Notices by tom jennings (tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org), page 2

It implies a lot when the operating system's declared string terminator character is a dollar sign.

If you're in New Hampster and need some tractor feed paper, here's your deal!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/177643034924

Word containing letters wkw.

"Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer."

@robdaemon

Funny you said that, me too. I've been using vi and vim for many decades but for some stuff like writing prose, dissatisfied.

What are your issues? Mine include, for writing prose, modal editors suck for prose.

I've been using Tea. Idiosyncrasies but good.

Found this, not gone through it yet ... https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl

I've been doing work on mp/m and used old WordStar again, and it's a shockingly good editor for writing.

There exist WordStar workalikes for Linux! That might be too scary. But it's entirely keyboard driven which has many advantages....

@Mikal

Ok I have to dig up the url for my toilet cam -- from 1993. It got mentioned in TIME magazine as an example of the decay of American culture (win! win!).

@Mikal

> zillionaire

because I bite that hand that feeds me shit. I will not do work for corporations. I quit Apple in 1987 and that was that.

Since then I try to build the world I want to live in, to varying degrees of success, and ignore the normalizers, which has been extremely difficult to ignore, though in 2025 people are starting to notice that maybe it's been a scam all along... surprise!

OK an attempt at clarity:

"Bootstrap" in computing is when you have the ability to write programs, using that computer's hardware, to modify the operation of that computer ("Lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps.") Access to and control of the execution of programs (collections of instructions) in a stored-program machine, from the first instruction fetched and executed, must be as accessible as all other instructions or it is not a trustworthy medium for human interaction.

Bootstrap is the thing that allows community: it allows the computer to be a core around which community is built, because users of the machine *can use the machine to build programs for* the machine for human ends. This is how computers can be a trustworthy medium of human communication.

The current instantiation of the internet (and windows 11; boot ROMs; browsers and more) sees an attempt to wrap computing in a shell, inside which are users, and the shell and it's outside built and controlled by corporations.

The ability to bootstrap is the fore-most requirement of a computer.

This makes encryption fundamentally problematic; but we knew that from the start. Encrypted matter within your machine, necessary for the operation of that machine, must be under and in your control, or it is not fully your computer.

@botvolution

Ha! Omfg I'm totally with you here! Apples QuickTime was perfect for this. Two little cursors, play to select, slide them, when you got it, you could delete or cut/paste. Lovely interface paradigm.

They dumped it.

I think VLC can do this. But yeah ffmpeg!!!

Why did all this get worse instead of better?

Smell-o-vision

Wow this very sketchy guy managed to get his car into a completely impossible situation.

Somehow he got it onto the bike path along the LA River, then drove down the concrete embankment, which is pitched at about 30 degrees.

About every hundred feet/25 meters is a big rectangular cutout, from which meter high pipes drain into the river.

He managed to drive over one, one wheel hanging into the cutout.

He had somehow got a AAA tow truck, which is parked out on the street. Absolutely that truck will not fit up the short, gated, ramp we bike down.

He asked me for a dollar. I gave him five.

How's your day going?

OMFG websites that I hate: where, when you mouse over something (product image, click to product page) the whole thing slithers around and changes shape, like the image is trying to evade the mouse pointer.

https://www.owc.com/solutions/memory-cards-readers?memory-cards-and-readers=memory-card-reader

FUCKING STOP YOU ASSHOLES. Baby web designer bullshit, stop! No one likes this!

Top heavy, bloated, meaningless, distracting, what does this do for people with vision problems or readers. Information density is low.

Just getting to this page from home is an exercise in mouse gymnastics, figuring out how to get the pointer over to the possible target without SWOOP! ALL BACK UP AND AWAY!

This nested menu thing has been a problem for DECADES and assholes like this toss it all away.

What garbage.

@ai6yr

I do thing its all about showing off the money spent.

@MLE_online

@ai6yr @MLE_online

I suspect they're trying to make themselves happy with pricey stuff, and its not working as planned BECAUSE WE ARE IN THEIR WAY.

@MLE_online @ai6yr

Lol, sorry, and sad all at once!

OMFG real bike people are awful. Down our end of the LA bike path (and I know elsewhere) are these guys, always guys, 40 - 60, expensive bikes, spandex with logos, grim expressions who yell OUT OF THE WAY like they're committing some uninterruptible task like lunar lander but instead are just going wayyy too fast and want no interference.

I may start yelling at them back, NO YOU SLOW DOWN but I'm not really interested in aggression.

Random 1.44 MB diskette found in a drawer. I tell ya, get one of those Vaio USB floppy drives, they're a bargain. Here it's plugged into a debian 13 box.

I'd forgotten how slow floppies are.

How old am I?

When I found a high tech PC board I'd written software for (baby blue CPU plus) in the dollar bin of a surplus store. Weird Stuff Warehouse. Weird Stuff closed years ago.

When searching the web for some files from the past, I come across my own posts on Google groups searching for those same files. 15 years ago. And no memory of doing so. Then later I find the missing files, from the 1980s, on my own computer, they had been there the whole time. My excuse is find /home/tomj | wc -l is .GT. 1e6. I remembered a filename to search for when someone was unrelatedly talking about Colorado, which made me think about biscuits and gravy, which I find fairly disgusting, then remembered that folks from Otrona Corp ate that for breakfast when we went to Denver or whatever to talk to them about the 8086 card we made for them, that memory inspiration for a search for "otrona" found it.

I know to never put nonoiled paper tape in a teletype.

Don't ask me what I had for lunch yesterday.

Fkn eBay, holding up my item sell page because I posted a URL; "sales off eBay". As if. Anyway I've removed the offending URL and now have to wait out the appeal.

Friendly fZ80 eBay sale page!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/205876956191

#cpm #mpm #retrocomputing

OK eBay resolved this a lot faster than I imagined. Problem solved. Simply cannot post any URL in an item page.

OK Friendly fZ80 Computers are now for sale!

I have no ecommerce site of my own and likely never will. I'm intending to use eBay. But I want to offer folks here first shot so I don't want to put the eBay page up.

There are ten units for sale. $90 each. There's no rational way to price these 10 because they're final stage prototypes.

Substantially updated Fz80 Page: https://www.bleeve.me/fZ80/index.html

f they sell in a reasonable interval I'll make more. Capitalism being what it is, I could assemble 50 or 100 of them cheap enough to probably sell them for less. The board and chassis are pretty solid. Missing is the sound API and the NRF24L01+ radio.