This is where an angle grinder meets aluminium.

Angle grinding through a 3.5" hard drive case, spinning platter and controller electronic circuitry will produce enough heat and metal scraps to produce an absolutely unrecoverable hard drive. The magnetic coating containing the actual data doesn't like any kind of dirt, metal chips nor rapid heating.

Funny thing: One of the IBM drives was from era of glass platters. I had no idea about that at the time. Ear protection and noise made sure of that. Afterwards the glass platter was shattered into small pieces making the hard drive sound like a jingle bell. There was a small time slot when glass was used in drives to improve data density. Later manufacturers learned to smooth the aluminum platters beyond glass ones and abandoned the brittle materials.

Electronic equipment recycling - expect me to show up with couple pieces of dismantled electronics.

Newspaper media and magazines have been suffering from digitalization for two decades. Quite few of the traditional publishers have been struggling to keep their revenue stream flowing.

Back in the 90s Internet-boom they simply went to net "because they had to". No clue what to do there, though. Paper sales were going strong, no actions required. Then the obvious happened, people stopped subscribing their paper services. Meanwhile, same people who cancelled their subscriptions, were reluctant to pay for the service on the net. Reasons were multitude: bad implementation of the site, bad implementation of subscription and payment, etc.

Past couple years the trend has been to simply block readers out of the site by erecting a paywall. That will keep the free leechers out (like me), but I'm not certain it would improve the sales. Maybe it does, because lot of the media is doing that. However, yet again the implementation is really bad. There must be enough complexity in the paywall that people like me cannot simply run something like this in Javascript console:

javascript:(function(d){d.cookie='Bhb2CdOB3V=; expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTC; path=/; domain=.tivi.fi;'})(document)

If you have no idea what a Javascript console is (most non-developer don't), don't worry. Here is the same thing as a bookmarklet. Concept of bookmarking sites into your browser is past gone, everybody just googles everything. Since nobody maintains bookmarks, it is not-so-user-friendly to manage bookmarks in a modern browser. However, the idea of you is to create a Javascript bookmark, aka. bookmarklet. In chrome, something like this:

Then it is easy to just click the bookmark when you run out of reads. Reload the page and keep reading!

Finally:
Apologies for the newspaper publisher for pissing in their coffee pot. Your product is good and I have enjoyed reading the articles, it's just the price point, you're too expensive! My motivation here is to offer you a pro-bono implementation evaluation. Hint: you failed badly.

I totally expect them to improve their implementation. Also I promise not to maintain any possible hacks their future versions may include. Also I'd like to offer a piece of advice.
There are two real options you can go with:
1) implement mandatory login
or
2) keep some articles free, some behind paywall. That seems to be the only working option of keeping people like me out of your system.

Last year I wrote a tool to keep a server having dynamic IP-address updated into Rackspace DNS (that's free-of-charge!). See the article DynDNS updates to your Cloud DNS for details. Since the software is running in "production", I've been maintaining the thing. Production is in quotes, becuse it's not a real production-production thing. It's just something I run to make my life easier.

For a while, I've been running Azure DNS -provider and now I published the code at project's Github repo: https://github.com/HQJaTu/cloud-dyndns

Since Azure doesn't have API-keys, you need to use a service principal. Grasping the concept of service principal is tricky. For example Azure official documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/app-objects-and-service-principals fails explaining it. My own explanation for a service principal is: it is a machine user account. Yes, you can limit regular users' access in Azure, but with a service principal it is even easier. Also, a service principal cannot have 2-factor authentiation enabled for it. That's why I consider it as a machine user.

Additional:
Given the requirements, I added --ip-address-detect-public command-line argument to skip reading server's current IP-address, but probing outside world for it. The exact service is https://ipinfo.io/. Having this feature a DNS can be updated with a static IP, detected IP or probed IP. Nice!

Humble Bundle was giving away GRID 2 for free: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/grid-2. Price was right and me, as a greedy bastard, of course leeched the ware.

GRID 2 is an arcade racer. It has some level of simulation, but mostly it is targeted for regular gamers. Still, driving a racing car with a typewriter doesn't really sound sensible to me and I whipped up my G29 wheel and started the game.

Crap!

Back in 2013 they didn't support my wheel. Turns out both Codemaster's forum ([Logitech G29] Can't use wheel with GRID2 & GRID Autosport) and Steam forum ([Guide] Add G29 and G920 support to Grid Autosport (Includes Clutch and shifter)) have lengty discussion about tinkering the wheel to work. However, given the age of the game, the XML-file referenced in discussion is long gone. The information is valid.

First: This is an obvious one. Make sure you have Logitech Gaming Software installed. Danger: The wheel seems to install correcly in Windows 10, but it won't. You really really need to have the Logitech stuff installed also. I got version 9.02 from https://support.logitech.com/en_us/product/g29-driving-force/downloads.

Second: The XML-file everybody is talking about is here: lg_g27.xml. Place it into steamapps\common\grid 2\input\ (suggest backing up the original file first!) and then selecting Direct Input Device from game controller options. This enables choosing of Preset <lg_g29> and further tailoring controller settings to your own liking.

Happy racing!

Whoa! I finally hit the long awaited 200 point mark in Stack Overflow. The good part about that is, Stack Exchange starts publishing a public badge they'll call "flair". They do this to make it possible for me to publicly boast about my prowess. To get some public boasting going on, my flair looks like this:

All of you Peeping Toms out there, I'll save you couple keystrokes of googling: My  public user profile is at https://stackexchange.com/users/1684769/hqjatu

Going back in the memory lane, back in 2009 Mr. Wroblewski coined up a term "mobile first". At the time pocket computers, or not-so smart phones where a new thing, but booming heavily. First iPad wasn't out there and tablet computing was merely a curiosity. Still Mr. Wroblewski envisioned a future, where most of the web browsing would be done with a mobile device.

To state the obvious: Mr. Wroblewski was not wrong in his statement. His future vision started becoming a reality in April 2015 when Google as the #1 authority on website content, announced they would be demoting pages not being mobile user friendly. In November 2016 Google announced Mobile-first Indexing initiative. In March 2018 they followed up on that and started rolling out mobile-first indexing.

Rougly past 4-5 years this blog of mine has been suffering from this demotion and I really started taking the hit in 2018. Originally I chose this paper-style theme for this blog when I first created it in 2013, and it has been unchanged ever since. Not doing anything about it was an obvious mistake on my part. However, it took a while for Serendipity theme repository to even have properly implemented responsive design themes, so it was impossible for me to change the theme. Still, why would I even want to change the way my blog looks like!

Finally: I chose to improve the theme by making it responsive. In practice, I bootstrapped it with Bootstrap. This is a super-cool project originally created by few guys at Twitter. Read the Wikipedia article about that at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_(front-end_framework). Getting to understand the 12 column grid system takes a while, but when you do the groundwork of arranging page content to rows and columns and realize that you can get six different chunks of display real estate by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 columns depending on user's screen size, the results will be amazing! Most of this trickery doesn't even require any JavaScript to run. Adding floating navigation bars and such will require JS, but majority of the goodies work fully on bare HTML/CSS.

So, this is where I stared my journey with:

Google Mobile-Friendly Test spits out a lot of grievance from my blog.

This is the result with this new theme applied:

Oh yeah! Now GoogleBot should be much happier with this one. For those of you who want to play around with this, just go make the browser window very narrow and see the point where screen breaks and drops the right side menu off. To access the goodies on right side menu, a hamburger menu will be added to the top of the page.

GoogleBot tester isn't completely happy about my page, there are some load errors. However, I'm not sure exactly what the load errors are as they're labeled "other". Tons of people in The Net are suffering the same. Warning says:

Page partially loaded
Not all page resources could be loaded. This can affect how Google sees and understands your page. Fix availability problems for any resources that can affect how Google understands your page.

Based on lot of other people's comments found in web, the "errors" are merely warnings and they may or may not reduce the page rank. I'm agreeing with some people commenting, that the test Googlebot smartphone client is using super-short timeouts forcing people to optimize their websites to do as little loading as fast as possible.

The standard disclaimer applies:
If any of you think, that this theme doesn't work properly or I did something wrong. Drop me a comment or go to my Github fork at https://github.com/HQJaTu/additional_themes/tree/brownpaper-r2 and create a new pull request. I'm more than interested in keeping this new theme running optimally.

Some of you may have noticed I've been busy doing everything else but blogging.

There were number of reasons:

1. No shoes -phenomenon
   • What I do for living (and past-time) is build/maintain/hack systems. Some of them running web applications such as this cloud Azure VM Nginx/PHP/PostgreSQL -thingie.
   • Sometimes just starting a tedious task of fixing/updating/repairing a server instead of playing The Division or Far Cry doesn't do the trick for me. I choose to play for entertainment and not update the server.
   • Ref.: The Cobbler's children have no shoes
2. PHP 5.6 support EOL
   • See https://secure.php.net/supported-versions.php for details
   • This blog has been running on 5.6 for years and to get that updated, I had to re-asses configurations to get 7.2 running. Not an easy task, but had to be done to go forward.
3. Serendipity 2.1 upgrade
   • Most of you have never realized, I wouldn't touch Wordpress with a 9 foot pole. This blog runs on Serendipity (aka s9y).
   • Previous version of S9y 2.0 wouldn't run correctly with PHP 7.2, so I had to go for this upgrade too.
   • See https://docs.s9y.org/ for details.
4. Mobile template
   • This blog gets reasonable Page Rank from Google, but it really suffers from not being very good when displayed on a mobile device.
   • See #1 above. This is what I do for living. It should be not a complicated task to strap Bootstrap boot on top of the theme.
   • See http://blog.s9y.org/index.php?user_template=additional_themes/brownpaper

What hasn't changed: I'm still in Microsoft Azure, running CentOS 7.

The mobile version of Brown Paper is still under work in my lab VM, but it will be out soon. I promise!

I'm not a huge fan of NetworkManager. Since I am a fan of many RedHat products, it creates a nice conflict. They develop it, so it is pre-installed in all of RedHat's Linuxes. Luckily its very easy to yank off and replace with something that actually works and is suitable for server computing.

Also, a third player exists in the Linux networking setup -scene. systemd-networkd (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-networkd.html) does exactly the same as NetworkManager or classic network-scripts would do. It is the newcomer, but since everybody's box already has systemd, using it to run your networking makes sense to some.

I don't know exactly when, but at some point Fedora simply abandoned all the classic ways of doing networking. I know for a fact, that in Fedora 26 ISC's dhclient worked ok, but looks like around the time of 26 release, they simply broke it. Now we're at 29 and it has the same code as 28 did. Since almost nobody uses classic networking, this bug went unnoticed for a while. There is a bug in RedHat's Bugzilla which looks similar to what I'm experiencing: Bug 1314203 - dhclient establishes a lease on the explicitly specified interface, but then endlessly retries old leases on other interfaces, but looks like it didn't get any attention. To make this bug even more difficult to spot, you need to have multiple network interfaces in your machine for this problem to even exist. Most people don't, and looks like those who do, aren't running dhclient.

The issue, in detail, is following:
When run ifup eno1, no IP-address will be issued by my ISP for that interface.

When running dhclient in diagnostics mode, with following command:
/sbin/dhclient -1 -d -pf /run/dhclient-eno1.pid -H myPCame eno1
output will be:

Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client 4.3.6
Copyright 2004-2017 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/enp3s0f1/90:e2:ba:00:00:01
Sending on LPF/enp3s0f1/90:e2:ba:00:00:01
Listening on LPF/eno1/60:a4:4c:00:00:01
Sending on LPF/eno1/60:a4:4c:00:00:01
Listening on LPF/enp3s0f0/90:e2:ba:00:00:02
Sending on LPF/enp3s0f0/90:e2:ba:00:00:02
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on enp3s0f1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 3 (xid=0x90249a1f)
DHCPREQUEST on eno1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 (xid=0xe612e570)
DHCPDISCOVER on enp3s0f0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5 (xid=0xb568cb15)
DHCPACK from 62.248.219.2 (xid=0xe612e570)
DHCPREQUEST on enp3s0f0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 (xid=0xb568cb15)
DHCPOFFER from 84.249.192.3
DHCPACK from 84.249.192.3 (xid=0xb568cb15)
DHCPDISCOVER on enp3s0f1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval

Notice how DHCP-client was requested on network interface eno1, but it is actually run for all there are. For me, this is a real problem, so I spent a while on it. Bug report is at Bug 1657848 - dhclient ignores given interface and it contains my patch:

--- ../dhcp-4.3.6/common/discover.c    2018-12-10 16:14:50.983316937 +0200
+++ common/discover.c    2018-12-10 15:20:12.825557954 +0200
@@ -587,7 +587,7 @@
                state == DISCOVER_REQUESTED))
         ir = 0;
     else if (state == DISCOVER_UNCONFIGURED)
-        ir = INTERFACE_REQUESTED | INTERFACE_AUTOMATIC;
+        ir = INTERFACE_AUTOMATIC;
     else {
         ir = INTERFACE_REQUESTED;
         if (state == DISCOVER_RELAY && local_family == AF_INET) {

My fix is to break the functionality of dhclient. If you don't specify an interface for dhclient to run on, it will run on all. To me (or my network-scripts) that won't make any sense, so I'm choosing to run only on specified interfaces, or interface in my case. This patch when applied and compiled to a binary will fully fix the problem.

Without thinking it too much, I just went for a SSH-connection on a Windows 10 box with the way it's typically done:

ssh -i .ssh/id_nistp521 user@linux-box

When the result was not a private key passphrase question, but a: Bad owner or permissions on .ssh/config, I started thinking about it. What! What? Why! It worked earlier, why won't it anymore?

For the record:
I am an avid Cygwin user. So, I get a very very Linuxish experience also on my Windows-boxes. So, don't be confused with the rest of the story. This is on a Windows 10, even if it doesn't appear to be so.

Back to the failure. I started poking around the permissions. SSH-clients are picky on private key permissions (also config file), so I thought that something was going on. Doing a ls -l:

-rw------- 1 jari None 547 Nov 12 17:25 config
-rw------- 1 jari None 444 Jul 15  2017 id_nistp521

Nope. Nothing wrong with that. Still, something HAD to be wrong, as this wasn't acceptable for the client. Doing a which ssh gave it away. I was expecting to see /usr/bin/ssh, not /cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/OpenSSH/ssh!!

So, who put an OpenSSH client to my Windows-directory? Why? When? What kind of sorcery is that? Environment variables:

Yes, there is a PATH-entry for OpenSSH before Cygwin. In the directory, there is a full set of OpenSSH-tools:

Version is 7.6:

OpenSSH_for_Windows_7.6p1, LibreSSL 2.6.4

The expected version in Cygwin is 7.9:

OpenSSH_7.9p1, OpenSSL 1.0.2p  14 Aug 2018

So, to fix this, I yanked the PATH-entry away. Now my SSH-connections worked as expected.

Little bit of googling around landed me on an article OpenSSH in Windows 10! in MSDN blogs. This is on January 2018 and apparently this stuff landed on my Windows in April update (build 1803). Also in article What’s new for the Command Line in Windows 10 version 1803, I found out that also tar and curl were added.

Ultimately this is a good thing. Now that I know this stuff is there as default, there is no need to go load a PuTTY or something for a random SSH-thing you just want to get fixed on a remote box.

Lately, I've been playing Mudrunner: Spintires a lot. That's a really weird game about logging machinery and mud. For some strange reason I find hauling logs from a lake through mud really entertaining. Why logs are located a "lake" is beyond me.

During the gameplay, player needs to operate number of different heavy machinery. This involves driving a skidder, a heavy truck or operating a crane to get the logs loaded. I tried doing that with a traditional mouse and keyboard config. I kinda managed to do it, but anybody who has driven a real car or truck or flown an airplane using only a keyboard knows, it's very tricky. Then I got a hint, that a Playstation 4 controller is really good with that game.

A-haa! All I need to do is hook up my PS4-controller into my PC using ... well... dunno. As Google search engine is a good friend, I found a project DS4Windows from Github https://github.com/Ryochan7/DS4Windows. It will convert a PS4-controller into an Xbox controller, which will work perfectly with most games.

Just hokk up an USB-cable to the controller, run the software, and:

You're done! It really is that simple. Now spinning tires in mud is much much more enjoyable!

The other day I realized, that my mobile subscription has a voicemail. Since its a corporate one, I really cannot control it much, it just ... well ... is.

This existence of voicemail became evident for a simple reason. Somebody left me a message there. Ufff! Why! Personally I hate those 70s relics. If you cannot get a hold of me, just send a SMS or an email! ... People... They just don't get it.

So. I had an easy task, go listen the message. In an iPhone, there is a Voicemail menu:

Tapping the "Call Voicemail" does absolutely nothing. Eventually I did find the voicemail number from my subscription paperworks. That is, if I really was interested in the message, but I wasn't. Being a geek, I wanted to get my iPhone to do what the button caption says. To Call Voicemail.

Apparently that is something my Telco should fix. Or, that's how its done in the Big World. No such joy for me. After a good while of googling around, I found bunch of codes, which actually didn't either work, or do anything useful on an iPhone. Finally, I bumped into an ancient Apple community discussion with topic Q: iphone 5 change/add voicemail number? This user had been instructed the following:

I have just been in contact with Orange regarding this they advised to dial:
*5005*86*123#

This will set the voicemail number to 123 (orange) so hopefully (i've not tested) you can just put your voicemail number inplace of 123!

Yes! Doing a *5005*86*<my voicemail number here># does the trick for my iPhone 8 running iOS 12.1.

While at it, I googled more and found article iPhone codes from the same era.

For a complete list of generic mobile phone Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), or "Quick Codes" or "Feature codes" see Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Service_Data#Code_table.

As a Formula 1 fan, while watching a F1 Grad Prix, I've been using real-time information feeds on https://www.formula1.com/en/f1-live.html pretty much since it was released. If memory serves me correct, that must have been around season 2008. After getting my first iPad (yes, the 1st gen one) in 2011, I went for the beautiful paid App by Soft Pauer flooding me with all kinds of information during the race. I assumed, that I had all the same information available as the TV-commentators.

In 2014 something happened. The app was same, but the publisher changed into Formula One Digital Media Limited, making it not a 3rd party software, but an official F1-product. At the same time, the free timing on the website was removed, causing a lot of commotion, as an example Why did FIA dumb-down the Live Timing on F1.com? Also, in a review (Official F1 Live Timing App 2014 reviewed), the paid app was considered very pricey and not worth the value. Years 2015 onwards, made it evident, that in loving care of the Formula One Group, they improved the app adding content, more content, improving the value and finally a TV to it. It was possible to actually watch the race via the app. All this ultimately resulted in a must-have app for every F1 fan.

This year, for Singapore weekend, they did something immensly stupid.

They changed this:

into this:

ARGH!

Did they really think nobody would notice? To put it shortly, their change was a drastical one. I ditched the new timing app after 5 minutes of failing attempts to get anything useful out of it. The people doing the design for that piece of sofware completely dropped the ball. Thy simply whipped up "something". Probably in their bright minds it was the same thing than before, it kinda looked the same, right. Obviously, they had zero idea what any form of motor racing is about. What information would be useful to anybody specatating a motor racing event was completely out of their grasp. They just published this change to App Store and went on happily.

Guess what will happen, when you take an expensive piece of yearly subscribed software and remove all the value from it. You will, but the authors of the software didn't.

IT MAKES PEOPLE MAD!

It didn't take too long (next race, to be exact), when they silently dropped the timing feature and released the old app as a spin-off titled F1 Live Timing. Obviously informing any paying customers of such a thing wasn't very high on their list of priorities. In their official statement they went for the official mumbo-jumbo: "The launch of our new F1 app didn't quite live up to your expectations, and live timing didn't deliver the great mobile F1 experience you previously enjoyed." By googling, I found tons of articles like Formula 1 makes old live timing app available again after problems.

As a friendly person, I'll offer my list of things to remember for FOM personnel in charge of those apps:

• Do not annoy paying customers. They won't pay much longer.
• If you do annoy paying customers, make sure they won't be really annoyed. They will for sure stop paying.
• If you make your paying customers mad, have the courtesy of apologizing about that.
• Also, make sure all of your paying customers know about new relevant apps, which are meant to fix your own failures.
• Improve on software design. Hire somebody who actually follows the sport to the design and testing teams.

Thank you.

Couple days ago 8pm, I got an email from Facebook. Personally, I think face book is a criminal organization and want absolutely nothing to do with the idiots. Given the nature of the email, I started investigating:

Yeah, right. Like I would create an account there. And if I would, I wouldn't use any of my proper emails. Their information gathering from non-users is criminal and they do know pretty much everything there is to know about me. Still, I wouldn't give them anything too easily.

I did confirm the time. I wasn't even using a computer when above mail was received. So, I'm claiming, it wasn't me!

Things started getting really weird, when these arrived:

Somebody from New Jersey, USA had reset the password for this newly created account. How nice of them!

Also, there was some trouble logging in. Well that can happen, when you're hacking.

Given the option in the mail, I did click the "If you didn't do this, please secure your account". The first thing they want from me is my phone number. Again, they need to steal that information from me, I'm not going to GIVE it to them. Without verified mobile number, face-jerks let me do nothing. I cannot report the security incident. I cannot request closing the account. There is absolutely no options before entering my phone number. Nobody at super-smart face book anticipated things like this to happen. I really love their service design there!

Just to make sure, I did check my email logins at my service provider. No suspicious activity there. I did reply to security@facebookmail.com regarding this security incident, but I really don't have my hopes up. If somewhere there's a nipple visible or just regular business presentation, then the jerks at FB will censor the material in 5 minutes. When something really serious happens, they don't care. Their only motivator is the stock price. Visible nipples can threaten their revenues, security incidents to so much.

My guess is, that after their last incident (see: Relax, just 30 million Facebook accounts were compromised after all), there is lot of people wanting to crack the site. To me it looks like, somebody is progressing with the attempt and using my mail account at it.

Now that my new PC is done (see my previoius post and Larpdog's Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/videos/319110553):

It's finally time to make some space to my old junk storage. I found two of my previus PCs there, which finally need to go to SER.

When reading this, please understand that I do own other PCs too. Also, I have owned more PCs than I currently run and these two heading out, its just that I don't have those ones anymore to write a blog post about.

New PC - 2018 - Reference

Just to get the difference, I'll post couple bad still images from my new PC:

Both pictures are actually crappy for a number of reasons. First, a Noctua NH-D15 CPU-cooler is huge. It weighs 1.3 kg and is 16 cm tall measured from top of CPU to top of Noctua's fans. It takes 16 x 15 x 15 cm space from the PC case, just to make sure there is proper air flow for the heatpipes coming from the CPU. For photography, it means everything else is hidden by it. Ufffff!

Then Asus motherboard has an aluminium shielding covering everything. That's most likely for EMC protection and heat management. In a properly cooled PC-case, black aluminium transfers heat out of the motherboard faster. Also, a Fractal Design PC-case is pitch black. What I have here is a black picture of blackess on black.

Finally, also the graphics card is quite a beast. It takes 30 cm in lenght and is over 5 cm thick. Yet again covering everything inside the PC, that would be worth looking at. So, this 2018 PC is visually quite boring. Maybe that's why people love having some sort of light show inside their transparent case. Ufffff! My case doesn't have any transparent parts in it, no PC-disco for me, thanks.

PC 1 - Pentium 4 from years 2002-2008

This one I used in couple of hardware configurations for many many years. Mostly with Windows XP.

After serving me well, I decommissioned this around end of year 2008. There are changed files in early 2009, but it looks like I haven't used this PC since. It has been mostly gathering dust in storage.

CPU

Spec:

• Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 2.40 GHz, 512K Cache, 533 MHz FSB
• Launch: 2002/Q1
• Cores: 1
• 512KiB Cache
• 2.4 GHz
• 533 MHz FSB
• Socket 478

Details are at Ark Intel.com https://ark.intel.com/products/27438/Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-2-40-GHz-512K-Cache-533-MHz-FSB

It was my last PC not running 64-bit AMD64-instruction set at the end of 32-bit era Mighty powerful at the time, still less powerful than my iPhone 8 today. It looks like this with Intel's boxed CPU-cooler:

Board

The motherboard for this project is an Asus P4PE:

More details are at Asus' website: https://www.asus.com/supportonly/P4PE-XTE/HelpDesk_Manual/

Graphics card

Given the fact, that I never like putting enormous amounts of money into GPU's, so this one has a Club-3D Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB DDR GDDR:

The manufacturer's fan on top of the GPU was a piece of junk. I had to replace it in a year or so. Also, note the S-Video output between standard VGA D15 and DVI-D. Before HDMI, hooking up a PC to an everyday TV was tricky. S-Video was one of the supported connectors in TVs having multiple SCART-connectors.

Also looking at the pics of the CPU-cooler and the graphics card make me laugh. There is almost no cooling at all in neither. Also the simpliness of graphics card is something that really sticks out. Modern cooling, especially in graphics cards, looks HUGE!

One notable thing to mention, is that this graphics card connected to the MoBo via AGP or Accelerated Graphics Port and having DirectX 9.0 hardware acceleration making it pretty fast (at the time). If you've never heard of AGP, don't worry, it was just an attempt to make GPUs connect to CPU/RAM-package faster. It was little bit faster than PCI, but not much. Obviously, it wasn't such a great invention and was quickly surpassed by PCIe, which seems to stand the test of time. For curious ones, I googled up some specs for the card: https://icecat.biz/en-in/p/club3d/cga-p988tvd/graphics-cards-RADEON+9800+PRO+128MB+DDR-113233.html

PC 2 - Pentium from years 1994-1998

Ok, this baby is an old one! To make it really ancient, it even runs IBM OS/2 as operating system. Those padawans who don't know what an OS/2 is, just hit to Wikipedia for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2. During the active years in servie, I recall upgrading the CPU once, doubling the RAM once and swapping the GPU-card to a faster one. This is the oldest hardware I have, and didn't create any records at the time. For anything newer, I have proper records of the history in my wiki.

CPU

Spec:

• Intel® Pentium® Processor 150 MHz, 60 MHz FSB
• Launch: 1996/01
• Cores: 1
• 8 + 8 KiB Cache
• 150 MHz
• 60 MHz FSB
• Socket 7

Details are at Ark Intel.com https://ark.intel.com/products/49958/Intel-Pentium-Processor-150-MHz-60-MHz-FSB

This old puppy has one distinguishing feature: it is Spectre/Meltdown-proof! As it doesn't have any kind of prediction or jump analysis in it, it cannot be fooled. Actually, there is nothing in it to make it run faster. It is a product of an era when everything was made faster by adding megaherz (note: not gigaherz) to base frequency.

The installed CPU with Intel's boxed cooler looks like this:

Please, notice how a heatsink and a fan on top of it are almost 20 mm high!

Also, don't confuse this Pentium to any of the modern day CPUs Intel calls Pentium. This one was really one of the first ever manufactured Pentiums. Initially this had a slower Pentium in it (I think 90 MHz), just getting an upgrade was inexpensive at the time.

Board

Motherboard is a Asus P/I-P55T2P4. Some specs of it can be found from: https://www.asus.com/supportonly/PI-P55T2P4/HelpDesk_CPU

Layout of the board is:

Note how this is clearly a PCI-era board, but it still has three ISA-slots in it. And please, don't confuse PCI for a modern PCI-express. That's probably why, the word "conventional" is used in Wikipedia article of PCI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI

GPU-card

Oh, this is a trip to memory lane. Card is a S3 Trio64V+. Some information about this relic is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Trio and http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item/359-s3-trio64v.

The card looks like this:

Note how I have Scotch Tape on two holes of the mounting bracket. Reason is simple, back in the 1990s we didn't know how air in a PC case should flow and we had it wrong. Sucking air trough graphics cards (or any other necessary components) is not smart and that's why its done differently today.

This particular card first appeared in 1995 and I've been using it for couple of years around that time. S3 was a really successful graphics company and their products were really good at the time. Also, at the time companies did design and manufacture their own cards. Today manufacturers just release specs and reference designs for the actual manufacturers to do the heavy lifting. Also, for old geezers like me, it is soooo weird to see a graphics card to be running just-the-regular PCI.

For brief history of GPUs in the 90s, read something like From Voodoo to GeForce: The Awesome History of 3D Graphics @ PC Gamer. Just like CPUs, also GPUs have gone giant leaps during past 20 years.

If you've never heard of company called S3 Graphics, go educate your self at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics. Brief highlights are January 1989, founding of the company, November 2000 at point where S3 had officially been outran by competition, they changed their name to SONICBlue. And finally March 2003, when filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They had their moment, but given the fierce competition by Nvidia and Ati and Matrox and many others, they just couldn't keep up with the technological advances fast enough to be able to offer interesting products to customers. Today, what remains of S3 is part of HTC, the Chinese cellphone manufacturer.

Ok, the junk's gone - What then?

Yes, it cleaing up doesn't end here. I still have ~1000 floppy discs in storage. Now that PCs having a 5.25" or 3.5" drive are gone, I'll keep cleaning some more. Maybe I should take a peek into some of those floppies to see if there is anything valuable in them.

Also, I have the images of the OS/2 hard drives. Next I need to figure how to read them.

Next Saturday, on 6th October, I'll be joining (again) with Larpdog on his Twitch-channel https://www.twitch.tv/larpdog to assemble my new PC. The stream language will be Finnish and we will start on 17 Finnish summer time, making it 14 UTC.

This is something similar we did last year (see the post about it).
Unfortunately Twitch-videos are kept only for 14 days, so that recording link has gone sour.

Update:

Link to the stream is https://www.twitch.tv/videos/319110553