We’re in the grip of -27°c windchill tonight and I can hear parts of the house cracking as the temperature drops.
Six weeks ago today, my wife received an early morning phone call from her gynæcologist and was told she had level two endometrial uterine cancer.
The following Monday, we met with her assigned oncologist. By that Wednesday she’d been already scheduled for surgery less than two weeks away. Surgery involved a radical hysterectomy and a check of the surrounding lymph nodes. She was home the next day.
This morning, she received another phone call. Her oncologist told her she doesn’t have cancer anymore.
Surgery was successful. Pathology showed no spread. It’s gone.
Gone.
We were confident that this was merely an inconvenient blip in an already weird year, but wow.
Wow.
Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Hiluxi is a word.
Today in retrocomputing, I connected one of my Apple IIc Flat Panel Displays to a host rescued from a basement the day before the junk truck arrived. Both have seen better days. At least the floppy drive works.
] PR#6
While this is not exactly a “One Day Build” (with a tip of my workshop tuque to Adam Savage) … a hacksaw I inherited from my grandpa was missing a blade stud, so I fashioned a replacement from a carriage bolt and a tape guide pin salvaged from a vintage U-matic videocassette.
Telidon and on and on …
Does anyone else remember Telidon besides me? I recall having a major crush on Telidon back in the early 1980s when Canada AM used it for all of their weather graphics. Oddly enough, I recently stumbled across this Apple II Telidon card on eBay and couldn’t resist picking it up simply for its historic, pre-webbiness, even though there is no existing network or technology to connect it to.
Twenty four years ago today, I registered my first domain name. Happy birthday splorp.com … you don’t look a decade older than your last update.
Re: Visor
It may be hard to believe, but it’s not always about Newton in my handheld compunabula collection. I’ve always had a soft spot for the simplicity of the Palm operating system and the monochromatic minimalism of its user interface. To that point, here’s my Handspring Visor stash, including a couple of EyeModule cameras.
IBM Personal System/2 Model P75 486
While the WWDC 2020 keynote was going on today, I was disassembling a Rev A Bondi iMac.
I may have figured out why the floppy drive in my Quadra 700 wasn’t working.
Boot’d.
Reinstalled one of my recently re-capped Macintosh IIcx motherboards into its case, fiddled around with a cleaned, lubed, but slightly stubborn floppy drive, booted into System 6, and installed DiskTop using Font/DA Mover.
Living like it’s 1990.
The original Apple QuickTake. Never forget.
Volvo, spotted.
The lady whippet of the house.
Connected my (almost) 20 year old Griffin PowerMate to my current desktop setup. I had forgotten how cool this little knob was.
Bourbon is a disinfectant, right?
Tea, Earl Grey, hot.
Cleaning the floppy drives from a pair of recently recapped Macintosh IIcx boxen. As one does. #retrocomputing #floopydoop
SCSI’ing.
Testing a 30 year old SCSI hard drive that will eventually wing its way overseas as a transplant for another vintage Mac.
Pew. Pew. Pew.
The latest update to my Comment Blacklist for WordPress contains over 39,000 spam-blasting terms and phrases to help keep your comment threads tidy.
U-matic.
This somewhat vintage beast is my Sony VO-9850, a professional U-matic video cassette deck. It will be moving its heavy ass from my workbench to the server rack any day now.
Visual cacophony, indeed.
This is the current state of my basement workshop.
Obviously, there is a metric shitload of accumulation mixed with an inordinate amount of partially finished projects piled up in this area. Neither of these “features” helps create an efficient or effective maker space. The plan for the next year is to focus on tidying, organizing, removing, and recycling a significant amount of my “piles” and documenting the progress on Flickr.
The fact that I just completed reading Adam Savage’s book Every Tool’s a Hammer may have something to do with this.
First thought of the new year … what good will I do today?