Eight Is Enough

08:51 Thursday, 24 September 2026
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Words: 467

Bits, that is.

Mitzi is taking a trip to Montreal early next month, and she's going to be gone for almost two weeks.

You know what this means?

It means I can take over the table. (I almost wrote "dining room table," though it could be considered "the kitchen table," except this house doesn't really have a dining room or a kitchen. It's all just one room. Hence, "the table.")

To distract myself from new house matters, the unfolding collapse of American Empire, and everything else that doesn't "spark joy," I've been spending a little money on Apple II stuff. While Mitzi's gone, I get to play with it.

I also bought another Apple IIe. Not my favorite version, it's one of the models that has the brown keys with black letters, and the case isn't painted so it discolors over time. But it's coming with two 5.25" disk drives, and there's a card in it I couldn't identify from the pictures. Probably a printer card of some kind, but we'll see. I'll enjoy cleaning it up and testing it.

I have two Apple IIe computers in storage, and I may spend some time spelunking in the storage unit to recover my third IIc and a small LCD monitor. The two IIes are in a ginormous plastic bin with wheels, and they're both at the bottom of it. I'm not eager to dig them out, only to have to return them when Mitzi gets back. But I think the other IIc is on top.

I got that third IIc as a bonus when I bought an external IIc disk drive. It was a really good deal, but the seller didn't package them well and the computer took a beating from the power supply in transit. I've replaced most of the damaged keys, the only one left is the space bar. Of course, that's the one that is nearly unobtainable. What's broken on it are the two clips that hold the stabilizer wire. It dawned on me recently that I might be able to carefully remove the clips from a smaller key that isn't unobtainable and glue them in after cutting the broken ones free.

The disk drive latch was also broken in transit as well and I have an entire replacement internal drive here.

So one of the things I want to do is to fix up that IIc and make a couple of mods. I've got a Mockingboard-compatible sound card here that I might install. I've also got a bunch of OneROM chips here that I want to play with too.

There's also the IIgs, which has a TransWarp card that I need to test.

So many things to play with! Should keep me off of YouTube for a few days.

Looking forward to it.

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