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My dad, OTOH mainly had the CB on as a poor-man's radar detector. The truckers let you know where the smokies were. ;)

Yep. Alternate routes around traffic slow downs/accidents, toll roads etc. but the big one obviously were those pesky speed traps. It was pretty useful. Smokey and the Bandit was popular around that time IIRC. Neat cultural idiosyncrasy. So many movies of that decade reflected that "freedom of the road" sentiment.
 
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Yep. Alternate routes around traffic slow downs/accidents, toll roads etc. but the big one obviously were those pesky speed traps. It was pretty useful. Smokey and the Bandit was popular around that time IIRC. Neat cultural idiosyncrasy.
Well…it was that whole time period. Convoy (the movie), Smokie and The Bandit, BJ & the Bear, trucking in general. All made the CB radio popular to regular people. And my dad was a Radio Shack fanatic as he was an electrical engineer.

And…from 1975 to 1980 I lived in Houston, so there's that. :)
 
Well…it was that whole time period. Convoy (the movie), Smokie and The Bandit, BJ & the Bear, trucking in general. All made the CB radio popular to regular people. And my dad was a Radio Shack fanatic as he was an electrical engineer.

And…from 1975 to 1980 I lived in Houston, so there's that. :)

Im pretty sure my dad picked up his CB as a kit from Radioshack as well ... a Realistic IIRC. Being that he was into radios, HAM etc, he was buying componentry & cleaners for repairs/maintenence etc. We had a couple of them over the 80's with that ubiquitous magnetic whip tail antenna. Another hobby of his that IIRC started at a Radio shack was RC planes. I was very sad to see Radioshacks go the way of the dodo. Spent alot of time in them as a kid.
 
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I was very sad to see Radioshacks go the way of the dodo. Spent alot of time in them as a kid.
Yeah, that was always odd to me. RS was the one 'tech' place that was always there. Before Federated, before Circuit City, before Software ETC, before Comp USA, before Best Buy, before Fry's Electronics, etc. You'd have thought they would have changed with the times. They did to a certain extent, but they wouldn't let the other stuff go (circuitboards, switches, etc). No one was buying that stuff and their stores were too small that they could try and be like Fry's Electronics.

Of course, online pretty much killed all the rest of them anyway (including Fry's Electronics). I think Best Buy is still around because it doesn't just offer electronics/tech and they also have a strong online presence.

Our first game console (a Pong knockoff) came from RS. My dad followed up with a TRS-80 CoCo in 1981.
 
I've been putting my newest revived acquisition, a long-forlorn A1150 15" MacBook Pro, through its paces. Some questionable software installations led me to fire up MacPorts and install and run clamav (since I don't think I'd really trust whatever version of AVG, AVAST or Avira is out there for 32-bit 10.6, even if I could find it).

Realistically, I don't think I've been compromised by any viruses or malware, but installing and running something from MacPorts was a fun little project to do (since most of my attempts to compile/build software from source fail miserably).
 
Well…it was that whole time period. Convoy (the movie), Smokie and The Bandit, BJ & the Bear, trucking in general. All made the CB radio popular to regular people. And my dad was a Radio Shack fanatic as he was an electrical engineer.

And…from 1975 to 1980 I lived in Houston, so there's that. :)

Hey that’s where I lived back then! The interstate I alluded to earlier was the I-45, somewhere between Houston and Huntsville, as our destination was Huntsville State Park. At that age, I’d only seen Smokey and the Bandit because of its prolific appearances on cable TV (there were times when I swear it was on virtually every single day). I was muuuuch older before I saw Convoy, and I still haven’t seen BJ and the Bear.

I sincerely wish I could have been un-self-conscious or un-self-aware at age 9 or 10 (which would have been around that time when we went camping). I think that phase had been siphoned away by the time I was maybe five, as I have a constellation of memories from age six onward in which a sense of hyper self-consciousness and self-awareness was, for worse or better, already firmly in place.
 
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Hey that’s where I lived back then! The interstate I alluded to earlier was the I-45, somewhere between Houston and Huntsville, as our destination was Huntsville State Park. At that age, I’d only seen Smokey and the Bandit because of its prolific appearances on cable TV (there were times when I swear it was on virtually every single day). I was muuuuch older before I saw Convoy, and I still haven’t seen BJ and the Bear.

I sincerely wish I could have been un-self-conscious or un-self-aware at age 9 or 10 (which would have been around that time when we went camping). I think that phase had been siphoned away by the time I was maybe five, as I have a constellation of memories from age six onward in which a sense of hyper self-consciousness and self-awareness was, for worse or better, already firmly in place.
We were in an area of Houston where the home development had a lot of streets that started with the name "Sage". Periodically, I visit using Google Street View because that address they made me memorize when I was a kid. My dad put in a lamp post at that house and street view says it's still there.

I was okay to watch BJ & the Bear until a few episodes started showing a few more girls than my parents liked. Somehow, though, Wonder Woman was deemed okay. :)

My being unaware of myself wasn't necessarily a good thing. I was unaware of how ridiculous I looked or appeared to others when I did certain things - which cause snickers and snide comments I either didn't catch or didn't understand at the time. That's what I meant by that. It definitely was not self-confidence!
 
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Update on this- so the a1278 was free to me but Ive found out the trackpad is bad - works half the time & then doesnt across multiple OSs, so will need to plop in a new one. Not hard. On the Ubuntu side of things, this machine actually runs pretty well with just 2gb ram. Swapped wifi & GPU drivers and installed neofetch and all is working pretty good (FF was crashing the GUI before the driver swap. Since I have to replace the track pad, I am highly tempted to drop in 8gb ram as well since the machine will be open. Will clean and repaste as this particular book gets noticeably hotter than my others while Im at it.
Aaaand I borked my ubuntu install Fing with the gpu drivers. :D It was working great until it wasn't lol. Guess I'll back up the lion install on it to an external, reformat and try again. What did I do with early intel today? Absolutely nothing productive lol.

Well not entirely true. My son and I are playing through SMB Lost levels on his white imac 5,1. That has been a blast.
 
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I live in a city with a lot of freight rail traffic, and I’ve long wanted to listen to the communications of the operators and engineers — not because I’d have any idea what they’re talking about, but because I would find it interesting and even calming.
I have one of these SDR’s myself and I have never been able to listen to train conversations. Maybe I don’t know the frequencies. I have however often listened to airplane signals. They’re always just above the FM radio frequencies and it’s quite a lot of fun to hear the pilots speak about mundane stuff like codewords. They never make jokes!
 
I have one of these SDR’s myself and I have never been able to listen to train conversations. Maybe I don’t know the frequencies. I have however often listened to airplane signals. They’re always just above the FM radio frequencies and it’s quite a lot of fun to hear the pilots speak about mundane stuff like codewords.

I’m not sure where you might be, but depending on location, you may be able to find some of your local freight railway carrier frequencies on radioreference-dot-com. I’m currently on the page of the local freight frequencies used by one of the two major rail carriers based here, and this is just one example:

1629100137544.png


They never make jokes!

Flying is serious business!
 
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I’m not sure where you might be, but depending on location, you may be able to find some of you local freight railway carrier frequencies on radioreference-dot-com. I’m currently on the page of the local freight frequencies used by one of the two major rail carriers based here, and this is just one example:
Thanks, I’ve looked on that site before and there’s little information for the Netherlands. I have a feeling they use some sort of encoded system similar to the system emergency services use (which is easy to pick up, but annoying to try to decode). I used to be able to pickup a lot of truckers on a walkie talkie when I was a kid but I’ve had limited luck with my current antenna setup for my SDR.
I believe passenger trains use mobile internet for communication nowadays, but I’m not sure as we still have a lot of trains from the 70’s in service. Interesting stuff!
 
Correct. It's a very cheap way to listen to ham radio, air craft, frs/gmrs, shortwave radio, local am/fm radio, etc. I got a 2 pack of these usb sticks with antenna's for $33.00. Software to use with them can be found for OS X, Linux and Windows for free. Interestingly enough, GQRX (the software i'm using) uses QT for the GUI, and is also found in macports, so i may try to build it for snow leopard and ppc linux at a later date.

Cheers

I gave installing gqrx a try from macports. Out of ~165 dependencies required for it, I managed to get all but these to install (with one, “stack”, producing an error stating that the system must be running at least Mountain Lion in order to install):

sh-4.3# port -v install gqrx ---> Computing dependencies for gqrx........Warning: qt3d does not exist in Qt 5.3.2 ... The following dependencies will be installed: bladeRF gnuradio gr-fcdproplus gr-osmosdr pandoc py37-matplotlib py37-pyqt5 py37-pyqtgraph stack uhd

sh-4.3# port install stack ---> Computing dependencies for stack ---> Fetching archive for stack ---> Attempting to fetch stack-2.7.3_0+prebuilt.darwin_10.x86_64.tbz2 from http://packages.macports.org/stack ---> Attempting to fetch stack-2.7.3_0+prebuilt.darwin_10.x86_64.tbz2 from https://ywg.ca.packages.macports.org/mirror/macports/packages/stack ---> Attempting to fetch stack-2.7.3_0+prebuilt.darwin_10.x86_64.tbz2 from http://mse.uk.packages.macports.org/stack ---> Fetching distfiles for stack Error: stack @2.7.3 requires OS X 10.8 or later Error: Failed to fetch stack: unsupported Mac OS X version Error: See /opt/local/var/macports/logs/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_tarballs_ports_lang_stack/stack/main.log for details. Error: Follow https://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets if you believe there is a bug. Error: Processing of port stack failed sh-4.3#


Is it feasible (or in the case of “stack”, possible) to manually build the above components in a SL environment, for use in SL, if macports is unable to install them?
 
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I did a little digging because i don't have time to dig out that machine yet, and found an older build that claims to run on snow leopard. You can grab it here. It lacks bookmarks/saved stations, but otherwise seems to work the same as recent builds. I tested v8 on 10.7 w/out issue.

Cheers
 

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I did a little digging because i don't have time to dig out that machine yet, and found an older build that claims to run on snow leopard. You can grab it here. It lacks bookmarks/saved stations, but otherwise seems to work the same as recent builds. I tested v8 on 10.7 w/out issue.

Cheers

I can at least confirm it does launch on SL, but testing will have to wait until after I order the USB stick:

1629442863712.png
 
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The trackpad on an 08 aluminum MB I had was wonky donkey and would not work across macOS or linux. Before buying a new one, I decided to give this one a clean and adjustment to see if it was just badly out of alignment. What was suspect is that one tap worked fine but physical click did not so Older kiddo at bestie birthday party & younger one zonked out in a coma, gave me a good 30 minute block to tear this thing down enough to check it out.

First thing, the ifixit guide for removing a TP on this model computer is just wrong. It goes as far as to have you pull out the lobo to remove the trackpad which is idiotic & leads you to potentially create many more problems where you don’t have to even touch the machine in the first place. Anyhow, I noticed how loose the TP was - it had a click before it actually clicked if that makes any sense. adjusting in the tri-wing adjuster took that slack out and immediately gave the TP I’d say, 98% click consistency. Since I had it apart I yanked the TP out and cleaned its bezel, it’s contact and the frame it sits in. Stuck it back together and success. At least for now. The click is a bit stiffer than on my others but it is consistent now and besides, I am a fan of the one touch tap functionality for a lot of things.
4F865CA1-15AC-4C99-9470-CEAB595A53AF.jpeg
Anyhow, I am happy with the result. Now back on to finding a Linux distro that is stable and I like.
 
Today, after some trial-and-error, my C2D built a 64-bit version of Interweb 60.9.5.

1629749918500.png


The only thing which is perplexing is the size of the binary itself: it’s almost one-sixth the size of its immediate predecessor (renamed as Interweb-64 60.9.4.app):

1629749790346.png


Now I’m wondering what I might have done wrong. I mean, it launches fine, but the discrepancy is… a lot.

1629750261984.png


And since I’m nerding out, here’s the .mozconfig I used:

export HOST_CC=/opt/local/bin/clang-mp-3.7 export HOST_CXX=/opt/local/bin/clang++-mp-3.7 #TARGET_CPU=i386 TARGET_CPU=x86_64 CC="clang -arch $TARGET_CPU" CXX="clang++ -arch $TARGET_CPU" # These must be set for cross builds, and don't hurt straight builds. RANLIB="${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}ranlib" AR="${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}ar" AS=$CC LD=ld STRIP="${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}strip" OTOOL="${TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX}otool" export CC CXX HOST_CC HOST_CXX RANLIB AR AS LD STRIP OTOOL #CROSS_COMPILE=1 ac_add_options --target=x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 #ac_add_options --target=i386-apple-darwin10.8.0 ac_add_options --enable-macos-target=10.6 ac_add_options --enable-application=browser ac_add_options --with-macos-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.7.sdk ac_add_options --disable-tests ac_add_options --enable-optimize=-O2 ac_add_options --disable-debug ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter #ac_add_options --disable-updater ac_add_options --disable-necko-wifi ac_add_options --disable-safe-browsing ac_add_options --disable-gamepad export MOZ_TELEMETRY_REPORTING=0 export MOZ_ADDON_SIGNING=0 export MOZ_REQUIRE_SIGNING=0
 
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Did you run ./mach package ? That will create the .dmg. If not, it looks like you are using the binary, but it's linked to the build tree. Hence the small size. You'll find the dmg in /obj_blah_blah/dist.

The packaging process might error out at the end. That's fine. The dmg will still be produced.

Edit: Due note that 64-bit builds lose the ability to use 32-bit plugins. (quicktime etc)

Cheers
 
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