>Why can't I pay to express my consumer preferences?
Cool, I'll start a HW-FOSS robo-vac company in California tailored to your consumer preferences, that will be profitable without selling your data. Buy one for only $4,999. Orders start now.
...fast forward 12 months ...
Damn, why did we already go out of business, I thought according to consumer preferences, people would pay 10x markup for privacy compared to spyware Chinese models?
You'd deserve to go out of business for charging customers $4,999.
You could make a healthy profit selling a robot vacuum for under $200 although you'd probably want models that cost a bit more for customers who wanted something more fancy (https://cookierobotics.com/060/)
> Why can't I pay to express my consumer preferences? Why must I deliberately buy broken stuff and fix it myself?
I guess it comes down to "market failure."
Many people would probably say that they care about security/privacy/maintainability of their electronic devices, but in practice they buy based on cost and features, and they remain oblivious to security/privacy/maintainability unless and until there's a major problem.
This is probably rational behavior for most consumers:
There's no real way for them to evaluate claims about security/privacy/maintainability of their devices. Basically every Internet-connected device advertises an enormous list of security-flavored bullet points. "Supports IEEE 802.11g/n/ac/ax, including Wi-Fi Easy Connect for secure passwordless connections", "Secure Boot to ensure only authorized firmware runs on the device", "Hardware cryptographic acceleration", "24/7 monitoring by our dedicated security incident team", yadda yadda.
But those claims don't in any way cover the massive attack surface of a cloud-connected device where the server and client sides have been co-developed with a bunch of rushed and dangerous assumptions about how neither the client to the server will ever talk to any misconfigured or adversarial peer. Finding those kinds of security vulnerabilities is basically my stock in trade.
I don’t know, I have a cheap Chinese USB adapter and it read a 40 Mb hard drive from a 286 laptop just fine, so… plus larger (hundreds of MBs) disks too.
I've got an adapter that only goes up to 40GB because it's 20 yrs old.
ATA (aka IDE or EIDE) was all they had before SATA so these adapters were all over the place.
WTF is a Pi for?
There's small little chips that do exactly this interface, still probably plenty available surplus for cheap since ATA is not popular any more.
Any ATA HDD that works on a mainstream USB adapter will handle CHS for DOS usage just fine, or LBA. Pretty much automatically. This was already smoothed out before about 1994 or so.
DOS of the '90's could handle LBA anyway, I like the MS-DOS from Win98SE which was not available separately by then but after W98 is installed to a FAT32 partition, the key DOS OS files in W98 will be available to copy to a fresh fat32 volume. You pretty much copy the same (newer) DOS files from W98 to your DOS root that it would have after installing DOS 6.22
Not only that but Windows 10 will still install and run on drives with these old connectors just fine in BIOS mode as expected but also partitioned & formatted with the latest GPT HDD layout, GPT would boot with UEFI rather than BIOS for most mainstream configurations.
But also if you do it right, GPT will boot a plain MBR HDD if the UEFI can find a suitable FAT32 BOOT folder.
UEFI + GPT alone is just too lame to run DOS on bare metal any more. Not without BIOS mode or CSM enabled. GPT is still a show-stopper though, DOS needs MBR drive layout :(
OTOH MS-DOS will still install & run on any PC or drive, even NVMe, as long as there is a CSM or legacy BIOS mode and you are not stuck with a crippled mother board having only UEFI. GPT-only means no DOS for you. Not without some kludge like a virtual machine.
The purpose of UEFI + GPT was to make it so you couldn't run DOS, Win3.x, W9x, Wxp, Vista, W7, and Linux ever again on bare metal.
Wow, the enshittification over at Dropbox has reached a terrible level. They make it super hard to just download a file in a browser, something that is supposed to be their core function. Why even use Dropbox these days?
This has nothing to do with this project. It's an adapter for connecting (very) old hard drives which only support CHS to a modern computer via USB, so that you can copy the data off them.
I mean, I’m sure there _are_ drive adapters without CHS support; in my sample size of 1, a cheap no-name adapter bought from Amazon a few years ago, it works just fine (I’m assuming the very early IDE drive I used didn’t use LBA, but I don’t have it anymore).
For what is worth the adapter is one of those half-red half-black vertical-insertion ones with a cursed USB-A to USB-A cable, connections for SATA and PATA (2.5 and 3.5”) and a sliding “Molex” connector for the 3.5 PATA drive. Not a quality item…
It may very well depend on how the HDD was set up originally.
Before the HDDs had Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), it required you to add an interface card to one of your ISA slots which you then connected the HDD to.
Each HDD factory had a documented CHS geometry for their products, but it didn't take long for this to no longer try to represent the actual physical geometry on the platters any more.
Either way, you set the jumpers on the interface card for that particular geometry according to the documentation, and that was the only way to correctly address the sectors in the most reliable way, if at all.
With the arrival of IDE, the interface card was no longer needed because that logic was handled inside the HDD after that, and motherboards arrived with built-in connections for HDDs, not only floppies any more.
You would set the HDD geometry in BIOS and all seemed OK until CMOS corruption occurred from something like a power surge, when the setting reverted to default.
The IDE got smarter in tandem with the BIOS's advances, and eventually the default "automatic" BIOS setting was smart enough to correctly pick up the effective geometry. Whether the HDD was flexible enough to have been commissioned with something other than its "native" geometry or not. By this time almost all new HDDs were, but the older PIO-0 HDDs were still the most abundant, and for people moving it to a new motherboard this made it work seamlessly most of the time.
Once LBA came out it was layered on top of that but you still had fixed CHS options in BIOS if you wanted it. Otherwise CHS was handled automatically as established. Never was exactly the same under every BIOS.
With a lesser USB adapter it may or may not be able to pick up geometry correctly, depending on how the data appears. And it can still be various different things, detecting and utilizing the structure found on the HDD, or re-partioning and formatting a HDD that still contains its previous data like that and having layout & structure come out the same, or not quite. But setting up a completely zeroed HDD may not end up with the same CHS as any of that either. In that situation the factory geometry prevails since there is nothing other than zeros to autodetect data structure from.
To avoid this I still do like to zero (the first 100mb at least) of the HDD first, remove it from all power for at least an hour to allow internal capacitors which store any non-default geometry to discharge, then partition & format on a vintage Intel-based PC with highly compatible BIOS.
That drive will then be more compatible with anything it connects to, but if a zeroed HDD was commissioned from USB to start it still can be just fine.
Booting is another thing to layer on, then you may or may not have to pay attention to sector alignment in addition to geometry, even if plain storage use works there are other obstacles to booting that may come up.
Now it does seem like the only advantage of a something like a Pi in the process would not be more helpful to access data from a properly established old HDD, but maybe one of the only ways to set up an old HDD using something other than that HDDs inbuilt default. But this was to be avoided back then too, it was better to have the HDD set up as default rather than unique "custom" CHS which amounts to "weird" and after that it may not be possible to connect to anything else and be recognized.
Unless you can manually set CHS in BIOS to match, which a USB adapter won't let you do anything you want like BIOS. A Pi could substitute for that but it was never really a good idea, mainly useful to set a non-default CHS on one drive to match the default CHS on an established drive when both are plugged into the same motherboard.
If I was being very skeptical, I would say it's possible the coder didn't even know that USB adapters exist. Prompted his AI to come up with one and this is the first untested draft.
Thanks for trying to educate the young whippersnappers about hard drives, but a lot of this rambling seems entirely off-topic.
>Unless you can manually set CHS in BIOS to match, which a USB adapter won't let you do anything you want like BIOS. A Pi could substitute for that but it was never really a good idea, mainly useful to set a non-default CHS on one drive to match the default CHS on an established drive when both are plugged into the same motherboard.
USB hard drives act as SCSI block devices, they don't have a CHS geometry and sectors are addressed by a single number (LBA=Linear Block Address).
Again: the purpose of this device is to connect an OLD HARD DISK to a MODERN COMPUTER. Not the other way around! If you plug it in and try to boot from with a BIOS / UEFI CSM that supports this, it will make up a CHS geometry based on the total number of sectors, instead of using the (real or translated) one that the drive actually uses and reports in its "IDENTIFY DEVICE" response. Because it's connected over USB and behaves like any other USB mass storage device.
That may well lead to problems when booting DOS from a drive that was formatted in some other machine, because the MBR will not use the same geometry. But that's not what this is for.
>If I was being very skeptical, I would say it's possible the coder didn't even know that USB adapters exist.
From the second paragraph in the readme: «« While cheap, modern adapters usually only work with newer "LBA" type drives, ATAboy works all the way back to the earliest CHS only, PIO Mode 0, ATA disks. »»
There were a lot of "non-standard" elements to work around through time, since there wasn't actually a real standard. More info can always help from many viewpoints and experiences and still not cover it all, young or old the more that have something to give as well as something to learn is a winning combination :)
The CHS values are still present in the partition table along with LBA equivalent, SCSI or not. Only with MBR layout though, not GPT. Some systems have never paid attention to CHS, some have never stopped. Like different forms of DOS.
Which is why a proper USB adapter is intended to just work with a PIO-0 HDD, and usually does unless the data layout on the old drive is so uncommon to be the kind of edge case that would be a show-stopper when connected to a vintage ATA motherboard too. That would require the unique CHS to be manually set in the BIOS to conform to a "custom" layout that was so non-mainstream for some reason when the old HDD was set up.
Then you had "drive overlays" which can get even more challenging when you're connecting old HDDs to newer PCs so often it makes you blue in the face :)
But yeah, at some point we should also consider the tradeoff between convenience and battery life. Batteries can be replaced, having to charge twice a day is a PITA for me.
My charging solution is that I've purchased three (cheap and therefore slow) wireless charging docks that sit my phone slightly leaning backwards, therefore nicely viewable if necessary.
One sits on my desk at work, one sits on my desk at home and the third sits on my bedside table (it acts like a clock radio / alarm clock). I just place it on the relevant charger while working / sleeping and it's always got enough charge when I need it.
(I also use the surprisingly fairly recent addition of charging protection to limit it to 80% charge)
I'm aware this won't work for all use cases, but it's great for mine.
Sometimes the phone is warm, I wouldn't even say hot. Could be because I bought lower wattage wireless chargers - I don't need it to charge fast, I just need it to top up the battery.
The only time my phone has given me a message about heat was, indeed, in a phone holder in the car, but it wasn't even charging. We are experiencing a heat wave in Australia right now though, and the car had been sitting in the sun in a car park for an hour.
They’re a joke, I used to have one in my car and the combination of sunlight & internally produced heat would make my phone shut off & display a “iPhone is too hot” message. Even when it’s cold outside.
I switched to wired charging with the phone mounted in the same spot and the heat issue went away. Wireless charging produces a lot more heat than wired.
That's really quite interesting. I know the wireless charging uses more power to deliver less power, so there's heat generation due to the loss of power in the transfer (I'm assuming that's how it works).
But, I figured that the battery would heat up more the faster it's being charged, and so wired charging at the same wattage would heat the battery more than wireless charging.
Must be a lot of power->heat transfer loss with wireless charging.
The default Mac approach is IMHO superior in this. Just select the regular US keyboard, you have deadkeys available if you need them by pressing “alt”+symbol (e.g. “o” to have the dieresis symbol), then press the vowel you want to modify. But if you don’t know better, it’s just a regular US layout, and it’s always there, by default, on every computer (including that of your colleagues).
It's good from a text typing point of view but horrible from a keyboard shortcut point of view. I personally had to disable the feature so that I could actually use keyboard shortcuts in a sane manner.
The AltGr approach is much superior by not invading on the keyboard shortcut space.
Which keyboard shortcuts? In MacOS apps they’re usually done with the Cmd key (=Win key), not Option (=Alt).
If you mean in the terminal, or in a RDP session, yeah, that can happen (but it’s obviously a minority of users, and you can select the US International keyboard anyway).
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