Linux

Here is a full demo of Gypsy: The Computer Oracle, which released in 1985 for the Macintosh. This was very early in the Macintosh lifespan and not a lot of people have seen it.

Plus two brand new boards made by Natalie.

Links and sources:

• Get Gypsy from the Macintosh Garden archive
• Visit the Salem Witchboard Museum!
• Link to the DigiBarn page with information about their copy of Gypsy and the photos of the Mouse Mover that I yoinked
• Positive review from a 1985 New York Times Christmas shopping article

Today was my last day at work, so of course I'm pulling an all-nighter working on projects and building my workflow. I don't think that will ever stop.

*I just got yelled at at 2:40am for pulling an all-nighter right now today. I'm like dude, it's my vacation, and this is me, relaxing on my goddamn vacation! I can sleep in a few days*

This is the desk I sat at for the last 5 years of my job and for two days a week for a decade before that. To be honest it feels weird for the job to be gone and for me to still be allowed in here. This is likely the last photo that will have my work laptop running Gibson in it. I am currently running through every bin and every parts drawer and converting my entire life over from full time network and server admin to ... someone who just hangs out and does projects and upgrades and documentation for a while.

And this is a sneak peek at what I mean when I say "I have a lot of projects in mind for this CheckMate monitor". I'm waiting for one sort-of crucial piece to this puzzle, then I'm going to make an in-depth tour of how I run all of this stuff, from media services to radio broadcasts. I'll be upgrading and making a lot of sysadmin improvements now that I have been freed for a bit. Retro computers are a piece, but are not really the "purpose" of this pile of stuff. My talents lie elsewhere. Fun times ahead as I embrace my inner digital hermit! I will explain why that is a good thing.

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:

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Far East keyboard vendors "are defining the lower end of the market, and I wish them a lot of luck, but we offer a better membrane keyboard, with better tactile feel, and a lot of service and market support here in the U.S. We offer Cadillacs, and are not the cheapest guys in the world."

- Lexmark's manager of market development Dick McCall regarding falling keyboard prices in 1993, just after spin-off from IBM

I recently bought a new Model F SSK. I've always felt bad for my role in The '90s Purge, wherein if I had a dollar for all the models M and F that ended up in a dumpster...well I could have put a down payment on a mortgage for a new modern Model F :-) I am not, repeat, not knocking the price. It's actually quite a value if you consider that a Model M sold for hundreds of 1989 dollars (MSRP direct from IBM anyway) as the cost-reduced, slightly crappier replacement for the F. It's also a labor of love and I like to support these sorts of projects. It's /incredibly/ well made and is just an absolute monster.

Aside from some initial glitchiness with a couple of "iffy" flippers and springs, we got it up and running relatively quickly. Definitely get the First Aid Kit, in fact I'll probably get another just to have it. The only modification I made from the default was to remove the fixed USB cable and replace it with a USB-C M -> USB-A F dingus so I could just swap it with my normal keyboard cable.

This steel & aluminum Model F also makes a Model M feel like the toy at the bottom of the Cap'n Crunch box.

Witness:

The model f ssk is pretty pingy but is a total pleasure to type on. My cow-orkers are lucky I didn't haul it down to our 3 day on-site meeing or they'd have tried to murder me in the first 10 minutes. Luckily it doubles as a weapon so I'd have been just fine.

See. The model M sounds like and feels like a children's toy by comparison. IT'S WHISPER QUIET!

Working in the computer store in the '90s I always loved the Model Fs we had around and tried to use them as bench machines, but they were /just/ that little bit too oddly laid out to be useful. So I heaved 'em. Lots of Model Ms too, and 5150s...yeah yeah. Progress. How was I supposed to know I could have made a lucrative career out of making videos about the crap in the basement of a computer store 30 years later?

I like the Model M keyboards I've got, but without fail a couple of weeks into using one my hands start to hurt and I worry about "This is it, after 40 years of this shit I'm finally getting some kind of RSI nonsense". Then I switch to a Keychron and everything is better after a day or two. It's weird because my natural tendency is to kind of hammer on keyboards, or at least I feel like I do, what do I know.

The F feels a lot lighter while typing even if it sounds much more violent. I haven't had any strain yet.

Verdict: Get one! They're Great! - As long as you don't mind maddening frustration when you assemble the whole thing and a single goddamn key won't actuate so you have to take all the caps back off and rip it apart. Not that I had to do that several times. Honestly I wasn't going to get this because I knew from reviews that it shipped without the keycaps and it looked irritating and fiddly to get it going (and I was right!) but Natalie talked me into it. I'm leaving the "locking" tab bent open since like, is it even possible for that backplate to slide? Time will tell!

Again, none of that is a knock on the manufacturing of this thing. It's /great/ and I'm sure it'll last me until I die. I just know my limitations and that I have a very low tolerance for frustration since I've been abused and burned by work for far too long and as such have no patience for friction unless I'm being paid. I don't care how much fucking hacker-chow gets in there, these keycaps aren't coming off to clean or anything unless I absolutely have to.

I was certain that one of Thomas's videos on the modern Model F showed the key assembly process, but I can't find it. Enjoy anyway.

This is by far the stupidest thing I've ever had to write.

For decades, IT has used pagers, and later SMS, to alert on outages and send notifications to stakeholders. This has been broken for some time by CloudFilter. Most (All?) US providers rate-limit access to SMS via email by filtering inbound mail through CloudFilter. This has resulted in me missing countless outage events. I'm not sure that my sites aren't even permanently blacklisted at this point. As far as I know there is no way to "opt out" of this, except in the case of Enterprise customers. We are not an Enterprise Customer. In fact if I get one pager event every 3 or 4 months that would surprise me. I'm not exactly "high volume". I do have a Business mobile account, but that evidently does not qualify me to opt out.

So...

I now have SMS emails being sent to my personal, non-work, email address. A cron job checks that folder for mail and if any exists, I use KDEConnect to send a "Find My Phone" alert to my phone. This isn't really ideal on any level:

• KDEConnect uses an Alarm for the Find My Phone feature. I never realized this because I don't lose my phone. Makes total sense though since this means it doesn't respect Ringer or Alert volumes being muted or your phone being on vibrate.
• This solution will only work when I'm on my home network. Not a huge factor since I generally only leave the house for a 30 minute walk around the neighborhood every day. Otherwise I don't go outside unless it's unavoidable doctor/dentist visits
• The fact that I have to write goddamn janky-as-fuck scripts to receive rudimentary alerting of potentially mission-critical failures

This is the whole thing:

#! /bin/bash

ismail=$(ssh user@mailserver.com 'ls ~/Maildir/.Junk.worksms/cur')

if [ -z "$ismail" ]
        then exit 0
        else
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; qdbus org.kde.kdeconnect /modules/kdeconnect/devices/ <device-id-GUID> /findmyphone org.kde.kdeconnect.device.findmyphone.ring
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;   ssh user@mailserver.com 'rm ~/Maildir/.Junk.worksms/cur/* '
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; fi