user224

Sorry for the Imgur link, catbox wasn't loading as image, just as a link again: https://files.catbox.moe/j3a7cl.PNG

Approximately EUR 8 including shipping. Still sealed (probably - if not re-sealed).
There's definitely some more stuff in the box like a manual and driver disc that I can hear moving around. After all, the boxes are fairly large compared to what you'd get today.

I'd want to unpack them... but I also don't because they survived so long. I don't know. Maybe if I'll get yet another one...

Here's a look at the entire box:

Specs:
Bluetooth 1.2 Class 1
USB 1.1

Minimum requirements:
300MHz CPU
128MB RAM
Windows 98SE

So what about the Class 1?
Typically the devices you use are Class 2 with Tx power of up to 2.5mW and range of around 10m.
Class 1 can go up to 100mW with range of around 100m. Assuming both ends are same class. Otherwise you're just causing more interference on 2.4GHz.
https://www.sharetechnote.com/html/Bluetooth_Specification.html#Bluetooth_Classes_and_Ranges

It also has an external antenna giving it some cool factor.

Bought online for EUR 22.

At first I got worried because it was just clicking. I thought I got one with the click of death, But after some 15 minutes of several retries, it got quieter and eventually started loading disks.

Curiosity killed the cat. I was curious to see what's on them:

The ones on left had no files, the 2 on right did. Mostly the F disk. The top one had some program called powerdvd 4.

On the F one, photorec found some TTF files (fonts), exe files, 4 second videos of motorcycle speeding up and fireworks, CompCore Multimedia inc. SoftPeg bitmap banner, and some random TXT files with variables and program descriptions.

Stored undeleted were game saves of following games: Etherlords, Gorasul, Hooligans, Operation Flashpoint (incl. exe), Renegade, Sacrifice, Serious Sam - The second encounter

There were also some spreadsheets with lists of games, and of course RAR archive with colection of generic porn.

The only interesting file is spreadsheet with list of compenents for a "new computer". Most files were dates around 2002.
Case - Miditower ATX
MOBO - Microstar MS KT266 Pro2 RU VIA PRO266A
CPU - AMD Athlon XP 1900+ Socket A
Cooler - Evercool MT2 Platinum Socket A DMI
RAM - DDR PC333 CL2.5 Kingmax 256MB
FDD - Alps 3.5" 1.44MB
HDD - Seagate ST340016A, Barracuda IV, 2MB (buffer), 7200rpm
GPU - Microstar MS8853 G3 Titan 500 Pro, 64MB TVout
Network - Ovislink

Source: https://meow.social/@yellowdog/115132494291526535

I lied, there's no Netflix.
Instead I have a local Jellyfin server with twenty terabytes of pirated media.

Found being sold online.

Right, so Racknerd doesn't offer Arch image:

As for custom ISO installers, that requires opening a ticket with tech support, giving them a link to the ISO, and asking them to mount it.
Well, I am not doing all that.

So, there's also this outdated (will become important later) "rescue environment":

Linux Kernel 4.x is Debian 9 and 3.x is Debian 8. I don't know why they couldn't just say that.

So, the recovery environment has some RAM (but seems to be less than the VPS), and some storage (around 1GiB). The free storage is around 350MiB.
The recovery environment can be accessed over SSH. OpenSSH 1:6.7p1-5+deb8u4, on that older thing, if someone is curious. Modern OpenSSH client just complains about old key exchange (quantum-resistance), but connects.

Welp, Arch Linux bootstrap is 138MiB compressed, so let's go.
But not so quickly.
There's no wget, nor curl. So let's install them.
Well, apt no longer works. Old minimal environment without package installer. Cool.
I found some trick for HTTP on stackexchange using telnet. No telnet.
No lynx either.
So I downloaded it onto my PC. I first got the idea of unpacking it directly from different server, but yeah, right, no sshfs. That would have been useful for directly dd-ing images.
So I try to use rsync. Of course there's no rsync. scp saves the day.
Let's unpack the bootstrap now, shall we? We shall not, there's no zstd to decompress the archive.
The bootstrap won't fit uncompressed, and anyway, I am uploading over mobile data.
LET'S FUCKING GO! Gzip is installed.
I created a temporary 1.5GiB partition for the bootstrap, this later becomes swap space. And then I can more or less follow installation with Arch Wiki. There's also this wiki page, but it's mostly just regular Arch Install.

That's a very healthy memory usage. RAM nearly full when something else is running, swap typically above half. But their RAID-10 SSD setup seems to be doing well for that.
Speedtest, or really anything is mostly limited by that single virtual core.
I don't know what their shutdown, reboot, change root password, and reconfigure networking would do or screw up in this case. I haven't tried them yet.
The VNC cuts out with Cloudflare captcha every so often, by the way.

Cyber criminals purchase advertisements that appear within internet search results using a domain that is similar to an actual business or service. When a user searches for that business or service, these advertisements appear at the very top of search results with minimum distinction between an advertisement and an actual search result. These advertisements link to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage.

In tips section:

Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.

Based on other similar recordings I made, I estimate it at 4GiB.

It was a baseband recording of APT+DSB from the NOAA-15 satellite from when it had AVHRR scan motor issues. Not that rare for NOAA-15 (xD), but now that the satellite has been decommissioned, I'll never record it again.
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/messages/2025/08/MSG_20250820_1410.html

I do have baseband recordings from good NOAA-15 and 18 passes, but still, this one would have been special.
I've posted about it when the issue was occuring: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/3035683
Alternative link: https://lemmy.world/post/4162384 (preferred - our instance is slow - trying without cache a few hours ago, loading main page took 2 minutes and 12 seconds excluding loading of thumbnails)

I've just been looking into this again yesterday, and remembered that at some point I had a recording of this partial failure, but it seems I permanently deleted it. The last place it could have been, a HDD from my old laptop, I wiped 2 months ago (incl. full overwrite).

At least I still have the demodulated audio of the APT signal from that partial failure - keep in mind this was still analog - NOAA-15 launched in 1998.

Perhaps not the usual file with sentimental value, like picture or video, but I am a bit weird. I can never record it again. Fuck, I need to start archiving everything.
Now I feel like BBC, erasing TV shows to re-use the tapes.
Or perhaps more aptly (pun intended), NASA re-using Apollo 11 landing imagery tapes.

Oh, guess where I had the 2 remaining recordings. On the cheapest unbranded DVDs I bought on sale in Kaufland at 10 cents / disc, which seem to corrupt after 4 years and can split apart easily with fingers.

OK, first of all, I am not a programmer. (yes, I heard the "thank god") Perhaps I could make the top example simpler.

But anyway, I kind of like goto too much. I find it more intuitive to just jump around and re-use parts rather than think about how to do loops without too much nesting.

In high school, we only did Python. I really wanted to do goto in Python as well, but all I found was this April fools' goto module.

Now in college we're starting with C, and I am starting with Bad Habits^TM^.

Anyway, tagging every line was BASICally just for the joke, but it is useful to just jump to any random line.