Month: November 2019

by

Well, my back hurts and I need a fresh shower, but my closet is a box of shit lighter and now back into an organized tech state.

The dogs, Corky especially, were about half convinced that I had lost my mind.

Last time I cleaned tech, I had eliminated some of the oldest stuff. E.g. limiting myself to a single graphics card that’s AGP, one SATA DVD burner, and a lone floppy drive/cable: just in case. But that did nothing for ~20 years of VGA, Ethernet, AC power, IDE, and other cables. Most of which survived.

For some of the harder to kill items like VGA and IDE, I’m keeping at least one decent pair for the odds that someday I’ll actually need one, and that’ll probably be in enough decades that they won’t be so cheap without visiting a landfill.

Likewise it feels good to have things back to order. One drawer is everything audio, video, network, and power that isn’t collected else where. Another bin collects the various USB things that aren’t the above, and another for misc stuff like my spare keyboards. Boxes used to collect internal components, like old PCI-E graphics cards(, and yes, still one AGP card), my old Audigy 4, internal cables and fans and shit, etc. Some larger things like an old tape drive

It’s kinda interesting how over the past thirty years, we went from having hardly anything but the Tandy 1000 set, to a closet full of computer shit. I feel bad for how unlikely some of it is—might need a VGA cable within the next twenty years, but I doubt MHL and SlimPort DP over MicroUSB-B are ever going to make the “Just in case” bin. Actually in another five to ten years, those should probably join the last composite video cables on their way out….lol.

by

Part of my mind says, “I will not use Velcro to solve problems”.

Part of me says, “Why the hell not?”.

Hahahahaha (^+^).

A good Game Boy video

by

Retro Tech: Game Boy

This kind of makes me feel old, and tempted to root around in my closet.

A long, long time ago in a childhood increasingly far away, I remember what mobile gaming was like. More than a bit of my childhood involved being stuck in the back of a car, bored for the duration, or stuck waiting places. Needless to say it was more remember to bring your shit with you than remember your phone charger. ‘Cuz if T-800 and Cpl Hicks lost their guns, you weren’t going back, lol.

Mobile gaming when I was little was something more like Tiger’s hand held games. I’m pretty sure that Double Dragon passed more than a few hours of my early childhood. And then there was Game Boy and Game Gear. Those were cool. More often than not, mobile gaming was borrowing my grandmother’s deck of cards, which didn’t require more power than daylight.

My first “Real” video gaming system of my own, was the Super NES. Between the original NES my brother and I played, and the THHGs I was used to, I came very close to choosing the original Game Boy for my first system, but in the end the green screen balanced me in favor of a more traditional console. The Super Nintendo had plenty of pretty colours, and Super Game Boy was eventually a thing anyway.  Some time later my brother would also end up with a Sega Game Gear, but that was short lived.

Most of my time with the Game Boy turned out to be the later Color model. My mother bought me a purple Game Boy Color out of the local pawn shop around the time Pokemon Red & Blue were still young in America, and I still have that GBC in my closet. Along with my Pokemon Blue cartridge, and other games. Before the rise of the affordable smart phone, more than a bit of time spent waiting someplace, I passed either reading books or playing on my Game Boy Color.

by

https://youtu.be/VES1KHFa_vk

It’s probably sad that when such machines were less well suited for propping open a window, and more suited to getting work done, I probably would have loved such a machine. I always wondered what use that form of Windows might be, especially when I learned there was a sorta-port of vim to CE.

The reality is, while by the time I reached the stage of wanting such machines, I didn’t really like Windows. But the reality is, what I really wanted was a device that was portable and capable of doing text editing and file management. In a better way than setting an e-mail to yourself off a phone.

When I was younger, the sexist thing a phone might be able to do is send an e-mail. That was part of why I looked at the launch of the T-Mobile G1 with sad, watery eyes; because I realized the devices I wanted were coming down the pike, and at my age, I may as well have wanted a Camaro for that kind of price tag, lol.

by

A Visual History of the Motorola Razr
http://flip.it/cmcBvO

Makes me wonder what drawer or box my mother’s old Razr ended up in. Seemed like she used that thing forever, until the smartphone era finally caught up to us, or vice versa.

by

Over the years, I’ve screwed with a lot of build systems. Both in the course of my own projects and other people’s, and I’ve come to a conclusion over the past fourteen years.

At best: you can reimplement make poorly. At worst you can reimplment half of autotools, poorly.

That’s pretty much what I’ve seen. Thus as time has gone on, I see it very hard to do better than good old Make. Especially when the GNU version has about five hundred pages worth of voodoo to appease even the worst masterbaters, and the need for autotools is kind of waning IMHO.

Enter ninja.

What I’ve generally found with Ninja is that it’s very simple. Like C: the little bit of syntax you need to remember is a small quantity. Opening a build.ninja file is probably enough to grok what’s going on if you’ve ever used an actual build system that involves editing files.

Likewise answers to questions that tend to make it easier to build a wonky, hellish, broken build monstrosity, tend to be “No, you can’t because that would make this slow”. And let’s face it, if you want much more than a relatively simple Makefile, you’re probably building a case for pain.

Based on the past year, I think ninja will be sitting next to vim and dump in my toolkit of loved and trusty computing companions.

by

You know that a camera is pretty good: when you’ve got to time pressing the shutter button to a dog blinking her eyes. Because otherwise you get a superb shot of a blinking dog.

I still remember early tablets and phones, and that feeling that a rusted barn door with a cement block glued to it could swing faster than a picture could be captured by the device.
Ahh, technological progress :-).
by

Watching The Outer Limits – s02e9 – Trial by Fire, I find myself wondering somewhat just what kinds of civilizations we could find out there amongst the stars.

Based on our own civilizations throughout history, I rather think there’s three ways that works out.

In a perfect world, we would probably have a first contact out of Star Trek. But I don’t really have that high a hope for humanity, so I expect our early associations to look more like Avatar or Enemy Mine.

In a way though, I worry that a more likely scenario given how difficult truly foreign beings are, and how fucked up we are, things would turn out more like the Earth-Minbari war in B5. Which could be summarized as a hot head meets cultural differences kicks off the near extimerination of the human race. Except I don’t think the Battle of the Line would turn out so fortuitous, so much as like an ID4 assault ship firing its primary weapon.

by

When I consider grilled cheese a comfort food, it can be hard to decide if adulting is a little bit sad or if my cheese budget is just a lot more flexible than my mother’s, lol.

Tonight, I found myself in more need of a happy meal than a desire to cook. Plus it’sa little too soon to make pasta again, thus simple plans.

by

How Steve Jobs saved Apple with the online Apple Store

Not sure if memory lane makes me feel old, or just makes me remember the shopping experience from when we bought our first WebTV back in the mid nineties. I also find the old snap of Dell’s site oddly appropriate, and appealing, as someone that experienced that era of the World Wide Web.

And with regards to our present time? Well let’s just say, Amazon is a big thing now.