As a frequent reader of the retrobattlestations and VintageApple subreddits, I see a lot of photos of CRT screens that show significant scanlines resulting in images like the one on the left.
With a simple post-processing tip on the iPhone (though there is probably a similar technique for Android phones), it's easy to fix this photo after it's been taken so it looks like the one on the right:
I recently acquired a 3M Whisper Writer 1000 communications terminal circa 1983, and restored it to working order. This is a short session of it dialing into my Kludge BBS (hosted on a Macintosh Plus circa 1986) over its internal 300 bps modem.
I attended the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 17 and wrote two new programs.
In 2015, I wrote a custom BBS server in Ruby and had been using it to run my Kludge BBS on a small OpenBSD server in my home office since then.
Last year after writing a lot of C on my Macintosh Plus, I had the itch to write a new BBS server so I could move my BBS to run on another Mac Plus. As with all software development projects, it took quite a bit longer than expected, but last month I finally got far enough with the development to deploy the new BBS on a Mac Plus.
Since recording a handful of C Programming on System 6 videos, I've occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily programming being done on my Macintosh Plus. After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted broadcasting setup.
If I happen to be programming on my Mac right now, you can watch here at my website.
Introducing my Wallops IRC client, then returning to work on the BBS adding a serial module to join the console and telnet inputs to allow calls through a modem. I got stuck for a while trying to figure out why writes to the serial port would hang the machine.
I was trying to use a V4L2
Ruby module
on my OpenBSD laptop but ran into a problem where sending the V4L2 ioctls from
this module would fail, while other V4L2 programs on OpenBSD worked fine.
Since I got a few questions recently about kernel development and debugging, I thought I'd write up how I finally tracked it down and fixed it. (Spoiler: it was not an OpenBSD problem.)
After the disappointment of my X1 Nano and learning that all future Intel "Evo"-branded laptops would lack S3 suspend, I started thinking about returning to my M1 MacBook full-time or building an OpenBSD desktop. I chose the latter, building my first desktop machine in many years.
I tweeted asking if anyone would be interested in a Q&A, and to my surprise, I got many Qs to A.
It's a new year and my old computer is still old.
A bug in Amend caused it to crash during a commit, which corrupted the repo beyond repair. I quickly came to realize that using resource files as a database for Amend and my new BBS was a bad idea. I NIH'd the problem and created my own file format that will be a bit more resilient to crashes and partial writes.
Let's have a chat. Continuing feature development of my BBS software.
I review some recent commits covering user authentication and telnet negotiation, then write some ANSI output code and a broken function for returning a number's ordinal suffix.
Framework is a new company offering a laptop that is designed to be repairable and upgradeable, both in terms of internal components like the screen and motherboard, and in pluggable expansion cards.
I'm starting on a new project and I needed a cooperative threading mechanism which didn't exist in System 6, so I created one.
I started using the Tindie platform in April to sell my WiFiStation kits. I've now sold out all of my initial inventory and am not planning on making any more, so I thought I'd offer my opinions of Tindie as a platform for selling things.
