Occasionally I have a handful of projects that kind of just blurge into one. Occasionally I just make up words like blurge.
Recently I decided to resurrect the ancient APC Mast Console and attempt to replace the faulty time switch in the shed with something more home-automationy. Just to be clear, the switch in question turns the garden lights on and off at set periods during the night. It is not a switch for turning time on and off.
Anyway. I got it working and found the telnet interface. All I needed was a little script and telnet would do wonders. Except of course Windows command-line Telnet doesn’t let you do that. A bit of searching and I found this little tool. If you’ve found this page by googling that last phrase I feel you will be very disappointed. If you want a way to very simply automate a Telnet session, you can click your way to happiness.
The other thing I wanted to do was to finally get an old PC booted so that I can format it to pieces. It runs an old Linux build though so Windows has trouble with it if you just drop a CD in and nextnextnext. What I needed was to be able to boot into an old DOS version or boot from a USB stick.
Spiceworks have a thriving community full of helpful people like Thereal_joe who provide just that kind of help. Here is his guide to using DISKPART for making a bootable USB key.
For those hanging on to find out where to get that ISO for a bootable DOS6.22 image (and know there will be somebody out there), here you go.
