Category Archives: Navel Gazing

Retro Computing

Posted on 2009-03-02 by pappp

I saw retr0bright, a hobbyist produced restorer for antique plastics go by on the geek newses(first via /.) today. It probably does do a little bit of damage to the plastics when used, but I doubt it’s much worse than another year of aging. I love antique computing tech, and this provides a flimsy excuse to ramble about it a bit instead of working on all the things I should be.

I’m specifically interested in retr0bright for restoring the plastics on the Mac SE I yardsaled some years ago. I picked it up partly out of waning to poke around in a one-piece Mac, and partly because the case information indicates it is +/- a few months of my age, which makes it a nifty conversation piece. The machine is a fun project box as well; Mac SEs have bays for two drives, either two floppy drives or a floppy and a hard drive, I mounted a small spare SCSI hard drive into the internal frame with a little bit of EM shielding, and kept both floppies. Having grown up on Macs (the formative computer for me was a Macintosh Centris 660AV running OS 7.1. The machine is still in my parent’s attic, but I’m fairly certain its video board has died. The SE is sitting on a shelf in my old room in my parent’s house, and when last I tried it was still fully functioning. People who knew me in middle and high school will remember that one side of my room was covered in a selection of aging Apple hardware, it was a big part in making me the hacker I am today.

I am mostly unimpressed by modern Macs (although I wouldn’t mind a Mac or a hackintosh to play with), but still sometimes pine for awesome old mac software; this is what Basilisk][ is for. Coupled with an appropriate ROM image and disc or disc image (both of which I keep around), Basilisk][ can emulate a 68k mac on a Windows, Linux, OS X (and possibly others) host. This lets me reminisce, and play with old software from my childhood without having to bust out any finicky old hardware. A lot of the things I keep on the drive image are games I remember from childhood, especially a couple of old Ambrosia software titles like Barrack (a particularly awesome jezzball-like game) and the first two titles in the Escape Velocity series (which are perfect non-classical RPGs). I also keep a copy of Word 5.1, which is in some ways still the best thing Microsoft ever made, and some other productivity titles from the time. It’s always neat to see what changes and what stays the same.

In the same vein as Basilisk ][, one of my other formative experiences in geekry was learning about emulation, staring with the Super Nintendo and snes9x. The joy of “You can play all those awesome old games on your computer” has always been an almost irresistible motivator, both for myself and for passing on to others. Emulation also provides a great outlet for compulsive behavior for lots of people, especially when you start to look into the world of ROM collectors (ROM in this case refers to software copies of games, which were traditionally stored on ROMs). My interest in emulation waxes and wanes, but I always keep at least a distant eye on the scene, and have always sort of wanted a MAME Cabinet (a standup arcade cabinet with a computer that runs MAME to allow it to be all arcade games in one. Maybe now with the hacker space I can interest some others in putting one together, so that I don’t end up with a full-sized standup arcade cabinet that I have to worry about moving around with me, but can still build and play with one.

While talking about retro tech, it’s important to mention the other computer really important to my geek development the Winbook XL my parents bought me when I started middle school. It is a bog-standard, if slightly cankerous, Pentium MMX laptop (intel chipset, yamaha OPL3 sound, Chips&Tech graphics, etc.) with an awful, awful 12.1” passive matrix LCD. The machine was my first serious experience with windows, with hardware and software upgrades, with system administration, and, most importantly, with Linux. My first distro was SuSE 7.2, I then bounced around for a while, briefly settling on Slackware, and eventually finding my way to Arch, which has been my primary OS for years. As for the machine itself, some of the port covers fell off in its first few years, and the hinges failed after about 5 years. A few months ago the backlight(or backlight transformer) gave out… but the bulk of the machine still works, and has BeOS (a wonderful, beautiful OS that is a perfect example of computing that could have been) and Debian systems on it. I get it out from time to time when I need another beater box to try something on.

Obviously computer history is something I love, from the truly early stuff, (Babbage, Lovelace) and even more the World War 2 era (Mauchly, Eckert, Aiken, Von Neumenn, Turing, Zuse…) into the 70s, 80s and 90s when computing technology really began to permeate the world. The best book I know of on the topic is A History of Computing Technology, 2nd Edition, if anyone knows of something better, especially for more modern stuff, please tell me.

Posted in Computers, DIY, General, Navel Gazing, Objects, OldBlog | 1 Comment

Distractability

Posted on 2009-02-19 by pappp

Lately I’ve been quite distractable. I partly blame a rescaled sense of urgency from what I tried (and, surprisingly, succeeded) to take on last semester, I partly blame my every-other day class schedule. The fact of the matter is, the problem is nothing new; because I am curious, I tend to find the things I am exposed to interesting, and, as a result, follow up on them far more than I really have time for.
Eugen Roth (1897-1976) wrote a wonderful passage on this problem in Ein Mensch(1935) “Das Hilfsbuch” (titles tentative; my German is weak, in German because it is poetry; English follows):

Ein Mensch, nichts wissend von “Mormone”
Schaut deshalb nach im Lexikone
Und hätt´ es dort auch rasch gefunden –
Jedoch er weiß, nach drei, vier Stunden
Von den Mormonen keine Silbe –
Dafür fast alles von der Milbe,
Von Missisippi, Mohr und Maus:
Im ganzen “M” kennt er sich aus.
Auch was ihn sonst gekümmert nie,
Physik zum Beispiel und Chemin,
Liest er jetzt nach, es fesselt ihn:
Was ist das: Monochloramin?
“Such unter Hydrazin”, steht da.
Schon greift der Mensch zum Bande “H”
Und schlägt so eine neue Brücke
Zu ungeahntem Wissensglücke.
Jäh fällt ihm ein bei den Hormonen
Er sucht ja eigentlich: Mormonen!
Er blättert müd und überwacht:
Mann, Morpheus, Mohn und Mitternacht …
Hätt´ weiter noch geschmökert gern,
Kam bloß noch bis zum Morgenstern
Und da verneigte er sich tieg
Noch vor dem Dichter – und – entschlief.

English (tweaked machine translation):

A man, not knowing about mormon,
looks into an encyclopedia,
and would have found it there pretty soon –
but after three, four hours he knows
not a syllable about the Mormons,
but nearly everything about the Mite,
about Mississippi, Blackamoor and Mouse:
He knows about the whole “M”.
Even something he never cared about,
for instance Physics or Chemistry,
now he reads about it, and it absorbs him:
What’s that: Monochloramine?
“See also Hydracine” stands there.
The man is already grabbing for Volume “H”,
and so he creates a new bridge
to undreamt Happiness of Knowledge.
But by the “Hormones”, he remembers:
He was looking for the “Mormons”!
He shuffles the page, tired and overwaked:
Man, Morpheus, Poppy Seed, Midnight…
He would have liked to read on,
arrived only at the Morning Star,
and bowed deep
before the Poet – and – died.

I have heard this referred to as the “Wikipedia Problem” but clearly it is much, much older and more universal than that.

Posted in Navel Gazing, OldBlog | 1 Comment

TED and the Interesting People

Posted on 2009-02-17 by pappp

I’ve been watching TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks in the background lately, and it really is inspiring to hear truly brilliant people sharing with each other. The concept of the conference (which has been meeting since 1984) is to gather the brightest people in the three named fields, and have them share their ideas in 18 minute talks. CC-Licenced recordings of the best of the talks are released online on a weekly basis after the conference for the public to watch, this year’s are just starting to pop up.

Some of the standouts this year:
David Merrill: Siftables, the toy blocks that think – (person) I love physical computing, I love interesting UI design, I love embedded systems, and I love this talk. Reconfigurable smart little widgets that are aware of one another and able to interact in a natural way. This, and the other cool people it produces, makes me really think about trying to get into The MIT Media Lab for a Ph.D when the time comes. I had a promising conversation with a faculty member here at UK that knows people there, and it sounds believable that I would have a chance. (To self-plug, over on my Ideas Page, one of the works in progress is a dumber, simpler, hobbyist-accessible version of the same idea.)

Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius — (person) I like her thesis that our culture has trouble dealing with genius, exhibited in the classic image of the tortured artist; I don’t like her idea that we should go back to the Greco-Roman idea that inspiration is external to the individual as a means to cope. As a writer, she is unsurprisingly an EXCELLENT speaker.

Some old favorites:
Anderson (Wired): Technology’s Long Tail – A good overview of the normal life-cycle of tech.

Mark Bittman: What’s wrong with what we eat — Seriously, the standard western diet is awful, and the way it got that way is evil. I’m not a vegetarian, I don’t even eat an especially great diet (mmm meat), but I always try to THINK about what I eat, and be aware of it, top down, which includes preparing a large fraction of my own food. I also like his notes that the current wash of “organic” and “local” is bullshit. The only thing I object to is that he seems opposed to the industrialization of food production, rather than the details of our industrial system (I like the idea of a future of vat-grown animal tissue and such). The thesis “eat real food” is really hard to object to.

Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning — He is an AWFUL speaker, both voice and style, and his particular instance Connexions is not exactly a shining example of success here, but the idea absolutely rings true to me. Old media is, or should be, dead or dying, especially in education. To modify a cliche, the medium changes the message; the use of, and expectation for the use of media, be it music, video, or text, is fundamentally different when it is distributed in a different medium. People expect to be able to interact with electronic media, to modify it, extend, and distribute it. One of my favorite things about electronic media is that it is instantaneously, interactively searchable. To make it even better, the cost of replicating digital copies, and the physical volume of those copies, approaches zero. The only impediment to all this good stuff is the old IP system. As an exemplifying anecdote, I had to ILL the article from 2005 referenced in my last post, because the journal it was in has a 5-year embargo on full-text databases. There is no technical impediment; only “oldschool” publishers not “getting it”. This is offensive to me. The situation that know exists with “piracy” of audio and video is creeping into textbooks; hit major BitTorrent trackers and you will see lots of digitized textbooks being traded now. At the same time, the situation is largely being avoided; watch people look for information, and they no longer look to old fashioned texts, they look at projects like connexions and Wikipedia that are built to embrace the new reality instead of trying to cling to the old.

This all jives very well with my personal anecdotal theory that “Interesting People are Interesting”: that is, that in general, anyone exceptional enough to be interesting in one way, will generally be interesting (and likely exceptional) in a variety of ways. It will usually be hard to articulate exactly HOW someone is interesting in a variety of ways; interesting people will find ways to interrelate and integrate their interests until they begin to appear seamless. Try to think of the neat people you know, I bet you’ll have trouble coming up with counterexamples.

Posted in Entertainment, General, Navel Gazing, OldBlog | Tagged | 2 Comments