Sunday, August 11, 2013

22.0.1 available

Sorry -- after much unintended delay, 22.0.1 is now available (downloads, release notes). This brings the browser to security parity with 23 except for Ion-related stuff, which is irrelevant to us, and has some performance tweaks for garbage collection, cores, opacity and gradients. It also fixes the font reference leak which regressed in 19 and shouldn't ask for updates quite so frequently. It will be a good interim release until the disposition of 24 is better resolved. More on that later.

Speaking of security, Dan DeVoto has a nice post on getting TenFourFox to work with Tor. Just make sure you have NoScript enabled, and as he points out, consider masking your user agent.

On a totally unrelated note, but because I know there are some Amigaphiles in the audience, picked up an Amiga 3000 with an A3070 streamer from fleaBay. 2MB/8MB chip/fast, running WB 2.1; I cut out the ticking timebomb known as the battery (battery holder on its way) and cleaned it up, and it boots like a champ. Took a bit of cussing and screaming but it now can talk to my old Apple external CD-ROM as cd0: with AmiCDROM (bless you, Aminet) and I got the absolutely ancient version of CrossDOS on it to read a floppy from the Power Mac 7300 so I could transfer drivers to it (as di0:, not the usual pc0:). If anyone's selling a Picasso video card or an A2065 or Ariadne network card, send me an E-mail. I like this machine a lot more than the A1200 I owned back in the day, and it works in with the office a lot better than my A500. It's pretty sweet.

8 comments:

  1. I have an A3000/16Mhz with Deneb USB and an A500 with Viper 520 accelerator. I definitely prefer the A500. It's silent (no fans, CF card), twice as fast as the A3000 and much more stable. The whole reason I bought the A3000 was to get cheaper accelerators and graphics cards, but then I found that they are "uber rare" and ridiculously expensive. My A3000 sits in the closet now, but my A500 still gets use.

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    1. This is a 25MHz, so it's decent speed, even considering I do have a GVP hard disk/turbo unit for my A500 as well. But the main reason it's getting used and the A500 is currently on the shelf is because the A500 takes up too much real estate in the office. The 3000 is on its side under the desk on standups, and it connects to the VGA KVM with the flicker fixer, so it's not taking up any desk space (whereas the A500 took up the space where the BeBox, the Solbourne and the VAXstation are now). It's just a lot more convenient.

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    2. Yes, the A3000 VGA is handy and the A500 does take up a lot of desk space. I've discarded my BeBox though and put away my NeXTstation and SGI Indy. I've decided that the 90's are over and best forgotten. ;)

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    3. The '80s and '90s live forever at Floodgap :) (well, except the NeXTstation; I don't have one yet).

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  2. I don't mind the 80's living forever, but the 90's don't deserve to live.

    I had to research Solbourne. I see that Solbourne was eventually sold to Deloitte. How odd. I used to work for Deloitte.

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    1. Solbourne has a specific interest to me because the SPARCs I used in undergraduate, other than the SPARCstations in the UC San Diego AP&M basement, were Solbourne servers. They're SPARC, but just un-Sun enough (I think the MMU is different) to require hacking SunOS, which yielded OS/MP. They won't boot any of the *BSDs except for a very rough OpenBSD port (and you can forget about Linux), but fortunately I have OS/MP files courtesy of an anonymous gentleman who worked for them before Northrop Grumman, and later Deloitte, bought them out. So the SPARCstation IPX is on the shelf, too.

      The S3000, which is the machine out on the bench, has a gorgeous (and rather warm) flaring orange gas plasma display. Besides its intriguing form factor and its sharp-looking black carrying case, everyone loves that garish flicker. It's a fun machine and I hacked up a simple port of Mosaic for it. I just need to get OPEN LOOK operational and then I'll be back slaving away in 1994. :)

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    2. Ah yes, flaring orange gas plasma. My Compaq Portable III supplies all the flaring orange gas plasma I'll ever need. ;)

      I took a look at your Retro Room and it looks just like my "Command Centre"... but yours is a bit more "modern". ;)

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  3. I have an email from the Phila. Library that is causing 22.0.1 to thrash in Gmail, can I forward it to you?

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