Sunday mix of texts (health, bikes, computers)
==============================================
Inevitable happened: combination of hot weather, stress at work before
the end of June and other minor things have derailed me. I am
exhausted, experiencing some minor health problems and so.
Thus I have to stop cycling for some time and have to limit all other
activities (including work ones), too.
So at the moment I doing almost nothing. I downloaded a new portion of
Italian music which I supported on one Italian crowdfunding portal
before few months. They sent me a link for download of their production
a few days ago.
I ordered a new saddle for my Brompton. This time a better ventilated
one. When I will be able to use my bike once again I will find if it
helps or not.
And I have turned my SGI Indigo in our cottage on (I am actually
writing this text on it). While it is the "entry" machine (with just 2D
graphics board limited to the 1024x768) is is still pretty decent
machine. It is not connected to any network but it has the 3.5" floppy
drive so I am able to transfer data with use of 3.5" floppy disk.
Actually, I have (an USB) floppy drive both at home and at work so this
approach actually works. Yes, it's limited to small data (these disks
can accept 1.44 MB at best) but for text files (C, TeX, XFig, BASIC and
other such file types) or for small images it is more than enough.
The problem is that the IRIX strictly uses old DOS 8.3 filename size so
longer file names are or damaged or (in some cases) these files are not
handled at all. But one can always user the tar(1) and the gzip(!) or
the zip(1) to pack the files.
By the way, the hardware is:
1 100 MHZ IP20 Processor
FPU: MIPS R4010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0
CPU: MIPS R4000 Processor Chip Revision: 3.0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Data cache size: 8 Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 8 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte
Main memory size: 128 Mbytes
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision C
Disk drive / removable media: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0: 720K/1.44M floppy
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Iris Audio Processor: revision 10
Graphics board: LG1
As you can see, it just a 100 MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM. That's enough
to run the full UNIX system with GUI (X11 and Motif based) with
programs. It is probably much slower than your current phone (if your
phone is slower or has smaller RAM that my workstation then please send
me an e-mail to my account "jirka" on the S.D.F. server).
