Just checking in.

Haven't felt particularly inspired to do whatever it is I do here. Weather has been crap, so I haven't taken any pics lately.

Surfing the web reveals the usual complaints about platforms. ("Leave X!" "Don't leave Twitter!" "Substack is for Nazis!" "WordPress under siege!" "European Commission going after Apple!" "Facebook wants all your data!" "Apple sucks! I can't back up my messages!")

MAGA-world is divided on immigration. Well, MINOs and MAGA. ("MAGA In Name Only" - Techbro oligarchs who bought their way into policy-making.) That is at least mildly entertaining.

Walking seems to have brought about, or aggravated, achilles tendonitis in my left foot. Used to take running to do that. Getting old sucks.

Christmas was fine. All my girls were here. (Daughters and granddaughters.) Had a nice visit. Talked about our move to New York.

Started watching some Hulu "content." Signed up back in November for that $.99/mo for a year rate. It's not a great experience, with commercials. Gives you an opportunity to get up and go pee without pausing though, so there's that.

Got some new feet for the second Apple IIe I bought some time ago. Spent some time in the garage yesterday opening the power supply to look for an unexploded RIFA cap. I needn't have bothered. It failed long ago. Snipped it out.

Did some more testing and noticed the "E" and "F" keys weren't working. Figured I'd have to squirt some DeOxit in there, so I started pulling keys. Ended up pulling all of them except the space bar. Gave them all a bath and cleaned up the key switches. While they were off I exercised the keyboard some more and "E" and "F" were working fine, so no DeOxit.

Put everything back together and it seems that the action feels a little stiffer than I'm accustomed to. Wondered if I might have been better off treating all of them. I'll see how it goes.

That IIe came with a bunch of cards as a bonus, one of which was a Universal Disk Controller. It's not a true SmartPort interface, but it does allow me to use 800K 3.5" disk images from the Floppy Emu. It won't read 32MB HD images though, unlike a //c and BMOW's Yellowstone card.

But the UDC is compatible with the SpeedDemon accelerator. I'm wondering if that may have anything to do with being a Rev B motherboard. The SpeedDemon was incompatible with the Yellowstone card in the Rev A machine. I'll swap the cards around and find out later this weekend.

Anyway, with an 800K disk image, I can make a single disk installation of Apple Pascal 1.3 and move it to a RAMWorks clone card, so all the tools reside in a single-volume RAM disk. With the accelerator, playing with Apple Pascal is far more pleasant. No disk swapping at all, and faster response between editing, compiling and running.

The pace has picked up significantly on Silo. Probably means the season is about to conclude and then we'll have to wait forever for the next season. I know Apple has already approved two more seasons to wrap up the story.

Severance resumes soon, but, once again, I'm not at all certain I care. I have to go back and re-watch parts of the last season so I can recall what was going on. I know they got their memories back, or something.

I think I'd prefer "limited series" formats, where a complete story is told in one "season." Whether all the episodes are released at once, or rolled out weekly. This nonsense of a year between seasons is just bullshit. And then they may cancel the series, mid-story.

Started watching Wheel of Time on Prime. I like Rosamund Pike, and the production values are good; but it's all tropes, all the time so I'm wildly ambivalent about the whole thing.

One of the cameras in New York has gone offline. The neighbor is going to let Home Depot in to deliver some cabinets, so I'll ask him to just unplug it and plug it back in and see if that works. It's the one that looks at the driveway and gives me a good look at the weather.

And the beat goes on...

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:00 Saturday, 28 December 2024