I'm generally for it, as I'm pretty sure that without them we'd have even MORE people playing videos out loud on buses and trains. (Even if automatic captioning were perfect.)

A hardware debugging scene: from left to right, a Tektronix TLA714 logic analyser (a big squat box with an LCD computer display), a PERQ 2T2 workstation with the covers off and the EIO board jutting out from the front (I'm using bus extenders for easier access to the ICs), and an oscilloscope. Wires snake everywhere to connect the test equipment to the guts of the ailing PERQ.

POV: #PERQ hardware debugging, as usual. The #Z80 (serving as an I/O coprocessor) is behaving strangely: fetching instruction bytes without toggling the M1 pin, jumping to random locations at around 47uS after coming out of reset; what's going on here?

RetroFest in six weeks or so...

Hang in there, you'll fix it! And I'll fix my blasted PERQ that seems right now to be experiencing strange behaviour around its Z80-based I/O subsystem.

I think it means that you can get Kraftwerk to do your assignments

This disk is one of several 8" floppies for #PERQ shared with me by a generous person on Mastodon --- thanks! (So far I've mainly recovered floppies you can already find on Bitsavers, but the as-yet-unarchived ones will be tackled soon.)

An 8" floppy disk rides "hammock-style" on a pair of wires slung inside of a smoked perspex box with a backlit indicator panel.

Developing technique for "disk baking". The box is a filament dryer for 3-D printing, and the disk "bakes" inside at 55 °C for six hours in an attempt to stabilise the degraded binder that holds the magnetic oxide to the PET substrate.

A picture of an attempt to compile uemacs on the Torch Triple X. The file named fileio.c has generated a number of errors.

I struggled with vi on the Torch. There's only one thing to do. Compile uemacs on the Torch. In the process of modifying the code to K&R formats I've started to like vi, rendering this task pointless. But now I've started I need to to see if uemacs will work. Why do I do these things to myself?

Ha yes, that's the way to do an exhibit at a retro computer show! (Don't I know it...)

no fooling that last week I really, actually saw someone at work earnestly complement a Steelers fan on their "AI hat"

Two Farallon EtherMac 10BASE-T MAUs with their AAUI connectors plugged into small circuit boards with AUI plug connectors. These circuit boards are the AAUI-to-AUI adaptors described by the project linked in this post.

You want: a regular #Ethernet MAU to plug into an AUI port
You have: a MAU that only works with Apple's weird AAUI port
No problem! Here's an adaptor: codeberg.org/stepleton/aa...

I would love to get another 8" drive. Does the place where you got yours have more?

Once you get a blank disk, I might be able to get a flux image of it for you so that you can recreate it more easily.

This is the manual for the Elliott 803 library subroutine D2. It was implementing this sorting algorithm in 803 machine code that lead to Tony Hoare suggesting to his boss that he had a better algorithm, which turned out to be quicksort.

I tried to chase down the problem for a long time without finding anything suspicious, so now the Astec has been pushed to the back of the bench 😂 But I never investigated the rectifier board and wonder whether something about how it handles inrush may no longer work as well as it once did.

@adriansdigitalbasement.com I have the same Astec AT PSU as you. Mine has a power-on voltage pulse so high that it immediately shuts itself down. But if you temporarily disable the voltage protection by tampering with the optoisolator, it regulates itself quite well once it has got started.

But of course the writers surely had no such thing in mind, legacy or Granite City, and 100% should have started the station call with a K.

TIL about WDAF-TV in... Kansas City of all places! Once an affiliate of the DuMont network, which has been my Pee-Wee's Playhouse secret word of broadcast facts for a long time now. One of those before-they-systematised-it stations.

Oh now that's tough to forgive, but it IS possible to try and rules-lawyer it into okayness. The W/K split for radio calls is the Mississippi, so assume the TV station has the transmitter in Granite City. WKBQ-FM "Q" 106.5 was this way when we were growing up (it's WARH "The Arch" now).

I'd be glad to give it a shot! If the disk is warped, I'll probably remove the donut and put it into another jacket for imaging. I'll DM with an address. Thanks!

Therefore I'm looking for loose collections of old floppy disks to practice on. I'm especially interested in working with disks where the binder affixing the media to the donut is starting to fail.

I'm in London; will pay shipping; can pick up disks around here as well. Reshares are appreciated!

A trio of floppy disks: a big 8" disk, a fairly ordinary 5.25" disk for PCs, and an Apple FileWare (aka Twiggy) disk.

Do you have 5.25" and 8" floppy disks that are spare, low-quality, degrading, or just generally in bad shape?

I'd like to take my floppy disk data recovery game to the next level. I have equipment, but there's no substitute for experience.

A good question for math fans. A 32-bit random number makes the pattern, but some patterns are illegal (photosensitivity risk). So 2^32-2^30 is the upper bound on # of patterns, but some numbers could be equivalent.

In ordinary use: fair odds that any pattern you see once, you'll never see again.

Arrow keys with M0110 keyboard and Cameo/Aphid Selector Arrow keys with M0110 keyboard and Cameo/Aphid Selector

Well, keypad 8 and 2 also work :-)

But this may be more helpful to you for now:
lisalist2.com/index.php/to...

Rudimentary bootloader @adriansdigitalbasement.com ? I think it's fairly sophisticated! 😀

codeberg.org/stepleton/ca...

All hand-coded 68k asm down to the text display (the ROM only has routines for UPPERCASE).

Congrats on progress, it's been a blast to watch.

PS: hit backspace during screensaver

Nice, that's what I use for all of my 8" floppy recovery activities. It's hard to clean the heads without removing the logic board, but otherwise it's worked pretty well for me.

I did blow one of the tantalums by the voltage regulator when powering it up for the first time, so be ready for that!

I don't really know for XMOS, but I'm reminded a bit of XMOS. A sequel to transputer with some of the same people. www.xmos.com/usb-multicha...

Congrats on leaving all the same. I just think it's funny how the X gang was even lazier than one might first think.

It's not X11, it's $\mathbb{X}$

A Lisa is a mere vestibule to pain, the gentle piedmont to the distant jagged massif, the dewy outpost to the foul raucous garrisons...

Get a PERQ.

Americans can vote. Wherever they are. Ensuring Service members, their eligible family members and overseas citizens can vote -- from anywhere in the world.

PSA for Jan 1: www.fvap.gov remains a fine way for US citizens living outside of the US to request an absentee ballot without winding up on somebody's mailing list.