Had a weird thing happen just now. I looked over, my whole workstation had no power. Initially thought the power strip died. Switched a plug, nothing. The whole wall/outlet is out. Go outside, flip the switch. Come back in, things are back on. Power is back to the wall.
But I believe the Windows 7 machine my father in law gave to me several years back is dead. Won't turn on, always has before easily. It was lagging a lot, I used it daily for many years. Suuucks.
Looks like it's time to break that Windows 2000 machine out of the closet and put Linux on it 😂
Set up the other PC I had in the closet. Another old Dell (I thought it had Windows 2000, it's XP). I last actively used it around 2012-2013. Plugged it up, works, clearing off garbage software (Chrome!) I discovered that in true music freak form, I forgot I have like ~20GB of great music mp3s on here. Add the more recent stuff from my phone, I'll be almost back up to speed. Today's playlist is wild. I still listen to like 80-90% of it. Check the old apps in the 2nd pic before I deleted Tweetdeck, etc! 🤣 The BlackBerry one stays forever. 😍
I am not sure why Lagrange (Gemini Browser) isn’t in the AppStore yet. I use the beta daily and I am sure most people wouldn’t notice the few remaining issues.
Especially since there isn’t any other good Gemini client for iOS at the moment (that I know of). Elaho was removed.
This is an IOCREST-brand USB to RS-232 serial adapter, which I bought from a seller on AliExpress. It arrived in exactly the same time as an identical eBay listing said it would, for literally half the price - if eBay is still your default go-to for weird stuff like this, keep in mind dropshippers are probably fleecing you.
This adapter contains an FTDI chipset, not the much cheaper CH340, and it's time to see if this is the reason I couldn't get serial mice working natively on Windows 10.
So, question: Can I get some suggestions for software / tips and tricks for recording and reviewing raw data coming off a serial port? I'm a very long way from trying to reverse-engineer a novel protocol myself, but that's the eventual goal, and the next step I'd like to take is compare what I'm seeing coming out of a serial mouse with documentation online to make sure I really understand what's going on and how all this works.
Some old but fascinating notes on the history of window systems by David Rosenthal, who worked on X-Windows and NeWS.
The post starts by commenting some remarks by Alan Kay on browser architecture and goes from there, discussing the work of other pioneers and their own comments. It covers display PostScript and other interesting system design ideas.
Well, I got into our loft; and in between more valves, ancient capacitors, huge speakers, my dads university notes, yet more slides to scan, I found my pile of yet more keyboards.
I see a Sun 3, Sun 4, and maybe 5, 2 archimedes keyboards and some others - that'll be a job to clean up.
(I was hoping my dad might have kept an FX-80 but I don't see it, or his pile of Nixie tubes)
The CBM 8050 utilizes MN2114 SRAM chips, which are 1Kx4 SRAMs. The advantage is that they don't require refresh, as DRAMs do. But they were of course more expensive. However as there are only 8 for a total of 4KB of memory the cost factor was probably not that great. Plus otherwise you would have had to have extra ICs for the refresh signals... #retrocomputing#commodore#commodorePET#cbm8050
No shortage of discrete logic in this NEC PC-8031 disk drive. The rusty full-height 5.25" floppies are going to be "fun" to get working again. #retrocomputing#pc8001