Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Fighting to get time in the shop; replacement light bulb arrived for Unlock lamp on 1130 console

ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER THIS SEASON

I had several visitors including my daughter and her fiancé, as well as other family. In between, there are all the seasonal obligations to deal with. Nancy and I both caught upper respiratory infections while enjoying Disney's EPCOT with our daughter. Still mostly recovering but looking forward to a more normal schedule playing with old computers. 

RECEIVED REPLACEMENT INCANDESCENT BULB FOR UNLOCK LAMP

The colorful lamps on the 1130's console use incandescent bulbs behind frosted colored plastic rectangles. I have quite a few bulbs available for 12V and lower voltages, but a few of the lamps on the console are wired to 48V circuits such as the disk drive. Thus, they need a 48V bulb which I didn't have on hand.

The new 48V bayonet bulbs arrived today and I will replace the burned out bulb for the Unlock light. This illuminates when the drive is at rest, showing that the handle is unlocked. The operator can slide a disk cartridge into or out of the drive while this is lit. Once the Run switch is activated to turn on the drive, the handle locks and our bulb goes out. 

CONTENDING WITH ODIOUS BEHAVIOR OF A NORTON 360 UPGRADE

The new version that updated itself is much more active in its attempt to protect me. Overly so. When I run the Vivado toolchain to work on FPGA logic, it attempts to block several programs and hangs the start of simulation - claiming it is sending it for real time analysis in their labs. They way they do this leaves Vivado dead in the water, requiring me to kill a background task and restart. 

There is no straightforward way to tell the obnoxious software to not block the software, unlike the ability in the past to ask for a given program to be put on an exclusion list. The only way I could work with Vivado was to disable multiple of the Norton 'protection' services - three of them were involved in ruining the Vivado experience. 

The software now stomps through my system like hateful stormtroopers, interfering with many innocuous acts of trusted software. The change in aggressiveness is dramatic and I don't like it at all. 

2 comments:

  1. I know what you mean about overly eager anti-virus software!! Just drives me crazy. For quite a while I only used Windows Defender, but have been trying the free version of BitDefender with Windows-11 lately, and it seems pretty reasonable. I do have to stop it from doing some sort of super intensive scan of a flash drive every time I plug one in, but that is easy to do. Oddly, it doesn't do that with external hard drives...

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    1. I can live with the insistence on scanning flash drives since it allows cancellation.

      When it pops up an alert offering some scan or upgrade and I click "No" or "Do not show me this again", it fires up the main Norton app anyway. Further, it does show me these things whenever it wants to. More intrusive annoying behavior from Norton.

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