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Hometech: The Dishwasher Princes
Tue, 15 Aug 2006

Theres a number of things I'd like to go on about; the Butterfly Conservatory, the Beer Fest, the Baby-stuff. For now indulge me while I prattle a bit about the dishwasher - the under-rated workhorse of the modern household.

Everyone who marries knows the toll -- you get married, and for the next year or more the dishes get washed by hand. Later, for the lucky, when you can afford it (or in my case when a wonderful brother-in-law comes to the rescue :) a dishwasher appears and life is good again. It started making funny noises yesterday -- you know, a house gets to be 5 or more years old and everything in it must begin to fail. You see.. the companies who produce such staples need to sell, and sell, and sell again, so every machine has a lifeclock. The Maytag Princes count themselves among friends when supping with lawyers and tax collectors, I'd bet ;)

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Day by Day: Nerd colour preferences
Tue, 08 Aug 2006

"We went to the moon with less than 32k; what has your computer done lately?"

Theres a Bordland article on /. about the returning old "Turbo" brand back to the front lines; in the comments some folks fondly recall using Turbo C and Turbo Pascal to learn coding back in the day. I'll admit I did my share of Turbo Assembler hackery though I really preferred (*swallow*) Microsoft Assembler (MASM) at the time. Oddly enough while cleaning out the basement a little last week I stumbled across and sadly threw out my Turbo Assembler manual set. I also liked MS Quick Pascal and wrote some crappy old BBS utility for a friends system ('Alpha City') in it - "MEP", a log analyzer, the "Most Expensive Program [in the whole building]" (Ahh, to be a young newbie who liked Monty Python again!) I even at one point paid big fat money for the full MS Windows 3 SDK (some 3 feet of books and about 40 floppies, oh baby!) I have fond memories of old Borland but I don't recall using the stuff much, but we all did cheer them on for supporting a non-MS Windows API. Anyway.

I post, because someone mentioned their fondness for 'yellow on blue' type, as that was the default for the Turbo products. This thought has come to me many times -- that I always liked black on white due to my Atari ST background - though admittedly later I went through a white on blue (Amiga-like) fetish, and then later to a white on browns phase. (That one was an experiment - any new terminal/shell window I opened would use a slightly darker shade of brown so that one could immediately discern window boundaries without looking for the border pixels. I went so far as to hide all window gadget-decorations like close and borders until you held down a hotkey.) Later still in my Kronos project for Palm OS - a group of text adventure interpreters brought to the PDA - I put menu options in for setting the text/background colours to those classy old settings - gray on black for a DOS-like feel, green on black for the mono-green text monitor feel, amber on black for those people, cyan on white for Commodore Vic-20 fans, and so on. Sick.. but you know how far I'll go for adding authentic feel to retro.

How many of you are still influenced by those old colour choices? I bet every Unix weenie who configures a terminal plays more than a few times with green on black. How can you not? How many people still use a DOS-font with gray on black? I sure as heck know I'm typing green on black with a big fat pixellated font right now.

Course, its not the same with high refresh monitors - we need terminal applications that pulse the cursor nice and fat and slow, simulating the slow fade of the white to black phosphors during the absent part of the blink. And 'tick' noises as the cursor moves forward. Bring it!

NO CARRIER

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Tech: The Atari ST Book
Thu, 03 Aug 2006

Everyone knows I've got a mental problem when it comes to retro hardware or anything with Atari written on it; I've collected all sorts of ST hardware but I thought I'd take some pics of one of the rarer pieces I've got - the ST Book, of which only about 1000 were ever produced and likely most are damaged or lost. Really, right now I'm going through another round of 'trim the fat' to make room in the house, and after that.. perhaps a round of 'trim the meat' too (*cry*). But hey, need to reduce the amount of junk in the place, and make room for the <secret's out>baby on the way (teehee!)

The ST Book was one of the first notebook class computers -- smaller laptops. It followed the earlier Atari STacy which was a great machine, though a monster weighing in at about 15 pounds.. too heavy to carry , for sure. The ST Book trimmed down features to reduce power consumption and the physical specs, so it lacked a backlight on the display, a floppy drive, various ports you might like.. but it did slip in at around 3 or 4 pounds with a decent battery life and was essentially a full monochrome Atari ST the size of two VCR tapes side by side. With flash memory so it could shut down and start up nearly instantly. In 1990-91. Nice.

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