Sinéad O’Connor - Jerusalem (AKA the nice lady who was right about near every goddamn 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:
I'm going to be working on making a few videos about how my office is set up and fix some problems with some of my machines and stuff as I polish this all up.
This was shot as I finished cabling in my in-rack video capture and face-camera. So I'm doing a quick dry-run of a couple of features of the machine I built that lives in that monitor. It's a Raspberry Pi 3 that I have configured with a menu to emulate every other object in this rack as well as manage and maintain my home servers as a KVM for all that stuff. It's connected over serial to an Avocent 16 port serial console. So from my main menu I log into that serial console and then I use that to connect over serial to my main webserver in the rack below.
After logging back out of all that I am launching the Amiga emulator for a quick run of Nebulus.
Here's what that end of the room looks like. My main workstation that's getting all the video is in the bottom of the left hand rack. Then the right rack is all the network hardware, storage, servers and stuff.
Consider this a "Before" post for an upcoming weekend project I'll have to do. Traditionally that's what the Thanksgiving long weekend is for.
I'm a big believer in having relatively tidy cabling. There's definitely just masses of wires in my life. But if you have a solid base of sanely cable managed stuff it makes it pretty easy to just tidy up the important stuff and brush all the random knots of cables into a drawer because if they mattered they'd be cable managed.
Earlier this year we were introduced to Gypsy: The Computer Oracle, a Mac game from 1985. This started a whole Thing and I immediately set about making this work in a display that could be exposed to the public with as little friction as possible for people to play with.
This is how that turned out.
For the machine I just used a brand-new Raspberry Pi 3B+ mounted to the back of an Eyoyo 4:3 monitor and added grommets to some Velcro straps for securing the HDMI, power and mouse cables.
This is very much a 1-weekend hack job project and is not anyone's idea of "secure", but it's also not meant to be connected to a network or a keyboard. At some point I might compile out the standard hotkeys for management of Mini vMac, but for now it's fine. If someone yoinks a keyboard out of their pants and inconspicuously plugs it in and starts hammering away, well now they've got access to a single-function Linux machine with no network. Congrats.
I have to admit though, I have been toying with linking multiple web-based Ouija boards together so different locations can send messages back and forth, or to a (non-ai, more Eliza-level) chatbot if there's no one on the other end at the moment.
I got a replacement cable modem this week due to a failure of the one I had. The field service tech mentioned he had rack mount brackets if I wanted, so I took him up on it so I could recover the shelf it was sitting on.
However, the design of my modem is stupid and pretentious, and must be laughed at. This is what you get from a company with no realistic competition at all. The designer was obviously a massiveBattlestar fan.
I need one of these antennas but I don't know exactly which size I should get. So rather than just buy 3 of them a month ago I've been waffling :-) If I could get it to make solid contact without opening the case on this otherwise totally pristine boombox I'd just use the wire I have there now.
It doesn't have to look great it just needs to receive FM from the other room. These are both favorites of mine among the dozen or more radios we have scattered around the house and barn. When I took this picture I hadn't even cleaned them after bringing them both home for five whole bucks.
A couple of years ago Natalie rescued a 1960s Moe Lighting resin pull-down light from the flea market. The mechanism was rusted to hell, half the "egg" was missing, but it was absolutely gorgeous looking.
Yesterday we flipped it upside down and wired it up over our video game cabinet:
The new lamp adds some really nice light at the video game cabinet and we've got another Moe pull-down light in that room already so it's pretty matchy and nice.
It seems like I really don't write very much, but that's kind of a massive misconception. I don't write "much", but I had a bunch of blog entries that were at least 60% written and were missing like, screenshots or links or tags or I need to make new tags for things like XScreensaver and BSDs. Haiku. Shit lots of stuff.
Couldn't just leave the little beggar outside in -15F while we were all cozy on the couch...So after a long night in the basement napping comfortably, how do we greet the day? Find the only sun spot in the house and nap some more of course.
I need one of 
