Since I recently got my HP Apollo 9000 Series 735 up and running, and it’s March, I decided to have a little Marchintosh fun and load MAE (the Macintosh Application Environment, a real officially-licensed Apple product) on to it this evening. As you can see from the photo (because I don’t have a device that can capture the video this thing outputs, and haven’t figured out screenshots under HP-UX 10.20), it works.
Over a year ago I started working on an inert HP Apollo 9000/735 a friend gave me from their collection to avoid moving it cross-country. I’ve recently got it working, and am posting notes about the fun.
At the end of my first post about it, I had recapped the power supply, but had not found a monitor that would talk to the enormousCRX-24z video board with its 1280×1024@72Hz Sync-on-Green via 3x BNC output, or verified the condition of the discs.
As you can see from the splash image, all of those things have been remedied.
Last summer I posted about some tiny stepper motors from the internet, thinking about them as an alternative to mechatronic standbys like those terrible SG90 type servos or larger and differently terrible 28BYJ-48 geared steppers driven through a ULN2003.
At the time, I tried one with an A4988 stepstick from the top of my parts bin, and it didn’t work, so I figured there was some limitation and stuck to directly driving with H-bridges.
…it turns out the “limitation” was that the cheap current-setting potentiometer on that particular stepstick was broken so it was driving no output current.
Discoveries:
I’ve been biking a fair amount lately after a 20-odd year hiatus; I decided last year that I wanted to start biking, bought a Giant Escape 3 Disc near the end of summer, but didn’t get confident enough riding to use it around campus last year among the students texting their way to their first (next?) vehicular manslaughter charge before they flocked back.
This summer, I’ve been dong my commute into campus on it, plus a significant amount of fun/exercise riding, and the top fixable annoyance has become getting sprayed at the slightest hint of wet. I did some hackin’ that I haven’t seen on the interwebs to fit the fenders I picked to the frame, which is the point of this post.
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The Latitude E7250 I’ve been carrying around since 2017 is one of my favorite machines I’ve ever had; it’s small, robust, has perfect hardware support under Linux… and is starting to get a little too feeble for some tasks I’d like to use it for, experienced a few spurious shutdowns, and has a screen crack causing delamination.
I continue to be a fan of having a small, relatively inexpensive machine for carrying around, and a believer in “The only Dell laptops with acceptable build quality start with a 7”, so in the tradition of the $400 for a refurb and RAM upgrade I spent on the E7250, I ordered one of its more-or-less direct successors, a refurbished Latitude 7390 on a half-off sale a few weeks ago for about $470.
After a few weeks, it looks to be an excellent successor. Nitpicky details and comparisons below the fold.
I have an Onn Surf 8 (One of the surprisingly-not-that-shitty ultra-cheap Walmart tablets) that my research group bought a couple of to use as Android dev testbeds. I’ve been occasionally using it as a normal tablet since I have it around, and have been consistently irritated by the collection of bloatware it comes with…. so I decided to hack it. To tl;dr this whole thing, ignore the collection of typically scammy Android dev forum and blogspam crud, and use the open-source mtkclient for your MediaTek Android device hackin’ needs.
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I’ve wanted a hard-copy terminal for a while – both to play with and to use for explaining why serial works the way it does, but they tend to be expensive. Most of the common hard-copy terminals also aren’t really convenient objects to own: loud desk-sized machines (Teletype 33 family, most DECWriters), additionally clockwork nightmares (IBM 2741, earlier Teletype devices), which speak ridiculous protocols (…ditto).
This only leaves a handful of reasonable options, the most common of which are portables like TI Silent 700s and DEC LA12s, or one of the dasiywheel-printer based terminals (which are often non-period-correct things like a WheelWriter with a modern serial interface card in it).
So, of course, I’ve been idly keeping an eye out for a deal on one on the auction sites, and mid-October last year I got lucky: I scored a TI Silent 700 Mod. 745 for $34.00+S&H (about $47 all in) from a Shopgoodwill auction, and got it working.
I’ve had an Anycubic Linear Kossel for several years now, and have generally been quite pleased with it – if Anycubic were still selling them I’d still be suggesting them as ideal first printers.
It has produced quite a number of useful pieces, a decent assortment of household conveniences, and the usual selection of toys and meme trash for myself and others.
I’ve made a couple recent upgrades that seemed worth documenting.
…An otherwise useless exercise in rapid prototyping.
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I had my regularly-scheduled itch to play Escape Velocity or one of its successors and/or clones the other week, and decided to play the real thing this time since I did a lap on Endless Sky not too long ago, and NAEV still doesn’t quite grab me.
I’m now most of the way through a game of EV (under emulation in Basilisk II), and …impulse bought a cheap 2004 15″ Aluminum PowerBook G4 (a 5,4) off the internet after a crash ate a save file. I have good coverage of Apple 1984-1994 in my collection (in the form of bulky desktops with CRTs), and x86 OS X is pretty easy to run in a VM, but I have a hole in the late PPC era. That machine will hopefully eventually also get its own post as I finish fixing it up, it’s not in perfect condition but it auctioned below prevailing when I was looking, and seems to be acceptable.
While I was looking into the player communities (…because it’s become very hard to set up a working install of EV Nova recently, and I can’t find a backup of my registered copy) I discovered that a couple months ago some wonderful person (slurked on thingiverse/quarmus on reddit) made and shared 3D models of the Kestrel and Lightning ships from the original EV.
…So the little Mac-user child of the 90s in me promptly headed down to the basement to print a Kestrel and a pair of Lightnings.
I gave them a quick sand to take the worst print artifacts off and sprayed them down with a couple coats of gray Krylon Fusion, which gave a decent base coat. I needed to do a little (bad) detail painting on the Lightnings, and the acrylics I have around didn’t stick well to the spraypaint, so I dug out my decades-old Testor model enamel set. Eventually they were shaken and stirred enough to get the job done; in another post post, an absurd over-engineered shaker that didn’t really solve the problem.
EV is still one of my favorite games, though I think Endless Sky’s implementation of the formula is actually significantly better for a modern player without the memories, especially now that Ambrosia is defunct and the hacks around registering Nova seem to not be working.
