> I had also fit a tower PC into my car to play MP3s, so I thought I would tackle the thin client problem

Sounds like a flash car

This is the bit of the story I want to know more about!

Install a decent inverter, plug in PC. Done. Not exactly rocket surgery.

I'd strongly suggest not using a tower box for this exercise. A laptop makes more sense.

Agreed, especially as I can't see a traditional disc drive surviving for long with all the vibration & banging about it'd receive in a car if still fitted to a tower case rather than a shock-proofed housing?

For everything else, give that girl a coconut!

The Dension mounted the 5.25" disk on some small rubber. How it never damage a disk I do not know, but it didn't

> I can't see a traditional disc drive surviving for long with all the vibration

I wish you'd mentioned that to our engineer that RTB'd a PC when he couldn't figure out the issue with a multi I/O card. In those days HDD heads had to be parked by 'manually'. That job cost quite a bit and overran the promised quick fix.

[Icon: the MD, who happened to be the engineer's dad!]

Around 2003-4 I fitted a mini-ITX PC into my car in the boot with a VGA cable and USB cable up to the dash. A small touchscreen monitor sat mounted to a bracket on the dash and ran Sat-nav and a music player which broadcast using a very low power radio signal on FM to listen via the radio - the built in radio didn't support aux input.

It was quite the thing to do back then. Car cases and power supplies that could handle the drop in voltage during cranking the engine were fairly easily available. I seem to remember that it used a 2.5" drive mounted with rubber feet, but I may be wrong. It was part of the car case.

This was before Tom-Tom's were cheap enough. And the bigger display was great.

Much better way to go.

Trying to find something even to this day that works with lots of files and a folder structures. = AIMP and Music Player Folder do it in Android but even they are crap when in the car - AIMP is so slow and the later does not work in Android Auto.

Even in the Days of Yore, I'd've been thinking about a way to automate the keypress.

Which would mean a few days of fun, hacking something together* but that would be it. The more sensible Hannahs of this world get far more play time.

* yes, yes, these days all you need is a RubberDucky but back then...

Well you want to figure out a way to automate it, but not tell your boss about it. That way you still get paid to goof off, but don't have your goofing off interrupted every two hours!

Way back in the day, I was having a Friday after work beer with a mate. He was whining about how he could only have the one, because he had to deliver a pile of similar thin clients to a guy to "fix" them for similar reasons. I mentally wondered why they weren't doing it in-house, but what came out of my mouth was "what do they charge for that?". He told me, and I said I'd do it for half price, and I'd pick up and deliver.

Unfortunately, his Boss was at the next table and I managed a new gig which consisted of weekend work. Pick 'em up on Friday, deliver 'em on Monday. That'll teach me to open my yap ...

Usually added up to 15 to 25 units/week, for $350 per. Paid the mortgage & utilities with that income for about three years.

It didn't take a week to build a boot floppy[0] that fully automated the entire procedure.

[0] Using DOS5 and NDOS, the Norton version of 4DOS, and a tweaked version of the manufacturer's flash program.

Homer Simpon's drinking bird?

"Have you found a way to work without really working?"

I spent a year or so in IT sales, easiest year of my life but my conscience was too developed to allow me to continue.

Been subject to two acquisition processes in my 30+ year career and the three to six months it takes for these things to work themselves out have been spent improving my Minesweeper skills for the first one and messing about installing various Linux distros for the second.

I'm currently in a consultation period for possible redundancy, so am seeing if I can finally sort out my ascension run in Nethack in between job interviews.

With a conscience problem you should've lie down and breath deeply. The doubts would go away after few minutes every time, guaranteed !

Indeed it is a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it weasel

Doffs hat (black fedora today) to to "Hannah" and the authors of Blackadder

90% of a sysadmin's life consisted of watching paInt dry. OS [eg proprietary Unix] installations and updates typically took hours.

A real incentive to automate tasks — I can imagine Don Libes developed Expect back in the day for this reason.

In the days before the internet and game consoles you were often reduced in extremis to reading the documentation… or indeed any documentation.

Compiling kernels and watching large disk arrays init were also way up there.

I always made sure I had something else useful to do before starting anything like that.

I remember the days when installations took many hours and an hour or two in there would be the inevitable and highly annoying "Click OK to proceed". Worse still, they would sometimes appear as a pop-under so you didn't even know nothing was happening. Seems to be less of an issue nowadays where all the relevant questions are asked prior to installations commencing.

Back in the early 1190s I was working with a small industrial instrumentation outfit. Muggins here was frequently called upon the prepare exhibition equipment and help man the stand during the show or whatever. This one time we were offered space at a trade show in Norway.

The idea was that I'd organise an hotel and a hire van. I'd load up the kit and drive from Luton to Newcastle on Tyne for the ferry to Stavanger. Our rep would fly out from Birmingham and join me for the show, which was over 3 days. He'd fly straight back, while I'd have a few days at leisure till the return ferry.

Then said rep pointed out a couple of things: Living in Norway was bloody expensive, plus he had a significant family event scheduled just before and wasn't keen on leaving his missus behind so soon, so he has a plan.

He'd pay the extra for his missus to go and they'd stay for a week. In the meanwhile I would book a minibus with a couple of back seats taken out for the kit instead of a van, and make sure it had a tow ball. I'd book for me, my wife and the kids in the minibus plus our caravan. I'd book us into a campsite that was about 20 mins walk from the exhibition hall. We'd stock the van with food, have a family holiday and the firm would be several hundred quid better off.

It was hard work, especially for my missus but it was a great free break.for us all.

I remember somebody at a client site who'd just come back from Norway saying it was a great place. You could get anything for 20 quid. A bottle of beer. A sandwich...

1190's? You have been around a while, is your surname Mcleod?

I'm doing it right now. And so are you.

Of course not! We are perusing this illustrious online journal and dutifully keeping abreast with developments in the field!

Or at least that's what I tell people

"And so are you."

Not really. I've just sent an email to ask for extra material to be added to tomorrow's visit to the archives and I've another to send for January's visit. Wander down to the gate to bring the bin back up and that's about it for the day.

Retirement.