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TL;DR: Here's why I don't want to see "legal firearms" at local rallies in my town.

I want to see a movement like '60s Black Empowerment and the Pettus Bridge and Kent State and Stonewall heroes. I do not want to live in armed-skirmish-Northern Ireland. We remember the names of the relatively few who lost their lives in the mid-century US, because there were relatively few of them. And look at all of what their sacrifice actually gained us. Voting rights, school integration rights, abortion rights, women's rights, LGBTQ Rights. Think very hard at the progress made in the last 70 years through persistent non-violent protest movements.

Yes, violent fascists are in power. But they've been in power before. The actions of their thousands of assholes is no match for our millions of Regular People who don't want to see their Regular Guy Suburban neighbors eyes burned out of their head with pepper spray or shot 10 times in the back. That guy they just hauled away still has my skil saw.

We can get it back (Not the saw, that thing's just gone let it go). We don't need to walk around armed to protest for peace.

I am not victim blaming. It's not my opinion that Alex Pretti had any role in provoking his own death. My opinion was that he only would have used that weapon in the defense of others facing violence. ICE pepper sprayed this man in the face, and never did he try to shoot them for that. He remained calm. It's unclear to me when they even noticed he had a gun. It seems it may have been after they'd already made their decision that he wasn't ever going to get back up. I'm not going to watch that man die so I can frame-by-frame figure it out.

This is in response to this video about which I have no context. But it's basically a MAGA prick who rolled in all Maga Prick-like and IRL PWN some Libs and then panicked like anyone would when they've mouthed off and decide they gotta go. My opinion is that Pretti would not have used that opportunity to unload his firearm in the MAGA guy's face. As a public servant he would have attended to the injured student. Because he's a regular, nice person who feels a duty to his fellow people.

It's shocking, but not shocking. This will be played by the MAGA right as "bad apples on /both sides/ guys remember that ANTIFA lady who tried to run down that ICE guy?" The civilian hard-MAGA right buys all that and so they feel like they can retaliate in kind when they try and trigger some libs and things get a little too real. Regardless of what an asshole he is, think about this guy's state. He's all jacked up on adrenaline because he braved marching into the lib crowd and talked some smack. Hurries back to the truck. People are gathering. Decides it's Time to Go.

It's a case study in "there's suddenly a crowd of people around my car yelling at me I better get outta here, oh god did I hit one of them I better GO!".

The difference is the ICE agents unload in your face you when you panic under those conditions. As any Regular Person would panic. The Libs do not do retaliate with firepower, and must not IMHO. We are not the violent ones here. This is what non-violent resistance looks like to me. Everyone can do what they can. When the violent fascist government marches straight into us with riot gear, we remain peaceful. And we remain there. There are Trump Flag waving pricks at the No Kings rallies in my town. They get jeered. But they don't get shot at. And I don't want armed Regular Libs in my town square ready to "protect" us. This lady didn't die did she? Would it have helped anyone if this guy got lit up for that?

There's a lot of power in the moment when a peaceful resistance movement is met with state sanctioned violence, and they're not armed to respond. They're just a bunch of regular people being gunned down. And things start moving really fast politically when regular moms in a mini van full of cheerios are being gunned down by feds armed like a military. From 100 angles. On the nightly news. Like you're watching Idi Amin.

The optics works. Most people are disgusted by the national guard having to protect a little kid walking to school because of her color, whether it's in the 50s or now. Churches were bombed and community aid workers murdered then also. But there wasn't a race war because you can't really have a "war" when only one side chooses to use force.

If I take one in the face while peacefully gathered in my literal town's square my final thought isn't going to be "damn I wish someone was armed so we could shoot back".

I would hope I'm thinking of John Lewis.

This isn't Crips v. Bloods ca 1987. It's LAPD v. All of Regular Guy LA in the '90s.

This is not a "general purpose" guide for people to learn how to make network cables. I'm sure there are better guides with better methods and videos and whatnot. This is not a technique super-guide. If you find it and it's useful, great!

K, so here's us putting an RJ-45 end on a CAT-6 cable.

Strip about 1.5-2 inches of jacket from the cable. In the world of pass-through connectors you're not really penalized anymore for making everything a bit "too long". It's easier the more slack you have.

Well look who is making an appearance on my bench, finally.

I was given this monitor and printer (!) last year by a coworker who used to work for NeXT back in the day. "Just get a slab" he said. "It'll be fun" he said.

Like everyone my age I've lusted after these things since 1989, but I'm also not Dr. NeXT, so there were some bumps. I found the Wombat USB -> ADB dingus that proudly Supports NeXT _{(fine print... very few NeXT machines have support for ADB)} and so I bought a 25Mhz 68040 NeXTStation.

Unfortunately this was not one of the vanishingly few machines that supports ADB, so I was out of luck there. I kept trying to mash my Mac keyboard in until I finally actually looked at the connector. Ah well. $300 later and now I have a non-ADB keyboard and mouse. Which of course can't just plug into the NeXTStation itself. They have to go through the monitor. This is also a first-gen monitor of the type that can't be turned off, so they just burned themselves up. I do look forward to building a Non-ADB to USB dingus using the guide I found via forums, which appears to have been taken up by Adafruit.

After getting the keyboard and mouse up and running I took out the blank 200MB drive and replaced it with a BlueSCSI with a NextStep 3.3 image. I am able to get the machine on the network and pinging Internet hosts. However the Terminal.app seems insanely unstable at least on the OS image I am using. And once crashed it just can't be made to come back at all but just goes into a "launching" state in the Processes app. Know what'd be nice? Virtual Consoles. Just saying. I wonder if there's not a better PID based process viewer that can show me stuff outside my user session.

I'm basically just trying to FTP down some software to use and it's not going /super/ smoothly. But it probably is an accurate representation of the experience I'd have had as a user in a lab in 1992 or whenever.

But the party piece is that printer. That's why I'm here. And I'm happy to say it probably is capable of working. The machine sees it no problem but if I try to print I get a "Printer Door Open" error, which is a lie. It looks like there are three possible switches that get activated when the printer lid is closed, and they all seem to be fine, so this might warrant some further investigation. That is unless I just don't have the right cable since I also learned today that the "high speed serial cable" from the 68030 is not compatible with 68040 machines. So that's nice.

I can't even get my head around how rare these printers must be though. It's estimated that NeXT sold something like 50,000 workstations. My guess is most of those went to university labs and scientific installations (CERN, DUH!). Those places would have had print spoolers and maybe like 1 printer per room full of users. I can't imagine they sold more than a couple thousand of these printers and for such a minty fresh example to fall on me was just super lucky.

Whatever, I'm $1000 into this project and there's no stopping me now! Next up is to get a modern "Soundbox" replacement which will give us VGA output and a non-ADB keyboard port so we can retire the actual CRT into "Sit over there and Look Pretty" mode.

Thanks again so much Andrew for the project, and it's definitely gonna continue to be a project! Of course my goal is that this machine should work as a print spooler for my network. At least for a day or two before the power bill drives me into debtors prison.

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.

Greetz:

Couldn't have done this without Mini vMac by Gryphel, and specifically the SDL-1 build hosted at Macintosh Repository.

A couple of months ago the Salem Witchboard Museum got a copy of Gypsy: The Computer Oracle for the Mac from 1985. We got to play with the game on original hardware and took some photos for their site in our livingroom:

I immediately copied the software and started trying to make an image that I could play in emulation. But a 400k GCR Mac floppy, while I could easily copy it with Copy II it turned out to be more difficult to image and there don't seem to be any archived anywhere that I was able to find. An image just fell in my lap today and has now been uploaded to Macintosh Garden for preservation!

I've quickly bashed up a menu listing in my auto-booting Raspberry Pi emulation machine. Ultimately this will automatically boot to the game and hopefully be used in an interactive display in the museum.