Rick's b.log - 2017/08/07
It is the 24th of November 2024 You are 3.133.145.17, pleased to meet you!

Lolita

Mom asked if it was cosplay. I don't think so, as I think cosplay is when you are pretending to be your favourite animated character. This just seems more like something she'd wear normally - you know, in an alternative world directed by Tim Burton - so I'm guessing it's (Classic) Lolita - "cute and girly" without going as ridiculously over the top with ribbons and lace as Sweet Lolita is prone to do...that much lace only looks good in black. ☺
Mom was rather less complimentary more judgemental - but then I've watched a hell of a lot of Japanese TV and these sorts of characters crop up from time to time...unless you're watching the surreal film Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma monogatari) where one of the lead characters takes this to extremes.

Pregnant

Pi2

It arrived this morning, in an antistatic bag with "(R) No display o/p" written on it in pen. Not a good start. I powered down my Pi and took an image of my µSD card on the PC. I had been meaning to anyway so this wasn't a problem. I hooked the video adaptor and mouse to the Pi2, inserted the µSD card with RISC OS on it, and powered it up.
I dunno. Worked fine for me. Maybe whoever had this before me was trying NOOBS? I haven't managed to get bugger all out of recent versions of NOOBS on any of my Pi machines. That's why I installed OSMC directly rather than via NOOBS.

I powered down and moved the hardware (OLED, RTC, reset button) to the new Pi. I had to solder a header to the two holes marked RUN for the reset switch. Rather ironic that is is marked RUN when in reality PANIC! is more what that's for. Since the machine was open, I added heatsinks to the SoC and to the USB/network chip. Well, cooling is a good thing, right?

Since everything was all over the place, I decided to remove the older power supply, that might have struggled with a Pi2 (it was rated 2.1A but was also running the Vonets) and replace it with a nifty little 5 port USB supply that I picked up for €10 in the sales. It is powering the Vonets, the Pi2, a tiny (1") fan attached the the Vonets, and the laptop cooling fan you can see in the picture below blowing air over the Pi2 and the power supply. This last fan will come down when the weather gets colder.
There's a socket remaining. It is intended for the HDMI to VGA adaptor, but I left that on its original power supply as it was too much bother to rummage around under the PC to retrieve the lead. So, yeah, I have a socket free if I need to charge my phone...

In case you hadn't noticed from the text on the OLED display, not only have I traded one core for four times that (not that RISC OS can use them yet!), I've also traded 256MiB for four times that.

While the Pi1 ran at a flat 700MHz (by default), this Pi runs at 900MHz stepping back to 600MHz when the machine is not busy. The Wimp's busy/idle detection is a bit flakey but it works well enough.

In terms of software, I've only needed to make two changes so far. The first - nothing to do with the hardware - is that UKRD have switched Eagle to AAC audio today. DigitalCD doesn't appear to support this, so I needed to change URL to pick up the MP3 stream (suffix ".mp3" to the URL, in case anybody else is listening to a UKRD station). I've had Eagle on a lot these past few days, my network card was reporting a total data transfer of around a gigabyte and a third - most of that will be streaming radio. ☺
The other change was SparkFS failed. There was an update on David's site... a zip file. Uh... But I knew that there was a self-extracting read-only version of SparkFS on the ROOL site, so I downloaded that to unpack the updater to update SparkFS. Lateral thinking, see?

Other than that, it's pretty much the same as my previous workhorse, only with oodles of memory.

Oh. The RAMdisc maxes out at half a gigabyte. But, half a gigabyte. Hahahaha! I remember a time when RISC OS machines were available with half a megabyte (A305), one megabyte was a standard entry level system (~£745 for an A3000, ~£1030 for an A310, ~£1380 for an A410), and four was something for the rich (A440 ~£2870!). Prices from September 1989 price list.
Ah - it stops before the 512MB boundary - I guess RAMFS can't handle "large drives".

Your comments:

Gavin Wraith, 7th August 2017, 22:26

My youngest daughter brought home some DVDs of Japanese films some years back. I thought that Kamikaze Girls was rather sweet. I also liked The Happiness of the Katakuris. Mind you, they are not in the same class as films from Ozu or Kurosawa, but they are good wry social comment all the same.

Rick, 8th August 2017, 00:34

Don't get me wrong - I *like* Kamikaze Girls. Saw it on Film4 then got the DVD from Amazon.  However, as an example of Lolita taken to extremes, the character of Momoko serves well.

Rick, 8th August 2017, 17:28

Fuuu.......    Unpacked RISC OS source archive to a half gigabyte RAMdisc.  Unpacked BZ2 to TAR in 32 seconds, then took SIXTEEN seconds to unpack 8382 files (in 2439 directories).    Building RISC OS utterly from scratch. Started at 17:12:14, finished at 17:22:03, so a little shy of ten minutes.    An entire ROM built from source archive in under a quarter hour! I think a little pee just came out...

David Pilling, 11th August 2017, 13:38

I'm not sure that people spotting is PC. But anyway... when I were a lad I used to spot nuns and tramps (as well as cars, busses and railway engines, oh yes and trams). Nuns and tramps don't have numbers and cameras were not as readily available.    There was a story in the papers about a small village where coaches of Chinese tourists would keep stopping, no one had any idea why, and when they eventually asked, it was just because it was different to anything they'd seen before.    If you want to see Japanese tourists, come to Blackpool! (I lie). If you want to see Japanese tourists go to the home of Beatrix Potter (Lake District). BP is big in Japan.

Rick, 11th August 2017, 23:40

Not so much people spotting as noticing something quite out of the ordinary. :-)  As for PC... meh. I'll take the Gene Hunt attitude to that.    Now my Pi has silly amounts of memory on-board, I can play with Otter-browser. It takes 130MiB just to start up (91MiB of that are shared libraries). It takes a further ~20MiB just to open and load this page. Let's not forget that it takes about five minutes to enumerate fonts at first startup, and annoyingly tries (and usually crashes) if something feeds a font from a website...    Meanwhile NetSurf takes ~20MiB to load AND display this page. It's simpler (rudimentary scripting) but it's a lot quicker.    Still, it's nice to know there is a script-capable browser available on RISC OS, even if adfly kills it. :-)

zahidshaam, 3rd August 2020, 02:48

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