Scott Small 🇨🇦

@smallsco@oldbytes.space
1.5K Followers
881 Following
25.3K Posts

Just a 30something Canadian dude from #VancouverIsland who's into #RetroComputing (mainly old #Apple / #Mac stuff), #Programming, and general #Technology enthusiast. Also love to #Travel!

I wrote a Mastodon client for vintage Mac computers, #Macstodon, which you can get from here: https://github.com/smallsco/macstodon

Occasionally I’ll post about #Anime and #Gaming, especially #ZenlessZoneZero and #HonkaiStarRail.

I boost a lot. Boosts are not endorsements.

DMs from non-followers are blocked due to spam.

Pronounshe/him
Websitehttps://scottsmall.org
GitHubhttps://github.com/smallsco
Blueskyhttps://bsky.app/profile/scottsmall.org

YES!!

I successfully repaired my Apple 40SC Tape backup drive by creating a new 3D printed capstan for it. I then was able to recover some lost Apple / Claris engineer's goodies from 36 years ago! 😮

Read all about it here... 📼
https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/repairing-my-apple-tape-backup-40sc-drive-and-rescuing-apple-history-from-36-year-old-data-tapes.4477/

Web comics about emerging technology don't generally age that well, but the passage of a mere decade hasn't blunted this one a bit.
i wonder how the people using ai assisted terminals are doing

I recently received an email that at first glance appeared to be a well-crafted phishing message, warning that my Microsoft Entra ID was going to expire in a month if I didn't make a purchase. The only piece of information in the message was my supposed Entra ID.

After checking with Microsoft it appears this automated message is legitimate, and it is in reference to a Microsoft Teams trial account I created for a day and then abandoned. But apart from the Entra ID, which isn't mentioned in any prior communications from Microsoft, there is zero context for the user.

How hard would it be for Microsoft to include just a tiny bit more information in each message? Like, "Hey, this message is about an account created 5 years ago, for Teams" or something. Otherwise these marketing messages train users to fall for phishing scams.

Happy horse on Mars day!
The creator of BlueSCSI booted Snow from a real physical Mac HDD (Quantum ProDrive) through the new USB-to-SCSI Bridge feature in BlueSCSI!
It's common for us nerds to get hyper focused and obsessive. However, 40 years on one task seems a bit excessive. Wait till this guy sees what is out there now.

NEW: An awesome configuration utility for your A2Pico!

Based on customer feedback, Oliver Schmidt has built a utility to make managing disk images on your A2Pico with A2retroNET much easier.

Grab the ProDOS Disk image at the link below!

https://github.com/oliverschmidt/a2retronet/releases/tag/2025-07-08

Release 2025-07-08 · oliverschmidt/a2retronet

2025-07-08

GitHub
This is exactly what the internet is for.

Control Panel 1.0 -

Pour célébrer la naissance de mon enfant, j'ai brodé le panneau de contrôle du premier Macintosh.

À partir d'une capture d'écran, j'ai créé le modèle à broder, en mettant son nom dans la barre de titre, sa date et son poids de naissance. J'ai mis plusieurs mois à le réaliser, et il est né quelques semaines avant que j'arrive à le terminer, ce qui tombe bien parce que je devait de toute façon attendre la naissance pour les informations de dernière minute.

Je suis impatiente de partager un jour avec lui l'origine de cette œuvre de Susan Kare.

Vous pouvez jouer avec l'original (dans une émulation) dans ce très bel article de Marcin Wichary.

https://jena.pink/control-panel
#broderie #famille #Macintosh

×

As promised: PartUtil a limited partition editor that makes dual booting DOS and Win 9x without a boot manager easier.

Hide, unhide and make partitions active. Save and restore MBRs to files. And a few extra tricks that help with initial setup. Runs on any PC compatible and any version of DOS. Source code included.

(I've been using an earlier version of this for years on a PCjr. This is a complete rewrite that is finally worth sharing.)

http://www.brutman.com/PartUtil/PartUtil.html

#retrocomputing #dos

@mbbrutman wow you are a magician! Can’t wait to try this out.

@hamburglar26 No magic, just some lower level bit twiddling.

(I should have cleaned up the code and published it years ago.)

@mbbrutman This looks very useful!

I've been using System Commander 2000 for partition hiding, but only on systems with more permanent installations because it takes a lot of setting up. So something lightweight like this is a great alternative :)

@loadhigh You'll love this then. The executable is less than 20KB and it runs on anything. You can run it interactively or redirect STDIN from a file to run commands. That and the ability to read/save MBRs from/to files makes it easy to swap an MBR quickly using a batch file.

I used a precursor to this for years on a PCjr. I rewrote it because Partition Magic's Boot Manager on my P133 was being flaky and the machine was no longer booting consistently. (I still need to debug that.)

@mbbrutman Saving and loading MBRs would make one of my projects infinitely easier if it doesn't clobber the partition table. I've been looking for something that would do that from DOS without having to just make one myself. Would you consider making this work with args passed to it in addition to being entirely manually-driven?

@parzivalwolfram Does the ability to redirect stdin from a file work for now? (Build up your commands in a file and then run the program using that file as standard input.)

Adding a command line API to it would make it quite a bit larger and it would probably make sense to just repackage the guts as a library that you link against.

@mbbrutman That would work, this is mostly for personal use anyway. I can't install IBM-DOS/DR-DOS/etc from MS-DOS because their sys.com methods are incompatible (MS/IBM is a different story, but still), which is my main use case for this.