Brandon @bsharitt@fosstodon.org

I've had a decent run of good luck with my "as is" eBay purchases, but today I got a "Tested and Working" Atari 800XL that's not quite working. #retrocomputing

Always nice when the “not tested, as is” eBay purchases work out this CoCo 2 seems to be in fantastic shape.

Another ZFS update for Debian, another problem. This time my data *appears* to be missing, it may be recoverable and I have backups either way, but I think it's back to the more reliable mdadm for me.

For a computer without an actual graphics mode, this version of space invaders isn’t too bad.

Turns out the chip I thought was bad was actually fine. I read the diagram wrong and instead there was a bad trace to a different chip. So one bodge wire later and I have a working Osborne 1. #retrocomputing

No wonder Apple started making everything out of glass and metal, these old Macs I've been working on have the most brittle plastic that I've seen. The things are practically crumbling.

While digging up software and manuals for my old computers I've been working with, I've been crawling a lot of FTP and plain HTTP file sites. I've kind of missed that.

Don't work on old computers when you can't sleep. You might put an ISA hard drive controller in backwards in your grogginess. Of course the the component that popped is the only surface mount thing on the whole board. Off to eBay I go, I guess.

In my hubris, I soldered the AVR directly to the board then noticed a programming error. A few hand burns later the 40 pin DIP is now desoldered, reprogrammed and socketed and I have a working flashrom for my TI-99/4a.

Since it’s so hard to get a PS5/Xbox or the ryzen 5k and rtx 3k to build a new gaming PC, I went the opposite direction with my gaming budget. A Tandy 1000TX. With a hard drive!

I don’t know if my Pinephone will ever be my daily driver, but being serviceable and able to buy replacement/upgrade motherboards from the manufacturer is pretty neat.

I find it so bizarre that Gnome 3 has (what I assume is) a supported dark theme, but that a core Gnome default Gnome application like gedit is useless on that dark theme out of the box.

I think I'm going to have to finally dump Ubuntu, 20.10 is just way too buggy. Don't know where I'll go. I don't like Red Hat-like distros, so Fedora is out. I'd like to stay in Debian-like land, but real Debian won't support my fairly new laptop without lots of work and other Debian-like is generally Ubuntu based, so I don't know if I can trust it. Maybe Manjaro? I don't dislike Arch-like as much as Red Hat-like at least.

Think I may spend some of my holiday spare time getting to know #rustlang It's probably the biggest programming language that I've had zero contact with.

Found a fatal flaw in my plan for a quieter computer. The old did a lot to drown out the sounds of kids and TVs.

At this point I think I'll just disable my Debian zfs repo and never update it again unless there's a really good reason.

Another upside to going laptop only is that I can now donate my old PC's guts to my server. That Core i7 4790 may not be the fastest thing anymore, but it'll beat the pants off the FX-4100 in my server right now. Maybe Jellyfin won't choke on transcodes as much anymore.

Think I'm going to give up on my noisy desktop for a while and go full laptop(with a USB-C dock of course). It's got less RAM, but it's manageable, the integrated Radeon graphics are nearly as good as my old desktop discreet card and more than enough for my light gaming, and finally the 4700U Ryzen clobbers my old Haswell i7 every time I put them head to head. WIth the added bonus of near silence and all my stuff being with me at the desk or on the go(when I can go again, maybe in 2021).