Monday, March 4, 2024
Preparing for the RV
Friday, March 1, 2024
Favorite Books: Old Man's War
This series for books will be similar to the album covers I did for February, except I plan on making it an ongoing Frday thing, and I plan on including a little commentary in the post instead of adding a comment later. I also will not be crossposting to Facebook, because that's just too much work. And again, they are in random order.
I discovered John Scalzi several years ago at Penuicon when he filled in for Wil Wheaton as a guest. I had never heard of him before that, but he was likable and I enjoyed all of the panels he was on and such, so I decided to check him out. Natually, I had to start with his first traditionally-published science fiction novel, and immediately got hooked on his writing.
There are other books of his in my library which I may enjoy even more, but without this one I would not have known his writing at all. That, I think, is enough to land Old Man's War on this list.
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Monday, February 26, 2024
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Saturday, February 24, 2024
Friday, February 23, 2024
Thursday, February 22, 2024
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Monday, February 19, 2024
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Friday, February 16, 2024
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Monday, February 12, 2024
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Friday, February 9, 2024
Thursday, February 8, 2024
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Monday, February 5, 2024
Green Apple crew
Sunday, February 4, 2024
Saturday, February 3, 2024
Books? Movies? Games?
Friday, February 2, 2024
Thursday, February 1, 2024
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Thoughts on the Altair-duino
My kit was missing a single 1k resistor, so I was afraid I would have to wait to finish the kit, but I discovered through the documentation that this resistor is used to limit volume level of the built-in sound. I left it out until I get a replacement (or something close), and continued assembly.
After I finished, I booted up using the USB port and started playing around with some of the included floppy and hard disk images, especially the Infocom one, and discovered how to configure it so that my favorite floppy and hard disk images are already loaded at power-on, so all I have to do then is load the correct rom and boot into that image. This saves a little bit of toggling of switches to get into an operating system with a disk already mounted.
The kit also includes a built-in VT100 terminal which uses a VGA monitor and USB keyboard. It is very picky about what keyboard it will accept, though, to the point that I was nearly convinced that I had a poor soldering joint on the USB connector or something. I used all of the USB keyboards I have, including an IBM M Keyboard which has a built in Soarer's converter (which converts it from a terminal keyboard to USB), and none of them worked. Then I remembered seeing an old Saitek keyboard of my wife's out in my garage, so I grabbed it and... Success! There a jumpers on the RGB lines so that you can set which of the three colors you want the VT100 to be. I don't know if you can mix them, but I currently have it set to green. I may replace the jumpers with small switches on the back of the machine.
Using the VT100 terminal leaves a serial port open, which I am considering using to connect a WiFi "modem" to, allowing me to "dial" into other systems, or possibly run a CP/M-based BBS system off of. I hate to leave this thing sit here idle, or just use it for the occassional game of Zork.