The full thing is A3, but this is an excerpt.

I seem to have kept this photocopy, and a few originals which use yellow ink.

They seem to have been printed by the Chisholm Institute of Technology (later Monash University) student union for the use of information technology students like me.

I recall a lot of primitive equipment when I was studying there in 1989-92, especially in that first year before they introduced a lot of upgrades. We used these sheets for COBOL programming, because all the code had to be formatted in a very specific way.

This document describes these sheets thus:

This 11″ x 18″ chart is printed in green ink and provides 150 printing positions (at 10 positions per inch horizontally) for a printer carriage space-setting of 6 lines per inch. This form replaces GX20-1776 which allowed for a printing span of 144 characters. Printer charts requiring 150-character spans (3211 with 18 additional print position feature) may be prepared using this chart. This chart may be reproduced using most standard office copying machines.

Not intending to keep these, but thought I’d scan and post before they go in the recycling.

I don’t look fondly back on using these… but they’re a bit of history.

import csv
import sqlite

def import_csv_to_db(table_name: str):
  """Load arbitarty CSV file into database"""
  filename = f"{table_name}.csv"
  columns = None
  count = None
  with open(filename) as f:
    rows = []
    reader = csv.reader(f)
    for row in reader:
      if columns:
        rows.append(row)
        if len(row)!=count:
          print(f"{table_name} column count mismatch; {len(row)} columns in this row, {count} in header")
          print(row)
          print("Halting")
          exit()
      else:
        columns = row
        count = len(columns)
        col_list = ",".join(columns)
        create_sql = f"CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS {table_name} ({col_list})"
        insert_sql = f"INSERT INTO {table_name} ({col_list}) VALUES ({','.join('?' * len(columns))})"
  return create_sql, insert_sql, rows
  
conn = sqlite3.connect(self.db_path)
c = conn.cursor()

create, insert, rows = import_csv_to_db('import_filename')
c.execute(create_sql)
c.executemany(insert_sql, rows)

You could do what I did, and add a column-name:datatype lookup, but rather than throw that in here I’ve left it as an exercise for the reader. Equally, halting the program when there’s missing columns is kinda extreme, but in my particular use case it’s reasonable. Fix it if you don’t like it.

I had a desktop PC on Win10. The desktop is very fast, and was a recent hand-me-down from a friend who is a gamer and has upgraded.

But it has an i5-4670K as its CPU, which is not supported by Win11. So I had to figure out what to do.

Possible options:

• Ignore the deadline – definitely not wise
• Upgrade/replace the PC – seems wasteful because apart from arbitrary Windows 11 support requirements, it’s actually fine
• Pay for support – Extended Security Updates for home users will cost US$30 and may not run for more than a year
• In my case I could get the laptop docked properly and just use that – and scrap the desktop – a big waste
• Perhaps I could migrate to Linux

Switching to Linux?

I have to admit, attempting to abandon commercial software is appealing to me.

Which Linux distro? I’d probably lean towards an LTS version of Ubuntu, because it’s well supported, and hopefully the interface is fairly familiar as a Windows user.

A lot of the stuff I do on this desktop is web-based, so apart from installing the OS, the main challenge would be to find equivalents for the non-web applications that I use:

• Word, Excel, Powerpoint – shouldn’t be too hard; mostly covered by LibreOffice and variants
• I also use Access. Libre has Base… but I tried the Windows version and found it impossibly complicated and limited.
• Paint.Net – there seem to be a few options – not sure if any support HEIC images off iPhones
• A video editor – I recently tried Da Vinci Resolve for Windows, and have been impressed. I notice there’s a Linux version. Officially it only supports CentOS, but there seems to be a way to get it onto other distros. The other one I’ve used a bit recently is Capcut, which also has a Linux version.

Printer/scanner support could be a challenge. I have an old Canon MP610 that I don’t particularly want to replace either.

How to dodge Win 11’s requirements

There’s one more option. Turns out there are ways to dodge Microsoft’s requirements for specific CPUs, TPM and Secure Boot.

You can use Rufus to create a customised Windows 11 install ISO.

These articles go into some detail: Tom’s Hardware, ZDNet/Ed Bott.

In short:

• Download a Windows ISO
• Run Rufus to create a USB disk image that removes the system requirements you don’t want
• Run the USB drive SETUP.EXE

That’s about it. Follow the prompts and Windows 10 will be upgraded to 11.

One gotcha I noticed while trying this first on an old laptop: if you choose a different language ISO than you were using for Win10, you can’t keep your applications. I had been on the standard English US version of Win10, and downloaded the Win11 English International version.

Most of us Australians are probably on the English US version. It seems to be a bit hard to tell, but if you check a Windows option/setting such as desktop personalisation and it says Color (US spelling) you’re probably on it. Get the correct ISO and you can keep everything. You’ll be warned before it starts if you get the wrong one.

When upgrading you may also see a warning about entitlement to updates. The crowd on Reddit think this is just legalese to cover themselves – or that you’ll only get security updates, not feature updates. After I upgraded my laptop, Windows Update was able to find and install security updates.

After doing the old laptop, the second computer I tried was my desktop PC… this also went smoothly.

Not saying I won’t dabble with Linux in the future, but for me I’ve solved the immediate problem.

Hope this helps others.

This post is not to tell you about various ways of bypassing the paywall if you don’t have a subscription.

But if you have a subscription to one of these, then you can get access to the other two.

I subscribe to The Age, but sometimes hit the paywall when trying to read SMH or BT articles.

In fact sometimes the links within Age articles are sloppy, and point to SMH. Ditto some of the social media shares I see that are from people who I know to be Age readers. I think there’s something dodgy in the app or web site that sometimes spits out an SMH link.

Then I noticed the articles on each site are replicated to the others. If there’s an smh.com.au/whatever/article URL that I can’t read, simply changing it to theage.com.au/whatever/article works. Same with brisbanetimes.

Not too hard to do this by hand in the browser, but it can also be done automatically with a browser plugin such as Redirector.

I wanted it to preserve the SMH or BT home pages, so I can see what the Sydney or Brisbane headlines are. So I added an exclusion for that.

It just about works, with the caveat that if browsing the SMH or BT home page, you need to right-click and open link in a new tab for Redirector to kick-in with the modified Age URL.

Import the JSON config I’ve listed below, or write your own.

{
    "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3",
    "createdAt": "2024-11-12T04:20:41.494Z",
    "redirects": [
        {
            "description": "SMH to Age",
            "exampleUrl": "https://www.smh.com.au/technology/shameful-tech-council-facing-questions-over-richard-white-saga-20241025-p5kla6.html",
            "exampleResult": "https://www.theage.com.au/technology/shameful-tech-council-facing-questions-over-richard-white-saga-20241025-p5kla6.html",
            "error": null,
            "includePattern": "https://www.smh.com.au/*",
            "excludePattern": "https://www.smh.com.au/",
            "patternDesc": "",
            "redirectUrl": "https://www.theage.com.au/$1",
            "patternType": "W",
            "processMatches": "noProcessing",
            "disabled": false,
            "grouped": false,
            "appliesTo": [
                "main_frame"
            ]
        },
        {
            "description": "Brisbane Times to Age",
            "exampleUrl": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/companies/abc-to-slash-dozens-of-jobs-ahead-of-restructure-20230615-p5dgoe.html",
            "exampleResult": "https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/abc-to-slash-dozens-of-jobs-ahead-of-restructure-20230615-p5dgoe.html",
            "error": null,
            "includePattern": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/*",
            "excludePattern": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/",
            "patternDesc": "",
            "redirectUrl": "https://www.theage.com.au/$1",
            "patternType": "W",
            "processMatches": "noProcessing",
            "disabled": false,
            "grouped": false,
            "appliesTo": [
                "main_frame"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Hopefully this is useful to others who subscribe to one of these sites.

It was really easy to embed a Twitter post in WordPress: just paste the URL into the block editor and it’d do the hard work for you.

That doesn’t work for Mastodon, possibly because it’s so many different domains (servers) that WP can’t figure out when it’s a Mastodon post. Pasting the URL just displays… the URL.

Mastodon does have a function to get the embed code, which you can put into a WP Custom HTML block… but that didn’t work for me either. On my personal blog with its modified Twenty Twenty theme, the Mastodon post appeared hard against the left hand side of the browser window, out of whack with the rest of the post text.

With some experimentation and Googling, I discovered that tweaking the embed code slightly made it better.

Basically in the HTML, edit the blockquote style attribute margin and change it from 0 to auto. That made it appear in line with the rest of the post.

I’d love to show you it here, but it turns out the even older theme we’re using on geekrant.org.right now can’t handle them at all. Attempting to save a post with embedded Mastodon HTML results in a Save error. (And I don’t have time right now to get screen grabs.)

Hmm, might be time for a theme update.

Anyway, hope this helps someone else out there (and remind me of what I need to do next time).