Floppies and Evolution

 v0.2

About a week ago, I needed to check a 3.5 inch floppy disk .. I have a 3 gig pentium machine that currently dual boots several versions of Debian Linux and Windows XP - it is my old Flight Sim machine you see, for which I needed Windows.

Well, shock horror, the drive was... er ... distressed.

Fortunately, I have some other carcasses and spare floppy drives lying around - but it took me several attempts before I found one that was working.

Epiphany.  I have rather a large collection of 3.5 inch diskettes ( and 5.25, but that is another story).  I got to thinking that perhaps I better copy them now before they were lost forever.  Despite the fact that I have a 5.25 drive under my desk, I am not confident of having it in a working machine.

So, for the last few days, I have been making copies of data from my 3.5 inch floppy collection.  Hey, I realise that it is unlikely I will NEED the files on them, but .. well ... it is nostalgia.

And then I started thinking about DosBox.  Or even Virtualbox with FreeDos.


Update

On a hunch, I had a look at a "slot 1" carcass I'd been given to dismember.  YES!!  A 5.25 floppy connector.  Now to see if my dormant "B" drive can be coaxed to life.


Later.

Debian 6.0 Squeeze - STABLE!!!!

v0.1

I have to mark this event.  While everyone was looking at Christmas or New year or some other significant day, who knew that it would be the Superbowl that influenced the Debian Organisation.

A new Stable Debian may only be declared once every couple of years, but the advances are huge between each release.  If you want meat in your computing experience, then Debian gives you the the highest quality aged, tender experience.

Whilst I'm short on detail for this post, I just have to mark the event, it is THAT important.

(of course, no-one listens to me ....  )


Ahhh yes, I remember now .... a night at "The Truck" .... the other guy I went with - I warned him - don't drink the draught Kirin .... only buy the bottles ...... "bullshit" said he ..

Next evening .. " Ooooohhhhh ... I should have listened to you mate!!!"

For those darting to google ... search on "the truck" Narita  ..... sadly, so I'm told, that high-class establishment no-longer exists .. 


Sigh ...


.. Later

Finding Emacs - Ccrypt Encryption and Default Load Path

v 0.1

I was spending some time poking around some Emacs information and came across this page explaining how to use ccrypt to automatically encrypt files.

http://myridia.com/dev_posts/view/638

It showed the location for obtaining ccrypt and the emacs " el " file to use it.

http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net/


The important point I gained from the article was that the " .emacs.d " directory is the default load path for emacs, so just placing the " el " files in this directory means they are automatically readable by emacs on startup.


... Later