Mom once told me a story of when she was a little girl, and the kid down the street had a new battery-operated light on his bike. “I’m not supposed to use up the battery,” he said, but he proudly switched the light on and then quickly off again.
“Maybe that was the last time it will work,” Mom said, “maybe you used up the battery.”
“Nuh-uh!” the boy said, and switched the light on and off again.
“Maybe that was the last time,” Mom teased.
“Nuh-uh!”
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I love fixing up old computers. Who needs the latest-and-greatest if all you’re going to do is web surfing, email, and some light word processing? I’ve accepted donations of dozens of unloved computers around town, I’ve wiped them clean and put Ubuntu Linux on them, and I’ve given them new homes with families who need them. The new owners don’t mind much that Ubuntu can’t run Windows games or Windows viruses.
I’ve got a collection, in fact, of very old Mac computers. One of my favorite is a Mac IIfx, which was totally the boss of its day. 40MHz! “It can finish an infinite loop in twelve seconds!” people would say. “It takes seven HALT instructions to stop it!” I hear the Linux m68k project has come to life again; maybe someday I can put Debian on it.
I wish I knew as much about fixing cars as I know about fixing computers.
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So, my first tech tip of this new blog.
I installed WordPress and customized a theme to match the rest of this site. (I used to do Enchanter.net entirely in hand-written HTML, but then I decided to “get with the times” and try using a template-based site-generation tool to do the work for me. In hindsight, I should have just continued to write the HTML by hand.) Everything went smoothly, but there was one hitch.
WordPress has a “Permalink Settings” page where I can change the URLs of my blog posts from something boring – “https://www.enchanter.net/ao/?p=123” – to something more trendy like “https://www.enchanter.net/ao/2013/04/sample-post/“. Problem is, to enable this, I had to either use a .htaccess file with some rewrite rules in it, or else modify the server’s httpd.conf with the rewrite rules.
There was much gnashing of teeth as I tried to figure out how to get this to work.
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