[Coco] terrifying sysadmins for fun with UUCP was Re: old backups , RESTORED!

[gene heskett]

On Friday, January 07, 2011 11:45:42 pm Aaron Wolfe did opine:

> On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 7:36 PM, gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> > Someone, I don't recall who now, said that with dw4, one could assign
> > one of its 256 virtual disks such that anything stored to that disk,
> > actually was sent to the printer, and I'd like to do that as it would
> > truly free up
> 
> DW4 and DW3 provide a /p device that you can use as a printer.  It is
> a regular SCF device, not a disk device.  Dump text into it and you'll
> get a text file on the server side.  DW4 also has an optional mode
> that instead of creating text files will render images that look
> something like a page of dot matrix printer output.  It understands
> most of the Epson FX80 printer commands for formatting text.  Graphics
> mode is not yet supported.

I will probably cobble up something for that from the two scripts I'm using 
now, by having it watch for a file, and print it through cups when the file 
stops growing.  Once I have a test file or 2, that s/b easy enough to code 
up in bash.  I haven't tried it with a .vef or such though.
 
> I have similar results with all things Bluetooth, I don't think this
> type of problem is limited to the bluetooth pack.  Not sure if its
> just our bad luck or something inherit to the way bt works.
> 
The thing I've noticed is that it is time dependent, I can start a 
connection with blueman-manager saying the link quality is optimal at 41% 
rx signal and 51% of max power being transmitted, with a link quality of 
over 54%.  Without moving a thing, 2 hours later the link quality is down 
to 11%, but still looking like it is working thanks to the error 
corrections in the protocol.  But it won't survive that on the coco end for 
more than an hour or so before either the shell on /t3 crashes, or sc6551 
crashes in a lockup situation like an xoff has been sent, but the only way 
to recover is reboot both machines.  Head scratcher, good thing I still 
have some hair.

> > Has anyone, using a short 3 or 4 foot cable to a decent FDTI ser-usb
> > adapter, made that work at 460k? �I am fresh out of those 4 pin din
> > connectors and they are no longer a shack stocked item. �Also I have
> > noted that neither Mark nor Roger, seems to be offering that cable
> > ready made, so who has the parts and is selling them?
> 
> I run both an FTDI and a Prolific usb-serial adapter into a 6 foot
> serial cable to an FPGA board running CoCo3FPGA at 460kbps, no
> problems at all.   Surprised neither Roger or Cloud9 is selling the
> cables any more. Maybe they can scrounge one up.  I once rigged up a
> cable using an end of a C64 disk drive cable (you have to bend the
> pins a bit and it still doesn't fit perfectly).  That cable worked
> well enough to run the world first CoCo web server for a few months :)

I am surprised the Prolific worked, it is very fond of throwing away the 
first byte of a packet when used in light duty circuits, like a heyu 
monitor or a ups that sits there and outputs about 10 bytes a second worth 
of status data.  I found it was also pretty useless as a cable from my old 
Garmin 12 too, the data losses during a trip to say goodby to my daughter 
in 2007, at one time had me driving across a 9500 foot elevation cow 
pasture just west of Raton in New Mexico when I was in fact about 25 miles 
north of Harlan Iowa.  I found another adapter with an FDTI chipset and it 
never put me more than 200 feet from where I was for the next 1600 miles.
 
Then that Garmin died.  I bought a big screen nuvi, but can't update the 
elderly maps in it w/o a winderz box I'll have to take it to.  No winders 
allowed here.

Thanks Aaron.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Is your job running?  You'd better go catch it!