Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe), page 4

today’s pickup is a Palm Tungsten E2. really excited about this one because it has a built-in SD card slot and bluetooth, making for super easy program/file transfers

appears to never have been used, and the battery still holds a strong charge!

this is going to become my bedtime #infocom and #interactivefiction game machine

@ThreeOhFour it doessss 😎
https://palmdb.net/app/frobnitz

@ThreeOhFour it works surprisingly well on the device too - text is readable

i just need to figure out a keyboard for it

@ThreeOhFour i really, really wish BBs were still usable. i'd absolutely get one.

@HauntedOwlbear she couldn't have a better home 😻

@HauntedOwlbear oh for sure. i can imagine she probably had a UTI along with borked kidneys for the first few days. what a trooper.

@HauntedOwlbear you've probably already done this but - if the vet didn't mention it, putting her (blech) urine in the litter box will help her figure out that's what it's used for. might even be as simple as mopping it up with paper towel and mixing them into the litter.

@HauntedOwlbear poor gal 🐱 thank you for rescuing her 🙏

wayyyyback in june i asked @paulrickards for his item id magery - all i had was a blurry low res pic of the back side of what i thought was a pen #plotter, being sold on fb marketplace

i messaged the seller, and got no reply. 5 months later, i got a message and she asked if i wanted to pick it up

it turned out to be a monstrous DraftPro EXL - exactly what paul thought it was.

$20 later i am driving home all smiles 🤓

my wife just pointed out that kiki made her own costume this year 😅

she is going as a kitcat

so this was a new one for me after 30+ years of networking

for the past 3 weeks, my mac pro decided to fall off the network randomly, every 5-45 minutes. prior to this, it had been solid for 10 years.

suspected a bad ethernet port, so i switched to the secondary port. no dice.

suspected software weirdness, so i reinstalled adguard and anything that might be hijacking my connection. no dice.

suspected a bad ethernet cable, so i swapped that out too. green lights on my pro, and on the switch. no dice.

yesterday I noticed that my doorbell cam had been mysteriously offline for some time - probably weeks. i traced it back to its ethernet cable, which was only partially inserted. the locking tab had snapped off.

oddly enough, i noticed that it neighboured the mac pro's port on the switch.

i replaced the bad doorbell cam cable. suddenly, i've got rock solid ethernet on the pro again. 😖

i assume this means there are electrical relationships between neighbouring ports on this $9 switch, probably to save money. sigh.

@mac84tv exceptional write up. thank you 🙏 i’ve got a magnasonic FS71/81 that appears to be a rebadged wolverine, but i’m not sure specs-wise where it fits between the kodak and 720p versions. my #1 complaint was the incredibly bad compression artifacting. (and yes, sprocket tearing)

looking forward to seeing how much of your process could be applied to the magnasonic

🧵 [1/2] had some friends from down south asking what the drive from #Yellowknife #nwt #canada is like, so I thought I'd share the comments here for public interest sake. vga256's unlicensed lonely planet guide to driving south from Yellowknife:

first, the route that 99% of northerners take. annotated stops below:
https://goo.gl/maps/gfHTRwoVCxzS9ZoSA

roads:
- it's a 15h one-way trip on a perfect day. it's more like 20-25h now, due to the gridlock on the highways due to smoke/wildfire crews/refueling lineups between YK and Fort Providence.
- it's a narrow two-lane highway with no median, sharp shoulders because it's raised many feet above the muskeg/marshes
- no cities in between, just hamlets, villages, small towns and a couple of large ones. the further south you go, the larger the community.

fuel:
- no fuel for the 300km between YK and the next stop in Fort Providence.
- the next fuel stop was normally 150km away at Enterprise, which sadly burned to the ground 5 days ago. so the next fuel stop is now Steen River (or Indian Cabins) 275km away, on the AB side of the border.
- regular unleaded is over $2 / L, and gets down to $1.35 / L as you get closer to Edmonton.

lodging:
- motel/hotel lodging along the way is almost completely booked up with evacuees. many chose to stay in northern AB to be closer to their homes, in case the evacuation order ends.
- most people are sleeping in their cars at major rest stops like the NWT->AB border.

my extended family (not me!) was put under evac notice a few hours ago in the northwest territories of #canada

this photo by julie beaver looks as if someone got a little happy with instagram filters....

... but it is perfectly color-accurate. this is what it looks like in the southern #NWT right now, due to dozens of out of control #wildfires

@Ccollet @SteveBellovin @nilmethod ohh that's exactly the kind of 4/10 humour i love

i absolutely miss the kai krause #design inspired homepages of the late 90s.

this western canadian ISP's splash page, circa 1997, features the kinds of bulbous, spherical buttons in a circular arrangement that enjoyed a brief popularity in that era ☺️

for @irenes and @alfvaen

https://web.archive.org/web/19970331194330/http://telusplanet.net/

fellow #bbs and #adventuregame nerds, please welcome none other than Seth Able The Bard himself, maker of Legend of the Red Dragon and Dink Smallwood, to mastodon 👏 @rtsoft

a few of you pointed out that https://tomo.city looked like a DEC VT-320 terminal.

it turns out this was exactly the computer terminal that my childhood library used in the 1980s. in its honour, i added full DEC colour emulation and scanlines for the complete effect 😆

(view full pic - scanlines don't resize well)

just found out the <a name="myanchor"> named anchor HTML tag was deprecated in........ 2014

aside from
<html>
<body bgcolor=black>
</body>
</html>

it was one of the first html tags burned into my 13 year old skull. RIP 😿

@goatsarah thanks for this. i've been quietly grumbling for weeks saying the exact same thing to myself.