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).


Written on the Silicon Graphics IRIS Indigo R4k.