After decades of looking for one, I've finally managed to find an #Atari Falcon030. 🤩

Mine no longer had a functioning NVRAM and reverted to a low resolution and English defaults (this is a French machine). And it didn't save its clock.

The fix was to replace the chip (which contains both a battery and a few bytes of addressable memory). In its wisdom, Atari decided to solder it to the motherboard. So I desoldered it, put in a very thin socket and a replacement chip and it's happy once again.

I desire this product from AliExpress.

On top of everything else, its name, "Violent Fan", and its capacity for "Make fire" makes me hum "Blisters in the Sun"*.

* I'm old, shut up.

My 13 year-old has developed an interest in gaming PCs and would like to build his own.

Since he's shown little interest in computers in the past, it's been a great opportunity for us to talk about them and for me to show him how they work (having a bunch of old computers is great for that because they're much easier to grasp).

But his disappointed face when looking at the mad price of components these days is making me deeply angry at the AI speculation jerks.
Way to kill the joy, asshats. 😡