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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Woz.org

2019-10-24

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

So I decided to visit Woz.org to look for some interesting things. Steve Wozniak sure is an interesting and important fellow in the founding of Apple, but yeah, although he does get more media coverage than your average person, he doesn’t get as much media coverage as Steve Jobs got.

If he hadn’t been an inventor, what would he be instead? A stand-up comedian, he likes to make people laugh.

20191023/http://www.woz.org/
20191023/https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/05/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-interview/index.html

Some interesting notes on capacitor repair on vintage Macintoshes. Checkerboard pattern on CRT screen? Flickering lines on CRT screen? These are signs that the capacitors are in need of replacement. Sure, you might say taht after running the system for a while and the capacitors warm up, the problem appears to “self-heal,” but don’t count on that. Capacitors don’t get any better once they start to fail. Also, if you are replacing capacitors and accidentally remove a pad, no worries, you can scrape off a bit of the solder mask of the connecting adjacent wire and with magnifying optics, you can resolder to the wire. This is a bit more clever than the technique of tracing the wire on the board to find a different pad to solder to via an extension wire.

20191023/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/58144-recapping-accident-on-macintosh-classic/
20191023/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/58139-macintosh-se-flicker-and-interference/

A good point in hand to state here for working with hobby electronics… through-hole components are easier to service long-term than surface mount components. Maybe only in regard to capacitors, I guess. Many other components do not require all that much servicing and maintenance.

Read on →

Yes! At long last, what I was looking for. An Apple Imagewriter emulator, find it inside the GSport Apple IIgs emulator and hack away at the source code from there. The implementation is fairly modular, so it should be easy to get things going.

Ah, yes, by David Schmidt, the venerable name behind Apple II Disk Transfer ProDOS.

20191023/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/57584-any-way-to-print-from-a-iic-to-a-network-printer/
20191023/https://david-schmidt.github.io/gsport/
20191023/https://david-schmidt.github.io/gsport/printer.html

There is a Gameboy Advance emulator for the black and white Macintosh? Yep.

Not convinced to replace leaking electrolytic capacitors? Okay, take this. One forum member Dog Cow had the RIFA safety capacitor blow up. “And it’s always so dramatic! Just huge clouds of gray smoke pouring out of the vents like there was a dirty fire inside the case!! Too bad I didn’t have my camera handy.”

Beware if your floppy disk drive sticks, don’t force it! It could be that the lubricant dried up and turned into glue, open it up, clean the old lubricant off, and put in new lubricant.

Also, another interesting tidbit of advice, don’t put floppy disks to the left side of your Macintosh, the analog board and power supply generate a considerable amount of EMI that can mess with them and erase them. The right side is safer, or at least far away to any side.

20191022/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/54391-what-did-you-do-to-your-applemac-today/&page=21
20191022/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/54391-what-did-you-do-to-your-applemac-today/&page=22
20191022/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/54391-what-did-you-do-to-your-applemac-today/&page=23
20191022/https://macgui.com/news/article.php?t=431

This thread on 68kMLA contains some great information about Macintosh disk imaging and disk imaging in general. Disk Copy 4.2 preserves file tags, Disk Copy 6 does not.

20191022/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/56922-best-way-to-archive-vintage-mac-floppies-cds-to-images/&page=3&tab=comments#comment-607588

Here is the official Tech Support note stating that file tags are deprecated from Apple.

20191022/https://macgui.com/usenet/?group=14&id=169

Wondering about copying CD-ROMs with both data and audio tracks? To refresh my memory CUE/BIN is the name of the game for the file format.

20191022/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing)

What about the software to generate such a disk image? Use cdrdao, that is the recommendation of the 68kMLA veterans.

20191022/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrdao

JJJ TODO: Questions to ask:

  • How does DiskCopy 4.2 gather the format byte from the GCR format nybble?

Very interesting! A tiny development board smaller than a thumb with a built-in OLED full color display, ESP32 SoC, Wi-Fi, 512K of RAM, USB Type C, built-in lithium-ion battery charge/discharge, programmable on Arduino IDE, and $5 when bought in quantity. Introducing the TTGO. Alas, there are multiple different variants of this development board, those features must be only of the newest once. These are some of the other development boards I could find.

20191021/DuckDuckGo TTGO
20191021/DuckDuckGo TTGO $5
20191021/DuckDuckGo TTGO $5 OLED
20191021/DuckDuckGo TTGO $5 color OLED
20191021/https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/10/13/this-ttgo-board-combines-esp32-lora-radio-and-oled-display-for-just-10/

Yep, here we revisit the subject again on the economics of open-source. Nowadays, open-source is on a mixed position in the business economics spectrum. In some areas, more money than ever before is going into the funding of upen-source development. However, for many, being under-funded still remains a reality. Worse yet, there are sometimes some very big corporate users who demand that the maintainer fix a problem for them with urgency, but they are unwilling to pay. Here are a few articles discussing the subject, which I found from Twitter, etc.

20191019/https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc
20191019/https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/time-is-running-out-for-ntp.html
20191019/https://increment.com/open-source/a-call-for-change/

Here is a thread about biking in Amsterdam and the positive effect it has for children’s independence. Also… the fact that this is a pretty safe community.

20191020/https://twitter.com/notjustbikes/status/1136257110159663104

Here is a thread about women inventors who were often written out of the historic narrative.

20191020/https://twitter.com/Flaminhaystack/status/1170249572305854465