Notices by Gregly (gregly@retro.pizza)

Next weekend, my mom is getting married. She’s a bit over 70. She made it through my dad dying far too young in 2005, found someone else, made it through *him* dying, and after all that, found yet another person to spend her life with.

I find that very comforting in such an awful world.

(Also, it probably doesn’t hurt that she looks and acts like she’s in her fifties!)

The IBM PC 5150 I got off of eBay arrived today; planning on taking pics of it to post here later.

It appears to be pretty standard-issue, with two 360k floppy drives, a floppy controller, original IBM CGA graphics card, joystick card (!), extended memory card of some sort, and what I think is a parallel port card.

Looking inside, it has definitely had some RAM pilfered; man, RAM prices are so bad people are resorting to cannibalizing 45-year-old computers! 😆 Looks like the mainboard has 64K on it, with maybe another 64K on the memory card. Funny enough, I just might have enough spare chips downstairs to populate most, if not all, of the banks!

There’s also this smell inside it that is indescribable but *immediately* nostalgic, and I’m not sure why. I never had a 5150, nor did my school, and none of my other retro computers have that smell. Yet somehow it smells like my childhood.

#retrocomputing #RetroTech

@dalias @bitsnpieces @futurebird Hell, you can go back further, to Ford pardoning Nixon. I’d argue Nixon getting away with his actions, combined with Reaganomics, plus Bush’s endless wars, all led to today’s Republiklan party.

@whitequark I’d be concerned about scams, but other than that I agree, it’s extremely cool

@sinvega @Bobbins

General failure reading drive G
Falling back to bitter cynical asshole mode

@m04 @gerbal @kjhealy Yeah. I don't care if the guy actually "rewrote it all from scratch" when he built Netscape as he claims; the fact remains he took work primary developed at a federal agency, housed at a state university, and used it to become a billionaire. He's fucking scum.

@steter I can believe it! My first 486 was around $2500 (although that included monitor/keyboard/mouse). The cost of systems today is ridiculously low compared to the old days.

She could probably get by just fine with an older system (albeit newer than her current one), but if she’s going to put money into building a machine I’d prefer she get something that will last her a bit longer. I may work out a deal with her to help her buy pieces over time. (At least the pace of obsolescence has slowed down since the 80s/90s!)

Honestly, I’m glad she’s considering the costs! She just turned 18 and is starting to deal with a budget of her own for the first time, and she wants to save for bigger things like a car, so IMO she’s doing a good job of figuring out what she wants to put money toward.

My daughter wants to build a computer! She’s a bit dismayed that a moderate machine that will do everything she’d like would run about $1k though.

In the meantime I can upgrade the CPU and RAM on her existing system, but it’s old — 7th gen Core — so the benefits would be pretty small.

I just saw someone on Mastodon who identifies herself as totally blind side with ICE against the protesters

And I’m like

You realize the disabled will be the next target, don’t you?

Have you not seen the eugenicist rhetoric spewed by this regime?

How can you be so ignorant?

He died in abject poverty, after all of his savings and benefits had run out. One of the most prolific, brilliant, amazing sci-fi and comic authors ever, and he died like that.

I fucking hate this country. I fucking hate it.
https://www.ign.com/articles/peter-david-acclaimed-incredible-hulk-and-x-factor-writer-has-died

@cwebber I love that whole album.

So my wife is saying 4chan was hacked so thoroughly that it may be a *site-ending hack*. Practically everyone who ever signed up on the site (i.e. non-anon users) has had their private info leaked, including emails and IPs in many cases.

(Warning: offensive language and slurs in the link below, it includes screenshots from 4chan after all)

https://xcancel.com/Priniz_twt/status/1911970751663448290

@magicalgirlsabrina We’ve been noting here how they’re *massively* leaning on nostalgia this year. Almost like a bunch of morons just voted for someone who promises to return us to an era of “greatness” that exists only in their fevered imagination!

@rootfake @GavinChait @dalias @marshray @cwebber After thinking about it a bit, I’d like to suggest “faith-based patterns” (or “faith-based coding/architecture/etc.”)

@directhex @goatsarah @eff Strong agree here. Too often the EFF has felt a lot more like the “Straight Cis White Techbro Freedom Foundation”.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.
It doesn’t have to be practical.
It doesn’t have to be useful or monetizable.
It doesn’t have to be spectacular, extraordinary, or even original.

Make stuff because you want to. Simply for the joy of making it.

(This is mostly a reminder to myself, to banish all these intrusive self-criticisms. But maybe you need it too.)

@CelloMomOnCars @cstross The article mentioned that the battery is modular, and I think *that* is the key to mass EV adoption. Five minutes to 60% charge is amazing, but people are generally impatient. Imagine if you could stop at a service station, swap out a number of standardized empty cells for full ones, pay a fee for the charge difference, and head out again? Long-distance EV travel could be as easy as gasoline-engine travel.

Re the whole “First Lady” “joke” about Elon:

Aside from it being bigoted, I’d argue it’s better to call him “the actual President” because Trump is an insecure paranoid narcissist who will *absolutely* drop him like a hot iron if he thinks Musk has more power and attention than he does.

Keep insinuating that Musk is the true power behind the figurehead that Trump is. Keep tweaking him until he stabs Musk in the back. Sow chaos between the enormous egos of this regime.

@cstross @iinavpov Realistically he’ll ban EVs for all companies except Tesla, granting him an explicit monopoly.