Dan's notes

Latest — 26 Sep 2026

Part 2: Preparing an AI agent to port software to the PDP-11

I made some initial efforts at getting pine working on 2.11BSD running on an emulated PDP-11. I was successful with pine's editor, pico. However, pine required a lot more slimming down before it could run on the PDP-11. I turned to an AI agent because

More issues

Part 1: Building a UUCP node on an emulated PDP-11

Back in 1995, just before the internet exploded in popularity, I would use my modem connected to a landline to call BBSes. It was the way I would keep in touch with friends, play online games, and download software. My friend ran a BBS and he used UUCP to connect

Charging an EV using Solar

I recently got an EV and wanted to setup a way to charge it using the excess solar power that my house generates. It should charge faster when there is excess power and it should suspend charging when the house is importing from the grid. I should also be able

Retiring an NTP server

To run a NTP server in the NTP pool, I rented a physical server. Since the server hardware is relatively old (Xeon E3-1240 v3, 2013) it was discounted (about $45/mo). I've had it since October 2024 and it's been reasonably stable. But now it&

Ubuntu 26.04, HDMI, and HDR color

I upgraded one of my desktops to Ubuntu 26.04 and my second monitor stopped working. It got stuck in "no signal" mode. It was working fine in Ubuntu 25.10, and the OS still detected that a monitor was there. The monitor is an Acer V277U and

Porting software to a PDP11

I've been playing around with a PDP11 emulator lately to explore the history of Unix. Since development of the original version of Unix and later 2BSD happened on this hardware, I wanted to better understand the limitations of this hardware and see what "modern" software could

Windows/WSL hardware ssh & gpg keys

Continuing with the topic of ssh keys on Linux in a TPM, what options are available for Windows+WSL?

SSH keys in TPM

Various ways to protect ssh keys with a tpm on linux

GPG key in TPM

Using GPG with a TPM protected private key

Certificate Authority in TPM

Experimenting with storing Certificate Authority keys in a TPM 2.0