There is a lattice of convenience which runs my house. From ripping CDs and DVDs to Kodi, Arcade cabinet, and a shitphone army acting as media players and remote controls. These posts describe how to sysadmin my house.
Just yesterday I wrote a whole thing about how I feel bad for sounding like I'm trashing this monitor, when in reality I haven't actually used it as a monitor for more than a few minutes total. I really want to express my admiration for Steve and his project.
After spending a day with the CheckMate I have decided that it's going to change my workflow in a big way and reminded me of the Real Use Case for this thing.
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.
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.
The other day I found a Suncom Starfighter joystick in my projects bin labeled as "needs repair, right and down only". I tested it and sure enough Up and Left didn't work at all unless you really push which I was unwilling to do. This isn't a joystick I ever had when I was a kid, but it's a real tank. It's the exact same internal design as the Tac-2 and other Suncom sticks. I definitely see why the Tac-2 is more popular with the much cooler ball-capped shiny metal stick. I remembered seeing Jan Beta repair one of these and went and grabbed that and a few other video guides.
I'm trying to lay out some projects that I want to do "when I have the time". I'm considering streaming / recording these as I go if anyone wants to see them and/or help live. I'm at least going to document all of this so it's available to anyone who needs it.
I'm going to update this page as more things come up and I start completing tasks.
Pimp my Atari ST
Get video working. I have an SC1224 which isn't /super/ reliable. I have a Checkpoint monitor that I'm trying to get working for color + mono. I need to get that thing figured out and order whatever I need to make it go
Get a BlueSCSI working as a novelty oversized hard drive with tons of partitions and everything on there. This will involve removing the RIFA caps and getting Len's ICD enclosure working and learning how to install drivers and stuff.
Get my ST talking to Linux machines over serial. This could either be the Pi inside the CheckPoint monitor, or ideally hooked up through the Avocent serial console switch so I could address other ports
Use the serial terminal to manage software transfers from my PC to ST eliminating using aging physical floppy disks and drives or new things like GoTek
Use this method to make images of Len's stuff and transfer to the PC. I think that will be the easiest way to archive these disks
Build the AdaFruit project to use the NeXT non-ADB keyboard on a PC with USB
Use that knowledge to gauge how hard it might be to go the other direction? Using USB stuff on NeXT would be way more useful
Try to get the service manual for that printer or an equivalent Canon model
MiSTer Cabinet
Remove that front door. I keep banging my knees on this idiot door
While the cabinet is apart, extend all the ports from the TV inside with like pigtail connectors including power (C14 -> C15), HDMI and anything else like RF and stuff to hook up Ataris
I never got the appeal of the "Bullet Hell SHMUPs" genre that started popping up in the arcades in the 90s. I just saw a game that cost 50 cents that had lots of confusing shit happening. Surely you just get wasted right away because it's so hard compared to Galaga, and I know I suck at Galaga even though I torture myself with it daily.. So tonight I tried Fire Barrel on my MiSTer. No reason for that one vs any other SHMUP title, I think it was on some list of best arcade games or overlooked gems or something.
Anyway I had no idea how easy it is to feel like you're getting good value for money on this stuff. Even on the MiSTer it feels like a good deal. You quickly start blasting away with rapidly increasing weapons until hey I'm shooting guns, firing in 6 directions plus rockets and homing missiles. And there's fire everywhere. If you catch a bullet you will rapidly get leveled back up. Galaga is damn near impossible for the Average Maroon to play for very long.
I'd been playing a bit of side scrolling R-Type type games recently and they're fun and fairly unforgiving, I last maybe a couple level-ups so far before I have to move on. I probably should familiarize myself with the priorities of those games and what each different little nearly identical sphere thing means in like Xenon on the ST and Amiga..
In the meantime it's fun to just feed a couple quarters in for continues and Fire Barrel feels like a pretty good value for dollar pretty quick. As I'm looking for screenshots it doesn't seem like it was super beloved or anything, there's just rudimentary "This was a SHMUP from 1993" type information. If Fire Barrel is the "bottom of the barrel" that no one plays and is hardly documented, maybe the "good ones" are actually worth playing.
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
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.
Because of the same Technology Connections video as everyone else we quickly amassed an army of Sunbeam Toastmasters, hopefully a lifetime supply. The one in this video is the first one we got. It works great but really should be rewired. It's now the backup to our daily driver which has already had its cord replaced.
1:35 to identically toasted toast every single time like clockwork.
