Computers

*This was an email that I was writing, and just stopped and basically pasted in here and embedded videos in, so it's not super well formatted or anything.

This was probably the best explanation of core memory that actually made me understand it.

Read More

I made a quick tour video for an audience of about four. Here's a brief look at the basic stuff in my office, much of which I will do better quality videos about soon. Maybe like a monthly VAST/SPACE meeting? I dunno.

Enjoy the 1992 aesthetic. Pretend it's a VHS-C tape or something you found at Goodwill.

Update: I didn't notice the screensaver during the whole desk part until uploading just now and it's my favorite thing ever.

I'm running this setup to backup some Atari ST 720K floppy disks I have. I'm interested in backups of BBS newsletters and general BBS/Early-Internet ephemera from the '80s and '90s and I'm finding cases where at a glance I can't find that specific copy of like STReport or whatever on the Archive. Also anything fun related to the specific Atari club we were all members of since this is likely the only copy of any of that.

I'm very happy with the roll-away desk surface on top of this rack:

Read More

My friend happened to give us a 4 drawer grey parts bin so I decided to build some shelves and an easier to reach space for all the day-to-day rack screws and fasteners, Velcro, dinguses and connectors and whatever.

I'm transitioning my mindset from a fully-stocked laptop bag ready to go with all my stuff to that of a more stationary workbench because I will rarely have to just "get up, grab my bag and go" like I could have to do now. I can even just reach that TI calculator and do the calculation faster than I can go to the KDE menu and launch kcalc on the rare occasions I need it.

The answer is absolutely almost never "zip ties or twist ties". That's why the top two drawers are just Velcro.

This on the other hand is just over the top wasteful storage hubris:

Unfortunately the drawers are exactly too shallow to have the cover with handy glued-in map on the iFixit kit, but luckily it sticks to the side just fine. You know iFixit has PDFs that print out to exactly fit inside this screwdriver kit, right?

I've set up one of the racks with some finish ply as a roll away bench surface that I can pull out temporarily to use machines like the Atari and Commodore 8-bits without having them wired into the henge all the time.

All the cables and power supplies are convenient so it's quick to just drop a machine down and start messing around:

The project I want to do turns out to be a lot more homework than just "plug it in, turn it on, go!". To use a serial port it's recommended to make a boot disk for whatever DOS you prefer and write a tool to load and configure your specific device driver. Then you can run your terminal program.

I got some reading to do on that one. I can't even figure out how to launch a thing through MyDOS.