gizmos – A Jaunty Little Blog

August 14, 2024

What, Another Computer Post?

Friends,

A lot of years ago, when I used to work at the Omnipresent Charitable Organization, we got a donation of broken PowerBooks. I wanted to use one of them as my work machine, so I sent them out to Powerbook Medic for diagnosis. The doctor did not have good news: One had a bad logic board and the other had a bad power board. No way the charity would pay for repairs, so they had to go.

I bought them for next to nothing to see what I could do with them, and they spent a little time with my sister. Bad logic board machine charging batteries that would run the machine with the bad power board. That got tiresome (of course it did!) and they ended up on a shelf.

Fast forward ten years, and my interest was renewed. Why? A sale on PowerBook power boards showed up and I bought one. Old board out, new one in. Then the hard drive packed up and I gave up.

Another few years forward and a member on the 68kmla site asks if anybody has a line on Pismo parts. I was pretty sure one of the two was a Pismo, but wasn’t sure which. I pulled out the bronze keyboard big boys and discovered that the dead one was a Lombard, and the good one, the one I have now fitted with an SSD, is a Pismo.

Our 68kmla friend still wanted the Lombard, so we arranged for shipping and it went out the other day.

A working Pismo was not in my plans, but here it is. The keyboard is very good and it’s pretty responsive despite the small amount of RAM. I’m kinda digging it.

Your pal,

– bob

June 20, 2024June 22, 2024

No Love

Friends,

Something was up about a certain computer that I happen to be using right now. Remember this?

In case you were wondering, the fans in my 2019 Intel Macbook Air are going nuts right now. Is it because I’m dropping so much truth (i’m not feeling very well right now. -ed Me neither, dog. um, gross. -ed). I think the problem is that this machine is underpowered, unloved for its zero-travel keyboard with the dodgy zero key, and ready to be retired. UPDATE: Or mail.app crashed. Why? No idea.

Apple does too, and they’ve decided that this machine is best suited to prop up a rat’s nest in a landfill.

What Macs will support macOS 15
iMac — 2019 and later
iMac Pro
MacBook Air — 2020 and later
MacBook Pro — 2017 and later
Mac Pro — 2019 and later
Mac Studio — 2022 and later
Mac mini — 2018 and later

…because they believe, and with good reason, that this machine can’t handle the next version of the operating system. It’s a ruthless decision and a reasonable one all at the same time. This machine is a little sad about everything but the most lightweight text editing. Sad, really.

I’ll miss it, though. It’s got a cool shape and the battery life is very good, even after all this time. I’m sure my new M3 Macbook Air will spare a thought. It probably won’t be a kind thought, but it’ll be a thought.

Your pal,

– bob

April 22, 2024

Did you try turning it off and on again?

Friends,

It’s been one of the Monday-est Mondays in a while, but here’s some good news that makes me remarkably happy. The engineers at JPL correctly diagnosed the problem on the Voyager 1 spacecraft that put it in a boot loop since November. They uploaded a patch (22+ hours from here to there) and have been waiting all day for confirmation that it worked. That’s pretty decent tech support for a 50-year old hand-built computer that’s 15 billion miles away.

I guess patience pays off.

Your pal,

– bob

April 20, 2024

No, YOU need to cool down

Friends,

It’s been a while and the wet paper bag of events has finally managed to drop its load on my keyboard. In other, less pale mauve terms, a lot has happened and it’s time to share some of it with you, dearest reader.

The structure of this post is kinda up in the air, so let’s bookend the thing with good news. Nothing here is particularly bad or concerning, but a sort of positivity sandwich seems like the way to go, so let’s get started!

I’m still gainfully employed in my chosen profession! If you’ve been following the advertising and marketing industry, this is quite a feat. There have been massive layoffs—if not actual agency failures—here in the States and in Europe. Clients seem to be taking advantage of this by forcing rates down into the basement, but that’s probably not a great idea if they’re hoping to retain talent for their future projects. It works to bolster their quarterly results, sure, but skittish creatives are going to jump ship or change industries entirely. I’m not that easily spooked, so I’m sticking with it.

With that in mind, we were pretty excited when the call came in to get ready to come to London this summer. My sweetheart and I have been musing about our first European trip together, so a free ticket for me meant half-priced travel for both of us. England? Great. We can get a free trial for Babbel to learn the language, and we can get plug adapters for our chargers. Let’s go!

needle scratch.wav

The call today was postponing the trip. We bought non-refundable plane tickets, which added some complication, but there’s a happy resolution for that on the horizon. I’m not entirely sure what it is at the moment, but it’s gonna be amazing. Probably.

Before this happened, we moved my mother in-law out of her retirement apartment and into a great memory care facility. “Is there such a thing?” I hear you ask. What I know is this: she’s happier, healthier, and is more engaged. I think it’s very reasonable to say that it’s a great facility.

My illustrious writing partner was scheduled to have a hip replacement months ago. She’s SOOO much older than I am (eight months, friend. maybe cool it. – ed It’s a running gag. Relax.) but it really doesn’t seem like the hardware should pack up this early, and I don’t envy her having to wait another few months to get the procedure done. Also, I missed commemorating her birthday, so I’m a bad friend and feel terrible.

Speaking of repairs, and I know that she has, if you’ve heard of P0456, that’s a small leak of your car’s evaporative emissions system. Without a smoke machine it’s hard to find those small leaks, so I acted on a hunch and replaced the evaporative system sensor based on a bunch of YouTube videos. It seems to have worked so far, but I can’t be sure because, well, I’ve stopped smoking.

audience light applause.wav

Since you asked, I got the extra parts to install the Gotek floppy eliminator I picked up at VCF SoCal in my Kaypro 2x. Have I done it yet, no. I’m looking forward to not relying on 5 1/4″ floppies to make things happen on the machine which admittedly can’t do too much, but I still want to plop the machine on a table at the local Panera and start working.

In case you were wondering, the fans in my 2019 Intel Macbook Air are going nuts right now. Is it because I’m dropping so much truth (i’m not feeling very well right now. -ed Me neither, dog. um, gross. -ed). I think the problem is that this machine is underpowered, unloved for its zero-travel keyboard with the dodgy zero key, and ready to be retired. UPDATE: Or mail.app crashed. Why? No idea.

Remember how the Republican tax cuts from 2018 benefitted the very wealthy and threw the middle class a bone for a couple years to keep “the people” from revolting? It turns out that whatever enticement we had to not storm the Bastille has ended this year. Will low-information middle class voters blame the Biden administration for the tax increase or understand that this was a deliberate sabotage of our system by a bunch of cynical finks who are only in it for themselves? It’s hard to know!

Well, that’s about it for now. More soon.

Your pal,

– bob

February 14, 2024March 13, 2024

A Small Confession

Friends,

I’m using the Olivetti Lettera 36, an electric typewriter from the past that feels like it was intended to predict the future, to write this thing. It’s Italian, but I don’t think that has anything to do with my current problem: How do you make an exclamation mark on this thing? I’ve figured out how to make an apostrophe by rolling up the platen half a line and type a comma. I’ve even figured out that the lowercase “L” is a good substitute for the number one. The problem with this typewriter, as with many others, is that there’s no one key. On this machine, that’s been taken up by the “Keyboard Release” key. I think this machine has a problem with keys jamming in the basket and you need a special key to unjam the jam that they clearly considered to be inevitable.

I can’t say that I blame them. I find that as I grow more comfortable I with the machine, I’m coming perilously close to jamming it myself. Or it’s full of gunk, or rust. Also, let’s be honest, this thing is fairly loud. I’m concerned that the obsolete plastic gears or elderly drive belts are going to give up in short order. We’ll see…

Your best pal,

– bob

UPDATE: I just had to use the Keyboard Release button. I’m not sure exactly what I did to jam the keys, but the Release key did the trick. Super weird. Also, I could still use some help making the exclamation mark.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It looks like there’s a simple solution. Lowercase L for the number one. That was easy. For the exclamation mark, shift+8 for an apostrophe, and continue holding down the shift key, then hit period to stack the characters without advancing the carriage. I must’ve slept through typing class on this one. Amazing! Or, you know, amazing!

AN ADDITIONAL OTHER UPDATE: This post is part of The Typewriter Project. A post nearly every day on a typewriter, then scanned and posted here.

a_small_confession.pdf

October 6, 2023October 6, 2023

The Conceit

Friends,

It’s been a while, but I’ve been busy.

However, I have a plan. Two weeks ago I visited my piney paradise (more on how much I miss the forest tomorrow) and stopped by the local thrift shop. While there, I was thrilled to discover a 1964 Olivetti Lettera 32 that I promptly picked up. This was in service to satisfy my newfound desire to own a nice typewriter (this is news. – ed I don’t know if you missed this, but I haven’t posted anything new in quite a while.)

The new machine is going to replace the previous two typewriters I picked up solely because the typing effort on the other two is way too high—I really have to stab the keys on the Sears machine and the Smith Corona very hard to get anything on a page and that’s annoying.

So here’s the idea: I type out a post on paper, plop it into the scanner, then it shows up here. It seems fun to me. Gizmos, scripting, and old mechanical things. What could possibly go wrong?

– bob

September 9, 2023September 9, 2023

Where to begin…

Friends,

I had an idea, which is dangerous on its surface, but it turns out that this idea has been kind of expensive. The idea revolves around the idea of distraction-free writing. Which is in itself a misnomer. Who isn’t distracted by things? Dogs, coyotes breaking into the backyard trying to eat dogs, Nine Inch Nails suddenly popping up in the playlist, a smell, the garbage trucks playing catch-up from the holiday weekend speeding down the street. You get the idea. Life is hectic.

I thought that if I were to spend more time posting to this here endeavor, I could dig through the rubble of history to find a nice technological solution to get away from the social media and email notifications constantly ding-ding-dinging just in my periphery.

I thought that I might take advantage of one of the best compact keyboards from the mid-90s. None other than the Newton External Keyboard with a USB adapter.

It works great, but there’s that distraction again with the iPad happy to share notifications about EVERYTHING. Geez Karen, cool it.

Then I thought that I’d spend a little time resurrecting the trusty Palm Pilot. I already had the folding keyboard, so how hard could it be?

Hard enough. Palm desktop won’t install on Intel Macs. Palm Pilots of a certain vintage don’t have drivers for the keyboard built in, and Memo stinks as a writing tool. Also, getting files out is just as challenging as it is with the Apple Newton eMate. In either scenario, there needs to be an old computer sitting around as an intermediary. It doesn’t help that the more recent versions of macOS don’t play nice with Appletalk and the Apple Filing Protocol. Because, you know, progress.

Also, did the Palm Pilot screen get smaller? Just me? okay.

The answer for distraction-free writing, staring down all of us tech nerds, is the manual typewriter. Slamming slugs against an ink-drenched ribbon to leave some meaning behind. You’ve heard of it.

I got very silly and bought a couple machines through eBay. Machines that looked cool, but machines that I don’t like very much.

The key effort is too high for me and my now-noodly copywriter arms. Also, I wasn’t ready for the stadium layout of the keys. It turns out that I just don’t want to reach that high for the number row, since I’ve spent all this time on flat keyboards. I stopped by the Idyllwild Help Center today and found the machine everyone has been telling me I’d love—a mid-60s Olivetti Lettera 32. The key layout is nearly flat and the effort is so light that I could type on this thing all day.

It’s an absolute joy to type on, and once I put in a new ribbon, it should be a nice addition to the typing horde.

The plan is pretty simple(-ish). I have a sheet-feed scanner that I can connect to a computer that’s on most of the time. I’ll type a page, plop it into the scanner, and through some scripting I can recognize the text and save the image of the page, so everything just posts to the blog.

Like magic.

I guess we’ll see if that works when I post my first typed blog post.

The 20-something marketing experts offering advice on how to build audiences suggest not making promises in your blog that you can’t deliver. I can’t let them down, can I?

Actually, I don’t mind letting them down, but not you, dear reader. Let’s make this happen!

Your pal,

– bob

May 12, 2021May 12, 2021

Sometimes The Universe Just Knows

Friends,

I’ve been looking for a new gig for a while now and it’s really getting to be a drag. I’m spending a fairly large number of hours every day applying for jobs on various sites, responding to recruiter queries, chatting on the phone with talent acquisition professionals, and involuntarily twitching when an email from Phil at Ziprecruiter arrives with jobs that “he” thinks I’ll like. I just want to get hired for a job that I can enjoy and be fairly compensated for that work. That opportunity feels strangely elusive until today.

I had a nice chat with a talent acquisition professional who was lovely on the phone, did not seem to mind the spotty cell coverage at my Secret Alpine Laboratory. She suggested that I would move to the next interview round after consultation with another manager, so I’ll take that to mean that it went well.

Then, I spied in my inbox that a job I’d been passed over for a month ago is open again. It’s a weird one for sure; a high-paying custom picture framing job. Mostly production-type work, but they’re working on building their custom framing business. I can do that! I’ll even join the Professional Picture Framers of America to lend legitimacy to the effort. That sounds like good fun.

I hit Apply, then got a notification that the local company that’s been selling home automation gizmos for decades has an opening. You know how I love my gadgets, integrating X-10 Powerline stuff into Dad’s high-end swimming pool projects to provide rudimentary remote control. I automated the Lodge before that was a thing. Now I’ve moved to Homekit, but I think I better brush up on my Zigbees and my Z-Waves.

Yes, of course I applied. This could be very entertaining.

That’s a lot of fingers to cross, but I hope you’ll spare some phalanges for your best pal in the whole world.

– bob

October 29, 2020October 29, 2020

It Seemed Like A Good Idea

Friends

Here we go! I’m using a 33-year old Apple M0110A keyboard with a Drakware adapter to type this on my iPad, and it’s glorious. Spongy keys making noisy noises is just the start. The other great part of this is the keyboard’s physical height, which is absolutely perfect for typing from the couch in front of the teevee. The election is next week and this is looking like my weapon of choice to push my dumb thoughts to the blog that you (probably) can’t get enough of.

Except for one thing: There’s no good blog editor for self-hosted WordPress that works on an iPad. Not without crashing. Not without a lengthy session repairing the problems imposed by the editor.

Maybe this keyboard will work great on a laptop…

Your pal,

– bob

UPDATE: What’s that you say? Where’s the love for the Apple Desktop Bus? You know me, I’m down with the ADB. I picked up an adapter for ADB as well as the original Mac straight-through phone cord connector and I’m enjoying the Apple Keyboard II with the Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II. What’s missing? The second button on the mouse, which is easily solved with a Ctrl+click. Scrolling is a harder problem because windows on modern Macs have disappearing scroll bars. Grab them before they go away, because they will go away. Vintage computing is fun.

June 25, 2020June 25, 2020

Creaky Old Weirdos

Friends,

An update on Le Musée des Ordinateurs Anciens:

The Toshiba that caught fire after I soldered on the battery jumper backwards—in my defense, the battery terminals were mislabeled—is still on hold. Once burned, twice shy, I suppose.
The Toshiba Satellite I started work on has a bad and expensive to fix display, so that’s on hold for a bit as well.
But look here! The old Amiga 1200 is working! Sorta!

I cleaned up the Amiga after it spent some unfortunate time in the garage and it started right up. Its whopping 170 megabyte hard drive made a lot of clicking and clacking noises, but didn’t boot the machine. Time for a new hard drive.

Luckily, there’s a seller in the UK that sells brand new CompactFlash cards with the Amiga Workbench installed, and the hardware needed to hook it all up. I ordered it up and it arrived a month later. Can’t wait to see how the old gal runs after all this time.

BTW, got a spare a 72-pin 128 MB SIMM laying around? I’ll trade you a box of double density floppy disks.

Stay safe. Wear a mask, please.

Your pal,

– bob

January 19, 2020

What Are You Doing? Playoff Weekend Edition

Friends,

It’s a lovely January weekend here in Northern San Diego County. Even though the anticipated rain storm never really materialized, we still did inside stuff, like making ravioli. We’re going to wait a bit to try the ravioli (and tortellini made from the same ingredients), but the filling is going to top a pizza in about twenty minutes, so we’ll see how it tastes after the pie is baked.

Speaking of food, we both suffered from brunch at the in-laws’ in-house dining facility. Imagine getting punched in the gut for a few hours and you’ve got something of an idea. Note to self: Next time, skip the omelette bar. No, really.

That wasn’t really the point, though. Being the family tech support, I got to fix music streaming problems (get rid of the web browser and stream from iTunes to Airplay receiver instead), and palm rejection on the laptop (it doesn’t work, hit fn+F3 to turn off the trackpad on the Dell laptop thing).

We also spent some time watching football. So. Boring.

That’s mostly it. Maybe we’ll have a chat about the Hiroshima Carp baseball club and why you should care.

Of course you should care.

Your pal,

– bob

April 30, 2019May 7, 2019

What Are You Doing? Calculator Edition (update)

Friends,

It’s been a little while since I wrote about the pretty dead and not alive Toshiba T1000. I think that there’s probably somebody who wants the bits that remain, like the display, case and floppy drive, so I was thinking about selling. There’s a lot of other stuff to sell as well, like clamshell iBook batteries, Powerbook G3 pieces, and other computer stuff.

What I’ve turned my attention to at the moment is completing the handheld calculator wing of Musée de l’Informatique Anciens. Sure, I’ve got Rockwell four-bangers, Casio melody calculators, and a model that didn’t feel the need to include a decimal point. They’ve got red LEDs, LCD displays, and the collection includes my very first calculator—a green LED Casio four-function. It’s my favorite, but the next one was a gem that was extremely popular…

The Texas Instruments TI-30 digital slide rule. Yeah, that’s right. They used that marketing to differentiate this student-focused model from the pro-level “scientific” models. Mine came in a package with a great book that I read over and over again, The Great International Math On Keys Book. I went from junior high pre-algebra failure to college math major by paying attention to the processes in this book (and a few others).

I still have the book, but I don’t know where the calculator went. Time to find a replacement, I think.

They made a bazillion of them, so it should be easy to find another one.

Your pal,

– bob

UPDATE: Replacement TI-30 has been ordered and is on its way! Very exciting.

April 9, 2019April 9, 2019

Old Friends: Bad News For The Toshiba

Friends,

It’s been real bad news for les ordinateurs anciens around here lately. For one, I purchased a replacement battery pack from a Florida Man and spliced it into the power system of one of the older machines here—a Toshiba T1000 laptop.

Why get this particular machine running again? The concept is brilliant: A PC-compatible laptop that boots almost instantly to MS-DOS 2.11 and runs for nearly six hours on a charge. The keyboard is a delight to type on, the non-backlit LCD screen crisp and reasonably responsive. It’s got a serial port, a parallel port, a 1.44 MB floppy drive and a 2400-baud modem. It’s still a great writing machine and deserves another shot.

After putting the machine back together, I left it on the charger and went to bed.

11:38 PM: “Honey, it smells like plastic burning in the kitchen.”

I shot up out of bed and padded into the kitchen to take in smells like blown 35-year old capacitors. After disconnecting the power adapter, but ever the optimist, I flicked the power switch to see if despite all of the smells, it would still turn on. No lights, no sounds, all the smells. Placing the machine on the granite countertop, I figure that at least I wouldn’t burn down the dining room table if it burst into flames.

1:35PM: Burning smell getting worse. Noticeable from the bedroom.

Laptop is still warm to the touch and rubber feet are stuck to the counter. Move the poor burnt laptop outside into the barbecue. If things go very badly, at least the flames will be contained. She asks me as I walk back in the kitchen, “Hi honey, what are you up to?” “Oh, nothing,” I lied.

I didn’t have time to take the thing apart this morning, so it had to wait until this afternoon. The damage was much worse than I imagined. Bad capacitors weren’t the problem. The real issue was a bad (or incorrectly wired) battery pack. I connected my red wires to the red wires in the battery pack, but the damage sure looks like a dead short that caused a little bit of fire inside the case…

So the motherboard is burnt. The add-on 2400-baud modem is burnt. The battery carrier and harness is burnt.

It’s beginning to look like the machine can’t be fixed!

Aw, c’mon. You know that’s not true.

Your pal,

– bob

March 18, 2019

I See You – Telescope Thing

Friends,

I saw this fun gizmo at B&H Photo a few weeks ago at a steep discount, so I grabbed one. It connects to an eyepiece on your telescope and lets you clamp your smartphone camera over the lens. I just started playing with it, but I can see the potential.

There might be a little editing involved, though.

Your pal,

– bob