So while the current Franklin Institute building was built in the 1930’s, most people wouldn’t believe that the institute itself was actually founded nearly 200 years ago in 1824. I managed to acquire this interesting medal that includes FI’s original tagline of “To Promote the Mechanical Arts”.
I actually reached out to FI on this one in case anyone there knows what it really dates to. I have my doubts it’s actually from 1824, but the wear on it has me second guessing myself now. I’m guessing it was a souvenir from around the 30s to 50s but it would be really cool if it really dated back that far!
It’s hard to tell from the photos since I zoomed in, but the actual piece is about the size of a US Quarter. If anyone knows anything about this, please feel free to let me know in the comments (if you don’t see the comments below, click the title of the article to open the actual article first).
Anyway…enjoy what could possibly be the oldest piece of Franklin Institute ephemera yet…
FI’s original tagline was “For the Promotion of Mechanic Arts”
After many many years of the train room more or less looking the same, it seems today 6/4/2019 the Franklin Institute announced it will be renovating the train room and making it a two story affair!
While it’s awesome to hear the place is finally getting some updates, I really hope they plan to include many actual hands-on exhibits like they’ve done in the past, and not limit them to touch screens. Kids need to feel the weight of a train part, or be able to handle and see perhaps modern technology in modern passenger and freight trains. They can play with touchscreens at home!
Figured I’d do a quick post about this with some cool pics – we’ve had some crazy weather right after memorial day that’s not very common in PA. In fact we usually don’t get many (if any) tornadoes, and just last week alone had at least 2 different Tornado “warnings” (not watches, although we had those too). You don’t have to look far for news articles about the high number of actual tornadoes we’ve had this year, but here’s one to check out: https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/community/state-college/article231032518.html
After commuting for 20+ years, I can honestly say I’m pretty sure the clouds/storms that passed through last Wednesday were likely the closest I’ve come to an actual tornado. While (as far as I know) that actual storm didn’t produce a tornado, I’ve never seen clouds and weather like what I saw that day, and seriously scanned the road for underpasses and other safe spots in case one popped up. Some scary sh..tuff.
I guess this is more of a personal update, but I’ve been pretty busy most helping out some friends with projects, as well as going on a much needed vacation, that I managed to include a couple of my hobbies in…
A few days ago I mentioned a crazy weekend where all my hobbies had their big events at the same time. One of the events was Vintage Computer Fest East 2019, or VCF East for short.
Suffice to say there are several Vintage Computer Fests that take place around the country world, and you can find a listing of many of them here: http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/. VCF East happens to be the North-East version of the Vintage Computer Festival, hosted by the Vintage Computer Federation, who’s home and museum is at the InfoAge Science Center, an interesting complex that was once an army base, as well as part of Marconi’s original company amongst other things.
VCF East is an annual affair for the group, and helps raise funds for them to further their collection and restore many of the artifacts they have waiting for love. They host a museum space at InfoAge that includes not only your typical 8-bitters like your Tandys, your Commodores, Apples and so on, but some fairly big old iron as well, like a Cray Supercomputer, a WORKING Univac, and more!
The event is typically 3 days (Fri-Sun), with the first Friday being instructional classes on repair, restoration, and use of vintage computers, as well as a keynote speech. Unfortunately I missed Friday’s events in lieu of attending Pinfest this year, so no pics or recap there, but past classes are usually well attended and include a lot of info.
Saturday and Sunday are the show days where 2 large rooms of exhibits on vintage computing are on display, as well as a keynote speech, a consignment room (used stuff), a vendor room (new/reproduction stuff), a maker space where you can both buy and build your own single-board-vintage-computer right on site. other resources. During the show the rest of the museum is also open and included as part of the admission, and VCF’s own museum is open and manned as well.
Each show tends to have a theme, and this year featured large exhibits on the history of Atari Computers, as well as the Unix operating system, with all sorts of Unix flavors including Linux, Unix, AIX, Irix, and other ix’s.
The other room featured various display, such as the GEOS OS for Commodore, a DIY computer exhibit featuring an IMSAI-lookalike with functional switch panel, a display featuring various plotters making live works of art, information on the original ENIAC computer, amongst many more. (I apologize to anyone I missed as I’m typing this from memory.)
The vendor room had vendors selling new parts and accessories for vintage computers, including but not limited to new single board computers, add-ons for the MOS KIM-1, replacements ICs and helpful doohickeys for Commodore 64s and VIC-20s, and even some used stuff.
The show is growing – there were definitely some growing pains this year as the attendance numbers weren’t expected, but next year VCF East will be bigger and better. The Saturday keynote was not only standing room only, but included the outside hallway as well…
Keynote at capacity
All in all, I’m really glad I found the VCF group and the VCF East Event. It’s awesome to attend, and being close to Asbury park there’s other things to do in the area, including the Silverball Museum where you can play all sorts of Pinball and Video games. If you’re near the Mid-Atlantic states (PA/NJ/DE) and into retro computing, its definitely worth the drive (or flight) to check it out!
Did they really run Unix on an Apple Lisa?? Yup!Atari Computers for days!If there was an award for the heaviest computer at the show, I’m pretty sure this would have won it.Fun with paper tape – generated on a Teletype ASR-33.
One thing is readily apparent when it comes to implementing “known folder move”, a new(ish) feature of Microsoft OneDrive.
Known folder move is sort of a start in terms of replacing roaming profiles on Office365. Turning it on redirects your Desktop, Documents, and other “library” folders into OneDrive, so your important files are backed up in OneDrive regardless if you store them in other popular places in Windows. You can read more about Known Folder Move here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/redirect-known-folders.
Since it uses OneDrive which is based on Sharepoint, it has all the various limitations of both platforms, especially when it comes to naming and file types. For example, you cant create a folder called “Forms” on OneDrive, and certain file types and characters aren’t allowed either. Another interesting tidbit I found, is that if you already had folders like “Documents” or “Desktop” in OneDrive, I believe it creates “Desktop2” or “Documents2”. Not good for consistency!
One “unsupported” file type is OneNote files. I’m not sure what black magic is going on behind the scenes when it comes to OneNote and OneDrive/Sharepoint, but as an IT admin, the best I can say is “it’s weird”. OneNote notebooks and sections appear as “files”, but it’s obvious there’s more to the eye there and they’re likely being stored as blobs or objects. This is why you can’t “move” a local OneNote notebook to OneDrive or Sharepoint; you have to create a new Notebook at your destination, and copy your sections from the old to the new one at a time.
This also means if you have or had OneNote files on your desktop or Documents folders, its basically going to stop you from enabling KFM. In fact I’ve found a LOT of things stop KFM from being enabled, such as:
OneNote files
Unsupported characters in file names
Group Policies that lock down ability to redirect personal libraries, as well as policies that actually redirect Desktop/Documents to other places
The weather
Looking at it wrong
I ran into an interesting issue with a couple users. Previously these users’ documents folders were redirected to a network share, ala “home drive”. Before I enabled KFM, I redirected their Documents folder back to the local profile. I then checked for any OneNote files, and transferred anything important to new notebooks on OneDrive. Lastly for consistency sake, I rename any existing “Desktop” or “Documents” folders on OneDrive so they’ll be available for the real Desktop and Documents folders.
Yet, KFM didn’t work, and listed a OneNote file as the reason. I clicked on the warning that supposedly takes me to the offending file, but it only took me to the recycle bin, but the file in question wasn’t there! I tried checking other places, even “emptying” the recycle bin, but KFM insisted it existed, and kept pointing at the recycle bin.
Finally I decided maybe the GUI wasn’t giving me the whole picture, and dropped to a Powershell prompt and cd’d into the $Recycle.Bin folder (it may be hidden, but you can still change into it). Sure enough not only where there all sorts of orphaned files in there, but lots of OneNote files.
(Note: To change into the $Recycle.Bin file in Powershell, the folder name has to be in single quotes. So cd ‘$Recycle.bin’. If you don’t use the quotes, Powershell won’t find the folder.)
I found a couple articles discussing this behavior:
Another awesome piece of Franklin Institute ephemera has been found – a booklet from an Art Expo held at the Franklin Institute from April to June, 1937. The expo was put on by the Graphics Arts dept the Institute had at the time, and was organized in part by Alexey Brodovitch, who also designed the poster below as well as the booklet/catalog for the event. (Alexey is also known as a founder of the current Philadelphia College of Art). The expo was focused on advertisement posters from both the US and around the world.
It amazes me that stuff like this still exists, 80+ years later. Granted there are books that are in the 100s if not thousands of years range, but for this stuff to randomly pop up is why I love collecting it so much, and provides a picture as to what a place I love was like well before my own parents were a twinkle in their parents eyes!
When it rains, it pours! Not only does that seem to apply to the weather anymore, but to everything else life has to offer.
All of my various major hobbies (at least the vintage computer Stuff, the Buick stuff, and the arcade stuff) all have 1-2 big events each year. The first usually being in the spring, around this time. Naturally this year, they ALL fell on the same weekend, which made it difficult as I wanted to attend them all!
Unfortunately something had to give, and I opted to skip the car club stuff, as not being on Facebook anymore I have no idea what’s going on (they don’t update any other media outlets) so I have no idea if they still attend as a group. In addition, I forgot to get my Buick inspected in time so I would’ve attended with my daily anyway. Sorry fellas!
The other two events were the Allentown PinFest 2019, and Vintage Computer Fest East 2019. I was able to attend these by hitting up Pinfest first on Friday, spent a few hours there poking around, found a few goodies, then left there and headed straight for Wall Township, NJ to help the VCF peeps set up (or if anything at least get in their way), then attended that Saturday and Sunday.
Not only am I exhausted, my car is exhausted, and my voice is exhausted – my voice being worse for wear (great news for some people I guess).
So over the next few days I will try to post up some info about each event, some loot I found at each, and hopefully next year I’ll post up about them earlier so all 3 of my Twitter followers can see them as well.
Last but not least…another cool piece of vintage Franklin Institute ephemera has been acquired, which will be posted up as well. Stay tuned!
Yeah, my initial run of posts has slowed a bit while life gets in the way. Here in the Philly area the weather got nice pretty quickly, and as such, the grass started grow pretty quickly as well. Since nearly all of my yard equipment was down and out from last year, I had to both cut the grass with only my pushmower (not impossible but not fun), while my 32 year old tractor needed a new deck bearing and a new battery. The tractor is back on it’s feet and a week later the grass is already due for cut #2. Geez!
The front half is just as big…woof! Did I mention the drive wheels stopped working?
On top of all that, I woke up one morning to the sound of my cell phone going off non-stop. It turned out my Insteon leak sensor was picking up water near my hot water heater. I jumped out of bed and feared the worst, but thankfully found only a puddle under the heater. Without that leak sensor, I would have never known and left for work that day! So score one for home automation, and I now know how to solder (sweat) copper pipe and can say I finally delved into plumbing as I replaced the heater as well as several failing valves with all new ball valves while the water was off.
Next up will be cleaning up the kayaks and putting the racks on the car, after the car gets a much-needed bath as well!
I actually started writing this a couple days ago, trying to put some thought into how I would approach the reality that I’ve owned this domain for -literally- the last 20 years. Up until this year I’ve always had some minor amount of content on the site, mostly arcade-related stuff, and it’s been through many iterations of design (or lack thereof). I finally realized the design of the site was holding me back; trying to deal with themes, getting the colors right, getting the look down, etc all held me back from simply just USING the site or trying to find a solid direction for it. After some hosting issues that led to it being taken down for a while in 2018, combined with ditching Facebook, I decided to take the opportunity to start from scratch, go with the stock “blogging” theme, and this time, forego the “look” for now, and just start using the site.
That first line…owning something for 20 years…wow. For a kid that grew up in the 80s and 90s, I’m pretty sure neither myself nor anyone else I knew ever thought we wouldn’t be a kid at some point. We grew up in the age of video games and arcades, malls, Nintendo, Kiddie City, Toys R Us, the Simpsons, Saturday morning cartoons, riding our bikes until our parents yelled for us (no cell phones needed!), summers at the Wildwood beaches and winters sledding in the park. While there were definitely things going on, and we didn’t have a lot of money, life was good as a kid then, it seemed to last forever and we didn’t want it to end!
Fast forward to having my first job at a local computer repair shop (which also had a side business as an ISP), I had my first “real” web page, which usually came as a freebie site included with your internet account. If you didn’t have one, you may have also used sites like Geocities to host your own as well. Since there wasn’t a lot of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors yet, or at least any good ones, most people coded their pages manually, which in some cases resulted in some “really interesting” pages (aka really interesting train wrecks lol). Mine was no exception!
I didn’t have a lot of money then, but figured I would make what was likely my first investment into my career, by buying an internet domain, and learning how the process worked. Learning how to register it, learning how to set up DNS, learning how to code a web site and bring it online. Back then we didn’t have many choices for registrars, and if I’m not mistaken, you had your choice of: Network Solutions. That was it. With a deal in place to host the site through a friend, I plopped down some cash and purchased junknet.net. The name was always a joke…before the internet I wanted to run a BBS (it never came to fruition), and always figured since it was running on “junk” hardware, I would call it JunkNet to reflect it’s…humble stature. Sadly the BBS never officially made it public as I never had the money to get my own phone line, but it was only natural to continue the idea that I’d probably be running my own web site on junk computers anyway, so I just stuck with it.
Junknet.Net – Circa 2001 Junknet Web Design Group – HAH! (One possible career avenue anyway)
I tried hard to make my site look professional. I probably used CorelDraw back then to create the graphics, and immediately themed the site to my interests, which still remain valid to this day. Sadly, I couldn’t come up with content. I was too busy doing other things, living life and switching jobs to take the time to sit down and actually code more pages up with some actual content. It wasn’t like today where I can do this from my phone during my lunch break; I generally telnetted directly into the web server and edited the site using Pico (no Vi for me). Graphics were a pain to deal with then!
My one source of content came from a car show I found on happenstance; I’ve always been into Turbo Buicks since I got my Buick Regal, and driving through the Phoenixville, PA area one day, I came across a sign for a Turbo Buick car show. Since work happened to have a digital camera I used a lot on weekends, I was able to attend the show and take what seemed like a bazillion photos. The pics were popular and got mentioned in “The Source – Turbo Buick Newsletter” amongst other sites. I attended the show 2 more years and took even more pictures until it finally died out. From what I understand, the original folks creating the Newsletter had health issues and eventually stopped hosting the show.
The site had minor updates and variations after that; I added a page to host my friend’s artwork in 2003, I put up various posts, then in 2006, I redesigned the site with a new “dark” look many would consider “goth” at the time. I really wasn’t goth, but looking back I think I wanted to be…maybe…ish. Whatever.
Unfortunately, yet again life got in the way and the site sat like this for a while. Around 2008, I started messing with and collecting arcade games, and I wanted to finally use the site to show off what I was doing with the games, so I redid the site again into my first content management system: Joomla. To give it a look, I used the Firenzie Theme from Rockettheme.
Joomla was finally providing me a way to quickly update the site, it looked good (albeit boring) and I finally started using it a lot more often by posting updates about fixing and restoring my various arcade games. It worked, but alas, over time the page wasn’t updated, the Joomla CMS needed constant updates and attention, and I gave up on the idea of updating it, but let it remain online for what little useful content there was. That iteration finally died in 2018 when a billing issue took the site down (it was my fault), and rather than restore the outdated Joomla install, I figured I’d try something different.
I’ll be honest, at one point the name JunkNet didn’t appeal to me anymore. While I have a reputation for always having some “junk” laying around, I wanted to lose that connotation and go with something new. I bought up some different domains, but I never found anything that had the same “fun” factor as JunkNet, so I decided to keep it, only this time having it represent the “junk” in my head, since I have so many hobbies, interests, and useless knowledge, there’s definitely plenty of junk to go around lol.
Outside of the site, its amazing how much change would happen over 20 years. Thankfully I’m still around, while many of my former classmates, teachers, and relatives have unfortunately passed on. I went from a 100 pound scrawny nerd, to a not-so 100 pound not-so-scrawny nerd LOL, but trying to keep things in check. I’m not so clean shaven anymore, and my hair is actually longer than 1/4″ (ok its down to my neck). Computers changed from 486s, to Cyrix 5×86’s, to Pentiums, to Pentium IIs, then Pentium IIIs, and now you can get a laptop only fractions of an inch thick. My electronics know-how went from rudimentary, to being able to troubleshoot digital electronics at the component-level. Relationships, cars, hobbies, friends, social media, and everything else just seems like a blur now. Days, months, and years FLY by faster than ever. Many places I enjoyed visiting over the years are gone or changed, some held on longer than others. Personal web sites are truly a lost art to behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and countless other social media networks all vying for our livelihood, yet many still remain online even if frozen in time.
Anyway, now that you wish you had that 10 minutes back, I’ll wrap this up by shouting out another “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” to my first domain, Junknet.Net, and hope it’s still online for another 20 years, and hoping I keep it going this time, as well as that the internet remains a neutral, open community for the world to enjoy.
PS – Big thanks to archive.org and their “wayback machine” for capturing and keeping snapshots of various web sites, including both of mine over the past 20 years. I also want to give a shout-out to Net-Thing Inc. (now SeoPhilly.com), Paul S., Russell J., and several others over the years that have graciously hosted Junknet.net for me and helped me get started in all of this.
