Category Archives: Technology Insights
‘Tis the season for “The Print Shop”
Part of the holiday experience back in the 1980s was to fire up the Apple ][ computer, put in the diskette for “The Print Shop”, and print out Christmas cards and banners.
If this flooded back some memories for you, perhaps you’d like to do it all again this Christmas!
Head over to https://theprintshop.club which is a complete Apple ][ emulator with “The Print Shop” preloaded, where, from your own web browser, you can create a card, sign, letterhead, or banner, just like you used to do 40 years ago. When you’re finished, the website will generate a PDF file for you that you can print on your home printer. Likely, a lot less loud and annoying than the old dot-matrix printers of days gone by!
What a potato…
Netflix showed last night that while its content delivery networks (CDNs) continue to work well delivering static content, I believe their edge infrastructure in regional internet exchange points (IXPs) were completely unprepared for a live presentation that millions of people were watching.
Netflix can start by adding more infrastructure in the 511 Building in downtown Minneapolis, because most people in this area that I talked to had to keep hitting refresh or go back 10 minutes in order to view a potato 240p stream of the fights.
However, if you used a VPN to modify your perceived location to a different area of the world, streaming worked a lot better with no buffering…HD even!
What is the most puzzling to me is how a company, that wouldn’t exist now without its technology infrastructure, and which has a net income of $2+ billion a quarter, and nearly a year in lead time before the fight, couldn’t possibly prepare better for this event. Things aren’t all well at Netflix.
A look into the future of AI generated media and deepfakes
This seems like a good time to remind everybody about the Electronics Technician Association (International)’s Audio/Video Forensics Analyst certification program that we worked hard on several years ago.
Since 5 years ago, AI has become much bigger, and “deepfakes” are an even bigger issue now. Check out the sample video I shared below for a little shock value! Second guess what you see and hear. It may not be real!
Check out what is covered in the certification here: https://etai.org/comps/AVFA_comps.pdf
Now, more than ever, it’s very important to use logic instead of emotion, facts instead of opinions, and multiple sources instead of a single news channel, when forming your own opinion about anything. Realize the importance of skilled experts in the future to assist with the detection of these threats.
(Video created by The Dor Brothers)
Bethany accidentally scrams the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant reactor
Of course, she didn’t really. This was during a May 2017 open house at Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant in Red Wing, Minnesota, and this was a control room simulator they use to train their staff. Don’t worry, there was really never a risk of meltdown!
New mechanical SCSI hard drive replaced in an Apple Mac SE FDHD
I replaced an old Quantum SCSI hard disk drive in an Apple Mac SE FDHD this afternoon. A project long overdue! I needed to use the third-party Lido hard drive management and partition utility to get the Apple to recognize a non-Apple hard disk drive. Just as proprietary and “closed ecosystem” back then as they are today!
No, it’s not 1987, it’s 2019… (An Apple IIgs prints a “Print Shop” sign in 2019)
The sights and sounds of antique technology. I bought a new ribbon off of Amazon to see if that’s the only thing that was needed to bring this old ImageWriter II to life.
This is a fully operational Apple IIgs with a 5 1/4″ and 3 1/2″ floppy disk drive, color monitor, and ImageWriter II printer. The software running is “The Print Shop” by Broderbund.
1992 SouthLAN/MNWADA Joint Packet Radio Node Install at Faribault
During much of 1991, the SouthLAN and MNWADA Packet Radio Clubs in Southern Minnesota planned and designed 3 high-speed packet radio nodes to be installed at Apple Valley, Faribault, and Dodge Center. The Faribault site, MNFBL:N0QVC-1, would have a 1200 baud user frequency on 145.01 MHz, a 9600 baud backbone towards Dodge Center on 430.95 MHz, and a 19.2 kilobaud backbone towards N0DAI-1 in Apple Valley on 430.55 MHz.
This was one of the first high-speed amateur wireless data communications services in the upper midwest, and passed hundreds of messages between the Twin Cities Metro area and Rochester, MN throughout the 90s and early 2000s. All locations used WA8BXN’s MSYS bulletin board system and G8BPQ nodes, with a combination of Kantronics Data Engines and D4-10 radios. The N0QVC-1 Johnson RSDL VHF radio is still used as an APRS node on 144.39 in the Faribault area at this location as of 2016.
The video is a glimpse of the antenna and TNC install at the Faribault location on May 23, 1992.