nostalgia – grouchyfarmer

New Project, weather, and the ever popular Stuff

Weather here the other day was about as good as it gets. It was so nice out that I ended up staying out on the bike for a lot longer than I intended just because it was so beautiful out there.

Temperature was about 70, almost no wind, brilliant sunshine. Ended up putting about 20+ miles on riding around in the countryside just looking at nature, watching birds and animals. I wasn’t the only one out there. I’m not a fast biker because I’m having too much fun looking at stuff and finding little “hidden treasures” here and there as I ride along. Like, well, this…

I was rolling down one of the trails and these brilliant purple flower were so bright I could see them from half a mile away, standing out against the dull green grass that’s starting to die back.

And turtles. Seeing turtles around here used to be pretty rare. In all the hours I used to spend in the woods and along the rivers and creeks when I was a kid and teenager, I never, ever saw a turtle. Or a snake for that matter. But in the last few years there seems to have been an upsurge in the number of reptiles and amphibians around here. We have frogs all over our backyard, there are massive bull frogs in the neighbor’s pond, tree frogs in our bushes, toads in the undergrowth. I’d never seen a tree frog in my life until just a few years ago. Now we got these guys hanging around here. This little guy was sitting up on the window shutter outside the house one day and scared the heck out of me.

He’s a tiny, tiny little thing, hardly an inch long.

I’m thrilled to see these little guys hanging around here because if these little fellows, and the toads and turtles etc. are thriving it means the environment around here is fairly healthy.

One thing this year was very curious. No mosquitos. None. Well, okay I did get bit once, but that was it. Once. All summer. Usually by mid summer around here you don’t want to go outside at all in the evening or you’ll be swarmed by the little buggers. This year, nothing. Even in the early evening when mosquitoes are at their worst, nothing. I have no idea why. All of the frogs and toads out there might contribute to that but it was still remarkable.

And the new project. Well, sort of new. it is both new and very, very old, this project. One of the things I salvaged from the farm right before we sold it was my father’s old workbench. Which had been his father’s workbench before he took over the farm.

I’m not entirely sure how old this thing is, but it is very old. I know for a fact that it is well over 100 years old because my father remembered this thing from when he was a kid.

Look at the dovetail joint there on that corner and that scalloped edge there. Someone did a lot of work on this thing.

That square thing you see on the front there? That’s a wooden bolt. Seriously.

This thing wasn’t just a slab of wood on legs, either. This thing was a rather elaborate and very well made workbench for a woodworker or carpenter, and hand a lot of fancy features. And it was obviously made by someone who knew what they were doing with dovetail joints, scrollwork, those wooden screw vises and other goodies. And it is massive and very, very heavy. The top is one solid, 3 inch thick piece of hardwood. My son and I got it out of the garage where I’d been storing it yesterday and set it up on sawhorses so I could start working on it, we we figure it has to weight at least 200+ pounds.

Was this thing handmade by someone or was it a commercial product? That I don’t know and I don’t really care. It’s one of the few artifacts from the farm that I feel nostalgic about and I’m hoping I can clean it of about a century of grease, oil, grime, old nails, etc. and restore it to a usable condition and turn it into the main workbench in my woodshop.

Stuff Time

Computers: I do most of my writing on a 12 year old Macbook Pro that lives in the kitchen. I’ve mentioned this before, I believe. It’s been having some nasty problems with the video display for a long time now, but wiggling the lid back and forth or closing it and opening it a few times generally brings things back. But it’s been getting worse and worse. I was going to start using an iPad for all this stuff, but, yeah, that hasn’t worked so well. The iPad is nice, don’t get me wrong. I use it all the time, but not for this kind of thing. Trying to edit photos, write, cut and paste, using the iPad is, to me at least, ridiculously awkward.

So I went looking around for Macbook computers and guess what? If you’re willing to take a chance on older, refurbished equipment, well, damn these things get cheap. Relatively speaking. I picked up a refurbed Macbook Pro with decent specifications that’s about 3 years old for a bit over $500. So we’ll see how that goes when it gets here.

Drones: The DJI Mini 3 Pro drone I got a few weeks ago is bloody amazing. I’m going to take a closer look at it here in the near future. I only have a few hours flight time on it so far but the camera, the flying characteristics, the software, everything about it is, to me at least, amazing. But more about that later, maybe.

Gardening: We’re going to be moving two of the raised beds to a new location with better sunlight. Now that the big ash tree is gone it opens up much more space to full sunlight. We haven’t settled on a new location yet but that’ll be coming up pretty soon. We’re thinking of putting a small garden shed in the spot where the two raised beds are now. More about that as things progress.

We’re still harvesting tomatoes and peppers. Both seem to actually like the somewhat cooler weather we’ve been having. We stopped watering the darned things because, well, we were hoping they’d die, really, because we already have omre produce canned and in the freezer than we know what to do with.

I’m thinking about talking about so-called “solar generators”, unless Chris over at Off Grid Ham beets me to it. I’ve been getting interested in these things recently as an alternative to gas powered backup generators. But there are a lot of problems with these things, starting with the fact that they are most definitely not “solar generators”. And anyone who calls them that should be sued, frankly. What they are is a battery in a box. Period. That’s it. Oh, there are some electronics added to regulate power, put out 120V and that kind of thing. But they are neither “solar”, nor are they “generators”. The other problem with these things is the advertising, which often is blatantly misleading and even out right lies.

But while I’m interested in these things, the question is, am I interested enough to overcome my innate laziness to do the research?

That’s about it for now.

Photography Stuff – New Camera, and some Thoughts on Technology

If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you should know I’m something of a photography nut, and that goes back many years, and at one time it was a pretty serious obsession. But let’s skip the nostalgia, at least for now, and talk about the present. My good camera, a Fujifilm, is a pretty nice camera, but it is now more than 11 years old which makes it probably three or four generations behind the times. Technology has moved on. It’s time to replace it. So I did a lot of shopping around and and research and finally ended up with a Nikon D5600. It is considered to be at the high end of the consumer grade DSLR cameras. It’s been on the market for a few years so all the bugs are worked out of it and it has a solid track record. It is generally considered to be a pretty nice camera, so I got one with 2 lenses, an 18 – 55 mm lens and a 70mm to 300mm telephoto zoom.

Notice the manual sitting there. It didn’t come with the camera. The only “instructions” that came with it was a single sheet of paper. I had to track down the manual on the internet and print it out. All 400+ pages of it. Sheesh…

It wasn’t… I was going to say it wasn’t cheap. But everything is relative. My first really good SLR camera was a Minolta XG-M with a 50mm lens that I got back in 1982, and I quickly added several other lenses to the package. Accounting for inflation the Minolta was actually more expensive than the Nikon.

I’ve only had the Nikon for a few days and I’m still trying to get it all figured out. The Fujifilm was bad enough with multiple menus, way too many buttons and knobs, and the ability to adjust just about everything. The Nikon is all that and a lot more. I can still just put it in one of the automatic modes and let its computers handle everything, but the fun part with cameras like this is when you shut off the automatics and venture out on your own experimenting with ISO, shutter speeds, light levels and other goodies. The automatic settings are fine for making fast snapshots of a family picnic or something like that. But if you want really good images, images that really show off the scene you’re photographing, that express moods and feelings, well then you need to shut off the auto modes and start fiddling around. And there’s a lot to fiddle with.

The biggest improvements over my old Fuji are the lenses and the image sensor. The image sensor is much, much larger, the pixels are smaller and packed more densely, giving a much crisper, more, oh, dense, let’s call it, image. That also means the size of the resulting photo is much larger. For jpg images that seems to be running about 7 – 10 megabytes. RAW files are even larger. And one mode produces both RAW and jpg files. So this thing needs a decent sized SD card.

The lenses – the Fuji had a really nice lens that was more than adequate for the job, but it was permanently attached to the camera and I wanted to be able to get other lenses for special purposes, like for macro photography, or bigger telephoto, that kind of thing. So far the quality of the two lenses I got for the Nikon seem excellent.

Of course the most important thing is does it make good photographs, so let’s look at a few I’ve taken over the last few days. You should be able to click on an image to see it in a larger size. Some of the images have been cropped but no other processing was done on them.

I should point out this flower is only about a half inch wide

So far I’m pleased with the camera. I’m going to need to experiment and learn how to tweak the settings to get the results I want, but overall it seems to be pretty nice so far.

Now let’s talk about technology for a moment, specifically about photographic technology. Once upon a time I was heavily involved in film photography. I went through several 35mm cameras including some fairly expensive SLRs like the Minolta in that photo up there. That was the first really good camera I ever bought, purchased in 1981 or 1982. And it was expensive. I paid about $350+ for that camera at the time, a bit over $1,000 after including inflation. It was a very nice camera for its day. Still is. I still have it and it still works just fine. If I could be bothered to buy some 35mm film and deal with processing I have no doubt it would still turn out very good images even today.

I was pretty serious about photography. I also had my own darkroom and enlarger, developed my own film, made my own prints, etc. It was expensive, messy, I worked with potentially dangerous chemicals and I had to work in pitch black conditions or risk ruining the film or a print. It was a pain in the neck but it was also enormously satisfying.

A lot of semi-serious photographers complain about the decline of the use of film photography. They claim that digital photography lacks — well, lacks something. They don’t seem to be sure what it lacks, but for “reasons” digital just isn’t as good as film. The process isn’t as pure or something. Being able to manipulate images easily using Photoshop somehow makes images less real. That’s all BS of course. Film photographers like me always post-processed our prints to get the results we wanted. We just did it using chemicals, different types of photographic paper, dodging and burning and the like instead of tweaking settings on a computer.

I did pretty good with that old Minolta up there and my little darkroom. But I freely admit that the photos I produce today with modern equipment and software are so much better that there is simply no comparison. I would never, ever want to go back to the days of film.

I can understand why some people might feel that way, though. It’s like the people who think vinyl records are better than digitally recorded music. I share some of that feeling. I have a nice turntable and vinyl records and I love them. But even I admit that it is more a nostalgia thing than anything else. What I missed wasn’t some kind of ‘purity’ of the music, it was the process of playing the record that I missed. Getting out a record, putting it on the turntable, setting the tonearm down, I think it made me listen more attentively to the music because there was more physicality to the act. With modern streaming the music just plays. It’s almost like background noise, something you can ignore. When playing a record you couldn’t ignore it. You tended to concentrate more because you were physically involved with playing the record.

Clutter Your Life

Well, hopefully the insomnia isn’t back, but it’s about 4:30 AM, I’ve been up since about 3:45, and while I’ll probably crash and burn by 10, I’m wide awake now. So while the snowstorm blows and blusters outside I’m down in my snug little corner in the basement with my Alexa thingie sitting there on the shelf offering to show me how to make Chia Pudding (shudder) and telling me it’s going to snow all day and I want to talk about uncluttering of all things.

That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, aren’t we? Uncluttering. Especially us old farts. Instead of sitting around doing whatever it is us old people are supposed to be doing – maybe sewing our own shrouds and waiting to die or something I guess – we should be uncluttering.

Run that term through Google and you’ll come up with about a gazillion hits. “Ten Principles to Help Anyone Clear Clutter”. “10 Ways to Unclutter your Life”. “The Joy of Less”, “Unclutter and Unburden”. The basic premise is the same – we should be getting rid of all of the stuff we accumulate because it will be, somehow, “good for us”. The premise of all of them is that we don’t need all that – that stuff. We don’t need the books and the clothes and the magazines and the knicknacks and the dishes and the souvenir mug from Wall Drug and the pictures and everything else we own, and pare it down to just what we need to merely survive…

I suppose this trend has been driven, in part at least, by the occasional news story about hoarders and television shows about the nightmares discovered in the homes of hoarders. And the usual suspects have climbed on the band wagon to screech at you that if you have a single souvenir mug or refrigerator magnet or have a book you haven’t read in years, well, OMG you’re a hoarder and you’re sick and you need an “intervention” or something.

And if that doesn’t scare you into decluttering, they try to guilt you into it. “Just think of your family!” they whine. “They shouldn’t have to go through the pain of having to clear out all the stuff in your home after you’re dead! Think of the pain that will cause them!”

I normally don’t use language like this, but, well, fuck that. It’s BS. All of it. It’s like “mindfulness” or any of the other trends that seem like a good idea on the surface and have been quickly taken over by loonies and scammers and others out to make a quick buck. (Did you know there are books and classes out there to teach your dog “mindfulness”?)

Take a look at some of the “clutter” in my house.

There’s a battered, stained, beaten up looking Tom Swift Jr. book, part of a series of SF books written for kids back in the 1950s. It looks like it should have been tossed or recycled long ago. But that book is part of my life, my history, my memories. My mother would occasionally talk my father into abandoning the never ending chores associated with the farm long enough to go up to Green Bay, a major excursion for us back then. We’d stop at a department store that had a large book section, including a lot of kids’ books like Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Tom Swift books. I remember the trips, the store, stopping at Krolls afterwards for a hamburger… Interestingly, Krolls is still around and it’s right next door to the clinic MrsGF goes to for her knees and, amazingly enough, the hamburgers taste just as good now as they did 50 years ago or more

Hanging on a nail out in the garage is an old, battered cane made from white oak. It was my father’s, and his father’s before him. It was never used as a cane, it was used for sorting cattle. Every time I pick it up I remember walking into that barn, hearing the cows gently mooing at me in the hopes it was time to be fed, remember the smells, the warmth of the barn on a -30 degree winter day…

Back on my dresser is a statue of a dog, a collie. It isn’t anything special, probably didn’t cost very much. I should toss that too, according to the unclutter people. But my favorite uncle gave me that for Christmas when I was, oh, ten, eleven years old. He was a nice fellow. Gentle, kind, smart, successful. Every time I see it sitting there I think of him and my aunt, remember his voice, remember the times we visited.

No, I’m not going to “declutter”.

And I’m glad my mother and father didn’t before they passed on. Going through their things was a journey back in time, back through my childhood and even before I was born. My father apparently kept every receipt, every bill, every bit of paperwork concerning the farm that he ever got. Sorting through his papers after he died was an excursion into time, a trip into the past, a reminder of what life had been like going back almost to the time he bought the farm from his father.

We sorted through the toys of our childhood, even old homework that our mother had kept, old Christmas cards, ancient photos going back more than a hundred years. Going through all of that brought back a flood of memories that were full of joy and pain and sadness and surprise… It was difficult sometimes, yes, but it was an experience I also will always cherish as well.

We are human beings. Our brains work in funny ways sometimes. A smell, a sight, an object, can trigger memories so vivid that it is almost like we’re experiencing those events all over again. Objects, even silly, otherwise worthless things, become important to us, are even cherished by us, because they trigger those memories within us.

So if you tell me I need to “declutter”, I’m going to tell you to do something anatomically impossible to yourself because you’re telling me to erase my life, erase my memories, erase my past.

Old Radios And What To Do With Them

Because people know I like fiddling with radios, sometimes people give me old radios they don’t want or that don’t work in the hopes I can do something with them. I thought you might be interested in how your grandparents listened to radio, so take a look at this beast. I’ve had this thing sitting on the shelf for a long time now and finally decided to pull it out and deal with it because I need the space.

There is a technical term for radios like these: Junk

I have a term for radios like these – junk. It’s a shame, really. Once upon a time this was probably a nice little multi-band radio receiver. The rust on the chassis isn’t a big deal, that’s pretty common and can be dealt with, but this thing has some other, much more serious problems. It is unrepairable, but there are some useful parts I can salvage.

I looked all over this thing and I can’t find a manufacturer’s name or brand name. If I did some research I could probably find out what company made it originally, but there’s no real point because it isn’t worth the effort. There might have been a paper label that fell off long ago.

Or it’s entirely possible there never was a maker’s mark stamped on it. It wouldn’t be that uncommon. Like today, the name you see on the case of a piece of equipment isn’t necessarily the name of the company that actually made it. Back when this radio was made, big retailers like Sears and others would contract with manufacturers to produce equipment that the retailer would sell under their own brand name. Sometimes they’d buy the electronics from one company, buy the case from another, assemble it somewhere, slap their name on it and sell it as their own. It’s very common even today.

You’ll also note there is no outer case for this unit, either. That’s how it was when I got it. I find that fairly often today as well. Often the outer cases were made of cheap plywood with a thin veneer of nice wood on the outside to make it look fancy, and the cases would never last long. The plywood would begin to delaminate if it got damp, and they’d get damaged easily. Or if the case was in good shape, it’s fairly common for people to strip the old electronics out of it and throw them away and use the case as a decorative item or even build a modern radio into it.

Now if that radio up there looks complicated with the big transformer, variable capacitor, all the tubes and coils, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait until you see what’s underneath:

That – that mess up there, my friends, is what all radios looked like under the cover back in the day. When this radio was built, there were no transistors or solid state devices. This radio even predates printed circuit boards. Every single bit of this radio was built by hand. All of those components and wires were soldered in place by some poor schmuck who stood at a work station all day long doing nothing but soldering bits and nubbins and gubbins together.

Radios back then were very, very expensive, partly because they had to be all assembled by hand. It’s hard to tell how much this particular radio cost when it was new. Let’s say it was made in 1950, and it cost about $60 back then, which was a fairly common price for a decent, but not top of the line, multi-band receiver back then. That doesn’t sound like much until you take inflation into account. Accounting for inflation, that radio up there would sell for about $640 today. Ouch!

Another reason they were expensive was the sheer number of parts necessary, and, of course, these things:

Those are vacuum tubes. Now there is a wave of nostalgia going on about tubes, especially among stereo and audio aficionados who claim that sound amplifiers that use vacuum tubes sound “better” somehow, than those that use solid state devices and, well, it’s all BS, really. Vacuum tubes, to put it bluntly, suck. (Vacuum? Suck? Is there a pun in there somewhere? No, don’t go there…)

Sidenote: To give you an idea of how ridiculous this whole tube amplifier thing has gotten in the audio market, let me give you an example. An acquaintance of mine had a friend bring over a tube style stereo amplifier that had some problems. The four prominently displayed vacuum tubes on the top of the unit weren’t lighting up. But interestingly enough, it was still working as a stereo amplifier. Which it shouldn’t have been if the tubes were actually doing anything. Which they weren’t. The only connection to the tubes was a line to feed power to the filaments so they’d light up. None of the other pins were even connected. The tubes were being used for nothing but decorative lighting.

Vacuum tubes look really cool and retro and all that, but as actual electronic components they’re horrible. They suck up huge amounts of power, give off large amounts of heat, are physically large, often require massive transformers to provide high voltages, are expensive to make, and as soon as solid state devices began to be mass produced, radio manufacturers abandoned them as fast as they could redesign their equipment.

As I was looking this thing over, I found it had a rather serious problem. This:

If you look close at that photo up there, you’ll see what I mean, charred parts, melted wires – basically this thing was damn near on fire at one point. Probably some component failed, overheated, and started the insulation on the wiring on fire.

So what am I going to do with this thing? There are some parts I can salvage. The tube sockets are still good, and they’re hard to come by, so I’ll pull those out. The tubes themselves – I’ll keep ’em but I don’t know if they’re any good. They do make nice decorative items, though. Some of the big rotary switches may be salvageable as well. The actual electronic components aren’t worth even bothering with. A lot of them probably would still work within their original specifications, but without tearing them out of the circuits and testing them it’s impossible to tell, and frankly it isn’t worth the effort. Would you use a 50 or 60 year old resistor in a project you’re building today, even if a meter said it was within specification? I wouldn’t. But I am hoping I can salvage this:

These big air variable capacitors were (and still are) used for tuning, and they’re damned expensive if you have to buy them new. So I’m hoping that once I get this one out and cleaned up it might still be useful. It looks in pretty rough shape with some significant rust issues, but that seems to be limited to the nonessential parts. I can’t tell until I can pull it out and test it. I’m hoping it will work because a new one like this sells for about $50.

Is Repairing Old Radios Worth It?

Well, I’m not going to give you a whole lecture on antique electronics, but the answer to that question is … Well, to be perfectly honest, probably not unless it is something you personally enjoy.

My SX-43 isn’t worth much, maybe $100 – $150 if I wanted to sell it, but it is a really cool looking radio. And yes, it works quite well. This one has the advantage of receiving not just the ham bands, but also the AM and FM broadcast bands.

Financially speaking repairing and refurbishing old radios is almost never worth it. You aren’t going to get much money for them unless they are something rare or exotic. Often the people who buy antique radios aren’t so much interested in them working, they want them for decorative items. Considering the amount of time, effort, research, and the difficulty in finding some parts, you’ll be lucky if you break even if you try making money off restoring old radios. Fiddling with old radios is sort of a hobby of mine, but to be honest I don’t do it very often because I generally find it more rewarding to spend the time on other things.

Damn, I need to paint that wall and those shelves. Sheesh that looks like crap. Anyway, this is one of my other old receivers, an SX-96. I didn’t have to do anything to this one. The person who owned it before me completely refurbished it and it works probably better than it did when new. This one also isn’t really worth that much. I’ve seen people asking a lot of money for this model, but even in near perfect condition it isn’t worth more than about $125- $175

There are exceptions, of course. Old amateur radio equipment is one of them. Sometimes. It depends on the condition of the unit (external physical appearance is very important in this market, almost as important as it’s actual functionality), the desirability of the particular brand and model, and, of course, whether or not it works up to its original specifications. I’ve seen some old Collins, Hallicrafters, Hammerlund and the other “legendary” brands of amateur radio equipment being sold for eye-wateringly high prices. But it depends on the model, condition, etc. While at the same time other equipment of the same era, from a lesser known manufacturer, may sell for a fraction of what the popular models sell for, even if electronically speaking the off-brand was superior.

Replacing things like capacitors, resistors and other common components is fairly simple and cheap. You can almost always use easily available modern day equivalents. But things like vacuum tubes can be a serious issue. I don’t think anyone makes vacuum tubes except for a few Chinese and Russian companies, and they only make a very, very small variety of tubes, mostly for amplifiers. There are used ones out there, maybe, and some “new old stock” (NOS) laying around, but they’re getting harder and harder to find, and more expensive. If you can find them at all. Transformers can be a problem too.

Some of these old radios had some serious safety issues as well. I really doubt if some of these old radios would pass modern UL safety standards. So there are liability issues here as well. If a radio you repaired or restored causes a problem later, like someone gets an electric shock from it or a 60 year old component fails and starts a fire, could you be held liable and get sued?

I don’t want to discourage you from dabbling with repairing and restoring old electronics, but I do want you to know that you probably aren’t going to make any money at it, and if you do try to sell the equipment you repair, there could be legal issues as well. It can be a fun hobby but you need to be aware of the potential problems as well.

TRS-80, a Bit of Computer Nostalgia

TRS-80 Mod IV with dual floppy drives and a whopping 64K RAM. Note the front edge of the keyboard. Radio Shack was notorious for this battleship gray paint they used on their computer cases that started to rub off almost immediately exposing the even uglier plastic underneath. We went through this for something like 4 generations of computers before RS finally just started using colored plastic like everyone else.

I have a lot of elderly computers laying around that probably should have gone to recycling long ago, and probably will. I hang on to some of the because of nostalgia, like the one up above. That’s one of two TRS-80 Model IVs that have been kicking around here for ages now. I worked on a lot of these dopey things in the early 1980s, along with its predecessor the Mod III. All things considered, it was a pretty darn nice computer for its day, if a bit on the expensive side. And they did have some “issues”, as they say, thanks largely to some quirky design decisions made by Radio Shack that were probably done to save money.

Not exactly what you’d call a ‘high tech’ video system, even for that era. Basically it’s a cheap, generic black and white television without the tuner or audio.

They were made as cheaply as they could possibly be made (The TRS-80 Mod I came with a video display that was literally an old RCA black and white television with the channel tuner and audio circuits stripped out of it, for example.).

Yummy yummy RAM chips! Guacamole dip costs extra. Despite the Tandy Corporation brand, they were made by Motorola.

I had a couple of Mod III computers, and basically the Mod IV was little more than an enhanced III. And they were expensive. The III sold for, I think, about $800 with a whopping 16K RAM, and RS wanted an arm and a leg to upgrade it to a full 48K. (That’s all you could add to the Mod III) I don’t remember exactly what RS charged to upgrade to 48K, but it was a ridiculously high price. $180 sticks in my mind for some reason. Anyway, you could easily do the upgrade yourself for about a quarter of what RS charged. RS was selling the exact same RAM chips in blister packs at their stores. Total cost for that was about $30-$40. All you had to do was open the case, pop the chips in, and that was it.

The interesting thing is that you actually couldn’t use all of that memory even if you had it, so the memory claims were very misleading. The system ROMS (the computer’s basic operating system) were mapped into the system’s memory map, replacing the first 16 of RAM with the ROMS, so you actually only had access to 48K. If you used a disk drive, then TRS-DOS, the disk operating system, sucked up even more memory. Unless you used a non Radio Shack OS, you couldn’t use more than about 32K – 48K (which was the maximum you could have on the Mod III). So why load the computer up with memory you couldn’t use? Because RS was trying hard to push the computer at the business market, and a lot of businesses were running CP/M. RS didn’t actually sell CP/M for the Mod IV (at least I don’t think they did) but you could get it from other companies. But this was also the time when CP/M became obsolete thanks to the introduction of the IBM-PC and MS-DOS. Radio Shack/Tandy started out as a leader in the personal computer business, but because of an unwillingness to spend money on serious R&D they quickly fell behind and were desperately trying to keep up until they finally washed their hands of computers all together.

RS/Tandy sold the Xenix OS (a UNIX clone) for their business models like the Mod-6. They were bigger, better, faster, had 8 inch floppy drives and you could get hard drives for them. But they were expensive, clunky, and non-standard in just about every way. I have a Mod 6 and a Mod II laying around somewhere too and one of these days when I get bored enough I’ll open one of those up.

Speaking of floppy drives – my, aren’t those dirty… Actually the whole thing looks like it’s been sitting in a barn for the last 30 years. For all I know it was. Or is this the one that got soaked when my 50 gallon aquarium broke one night and the water poured through the floor into the storage area in the basement?

See? Didn’t believe me about the cassette tape, did you?

Those are some real ~~pieces of junk~~, gems, those drives up there. Genuine single sided, double density, 5 1/4 inch floppies, those are. And holy fright they were expensive when they were being sold! I don’t know what the ones for the Mod-IV went for, but the drives for the Mod-III were ridiculously expensive. But then floppy drives were expensive across the board back then. The Mod-III was mostly sold bare bones when it first came out. You could get it ‘fully loaded’ with dual floppies and 48K of RAM but not many people bought the drives at first because they were so expensive. The ‘standard’ configuration was 16K RAM and a cassette tape player was used to store programs and data. Seriously. Cassette tape. You can imagine how well that worked.

The first drive, which contained the required floppy drive controller adaptor, sold for about $1,200. Adjusted for inflation that’s almost $3,000 today. The second drive sold for about $800.

These floppies are single sided, double density, so they could store a whopping 180K on a single floppy disk. That’s 180 thousand bytes. Not even enough to store a single average sized JPEG photo.

Oh, and did I mention that floppies back then cost up to $5 to $10 each? The company I worked for back then sold genuine IBM brand floppy disks. They sold for “just” $10 each. We’d give you a deal, $95 for a box of ten. I just paid about that much for a 4 terabyte drive for pete’s sake. But at the time I was selling 5 megabyte hard drives to businesses for a cool $5,000 each. Considering what prices were like back then I’m surprised anyone ever bought one of these things. Adjusted for inflation that hard drive would sell today for over $12K.

This is what ran the whole show, the Z80 CPU. Most of the really popular computers of the day like the Apple ][, Commodore 64, Atari 400/800, etc. used the 6502 processor in their equipment. They used it not because it was good (it wasn’t), they used it because it was cheap. The Z80 was more expensive, but it was also more powerful. It had a better register system (it had some 16 bit registers which the 6502 lacked), more registers, better indexing, better instruction set, etc. It was more expensive, yes, but it more than made up for that with its capabilities. I’m not sure why RS decided to go with the Z80, but they did, and they kept using it for a rather long time. It served as the primary processing power for the Mod I, Mod II, Mod III, Mod IV, and the Mod-100. RS did use other processors as well. It used the 6809 in its “toy” computer, the Color Computer (ironically, the 6809 in their toy color computer was a much, much more powerful processor than the Z-80 used in their ‘professional’ computers)

The picture above shows the main board of the Mod IV. This was the first time I’ve had a Mod IV open (back in the day Mod I, Mod III and Atari were the ones I mostly worked on. By the time the Mod IV came out I’d switched to the Color Computer and OS9) and I was a bit disappointed when I saw this, well, mess is the only way you can describe that board. If you look closely at that photo you’ll find jumper wires hand soldered to various points all over the board. The backside of the board is just as bad. More wires running everywhere. And most of those don’t look like repairs or modifications, they look like they were done at the factory. When I see a main board with jumpers running all over like that it makes me nervous. It means either the circuit board was badly designed in the first place, or they found serious bugs in the hardware after it went into production and they had to pull them off the line and do some pretty serious rewiring to get them working, or they were trying to make modifications without bothering to redesign the circuit board. I don’t know what’s going on here, but if I’d opened up my brand new Mod IV and saw this it wouldn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Radio Shack/Tandy sold a lot of computers back then, but it also made a lot of mistakes, some of them serious. Once the IBM-PC was introduced, RS tried to compete in the business market with the Model 6, which was, for the time, a very sophisticated, multi-user system that sported a 5 meg hard drive, and the Xenix operating system. But it was also very, very expensive and if you wanted to do anything that couldn’t be done with the very limited selection of software available for it, required you to hire a professional programmer to write it for you. They brought out a line of PC clones which had a whole host of problems and were generally more expensive than other equipment with the same specifications. Basically they did just about everything wrong that they could do, and ended up abandoning the computer business entirely. Now the company is gone completely, for the most part.

That’s all for now. One of these days I might talk about the Tandy Color Computer. That was the Radio Shack computer I was the most involved with back in the day. Despite the fact most people looked at it as little more than a toy, it was an amazingly sophisticated computer once you got past the ridiculous operating system Radio Shack crippled it with. Most of us back then chucked Radio Shack’s OS in the trash and ran a multitasking, multiuser operating system called OS9

Chilton Antique Tractor Show and Well, It’s Been Busy…

… here over the last few weeks. I’m not sure what the heck happened after I retired. I was supposed to have all this free time to play with amateur radio, do gardening, dabble more in photography, go fishing, etc. Instead it seems I have less time than when I was working full time. Oh, well.

We did go up north last weekend to visit some friends, although we did run across this —

We came across the rolled over milk tanker about 10 miles from the house. Fortunately no one got seriously hurt. I think he was empty because there was no leakage when we came across the scene just after it happened. It was on a roundabout, and this happens on a regular basis with these big trucks. They hit the roundabout too fast and flip over trying to make the corner.

The annual Chilton steam engine and antique tractor show was this weekend and that’s something I try to get to every year even though it makes me feel so old sometimes to see equipment that I used to run when I was a kid or teenager now classified as “antique”. Although to be fair a lot of the equipment we had on the farm back then was probably already antique by the time we got our hands on it.

This year the big surprise was this —

Now if you’ve never seen anything like that before, it’s for a good reason. They never made many of these, and there are only three of them left in the world from what I learned talking to the guy who was operating it. When I first saw it, it was largely blocked from sight and all I could see was part of the front with the engines and I thought someone had lugged a Shay type locomotive to the show.

Yes, it’s fully operational. This isn’t just a static display, it actually runs.

What the hell is it? It’s a log hauler that was used up until the 1930s to pull huge sleds carrying logs through the woods during the winter. Only about 175 of them were ever built. It could pull up to 300 tons of logs on as many as 25 sleds at a time. I ran across this when I was looking up more info on it-

I can’t even begin to imagine what it must cost to keep that engine repaired and operational. It must be incredibly expensive. I’m very glad they do, though. If it weren’t for people who support the preservation of equipment like this all we’d have are photos. They show it at Wabeno, where its home is, but they also take it out to at least one of these shows a year.

As I said, sometimes it makes me feel very old when I go to these and run across equipment I used to use, like this Massey 44. I used one of these when I was a kid. For a long time it was our primary tractor that did everything from hauling out manure to chopping feed to plowing. And while it may look pretty and make me feel nostalgic, when it comes down to it it was a nasty, nasty tractor to actually use. The front end was too light. Those front wheels would be entirely off the ground as often as not when it was pulling a heavy load. It was difficult to steer. It had mechanical issues. The engine was decent, but ours tended to overheat and the transmission wasn’t very good. And it sucked gas like you wouldn’t believe.

What I like about these shows too is that it gives us a glimpse into what life was like for our not so distant ancestors. Just the simple job of washing clothing was a major operation not that long ago.

Yes, that’s a washing machine being powered by an ancient gasoline engine. And while that engine might be a bit elderly for this setup, washing machines running off gasoline engines was not uncommon in rural areas. You have to remember that a lot of rural areas didn’t get electric service until the 1930s or even later.

On the amateur radio front, I’ve been fiddling with antennas again. Well, sort of. I’m finally getting around to getting the Gap Titan vertical finished and hooked up.

It successfully survived the winds we had during the recent storms. After 60 – 70 MPH winds hit us during those storms I more than half expected to see it laying on the ground when I got up the next morning, but it made it through unscathed. We almost forgot to put guy lines on the thing. If we’d neglected that I’m sure it would have come down.

I got the counterpoise/ground plane installed finally and, well, it takes up a wee bit bigger area than I thought it would. Going to be fun mowing lawn through there. But that area is going to be part of an extension to the existing flower beds anyway so I only have to worry about it for the rest of this season.

And I still don’t have the dopey thing connected. I got started, got all the tools out and began to work on putting the connectors on the coax and… Sigh…

I had the wrong one. I needed a female and only had the male variety, so I either needed a female or an adaptor. Not a big deal, but mildly annoying nevertheless. In any case, I didn’t really like the style connector they sent with the antenna in the first place. Thankfully, Farm and Home, the big hardware store down in Chilton has a big electronics section (used to be a Radio Shack store) and they’ll probably have what I need.

As for the weather – this has been one of the wettest summers I can remember. The lawns should all be brown and dormant from a lack of rain this time of year. Instead they’re all lush and green, as you can see from the photo there. I’ve only had to water the gardens about three or four times all summer long so far. Most summers watering is something we need to do every two days or so.

The rivers and lakes are all abnormally high around here because of all the rainfall.

This is the river down by the old stone bridge the other day. Normally this time of year the river is so low and stagnant that it’s choked with algae and weeds, and so shallow it would hardly be halfway up your shins if you tried to walk through it. It’s a good four feet deep or more, though, and had more than enough current to keep the algae from accumulating.

That’s about it for now. Hopefully by the next time I get around to writing something I’ll have some amateur radio stuff to talk about. I should have that antenna finally set up. I should have the new Yaesu 818ND up and running with the laptop using FT8, JS8Call and PSK.

And hopefully I’ll have made some progress in moving all my equipment down into the basement. MrsGF found a matching set of old, heavy duty tables at St. Vinnie’s that might make good work benches. They’re about 4′ square with heavy duty 4″ square legs. They’re beat up but look solid, and I can get ’em for $5 each, so I’ll go take a look at those on Tuesday.

Still have to make a decision on where the electrical outlets are going to be placed down there, but I didn’t want to do that until I had an idea on where the work benches were going to be, how tall they were, etc. Probably at least 4, four outlet boxes fed with 20 amp circuits, plus at least one 240V outlet for amplifiers. And need to rewire for better lighting. Want to put in LED lights to replace the existing fluorescent tubes that are in there now.

Cleaning Up, Snow, Evaluating the Gardens, And Stuff…

MrsGF and I set aside Saturday to clean up the last of the gardens around here. We’ve had several hard frosts now and almost everything has died back so there was no reason to put it off any longer. So, of course, this happened…

Yep, that’s snow. Saturday was pretty miserable. Temperature around 38 degrees, 30 – 40 mph winds and then it started snowing. Oh, well. Ah, Wisconsin weather…

We got out the winter coats, hats and gloves and went at it anyway because, well, it has to get done. It wasn’t exactly a fun job in that kind of weather, but we did get it done. There was no point in putting it off because this time of year the chances of the weather being much better are pretty slim.

We ended up filling the entire back of the old truck. It’s amazing how much debris we ended up with after cleaning everything up. And this is just half of it. We already had taken out the remains of the tomatoes, squash and a lot of other stuff over the last few weeks. Good thing we live just down the street from the town’s compost site. That makes this a heck of a lot easier.

The snow didn’t stick around. It was too warm for that. But the wind did, with gusts of up to 40 mph all day. That kept us from raking up the leaves in the yard, but we got that done on Sunday. So we have just about everything cleaned up outside now.

All things considered, the growing season was pretty successful this past season. The tomatoes and peppers were ridiculously prolific. Our little lettuce bed kept us supplied with greens when we needed them. Some things weren’t very good, and some of that was our own fault.

We keep trying to plant onions and they never seem to make it to maturity for us. They start out good, but as they mature they seem to just stop growing before they get anywhere close to full sized. I don’t really mind that too much because my main interest is in having fresh green onions, not in full size bulbs for storage. So while that crop might look like a failure, it really isn’t because I get what I want out of it.

The squash disappointed. The acorn squash never developed fully at all and were a total loss, and while we did get a few absolutely beautiful butternut squash (wow, they tasted good!) they didn’t produce as well as they should have. We aren’t sure why because they were in the same place they’d been last year where they’d done really well. We’re going to have to reconsider planting squash. The stuff takes up a huge part of the garden and if all we’re going to get for it is three squash, well, there’s not much point in planting them and we need to look for alternatives.

Our rhubarb plant wasn’t looking too good towards the end of the season, but we think that’s the fault of the squash which were planted nearby. It was getting shaded by the huge squash leaves and wasn’t getting enough sun, so we’re hoping it will come back.

I raise that rhubarb more for nostalgic reasons than because I like it. For me, a little bit of rhubarb goes a long, long way. But I have fond memories of playing under the huge rhubarb plants we had when I was a little kid on hot, summer days, and whenever I see that thing in hot, summer weather it brings back memories that make me grin. So yeah, I’m going to grow rhubarb if I can even if I don’t particularly like eating it.

Let’s see, what are we planning on changing — I’d like to put in more raised beds if I can find a good location for them. Those two 4 X 8 raised beds I put in a few years ago are ridiculously productive. If I’d known how good they were going to be I would have built them long ago. Just those two beds provide more vegetables than the rest of our gardens combined some years. The problem is where to put more of them. We just have too many trees so finding a spot where there will be direct sunlight for more than 4-5 hours a day is difficult here. About the only decent location is on the south side of the house and there isn’t much room there any more.

Of course that could change if the pear tree doesn’t survive the damage it suffered. I figure about a full third of the canopy of the tree went down because the limbs were too loaded with fruit to be able to handle a thunderstorm that rolled through here. I’d hate to lose that tree. We planted that, oh, about 17 years ago, a couple of years after we bought this place. It’s not a very good looking tree, it leans at a crazy angle, but wow, it produces some of the most delicious pears I’ve ever had.

But on the other hand, if we do lose it, it would open up a very large area that could be garden with full sun. So if it does have to come down, well, it wouldn’t be the worst thing.

With MrsGF retiring in March she’s trying to figure out just what the heck she’s going to do if she isn’t working full time any longer. Right now it looks like as soon as she pulls the plug on her job she’s going to be dragging me along into the Master Gardener classes. Well not dragging, to be honest. I’m rather looking forward to it. We’d talked about getting into the Master Gardener program for a long time but we never had the time to do it. So now is the ideal time for it. She’s been on-line looking to get us signed up for the classes next year. And being able to tack on “certified master gardener” on the byline up at the top of this website is an added incentive because, well, hey, I’ve got an ego too, you know <grin>.

The other thing that is (probably) going to happen after she retires is all of my electronics gear, test equipment, radio equipment, etc. is going to get moved out of the office/library/workshop and moved into what used to be eldest son’s work area in the basement, and the office space is going to be her’s. She loves sewing and craftsy kinds of things but she’s never had much time to actually do it. Right now her work area for that kind of thing is in a small room upstairs. But it’s hot up there in the summer, cold in the winter, and she has difficulty getting up and down a lot of stairs because of her knees. So the solution to that is turn the office on the main floor over to her and have me move my stuff out.

I am not looking forward to moving. Eldest son’s work area down there is still crammed full of old computers and other equipment that somehow never got moved when he moved out years ago. So all of that has to be moved somewhere. Hopefully out of our house and into his house. Then I have to buy or build suitable work surfaces for all my stuff. Then tear down all of my equipment, move all of it down to the basement. Then I have to re-route all of the antenna cables, ground cables and other stuff to the new location down there. Then install a new electrical system down there including 240V lines to run some of the equipment like the amplifiers. Then try to figure out how to set up all of the equipment again because by that time I’ll have forgotten how everything was set up originally. Move all of my computers… Like I said, I am not looking forward to it.

Well, I’ve bored you long enough with this. Time to go.

A video experiment not sure if this is going to work

Let’s see if I can do videos on this thing… I keep forgetting the iPhone can do pretty good videos.

Wow, seems it actually worked. Well, if I can put up with the 350 kbs upload speed. 350 kbs? Really? I’m supposed to have 7 mbs upload according to the info the cable company keeps sending me. A wee bit of discrepancy there…

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Went to the antique farm equipment and steam engine show at Chilton on Sunday. It’s an annual event they do every August and it’s always interesting.

Oh, and in case you can’t play the video for some reason, here’s a picture of a butteryfly so this hasn’t been a complete waste of time for you:

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The Urge

It’s early spring, and that means the urge is starting to kick in again.

I never used to be much of a traveler. I was always a homebody. I hated traveling, hated the discomfort associated with it, hated staying in motels, hated having to try to find someplace to eat. I hated everything associated with traveling.

The result was that for the first 50 years of my state I’d hardly been more than a hundred miles from the place I’d been born, and I was quite content with that.

Then something, I’m not sure what, happened. That’s when the — the urges started to kick in. And suddenly the guy who hated traveling, hated being away from home, was finding himself in places like, well, like this:

Or like this…

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Or this

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Or these:

So what happened? How did someone who hates traveling so much end up doing exactly that? I have no idea. It’s weird, really, this urge to go wandering, traveling.

I was starting to think that I’d got it out of my system. I wasn’t going to go wandering very far from home this year. If I went anywhere at all it was going to be less than a day’s travel from the house.

But now that the weather is getting warmer, things are starting to grow again, that damned urge is coming back… Same thing happened last year. Wasn’t going to go anywhere, I told myself. Nope. At least not very far, not more than a couple of hundred miles. If that. And ended up spending over a week out in the Black Hills…

This year I’m not going anywhere though. I am going to stick close to home. It’s too expensive, too time consuming. No sir. Not going anywhere.

But then there are those damned urges. Don’t know where they come from.

Personally I blame allergies.

The War On Weeds

So, let’s talk farming. I ran into this article about weed control over at Agweb and it’s actually pretty good so go take a peek at it if you have the time.

Differentiate fact and fiction as you plan your weed control strategy. Source: Myth-Busting Weed and Herbicide Rumors | Agweb.com

Now, the reason this article has popped up (and I’m sure you will see others in the ag press similar to this in the future) is that there are a few new GM crops coming on-line now, modified to work with a couple of new blends of herbicides in an effort to deal with increasing weed resistance to glycophase. The herbicides aren’t really new, though. They are simply blends of previously existing herbicides with glycophase. They incorporate either 2,4-D or dicamba, both of which have been around for decades already. The only thing new about the system is the GM crops that have been engineered to tolerate 2,4-D and/or dicamba.

And they aren’t going to work any better than glycophase alone did. At least not in the long run. Sooner or later weeds will eventually develop resistance to these new blends as well, and we’ll be right back where we are now. In fact, there is already resistance to both of those herbicides “out in the wild” so to speak, because both have been in use for some time.

We have allowed ourselves to become dependent upon a system of weed control that we know is eventually going to fail. So, if we already know that these reformulated mixes are going to eventually fail, why are we bothering with them at at all?

Part of the reason this isn’t going to change any time soon is that over the last few decades we have adopted almost across the board farming techniques that make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to change.

How did we do it in the “good old days”? Well, like this:

screen-shot-2017-02-10-at-11-58-31-am — Oliver 70 with cultivator attachment

Now, if this text editor has managed to put the image in the right place, that is an old Oliver 70 with it’s optional corn cultivator rig. I used to drive one of those when I was a kid. For hours. And hours. And hours. And hours. And hours. And.. Well, you get the idea.

It was boring, tedious, took huge amounts of time, huge amounts of fuel. And with how expensive fuel is these days, how expensive labor is, if you can even find labor, how time consuming it is… Well, it isn’t surprising that the agricultural industry has always been looking for something, anything, to try to eliminate weeds that doesn’t involve so much time, labor and expense.

But some alternative to this never ending cycle of herbicide failures is going to have to be found. We’re running out of options. No matter what kind of chemical intervention we may come up with, sooner or later nature will figure out a loophole to work around it because that’s just how nature works.

I wish I could tell you that there is a solution to this, but there isn’t. People are experimenting, yes. But so far all of the efforts I’ve seen in trying to get out of this dependency on herbicides have involved techniques that simply can’t be scaled up. I’ve seen flame throwers to burn weeds, steamers to steam weeds, “cookers” that scoop up soil and literally cook it to kill weed seeds… All of them are tedious, time consuming, and worst of all, very energy hungry.

There are some new robotics and AI technologies that are looking promising. I suspect that may be one possible solution; machines that do the cultivation for you using cameras, LIDAR, GPS to guide them. Even systems that can identify weeds by sight and mechanically remove them, leaving the desired plants alone.

But those are years away, maybe decades. But who knows? Maybe there is some kind of “magic bullet” out there. Ah, well, no, there isn’t, but we keep looking for one, don’t we?