Albert

Funny, that's actually one of two different parallel cards I bought, trying to get them to work. Ultimately had to buy a machine with a built-in parallel port. Amusingly after I got the second machine working with the built-in port, I was able to install this very card and get the second parallel port working through the VM, so now I can have two different devices connected full-time, without having to use a parallel port switcher.

Those generally don't work very well with anything beyond printers. In this case, I am using older parallel-based chip programmers, and it's difficult to get them to work with anything but built-in parallel ports. I ended up buying two machines on eBay -- the first one didn't actually have a built-in parallel port (the machine pictured in the auction did, so I was peeved about that), and two different parallel cards I bought would not work, either. Ended up buying a second machine that did arrive with a built-in parallel port, and I was able to get the devices to work on that one, using a Windows 2000 VM (one of the devices does not have software that will work on anything newer!) inside Windows 7 and an older version of VMWare Player. Took a lot of work, but now I can program some older devices I wasn't able to program previously. ..Al

Yeah, that really sucks. After one cable came free from its anchor not too long ago, and another cable simply snapped, it was deemed too dangerous to repair. So this was the inevitable result. They were hoping to deconstruct it gracefully and not lose everything. Even the three towers snapped. I'm hoping it can be rebuilt anew once this is cleaned up, but that's not something I expect to happen quickly. ..Al

Great! 😄

Here's the SpaceX stream I'm watching: Was there three years ago for a crew resupply launch as part of a #NASASocial, for two full days at NASA with access to scientists flying missions to the ISS, talks from various people involved with the program (including the then NASA administrator), got to see the pad with the Falcon 9, and much more. And of course got to see the launch from the closest we could legally get. Was an amazing experience! I think I have a thousand photos and videos from that trip. 😄 These photos are from this January when I was out there again: Bonus, we got to see them unloading a Falcon 9 booster from the drone ship after boarding a cruise ship at Port Canaveral:

No, I have not, but thanks for the tip. I did look at some local marketplace groups on Facebook as well as on Craigslist and found a few good candidates, and hopefully I can buy one of them today. If that doesn't work out, I'll take a look to see what Discount Electronics has.

I need an older PC that has an integrated parallel port. Preferably one that can run XP (I can install it if need be if it has something newer installed like Windows 7). I need to use some old device (chip) programmers that need to be connected to the computer via parallel port. If you have one and you're interested in selling it, please send me a PM. Thanks!

Yeah, that's why I want to install it to an external drive (fast Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD). However, I discovered that Catalina will not allow me to boot from an external drive for security reasons, so you have to first boot into the Recovery partition(holding Cmd-R while booting) and then change that setting. But for some reason I cannot even boot into the recovery partition, it simply doesn't work. And this is a machine (newer Mac mini) I bought earlier this year, so it was partitioned and setup with Catalina from the factory. Really unimpressed with all the mistakes Apple has been making in hardware and software the last five years. I don't have time right now to really mess with it too much further until things slow down for me. Curious what you think about Big Sur once you've had a chance to play around with it a bit. I looked at this thread on MacRumors to verify that all the apps I use on a regular basis work fine (or mostly fine) in Big Sur, so I should be good to go once I can get it installed. Those new Apple Silicon processors look quite slick and are damn fast. Waiting to see what they do for the higher-end machines (to-end Mac Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, 16" MacBook Pro).

I was going to install Big Sur on an external drive and play with it, but yesterday was a bit of a disaster in terms of people having problems downloading and/or installing it, plus many cases where it just borked someone's machine and they have to reinstall Catalina from scratch. I'll hold off until at least an 11.1 release. It even slowed down launching of apps for people not using Big Sur, as their notary service (that apparently attempts to validate apps every time you launch them) went down. I was having problems yesterday just launching apps, where they'd bounce in the dock for 30+ seconds, at which point they'd either fail to launch or eventually launch. A bit of a clusterfuck.

It does look pretty damn good. I may have to try this out with my three 27" 4K monitor setup. 🙂

Love that photo! 😄

That thunderstorm woke me up this morning around 6am and it was pouring for quite some time, then still rained for a while after that.

Welp, I will be content to just watch people do that drop.. The sound of him hitting the tree, ouch!

Thanks! It's been a while since I've ridden that, glad to know it's still rideable.