Mike's Hobby Blog

Now for something completely different. Listen to a six minute radio interview of my Great Grandfather Charles Scharine, and his three sons, Herman, Walter and my Grandfather Albert Scharine. They operated Dairy Farms in southeastern Wisconsin through a good part of the 20th century. My mother thinks that this was recorded in the 1940s.

Great Grandfather Scharine’s Interview

Too close to home. Yesterdays event occurred in a place I know fairly well and at an event that is a unique part of the culture around here.

I hope that the survivors physically heal quickly and find a way to emotionally come to terms with their horrible experience, sooner, rather than later.

Here is a short video of the demo that I mentioned that I had working in an earlier post.

SCELBI blinking lights

Every once in a while I do some general searches to see if any unusual links connect to willegal.net This time, I came up with this…

According to this site (http://webstats-ranks.com/www/willegal.net) willegal.net is worth almost $15,000. Pretty incredible.

According to the same site, ranking in traffic is 779,337. With an estimated 644,275,754 sites in 2012, it seems my site ranks in the top .12% of all web sites.

It was actually a 2002 model, 1.25 GHZ dual processor MDD tower. I loved that machine, it really only started showing it’s age in the last couple of years. That machine lasted longer as my main home machine than any other I’ve had. Other contenders:

I wonder if Apple will be releasing new Imac models tomorrow?

My 8 year old Mac G4 crashed last night and refused to reboot. Took all normally recovery measures (resetting PRAM, etc) and still no go. Took every removable component off and still no go. Power supply measured correct voltages. Was suspicious of motherboard/CPU. re-seated everything else that I could get at (including CPU daughter card). Still no go.

At this point, I was considering next steps – what computer to replace it with and how to move contents of hard drives forward, when I discovered an obscure way to reset open-firmware (which handles booting the machine) on Apples web site. It did the trick and I’m back in business. I’m a bit surprised that I didn’t break anything, giving all the fiddling that I did.

Now to figure out what I was doing, when it crashed…

Long time visitors to my web site probably already know that when I post information and images on my website or blog, I always try to do two things.

There are many reasons for this approach and I’ll list them here in no particular order.

Over the years, I have freely shared virtually all the information I have gleaned over the years about the many topics that I have investigated, from Tropical Fish to Vintage Computers. About the only time I withhold information, is if I think the data might reflect badly upon a living person, and would serve no other useful purpose.

There have been several cases where I found weaknesses or bugs in the systems I have replicated. I have always published my findings, though in a couple of cases, it probably wasn’t necessary and I considered holding back. One example, is when I found a couple minor discrepancies between my rev 0 replica and the real thing. In the end, I decided to publish, even though it might reflect poorly upon my replication efforts.

There have been a number of instances over the years where discoveries or information that I published on my web site has been used by others without giving proper credit. Most of the time, these cases are minor, and not worth bothering about. An recent example is when someone hijacked an image of Mimeo to use as an iPod cover. That “case” amused me more than anything, because there were plently of legit Apple 1 images that could have been hijacked, instead. A couple of recent cases involving a couple of different people have disturbed me a bit more than normal, which is prompting me to write this “editorial”.

The bottom line is: ask permission and credit your sources. You’ll be amazed how a little bit of common courtesy will be paid back in a thousand ways.