, but are no longer capable of executing them.
Seems like it would be ineffective while traveling. Unless you could configure it to be 1000 meters from current location! I'm interested in doing something like this. I've been playing way too much Elden Ring this week and I'd like to cut back in general on consumption of anything.
Related to this but somewhat tangentially, I’ve been trying to figure out how I could programmatically determine if I look “busy” and engage Do Not Disturb for a period of time (roughly pomodoro interval) so that emails and alerts can’t distract me. The problem is that when I’m doing rudimentary code my interactions can be rather intense and obvious, but the more technical the problem the more I slow down, mulling things over in my head or wondering why we wrote code this bad and why it hasn’t broken before. I can be pretty deep in thought at this point and not showing my tools much to go off of.
In the end I think just making a pomodoro tool that automatically disables alerts until break is by far a simpler and more accurate prospect.
I was wondering how he prevented the kernel from caching the disk blocks in memory, but then I saw he is running it on a machine with 4MB of main memory, and presumably most of that is eaten up by the TCP stack, web server, and parallel ethernet drivers. Not to mention memory needed by the OS itself.
Even more surprising, his page isn't just pretty, it is functional! You can get a copy of the demo for Wolfenstein 3D off of the site (supposedly, I did not try).
I was born in the US to Canadian parents who promptly moved back to Canada where I have lived for the subsequent 55 years. Other than a US birth certificate I had no interaction with the US gov - we politely ignored eachother like a huge number of Canadians in the same situation. The informal status quo was that we both acted as if the "US citizenship by birth in the US" thing had not happened.
Until a few years ago when the US gov declared that I would be a criminal unless I became a full fledged US citizen. They also made this as difficult, expensive, confusing and time consuming as possible. For example having to find some paper documentation that is was living in Canada in 1967 etc. Huge costs - all of it going to specialist accountants - none to the IRS. And a huge complicated ongoing burden.
I am not even allowed to renounce until I have gone through this charade for a few years.
What has the US got out of this? They have processed lots of paperwork on my behalf and they have sent me some (unsolicited) stimulus checks which paid a tiny portion for the (Canadian) accountant fees they have saddled me with.
They tell all the Canadian banks and financial institutions that they have to ask all customers whether they are US citizens (and you lose account access if you won't answer).
The Canadian banks then have to report all the accounts of US citizens to the US gov. The banks comply with all this because otherwise they get super nasty fines against their us operations.
Also: they tell you that if you come in under the amnesty program (like I did) that their will be no big penalties - but if you wait until the amnesty program expires - and they then find you - they will treat you like a criminal.
In addition to the natural difficulty of cycling this extremely remote road (both ways), he was dousing himself in so much bug repellent that his heart was constantly racing (he thought he was going to have a heart attack) and he was hallucinating (IIRC) a giant bear that was stalking him.
He has taken the blog down, so I can't link it - presumably because he has published a book - https://www.amazon.com/Cycling-Quebecs-Trans-Taiga-Road-Wild...