vga256

with the current (understandable) uncertainty around the future of mstdn.ca, is there a desire for an alternative hosted/moderated-in-canada/for-canadians instance?

i registered fedizen.ca a while ago, and am willing to build a new instance if there is a need/desire for one using that domain.

#canada #mastodon

keeping your electronics happy doesn't have to involve phone calls for warranty service. many are straightforward jobs that require a sink, a screwdriver, and an episode of DS9 playing in the background.

today's fun bit of elective surgery and preventative maintenance: taking apart and cleaning the brew unit on my GE Profile automatic espresso machine

(if you recognize the shape of this machine, that's probably because SMEG re-shelled the machine and uses identical parts internally. so anything i've done here equally applies to its cousin.)

the manual assures you that there are no user serviceable parts inside, and that only GE's warranty service can do it. it doesn't say that GE stopped offering any kind of service or parts for these machines two years ago.

espresso machine elitists are of zero help as well, toeing the usual line "just go buy a REAL machine like a $2k Lelit that uses standard parts" blah blah.

understandably, everyday people give up and toss these machines in the landfill.

i've owned a half dozen machines and grinders in my life - some in the $3k range, and none of them make an *excellent* espresso for the $200 this machine can.

in the interests of extending its life for as long as possible, some preventative maintenance is super easy to do:

the brew unit detaches from the side of the machine with two squeeze-clips. it has six beefy phillips #2 screws to remove. once those are off, you'll see the guts of the brew unit. it's just a few plastic gears. look how vile they've become after 2 years of daily use 😬 (pic 1)

as soon as i started cleaning it, my fingers got gunky - sticky! all of the parts were gooped in white lithium grease, which had mixed with old coffee and produced quite a mess. i took out all of the gears, and scrubbed them all in the sink with hot water and lots of dish soap. an old toothbrush worked great.

pic 2: the cleaned up parts. cleaning off all the gunk also removed all of the grease, so i re-greased each gear using an old tube of food-grade silicone grease i had laying around from years ago.

pic 3: the brew unit back inside of the machine. you can see the orange plastic squeeze-clips that let you easily remove the brew unit for cleaning.

pic 4: the re-assembled machine, working happily.

#selfrepair #diyrepair #mottai #coffee #permaculture

inexplicably, the best parts of Sierra On-Line’s catalogue are often its least talked about. The Manhunter series has this absolutely bizarre setting - where aliens have devastated NYC and you work as a minion in their spy agency.

i can kind of understand why it became a cult rather than popular classic: it’s full of surprisingly graphic cartoony corpses, takes place in a post-apocalyptic city, and is full of dark humour. the polar opposite of every King’s Quest setting.

and exactly why i think it’s one of their best.

#sierra #adventureGames #dosGaming

TIL: over two dozen Philip K. Dick stories are in the public domain because their copyright was not renewed

https://philipdick.com/2012/04/03/public-domain-philip-k-dick-stories/

#books

in 1996 the university of alberta let departments manage their own homepages

mwah. 🤌

#smallWeb #1990s #worldwideWeb #webpreservation

in 1998 i was in my 2nd year of university; once a month i'd have enough cash to buy a new PC game. cash burning a hole in my wallet, i'd wander over to my favourite big box store (The Future Shop) and browse through their 4 aisles of big box PC games and spend 1-2 hours reading the copy on *every* box. there were so many great AAA games out that i'd end up having to choose between 3 or 4. it was torture.

that particular day i had to choose between Fallout 2, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, Half-Life and Baldur's Gate which were all in the centre of one aisle. 😓

at the very end of the same aisle were games with FMV like Riven, Ripper, and a new one called Black Dahlia. it had a huge yellow STARRING DENNIS HOPPER sticker on the front cover. i gave it a dirty look: years earlier i had been burned to a crisp on FMV games like The Critical Path and Ground Zero: Texas, and i wasn't going to make that mistake again. i grabbed a copy of Half-Life and went straight to the checkouts.

25+ years later, i finally got to see what i missed out on. Black Dahlia was among the last of the classic FMV adventure games, and it's surprisingly well-produced. @sqhistorian@dosgame.club's documentary is composed of interviews with the original cast, crew and development team - and watches exactly like an (Ars) War Stories doc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjaLilGWm_k

if you're into the mechanics of movie production, set design, and the complexities of translating cinematics to gameplay, i highly recommend it.

#win95 #fmv #adventureGames #multimedia

apple newton owners: how would you diagnose a squealing newt MP 120 with a sound that varies with the LCD contrast? i'm guessing a squealing cap, but i don't have a ton of experience with these logic boards

#newton #vintageApple

30+ years later MechWarrior 2's planetary mission startup still gives me goosebumps. never heard a better Betty/voice warning system voice in a game since this one, period.

just seeing a dos game running in 1024x768 in 1995 was an awe-inspiring experience

#retroGaming #mechwarrior #dosGaming #dosbox

thanks to @mark@canuck.social who let me know about the existence of a very obscure piece of BBS software called Falken and its door game Shadow Realms, i just rediscovered a 35+ year old RPG MUD that ran in MS-DOS

this isn't Legend of the Red Dragon with a bunch of menu options. this is a full-blown MUD with a text parser, monsters, objects, rooms, and characters.

as far as i know, this is the first time this software has been run in decades. i found it buried in a bbs ftp archive

i've still got some bugs to work out as it doesn't seem to be too happy with dosbox, but i have it running under Falken

i have never ever heard of a mud built for DOS and i am fascinated by the prospect. multiplayer, multi-node gaming over modems and no internet in the very early 90s.

#mud #dosgaming #msdos #bbs

inexplicably, peak Tom Selleck at the apple newton product launch at macworld boston on aug 3, 1993.

also pictured: peak tom clancy

photographer: doug menuez
source: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez

#vintageApple #newton

not sure how well known this already was, but i just stumbled upon an archive of super high-res 35mm photos of Newton and NeXT photos from the 90s, by photographer doug menuez. the vast majority are candid b+w snapshots of the newton and next teams as they grind through workdays and product launches

https://ftp.buriedbits.org/#/General_Scrapes/Apple/Apple%20and%20NeXT%20Photos%20-%20Photographer%20Menuez%2C%20Doug/

#vintageApple #next #newton

with more and more bloggers, coders, tech people now trying to publicly normalize their use of LLMs and various ML software, i see a lot of people getting visibly (and understandably) angry about it, for many obvious reasons. but you don't have to be angry about other people using LLMs. hear me out. the one concept that i always come back to is craftsmanship. there are those of us who entered, and maintain, our professions because we are attracted to and proud of our craft. honing our skill is always demanding, usually thankless, and quite often economically draining. but we do it anyway, because we're not just here for a paycheque or internet fame or an easy job. we do it because our craft is an inseparable part of who we are; the process of learning our craft reshapes us. there have always been people out there looking for the fastest, cheapest, sloppiest way to get results. they're in every industry, from academia to carpentry to mining. it's a gold rush mentality. but at the end of the year, they'll have whatever money or fame they wanted, and we'll be smarter and wiser with our craft. when the gold rush is over, we'll be *years* ahead of them. they'll be off looking for the next easy meal. i used to get mad about that. but i'm not angry about it anymore. it actually makes me sad. there are all these people out there madly de-skilling themselves and making themselves less intelligent, convinced they've found some magic time-theft machine that operates by pulling the lever really fast. meanwhile, there are folks like us who are advancing way, way ahead of them just by doing what we've always done: making tiny bits of progress in our understanding and skilfulness. this isn't a morality tale. it's just the reality of human intellectual and creative growth. getting better at what you do has a tremendous cost, precisely because it is something you can't steal from someone else.

in the 7+ years i’ve been drinking iconoclast’s house-roasted espresso, every cup has been different - even within the same bag

today, i picked up a bag of guatemalan Chiwgo Volcano beans and was instantly hit by the coziest molasses flavours i’ve ever experienced. imagine digging in to a box of mixed chocolates and your first pull is the best mélange of sea salt, caramel, molasses and chocolate.

it makes me appreciate that often when people say that they don’t like coffee, what they could mean is that they don’t like *bad* coffee. drinking a great coffee is nothing short of a sacred act. 😋

#coffee #yeg @yegdt

local ad for scratch and sniff stickers, repros of the 1980s originals

the second i saw the root beer and grape stickers, i immediately remembered exactly what they smelled like 40 years ago when my grade 2 homeroom teacher stuck 'em on our journal entries. i have never smelled a more perfect root beer in my life since. and that includes real root beer. 🥲

#1980s #1990s #stickers

in the absence of a new 65scribe video so far in this new year, i'd love to hear your thoughts on the most *beautiful* macintosh computer. it doesn't have to be fast, functional or useful. just what your pure aesthetic taste deems pleasing.

#vintageApple #macintosh

tldr: video tour of a multimedia Enhanced CD that no one has seen in 30 years.

anyone under 40 has probably never heard of enhanced cd's. they were a *very* short lived phenomena of the 90s: a Blue Book audio disc that has both redbook audio (music) tracks *and* a data track with multimedia content.

they were expensive to produce. every enhanced CD that i've personally seen was a Macromedia Director projector, usually in both Mac & Windows formats. since the data portion usually took up a significant chunk of space, this also meant sacrificing a music track or two.

but as a teenager, there was nothing cooler to me than being able to stick my cd in a discman to listen to music, and then stick the same cd in my doublespeed CD-ROM drive and goof around with multimedia content.

the best CD I owned was by a canadian band: I Mother Earth. and like almost all great canadian bands, we selfished refused to export them in the 90s and kept them all for ourselves. so no one really knew about their enhanced CD

I Mother Earth had one chart topping album in canada - Scenery and Fish.

a few years ago i ripped the windows and mac versions of the data track from my original teenaged copy of the disc and uploaded them to IA:
https://archive.org/details/ime-scenery-fish-ecd

#canada #music #multimedia #macromedia #macintosh #vintageApple

happy to belatedly discover this full 2.5h interview with Newton software engineer Steve Capps which goes into serious depth on the NewtonOS development and history of apple https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsaGx0loR3M (conducted by the director of the Love Notes to Newton doc) #newton #macintosh #vintageApple

a few years ago i mentioned that i wrote a book about the exciting, awkward and embarrassing experiences of growing up with computers and video games in the 80s and 90s.

i wanted to remember what it felt like being the only dorky computer kid at school. or what it was like to hear my first modem handshake sound. or starting the first flamewar on the school's national FirstClass BBS in the macintosh lab over the lunch-hour

it was originally something i wrote only for my family and friends who were there at the time.

and then i met all of you folks when i started my first masto instance 4 years ago. i had no idea there were so many hardcore retrocomputing and gaming nerds out there; unix and mac and ms-dos folks alike.

so i mentioned it casually. i was surprised by the interest in the book.

so i spent the better part of the past 3 years rewriting the book for *you* fellow mastodon dorkus malorkuses. the book is a celebration of all of the best (and worst) parts of a kid growing up in the digital age.

we're all busy old tired stressed folks now. so every memory and cringetacular story is short enough to read on a 5 minute bus/metro/toilet ride. they're weaved together into an arc that starts at my family's first Tandy TRS-80 and ends at my school's Mac LC II and building my first Pentium 133.

it's finally published, and i'm super proud of what it became thanks to everyone here nerding out for years.

enjoy the book. i wrote it just for you. ❤️

paperback edition: https://mybook.to/EDuUf

DRM-free ebook (EPUB format) and chapter samples here:
https://tomotama.itch.io/mages-modems

#books #indiePublisher #bookstodon #author #macintosh #vintageApple #vintageComputing #msdos #dosGaming #yeg #canada #alberta #bbs #smolWeb #indieWeb

i realize that this only speaks to 0.1% of you, but some useful info for NeXTStation owners: the battery backup that shipped with the nextstation is a BR 2/3A type battery - a chub gherkin that costs about $7-12 USD and are not easy to find these days. thankfully i've discovered a modern direct swap equivalent: the CR123A. it is used in various types of LED flashlights. it outputs the same voltage. the only difference i noticed is that the CR123A is about 0.5mm longer due to slightly more protruding positive terminal. thankfully, the battery holder accepts it (it just puts more pressure on the holder's metal flexi-tab). the CR123A can be found for $1 each. #vintageApple #macintosh #next #retroComputing #vintageComputing

really, really impressed with posty: a mastodon archive -> html static site generator it ingests your mastodon archive (post history) as a zip, and barfs out an entire static html site with indices and tags. all servable with any standard web server. this is super helpful because when i shut down the dialup.cafe instance, there was no easy way to get access to my old posts and images. it can either be run online here: https://posty.1sland.social or instructions here for running it locally: https://codeberg.org/oliphant/posty #mastoAdmin #mastodon