It's surprising how often I can get an okay-ish GPS signal indoors... it seems to have a lot more to do with building materials than anything else.
Multipath reflections means the location (and thus timing accuracy) wanders a lot, but it's still great down to microseconds if you can get 5+ satellites in view.
In the spirit of a 1990s time server is I also got Timelord + Tardis working (time service over AppleTalk, tested on a Mac SE/30, courtesy of netatalk) and tested multiple NTPv1, NTPv3, and NTPv4 clients through this (and soon an Xserve G5).
It's less about getting the 1995 hardware working, and more about rebuilding the actual time server to serve the original purpose, for the next 5-10 years at least.
I'm planning on using this chassis to build up an NTP Stratum 1 server for the global NTP pool, hopefully later this year. I thought it would be a lot more fun than letting the box go to e-waste.
And leaving the guts completely untouched means I can do a full restoration someday, if I want.
The two main things I'd need to do:
1. Modify the RF chain so I can use normal GPS antennas that don't down-convert the frequency.
2. Modify the DC bias voltage so it doesn't fry GPS antennas.
After that, I could work on patching firmware, but I'd probably just use the original guts as a frequency reference and leave time to other hardware.
I could even run the Pi and the old hardware simultaneously. The old hardware providing IRIG-B, 10 MHz, and 1 PPS references that are a little more accurate (it has a TCXO, haven't measured its timing accuracy yet). And the Pi could provide PTP and NTP, using a more modern GPS chip which even supports dual band and survey-in for more accuracy.
I'm spitballing a bit, but it looks like an absolutely-correct antenna for your clock might be a Symmetricom 140-615. There's a couple (literally two) on the ebay right now that look minty-fresh; they're not the cheapest things, but they're cheap compared to many other things in the low-volume RF world. :)
If that's the right antenna (just because I think it is doesn't mean that you should agree), then that would certainly simplify the RF side of the project. No hardware mods required at all. It takes 12v and does internal downconversion to the right frequencies.
After that, you only have the daunting task of patching firmware -- if it turns out (from testing) that it patching is even required. (IIRC, you speculated in the video that it might already be patched and I don't disagree with that outlook at all.)
Both legs of this thing represent interesting projects. I find that time is strangely rewarding to get exactly-right even when that doesn't really matter for the application at-hand. It's a good kind of weird.
(I really need to fire up my own little GPS-sourced Pi Zero NTP server some day soon. Chasing temperature-based clock deviations on that was actually kind of fun.)
I thought it was a fun video (the first I've watched of yours, though I read the blog). And I'd honestly forgotten about the Telstra outage even though it was news here
The US has done tests with eLoran as well. The receivers are quite expensive and the signal isn't permanent yet, so it's more of a lab thing right now. Also experiments with BPS (Broadcast Positioning System) using high power TV transmitters to distribute time and position in urban areas (very hard to overpower that signal).
I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s.
I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really.
Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.
Somehow the RISC-V designs mostly seem to have more coherent PCIe implementations, meaning some devices are easier to get running without the arm64 quirks drivers have to work around.
Drivers still need tweaking, most of the time, since most are still built assuming an amd64 world.
Common misconception. They don't franchise in the sense everyone normally means it. They call "managing the store" a franchise.
If you "franchise" a CFA, you don't own the store, you don't own the land, they severely control your income, you are required to physically work at the store (in other words, they control you as a laborer), and you can't re-sell the franchise since you don't own it. You have no equity. They refer to you as an operator.
When you leave the business, CFA picks someone else to give it to. You get paid nothing because you never owned it.
They're also very weird in picking their operators. I can't speak for every CFA, but where I live all the operators are white evangelical Christians. This is probably a side-effect of CFA's policy of not letting anyone who has debt be an operator, and buying everything without financing is a big thing in the evangelical Christian community thanks to Dave Ramsey.
It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.
I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).
Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.
Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S
More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.
I was recently looking for a cheap IOT camera in a specific form factor from aliexpress and the results were so irrelevant I had to develop alternative strategies like finding one good result and checking under its recommendations or image searching from the one good result to see other using the same picture.
I've used a number of mini PCs and Arm SBCs with 8 GB of RAM. Most casual use (browsing, writing, media playback) is no problem, but using "creative" software (image editors, NLEs, DAWs, etc.) quickly gets annoying.
Yeah, not sure why Dell has such a spread on US vs rest-of-world pricing here.
I know some have mentioned the $699/$599 price could also change a bit in the US come November. The internal assembly and parts seem like they'd cost Dell a little more than Apple's cost building the Neo, so maybe in the US they're selling them closer to at cost, and subsidizing it with the Windows exclusivity and price elsewhere? Not sure, but it stinks the price only applies here. It's a good deal at $699. Harder to justify at $1,000+.
Easy, it's priced much lower in the US on purpose so that reviewers will directly compare it with the Neo to get more favorable reviews, while in fact it should be compared to the Air from a price perspective (and then it will lose on everything big time except the 120Hz display). It's all misleading marketing.
MacBooks simply have the best value proposition. Compared to the competition at similar price point they are much faster, have much better build quality, better displays, better battery life, less fan noise, etc. Also much higher resale value.
Value proposition is still subjective. Apple should be making money hand-over-fist from the AI boom, but Nvidia is the one that wooed over the datacenter with their high-performance ARM chipsets. Apple's unwillingness to support CUDA cost them a market that was worth almost $2-3 trillion, and forces local CoreML to compete with CUDNN in ways that it can never triumph.
Macs are great if you want a Mac. If you want a flexible workstation, a gaming PC, a retrocomputing build, an inference server, a programming environment, or a headless VPS, macOS doesn't even attempt to cover your use-case. It's the reason why the Mac install base is still vying for pole position after 40 years of "you're holding it wrong" to their users.
Seems like it's targeted at students. They're probably expecting to sell a bunch of them at the time of "back to school" and they'll increase the price after.
At least for Europe, and more specifically France, laptop use in classrooms in high school, is still not a thing. So that would explain why they don't do it everywhere the same and the huge price difference.
Multipath reflections means the location (and thus timing accuracy) wanders a lot, but it's still great down to microseconds if you can get 5+ satellites in view.
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