raudette · HackerTrans

4 dagen geledendiscuss

I wonder if any of the Apricot-era software is still going? If the services side became ACT, which was bought by Misys, Misys bought by Vista Equity and merged with Canada’s D+H to form Finastra - still a going concern in software for financial services. Or any former Apricot employees still at Finastra?

raudette

9 dagen geledendiscuss

The author writes: "I discovered the IBM Model M in 1993 ... It took me many years to find one. I vividly remember the Craigslist ad for a dilapidated computer shop in a Toronto suburb. Inside I found piles of them, stacked six feet high. All of them had some kind of damage so I picked a few for $20 apiece and rebuilt one that looked pristine."

My Model M story:

I'd heard of the famous Model M for years.

I found a Model M in storage at a place I worked in 2004-2005 and started using it, loved it.

In 2006, I found one for my home PC at the Salvation Army Thrift Store on St Clair W at Christie in Toronto. I paid $20, and it worked!

I still have it, but stopped using it around 2010 - I was asked to use a quieter keyboard :(

raudette

28 dagen geledendiscuss

I agree - it's worth doing just for fun.

I did the same recently just for fun - I really enjoyed "Gravity Force" on the Amiga - itself a lunar lander variant.

Could a model build a Gravity Force like game I could run in-browser? Yep! (I never made it as good as Gravity Force - just got the basics down)

raudette

29 dagen geledendiscuss

Yeah, this is so bad - I struggled with this as well, why did they make it hard?

raudette

vorige maanddiscuss

this

It drives me nuts, I look at cumulative CPU time, and this is all my work laptop does.

raudette

vorige maanddiscuss

Agree - but even for the basic use case, it has not been trouble free for me. With a simple 1080p display on a desktop running LTS Ubuntu on an older 3060: - I've had updates where stuff just stopped working and I had to futz around with drivers - Just the fact that you have to 'pick' from a selection of drivers (which one won't you hit issues with for your use case?) - At least on mine, there have been display glitches on suspend/resume - as it's a desktop, I just leave it running

Just anecdotal, but I never had these issues with the desktop AMD APU I had before it or Intel on board graphics on numerous laptops.

raudette

2 maanden geledendiscuss

- IBM creates PC and its BIOS - Phoenix creates clone of BIOS - At some point, IBM/Lenovo stopped using its own BIOS - IBM spins out Lenovo - Lenovo buys Phoenix

In-house firmware, outsource, then in-house again.

raudette

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Same experience here. Was getting flats all the time on my commute, bike shop recommended Schwalbe Marathons, haven't had an issue since.

raudette

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Safari still supports MV2

raudette

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Just FYI - That defect only impacted systems which boot from ZFS - mine did not.

The installer would stop an upgrade if it found a mounted volume - it apparently checks for zfs volumes as follows: sudo zpool list -H

I could get around the installer's ZFS check by unmounting the drive: sudo zpool export poolname

I upgraded.

Then remounted the volume: sudo zpool import poolname

Then I was up and running...

raudette

3 maanden geledendiscuss

I hit this recently - nVidia issues with a Flatpak, I spent about half an hour on it, gave up, and just decided to try the app out on another laptop.

raudette

5 maanden geledendiscuss

May be of interest - here's what running Linux and NetBSD on Amiga is like these days: https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/02/running-netbsd... https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/01/running-linux-...

raudette

6 maanden geledendiscuss

The way Find My has been built, it doesn't really matter what they do with the tags, it's fairly straightforward to build your own tags, or modify tags, that bypass any stalking detection.

A phone's stalking detection just looks for a tag that's not yours that has been around you for a while.

But you can modify a tag such that it selectively powers up, or build a tag that changes identifiers, such that the stalking detection tools don't pick it up.

I've written a bit about this here: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/further-thoughts-on-stealth-ai... https://www.hotelexistence.ca/exploring-bluetooth-trackers-a...

raudette

6 maanden geledendiscuss

Story to share - my kids are well into her their teens now, but my youngest, in particular, loved Tux Paint, and used it long before she could read, she'd just click away.

One day, she's playing in Tux Paint, and a print out of her image falls from the sky. We had a desk with shelving. Two shelves above the monitor was our printer. She'd clicked on the print button, without knowing what it would do, or for that matter, even knowing what a printer was or that we had one.

She was SO excited, "look, look, what I was drawing came out on paper from the ceiling"

raudette

6 maanden geledendiscuss

I have been buying Brooks Adrenaline GTS shoes for 20 years.

My first pair, they were just on sale, so I bought them. When they wore out, I bought a different brand/design. And I noticed that I was wearing the completely worn out old pair of Adrenalines more than my new ones - they were just better.

And it makes it easy to buy a replacement - I've just buy another GTS shoe of the same size when the previous one wears out.

raudette

6 maanden geledendiscuss

Related: for fun over the holidays, I created an ePub of a paperback copy of "I Brought The Ages Home", by Charles T. Currelly, which went out of copyright in Canada in 2007 (copyright in Canada changed from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author in 2022, but this did not affect works that were already in the public domain).

I couldn't find a ebook online, so I found an old paperback copy and created one: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/create-epub-from-paperback/

Charles T. Currelly was like a real-life Indiana Jones, he was the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and sourced much of its early collections.

Even with modern OCR (I used Mistral's here), and a book with limited formatting, it's funny how hours of touch-ups are required just to get a glitch-free reading experience (no stray headers, paragraphs, page numbers sprinkled through the text).

raudette

7 maanden geledendiscuss

In my experience, no, but still worth doing.

You end up finding and chatting (often off-mesh!) with people who are within Lora-mesh-distance of you, who have similar interests.

raudette

8 maanden geledendiscuss

Maybe a centralized Op Ed page?

raudette

8 maanden geledendiscuss

Like my primary storage, with the old storage in a sub folder.

There's still a WP51 folder in there somewhere...

raudette

8 maanden geledendiscuss

I had equipped the family with identical corporate-refurb laptops - when you have any of 4 laptops in a family room, it was a way of not getting my laptop taken by my kids to school one day...

Back in the office days, it was also a way to identify a corporate laptop among a sea of identical models.

Also, like I don't wear branded clothing, I like to cover the device brand.

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