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.
| Pronouns | he/him |
| Website | https://scottsmall.org |
| GitHub | https://github.com/smallsco |
| Bluesky | https://bsky.app/profile/scottsmall.org |
If you happen to have an old PC that has a USB port but BIOS doesn't know how to boot from it, check out Plop Boot Manager (https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html).
This life-saver utility does one simple thing: you put it on a floppy, CD/DVD, boot from it and then choose what you want to boot next: USB, floppy, HDD partition, etc.
And it's only 500 Kb in size!
This way you can install modern OS on an old hardware if all you have is a memstick image and no ISO or CD/DVD burner.
Well my employer has decided to partner with Palantir, which means it's time for me to find a new job. I was a lot more willing to make 40% less than market rate when I knew my employer wasn't funding concentration camps because they want AI coding tools.
Anyway of you need a UX designer/researcher who knows his way around government regulations, healthcare, enterprise software I'm looking!
Cool,cool… I guess given Grok’s current configuration it should have the DoD invading Poland, around what, the first of September?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/14/elon-musk-grok-defense-department/
i'm not sure if anyone noticed this since it didn't make the news, but a month after McBarge sank, its former owner Howard Meakin passed away.
if you're unfamiliar with McBarge, it was a fascinating relic of canadian history: a floating mcdonald's from Expo '86 (vancouver).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McBarge
the mcbarge sank in march of this year, and no one was able to get ahold of the last known owner. it's likely because he was in the hospital.
howard's obit:
https://www.legacy.com/ca/obituaries/nsnews/name/howard-meakin-obituary?id=58340159
There's a guy on TinkerDifferent that got their hands on an early prototype of the Finder from 1982 and some other early demo apps - including the Bouncing Pepsi Caps (made to impress mike scully) app.
MacPaint 0.1, the IconEditor and a few others. This is all stuff the Mac team was using to build the Mac. Pretty cool! I don't think any of these apps were outside Apple until now?
How many parked (unused) domains do you own? I have an idea and want to know if my assumption is correct.
Boost generously, please.
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In early 2024, Robert Smith used his DaynaPORT driver to create a SANA II driver for the Amiga based on Lukas F. Hartmann's MNT ZZ9000 network driver and using the BlueScsi v2 WIFI version to enable the Amiga to access the Internet.
Now, with version 1.0 of BlueSCSIUI, he has released a user interface for BlueSCSI for AmigaOS 2.0 and higher that supports configuration and diagnosis of the DynaPORT driver.
@biglinter @nixCraft I don't. That's why I said it's a steep claim, not an impossible one. If you played Zork, it will run fine obviously. But then telling everyone it's great for gaming while playing, say, a text adventure wouldn't exactly be very honest, would it?
The hard fact is, it might run some games, but even in its time it was terrible for gaming. You could do better with just about anything else. I can't even find if it came with any GPU. I'd be willing to bet it used an integrated GPU stock. Those did not do well with gaming back then (still not exactly super great today.)
@nixCraft There are worse systems out there.
Does anyone remember that Spawn of Satan... Packard Hell...?
And it can be expanded all the way to 256MiB of memory, in the unlikely event that you need that much.
@nixCraft We all want to play with this old beauty!
So, in some way... It's not obsolete! :p
@nixCraft
Standard ATX case? If so, it should be possible - in theory at least - to swap out the motherboard and everything else🤔
Getting proper airflow will be hard, but something with a laptop class cpu might be doable.
@nixCraft Just slap Linux on that bad boy; I'm sure it will run just fine 😅
(this is partly a joke because I've had some harrowing experiences even getting Linux to run on older hardware)
@usagi @nixCraft One thing worth looking into is seeing if the case is reusable. Get a new motherboard, some fans, a CPU and new peripherals. Air flow might be an issue, and if it was built to proprietary specs new mb's might not even fit in there, but who knows?
New computers do not come with optical disk bays anymore which is a shame.
@nixCraft I'm actually genuinely curious to know if anybody ever got to make use of their leasing model (which is what that sticker references - every two years you trade up to a current computer for a small fee) or if they went out of business too fast for the clock to roll over.
BTW the "never obsolete" tagline for their leasing scheme was a joke from day one. Those specs were pretty rough even for the time. This one is from the year 2000.
@mausmalone @nixCraft Yeah my mother-in-law had this exact machine, bought early in 2000 (as I turned up in June and she already had it).
My wife inherited the HP Pavilion it replaced, the all-the-bells-and-whistles one with the 200MHz Pentium and the polaroid scanner drive (not kidding), video capture, etc. They used exactly none of this stuff but it was still by all accounts basically as good a machine as the e-machine that relieved it.
Those celerons sucked arse.
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