Notes

Well it took 41 years but I finally own my first 5 ¼" floppy disk

I kept seeing this disk for sale on eBay and wanted to know what was actually on it, so I bought an Epson floppy drive and was able to connect it to my Applesauce to image it

The raw FAT12 disk image is on IA: https://archive.org/details/bbsc83

It appears to be a "BBS (Bulletin Board System) written in UNIX SYSTEM-III "C"" written by Mike Kelly, last edited 07/07/1983

How many of you are also on BlueSky?

Mastodon still has the discoverability problem where I can't see random posts I might like because I'm on my own server and can only find new people to follow when someone I already follow forwards something I find interesting enough to investigate (which then leads to the other problem where I can't see a random person's old posts in my client without having to view their profile on their own server).

I don't really want to run my own server and keep it up to date, but I can't join someone else's server with my own identity (I tried living on SDF's servers and they kept forgetting to renew their TLS cert). I wrote my own ActivityPub server but it was too hard keeping up with the private "Mastodon API" that every mobile app uses, so I gave up and switched to the official Mastodon server software which is huge and constantly changing (and breaking).

I hate that Twitter died and fragmented everything.

Upgraded the Braun clock in my office to a slightly different one

🙃

If you've ever gotten this annoying error when trying to restart or shut down System 6 because StuffIt Expander 4.0.1/4.0.2 was running in the background, you can fix it by opening StuffIt in ResEdit and changing the existing 'mstr' resource 100 to have an id of 103.

'mstr' resources tell MultiFinder which menu items to generate fake clicks for in order to quit or open another file from Finder when the application is already open in the background. StuffIt needs one because its File->Open menu item is named File->Expand... but Aladdin goofed and numbered it 100, which is supposed to be the name of the 'File' menu if it's not named 'File'. By changing it to 103, it lets MultiFinder know how to remotely open a file and also unbreaks its ability to select File->Quit at shutdown time.

A new version of my Wi-Fi Desk Accessory for BlueSCSI is out that fixes password entry on Mac OS 8+:

https://jcs.org/bluescsi

Slowly making my way through turning these 30 battery packs into PowerBook 140-180c batteries

https://www.tindie.com/products/jcs/powerbook-1xx-battery/

Isn't this kind of a ridiculous number of expansion slots?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/296098141133

Street Fighter II: Ultrasonic Cleaner

Why is it that Apple can set up an API and leave it running for a decade but Google has to change their way of doing the same thing every 2 years and every consumer of it suddenly has to migrate to the Next Thing?

I've had to migrate Pushover to a different Google thing (push notifications, billing library, etc.) half a dozen times now and it always goes like this:

1. Receive e-mail that I have to migrate to some new version of a thing
2. Ignore it
3. Login to one of Google's dozen dashboards for something unrelated and see warnings that I have to migrate by such-and-such date
4. Read the documentation and see it's now much harder to do the same thing I was doing before with no benefit to me or my users
5. Nope out of it
6. Receive more dire e-mails from Google as the migration date gets closer
7. Read on Stack Overflow how to do it in a succinct way that condenses Google's awful documentation into a few steps, pointing out all the gotchas
8. Finally do the migration and hate Google just a little bit more

do you think in the future mechanical keyboards will be silent like EVs and you'll have to play the thonk sound from your speakers

I guess my car is Intel powered

The Brother SuperPowerNote, CP/M, and you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYo0fhXl754

I had to get a copy after reading about it on @WillFlux's SystemTalk

Anyone have a recommendation for a decent quality ultrasonic cleaner for PCBs?

Not looking for a huge one, but something that can clean maybe an 8x4" board at max.

Something I really like about working on my Macintosh Plus is that event loops in the system and applications often respond to the mouse and keyboard before window redrawing, so as I remember where things will appear in a window I'm familiar with, I can click or use a keyboard command to do something before the window is even fully redrawn. When I'm closing a dialog or an old window that was just brought forward, it saves time not having to wait for it to draw just so it can be dismissed.

It makes me feel like I'm able to think faster than the machine which seems like it would be a negative but it's rewarding.

On a modern machine, I'm so often frustrated at web pages that are mostly drawn but blocking on some stupid Javascript or font download that won't let me interact with it yet, even though I'm just trying to click something to get off of that page anyway.

Experience in programming comes not only from building things at lower layers, but also from the betrayal of trusting things someone else built at the layers beneath your things.

https://xuanwo.io/2023/04-rust-std-fs-slower-than-python/

Today I realized that my car had "Hey Google" turned on when my son in the back seat said something and it responded.

I couldn't figure out how to turn it off so I told Google to do it. It started responding but then stopped to listen to itself say "Hey Google".