A friend from out of town is visiting us this week, and to show him around the area, we've done many activities we don't normally do. My favorite so far has been a visit to a nearby amusement park, which we haven't been to since 2017.
My family gave me three old hard drives to try to pull data from. The oldest was from our family Windows 95 PC, the second had Windows 98 installed, and the newest was salvaged from my dad's Windows XP system--which was heavily used by my sister whenever she snuck into his office room after bedtime. I was able to successfully clone the 98 and XP drives, but the 95 drive appears to have some sort of logic fault that prevents the head from reading the platters properly. I don't hear any clicks, whines, scrapes or beeps when it powers up, and my computer can even detect the correct storage size, but it can't read any data. I may need the help of an expert on old hard drives.
The recent big buzz on Gemini seems to be about user authentication. The question is, in short, if one creates accounts on two different services with the same client certificate, how can one prove the accounts belong to the same person? Without some way to see information about users' certificates, and without third-party tools such as PGP, this doesn't appear to be possible. I tried to mitigate the problem on my capsule by showing a truncated SHA256 hash of the client next to the names of each user. I may write more about that later.
I recently finished reading "Crusader" by Ben Kane, a book I purchased in London. For a mostly-accurate piece of historical fiction, the story was gripping and, sometimes, almost fantastical in terms of the events it portrayed. I will write a full review soon.
Traditionally I've posted photos with a resolution of 800x450 (or flipped if the photos are portrait orientation). This is because the phone I had when I started posting photos took pictures with an aspect ratio of 16:9. My current phone takes photos with an aspect ration of 4:3 and videos at 16:9. Until now I've been cropping back to 16:9, but from here, I will simply post whichever aspect ratio is more convenient.
Photo of the week (week 22):
=> Signed Bucky O'Hare Graphic Novel
(PNG, 600x450, 176 KiB)
I've been a fan of Bucky O'Hare ever since I first saw the cartoon show in the early 1990s. Since then I've dreamed of owning the full run of the original comic run. That dream has yet to be satisfied. However, at a comic show last year, my sister found this edition of the Bucky O'Hare graphic novel, signed and numbered by original series artist Michael Golden. This is an absolute treasure to me.
Photo of the week (week 23):
=> Hard Wired
(PNG, 600x450, 152 KiB)
While attempting to dump an old Windows 95 drive, I discovered that a pin on the IDE connector had broken off. I don't have a soldering iron or correct replacement equipment, so I did the only thing I could think of: bend a jumper wire pin to bridge the gap, and wire the rest of the connections to an IDE-to-USB adapter. This abomination is the result. The drive still didn't work.
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[Last updated: 2025-01-27]
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