Notices by Tech Tangents (techtangents@dialup.space)

I pay for Google Workspace to host custom email domains so they don't get blocked by the cartel. And gmail has stupid AI nonsense in it (that is broken and impossible to disable without support due to the age of the account, I don't use it).

But the thing that drives me the most nuts about it is its insistence on replacing idioms with bland corpo speak.

I get that these don't translate well to other languages. But sanitizing all language down to a lowest common denominator is awful.

Welcome to our future. My grandmother bought a book on Amazon a few days ago and this is what arrived. My BS radar went off like crazy as soon as I saw it.

This is a almost completely AI generated book, printed on demand, and sold as a physical product.

@thomasfuchs I gave up on the "native" client for discord on linux years ago and just it in a browser. It has(had?) horrible update problems on linux even with a reliable connection. I also figured that there was no real reason to run an electron instance when I'm already running a web browser 100% of the time anyway.

I just got to add a new unusual 5.25in drive to my collection today! This is an MPI B51 single sided drive, used by a TRS-80 Model 1 here.

Bitsavers has an excellent brochure for it: https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mpi/brochures/MPI_B51_B52_Brochure.pdf

I find the variety of full height drives fascinating and am semi-seriously trying to collect examples of as many of them as I can. I love the 8in style drive door on these!

This might be one of the greatest error messages of all time.

@thomasfuchs
I'm pairing it with a Model 70 and the chunky mouse is the more "accurate" one as far as I can tell. I've got a project planned that is very IBM+GUI/Graphics focused so I'm trying to make it as close as possible.

@thomasfuchs
Here's a mouse I picked up recently that was definitely only for it looks!

Well I had a fun day today!

These are unaltered direct photos (other than mirroring) of a CED and a Laserdisc where using diffraction grating I was able to VISIBLY SEE video physically encoded on the disc!

I will be editing a video about this process but also did a quick write up about it on my wiki here with the direct sample images:

https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Seeing_Media

@thomasfuchs
That would not have gone over well if they didn't include one lol.

@thomasfuchs
That is really cool! I have a soft spot for dockable handhelds and I'm surprised they didn't add pogo pads if they were trying to do that.

I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't bring it to market. This thing was definitely out classed very quickly.

@thomasfuchs
That's awesome! is that a dock with it too?

@thomasfuchs
I have a feeling I would really enjoy vivaldi. I was a huge Opera 12 fan which it is a continuation of.

I'm just not a huge fan of relying on google for the blink engine.

I have as much interest in "browser hopping" as I do linux "distro hopping". But I have a feeling the writing is on the wall for firefox with them integrating AI nonsense.

I'm also not crazy about alt-browser options though.

From Chrome land Vivaldi seems the best poised but says this:

We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/

@hellomiakoda @crowgirl @shenquan
ndiswrapper were dark days indeed. Useful and impressive, but very painful

I was asked by a family member why it was taking so long to paste something large into a new Microsoft Word document on their computer, I sarcastically replied it was because it takes a while to upload it all to the copilot AI nonense first. And then I realized accidentally I might be right...I disabled copilot in Word and it went back to being instant again

So that's cool that Microsoft seems uploading everything you paste into a new Word doc to their servers now.

@thomasfuchs
I can't really disagree, my gateway into vintage computing was Win9X gaming but I've definitely spent more time exploring earlier parts of it now.

It's hard to beat the machines that you can fully understand the hardware in but also try wild and crazy stuff because x86+Microsoft hadn't engulfed the industry yet.

My 1981 HP Series 200 where HP uses HP-IB to connect all the peripherals is wonderful and would not happen 3 years later.

@thomasfuchs
I've been trying to find the monitor to go with my SMC-70 and have been looking into it for a while. I don't think they actually produced the spider stand.

Ads show a tilt stand more like the Sony KV-4000. You can also see it in V ( https://starringthecomputer.com/appearance.php?f=46&c=53 ).

It's shown by itself in this exploded parts display in the upper right.

@thomasfuchs
I would say selling used items in general is. There was a Zia Records near me that had a Game Boy Micro for $140 when places like target were still trying to clear them out for like $30. They kept it on the same self at the same price until years later when it was now a collectable and I assume someone caved and bought it.

Trying to hoard everything until it appreciates to the price you want seems like a terrible strategy.

There's been two sellers on ebay re-listing the same garbage kids game for ~$80 for months and every time they do I re-make the same reasonable offer that gets auto-rejected. Like, read the room, I'm probably the only person on the planet who even wants a physical copy of it. The sum totally of all videos views of it on YT are less than 15k.

Don't be that seller.