The funk never ends

As many of you from BSoD have noticed the show has been canceled due to a severe lack of help from the community. I have been griping about it for quite some time with the honest hopes of my blunt honesty it would perk people into helping out. After all of the unreliable boasts of segments, a busy and moderately unstable social life, and proceeding health issues, I do not have the resources to maintain the show with just the help of Mustang alone. He has been on the edge of severe diabetes for quite some time and I do not want to put any more burden on him than his health and family already do. I have plenty of segment content myself, but this isnt going to be The Foxx Show, ever, despite the fact that 90% of the fans of BSoD think I am the main man behind it all. I will take credit in getting things started, taking off in the direction we have, and sustaining interesting content for all these years, but I will never be the viable dictator commanding people to come forward to help that people assume me to be.

Onto my own personal affairs. Scuba from the BSoD community sent me a Wyse S10 terminal. It sports a 300Mhz AMD Geoge CPU, DDR RAM, and a typical 44 pin IDE header. The hardware is very similar to the WebDT 366. I have been trying to work my magic on it but one thing has really been putting roadblocks in my way, and thats nazi-computing. Wyse designed the BIOS so it will boot from USB only if it contains a specific partition and disk image layout which is 100% proprietary to their hardware. This thing is just a small form factor computer with a crippling BIOS so they can make sure you keep crawling back to them for support.

With the custom USB Booting aside I popped my Compact Flash card from my WebDT 366 into the Wyse S10 with the aid of an IDE to CF adapter and 44 pin ribbon cable. Besides the fact that the Windows XP install had absolutely no drivers for the hardware and I couldnt log into it, the thing boot just fine as expected. I could easily deploy a Linux distro from another host computer then tailor it once its in the Wyse S10. There is also the option to do a Network Install of an OS using PXE NetBoot, that is something I havent tried before so I will give it a whirl when I get some spare time.

The WebDT 366 is coming along as well. I caught a great deal on some Memorex 8GB Traveldrives. They are old but as soon as I saw them they looked a wee bit bigger than a typical Compact Flash or Microdrive. I decided to roll the dice and use my technophile intuition and I got three of them for about $8 a piece. As soon as I got them I popped one open and my assumption was correct, 8GB Microdrives! I tossed one onto the WebDT 366 IDE bus and installed XP a little hastily. In my excitement I didnt pay much attention to the finer details of the install so right now its far from optimal, however the Microdrive is operating in UDMA mode 2, which is a max transfer speed of 33.3MB/sec compared to the Compact Flash cards PIO Mode 4 which is only 16.5MB/sec. Any attempt to force these cards to operate any faster using BIOS settings make the OS crash almost instantly. I know these speeds sound like a ball busting crawl but hey, this unit is durable!

Something else I found out while doing all of this work with Compact Flash and Microdrives. I thought I had fried my CF cards because they wouldnt boot an OS anymore. Assuming I blew out some of the NAND gates in the MBR section of the cards, which is why I got the microdrives. After my second install of XP on one of the cards which I used for a different device I came across the same issue I had with the CF cards! Using a simple linux command recommended to me by another BSoD'er, Modat7, I did a full binary wipe of the drive inside of a linux virtual machine with the drive on a USB adapter. After the process was done I went back to work installing the OS on the native host hardware and dont'cha know it, it worked flawlessly. Unfortunately I cant exactly replicate the cause of this problem, or explain why it happens, but now I know how to identify and fix it.

With a little more time and patience I should have the DT366 in a field ready test phase. Ive unbricked my Zipit Z2, and the WebTV 2 RM4100 is running different OS flavors just nicely. The RM4100 needs a peck more work with some hardware hacks though. I have also reworked my Nokia n800 with a more stable and useful configuration for field work. With the help of Metatron I was able to get my WiSpy hooked up but the USB is so unstable its pretty much worthless as a 2.4Ghz spectrum analyzer. I will try out the WebDT soon but I need to focus on the OS and fine tune it to squeeze every bit, byte, and nibble of resources out of it.

Over the holiday I rebuilt the battery pack for a Microsoft Pharos Bluetooth GPS which I am quite proud of. Its sporting an interchangeable Ni-MH 3-Cell pack.


I also built a TNC-x kit which is (hopefully) going to air on BSoD once we kick back into production. I had to do some very minor modification to the serial port hookup which involved having to make a DIP socket Piggyback to get the leads out to the connector. I didnt have enough room to hook into the onboard DB-9 serial port and I didnt want to solder leads onto the PCB itself. I felt that it could be a cause for failure in the future.



In time all of these devices will be modular with one another adding onto their capabilities. They will combine to make different types of terminals, scanners, desktops, and portable mobile mayhem generators.