All good things...

M0RVB April 22, 2026

So this is my last blog post and this blog will be deleted in a couple of days. I simply have too many things to attend to in life than keep the information here in any way fresh or useful. There are now so many sources I am just adding to the noise.

These days running a web server - I host this blog on my own hardware - consists of security patching, log monitoring and threat removal, plus a bit of actual publishing along the way. If you don't do security monitoring and patching you become part of the problem. The server does other things so I need to keep an eye on it. After some logfile analysis I can see that over a typical day the vast majority of accesses are search engine spiders, some RSS grabbers, many threats, and one or two actual humans. And there are a lot of attacks, I can spot them a mile off because having been actively running websites of all sizes since 1992 I can look over a log file and easily spot them.

So there you have it. Most of my posts here are essentially for my own benefit with little actual information and nothing new to the world. There are far more appropriate platforms for stuff like that, and so you can find me on Mastodon and Blue Sky.

You should also read:

M0RVB April 29, 2024

Goodbye Mr. Chip...

"Zilog has called time on the Z80 CPU." (https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/opinion_z80/) Wow. Actually I had no idea (through never having checked) that it was still being produced. And a fine chip it was too. I never built a system from wires up using the Z80 though. My first system, designed, built from chips and wire-wrap was an 8080 system, hand programmed to control al x-ray diffractometer. This was decades ago now but I still remember it, although I have no photos unfortunately. The system had a timer chip for a 1-second count and was interface to a Nuclear Engineering (I think it was!) counter that used nixies. But I did at least use Z80s, just they came as boards. The first was a Transom Triton computer and by then I was programming in Turbo pascal - back then this was really neat as one could have procedures full of assembler code which made interfacing easy. Later I used Gemini boards and that also gave the ability to have a graphics card. By then my interfacing to the diffractometer included a stepper motor and shaft encoder to control the arc motor. In the end there were two sets of Gemini Z80 boards, one…

M0RVB February 15, 2019

Good old days...

So I now have a Creed 444 teleprinter. I've been after a teleprinter for about 2 years now. When I was still at school I used to buy, strip, repair and sell Creed 7E's - maybe 7 or 8 passed through my hands and on to others for pocket money. Back then I had two 7Es for myself, as well as a tape reader, tape punch and a valved TU hanging off a B40 / B41 setup. Weight was not an issue in my basement workshop... But I've never had one of the more modern units like the 444 (yes, modern is a relative term here!) Having manhandled the beast from the car to the workshop I now need to learn how it is put together so I can be sure it's not going to fly into bits when I power it up. However, hopefully I'll get it running and then get an interface set up. I doubt it will be allowed in the shack (aka the little bedroom) so it may well have to run in the workshop - but that does give the excuse to acquire a nice old comms receiver to go with...