Progress to Date
Current Wx: Temp: 75.04°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 53% Wind: 5.44mphWords: 405
It was a beautiful day today. Still is, I guess. It was 54°F this morning when I went for my walk. Loved, loved, loved it. Took some pics of the fog in the hills and my pals the cows, they're up at Flickr.
Later on I put up the drone to get some aerial shots of the house. We're making good progress, but we're going to have to kind of work around some scheduling conflicts. Ideally, we'd like to have the excavation filled before the concrete is poured; but we need to get the power and water lines run first, and that's dependent on the electrician's schedule. Supposedly he'll be here next week. But they also need to finish getting the waterproofing up on the exterior of the ICF, so that'll keep them busy for a day maybe.
Anyway, it's getting there.
I ordered a Leviton breaker panel. The panel is cheap, it's the breakers that are expensive. Part of that expense is because I'm buying a number of "smart" breakers that'll report power consumption; but also because the new National Electrical Code requires AFCI and GFCI features at the breaker, adding to the cost. And they pretty much have to go everywhere.
I believe in safety, but this seems like overkill. I hope there's data behind all these new codes, because this is another reason why people can't afford homes these days.
Still working on the doctor saying the magic words to the pharmacy on the GLP-1 prescription. I got a note that there was some new communication available in MyChart, so I logged in to see if my results from the sleep study were in, or there was some feedback on the GLP-1 thing.
It was the GLP-1. There was a "new" authorized medication in my chart. I called my pharmacy to see if they had the prescription, but I got the chatbot so I had to drive into Watkins to talk to the pharmacist. The prescription they have on file is from August 6th, and it likely wasn't written in accordance with the Bridge program requirements. The new medication does look like it meets the requirements, but the pharmacy doesn't have that prescription. Maybe it just hasn't made its way to their inbox yet.
We may go over to one of the wineries we haven't visited yet and look at the lake. We'll see.
The beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailWild Night in Florida
16:22 Wednesday, 19 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 76.96°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 68% Wind: 9.57mph
Words: 236
I keep up a bit with Florida politics because my kids live there, well, two of them anyway, and I spent over half my life in the state. But I was shocked to learn that Angie Nixon won the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat currently held by former State Attorney General Ashley Moody.
I think it's awesome!
Angie Nixon is from Jacksonville, and I'm very familiar with her and even met her once or twice. I don't have any deep insight into how she pulled off this upset, but I'd say it's mostly because she is incredibly driven, very tough and a very hard worker. She may very well lose in the general election because, well, Florida. But I think she's an outstanding nominee in terms of character, willingness to work and profound understanding what's important.
I know some smart-ass is going to think, "Winning elections is what's important." That's the disease of zero-sum thinking. I think Alex Vindman is a fine man who served his country honorably and with distinction. But there are two Floridas.
One is governed by, and for, the privileged.
The other is ignored.
And Angie Nixon is from that Florida. She knows what this race is about, and she's willing to fight for the other half of Florida. She is not privileged and she will not be ignored.
I'm so pleased and proud that she won the nomination.
✍️ Reply by emailRising
08:21 Wednesday, 19 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 64°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 5.28mphWords: 521
Work continues on the new house. Hopefully, we'll be pouring concrete on Monday. The weather has been fantastic and they're making good progress. This level is more demanding than the basement because there are more window bucks and they all have to be precisely aligned.
I think we finally have the HVAC design nailed down. Now I need to land a contractor. We've decided to use an air handler that can be mounted on the ceiling of the mechanical room. We have 9'-4" of height to work with below the trusses. Even accounting for mounting hardware and ducting, I'm confident we can get the buffer tank below the air handler, which really compresses the footprint, which means the hot water heater will likely fit in the mechanical room. I was considering putting it in the basement laundry, but now I think I'm going to put the water softener in there. I'll have plenty of room for the two tanks and the brine tank, and the filters would easy to change without having to contort myself.
Of course, this is all just hopeful, informed speculation until equipment starts arriving.
But I slept well last night, for the first time in a while.
It's a beautiful day today. The air is crystal clear, and quite cool. I really enjoyed this morning's walk. I skipped yesterday because I hardly slept Monday night.
I figured out how to donate blood around here, so I'm scheduled for a donation at the end of this month at the fire station. I want to get in the groove of doing that again.
The IIc Plus is at my feet here. I'm kind of struggling with figuring out how to get disk images onto the virtual drives built into the MegaFlash. I've ordered some ADTPro cables for the IIc and IIc Plus, and hopefully that'll avoid any conflicts with the number of devices on the SmartPort. I'm also going to take a stab at the TFTP network transfer.
I don't think I'm going to be able to use the database portion of AppleWorks to create an RSS feed, since the maximum field length is 70 characters. But I'll figure something out. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Christopher Drum just took a long look at AppleWorks in his Stone Tools series. I used AppleWorks very productively for many years, including at sea using an Apple IIc with an ImageWriter printer and the little ET green-screen monitor. I think I had a 4MHz Zip Chip installed in it, but I don't think I ever had any memory expansion.
I have an appointment to get my ears lowered this morning, which means I can stop by Jerlando's on the way home and get a turkey sub.
My GLP-1 prescription has been rejected twice, which is according to plan from what I understand. I've spoken to the pharmacy and messaged my doctor. Hopefully we can get this thing over the finish line and I can start shedding some pounds and stop obsessing over Finger Lakes ice cream. (And cheese, baked goods, cannolis, beer, the list goes on.)
The beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailFriday Night 8-14-26
Current Wx: Temp: 63.21°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 5.93mphWords: 58
This time next year, I shouldn't have to contend with the power lines.
Brad and Derrick are up on the house today, building the bucks for the windows so that when they start stacking blocks, they can just keep going. Helps them get into a rhythm and flow.
The beat that can be counted is not the beat...
✍️ Reply by emailBlogging Like It's 1989
15:31 Saturday, 15 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 76.17°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 59% Wind: 7.58mph
Words: 530
I spent a little time this morning working with the IIc Plus with the MegaFlash installed. It's a different sort of beast than I recall if for no other reason than I never had more than one hard drive hanging off my Apple IIgs, the only II that I ever had with a hard drive.
I'm going to need to study the docs for the MegaFlash and Apple II Desktop, because I'm observing some things that don't make sense.
The first is that I can't seem to manually eject 3.5" disks from the internal drive. I don't know if I didn't connect something back up when I took the drive and the power supply out to photograph the motherboard, or if MegaFlash or Apple II Desktop deliberately disables the eject button to force you to use the Eject Disk menu in order to help the Desktop app keep track of which disks are mounted.
It's not a huge problem, just use the menu bar item. But since I don't know why it works that way, I need to find out if something is broken.
I also can't seem to use the Floppy Emu in SmartPort hard disk mode, or any mode, 3.5" or 5.25", for that matter. They don't appear even when I use the Check Disks menu item. That may have something to do with the number of virtual drives (8) MegaFlash has assigned to ProDOS.
I can use an external 3.5" drive, but that doesn't help me much since I can also use the internal 3.5" drive. What I need is a virtual disk on removable media that I can connect to my MBP so I can move disk images and software I've downloaded onto it, so I can move those onto one of the virtual drives.
The MegaFlash folks seem to have anticipated that issue, and have included a wifi application to transfer files by means of something called TFTP, so I need to figure that out. Alternatively, I can use ADTPro, which means using a serial cable with a USB connection. I believe I have that around here somewhere, but I don't think I can put my hands on it in a hurry. It may be in storage. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't connect to the kind of connections I have on the IIc Plus.
In the meantime, I do have copies of AppleWorks 3 and WordBench on 3.5" media and I've installed both of those. The copy of TimeOut Ultra Macros that I have on 3.5" disk isn't compatible with AW 3, according to the installer, so I'm going to have to study that issue.
My goal is to be able to create an RSS feed using the Apple IIc Plus. I think I can use the database function of AppleWorks for the basic post content, and then either a mail merge or database report format to generate the RSS text file.
When I get my secret underground laboratory (aka, The Dave Cave) established, I'm going to look into setting up a BBS of some kind. How? I don't know how. That's kind of the challenge.
Anyway, it's a diversion from the "real" world.
✍️ Reply by email"Support the troops"
06:03 Saturday, 15 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 55.63°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 0.51mph
Words: 545
As a retired career officer in the United States Navy, I have strong opinions about what's going on in our nation's military today. In the past, I have often shared them here. Today, it's harder to do so.
Not because I worry about retribution or anything like that. It's because those opinions are accompanied by powerful emotions, and it's often difficult to write when there is a storm going on.
It is impossible to quantify the damage, physical, mental and moral, that this administration is doing to the men and women who serve our country in uniform. Not all of them, to be sure. I'm certain that there are more than a few of them who delight in what's taking place. These souls were lost long before Trump took office.
The problem is that the same moral rot that infects them will spread. And it's difficult to arrest once it's taken hold. Good people will leave the service rather than continue to serve with people like that. New members will be shaped and guided by the twisted, immoral, amoral and ambitious cretins that remain. It will become an embedded part of the culture.
"Rust never sleeps." We spend a lot of time in the navy chipping paint. When I say "we," I mean very young sailors, new recruits. It's hard, loud, hot, demanding work. But we have to do it because steel hulls rust in a salty environment, and if you don't stay on top of it, it spreads. It thins the hull, makes it weaker. You can always cover it with a layer of fresh paint, and it'll look pretty; but it's still there, corroding the hull.
Same thing with honor, integrity and courage. These things require effort to maintain. And it's not the effort of young sailors and new recruits. It's the effort of leadership, officers and enlisted.
It's also hard work, because it requires self-discipline and constant vigilance, and mental resources that are sorely challenged when you're deployed at sea, working eighteen hours a day without a break. Because those young sailors are always watching, looking for the example, the reason for how they should behave. What the meaning of their service and sacrifice is.
And that effort begins at the top. The very top. And we know what's up there.
People argue about the size of the defense budget. Whatever value you place on the material assets of the armed forces, whatever opportunity cost it represents in the larger scheme, it's nothing compared to value of the lives and the souls of the men and women who wear the uniform of this nation.
And we are wasting it. Squandering it. Pissing it away. Not through their deaths, though there have been plenty of those. Through the moral injury we're inflicting on them.
Republicans, "conservatives," always, always like to make a big show of "supporting the troops."
It's bullshit. It's performative bullshit by people who never served anyone but themselves. Republicans and conservatives and the MAGA crowd are unacquainted with the notion of honor. It's absent from their lives.
You reap what you sow.
I know people don't like comparisons with Nazi Germany, but you should study how Hitler and the Nazi leadership employed their troops.
We're doing the same things.
✍️ Reply by emailMegaFlash Arrived
Current Wx: Temp: 77.88°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 59% Wind: 8.41mphWords: 246
My toy arrived this morning and I immediately had to install it. While I had the IIc Plus open, I checked the motherboard to see which of two different motherboard versions it was. Happily, it's the one that is easily overclocked by swapping out a crystal. "Easily" being a relative term. The crystal is soldered to the motherboard, but that's not the hardest job to do.
I'll probably still have to wait until we finish the house and I can have a workstation set up where I'll be more likely to get it right and not make Mitzi unhappy by taking over the kitchen table.
As it is, it runs at 4MHz, which is four times the speed of the other 8-bit Apple IIs, and the fastest Apple II ever manufactured. The GS runs at 2.8Mhz, though it does have a 16-bit cpu and vastly larger address space.
The MegaFlash includes a modified ROM to control the features of the board, which includes a facility to intercept some floating point routine calls in Applesoft BASIC, mostly the transcendental functions. I experimented with a BASIC program that draws a 3-d image and relies a lot on sin and cosine functions. With the "coprocessor," the program ran in 5 minutes, while without it, it took 12 minutes.
Tomorrow I'll play around with it, setting up the hard drive images with a bunch of old software to noodle around with.
The beat goes on...
At 4Mhz!
✍️ Reply by emailSunflower
Current Wx: Temp: 58.26°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 3.98mphWords: 449
USPS let me down yesterday. No MegaFlash in the mailbox. Should arrive today.
Haven't heard anything more about the GLP-1 prescription, nor the results of the sleep test. I suppose I should check in with them.
Took along the E-PM1 again this morning. I noticed yesterday in On This Day... that it was a year ago I had the same sort of yen for the Pen. Weird. It'll probably go back in the drawer again soon, probably when I start feeling like I need to be carrying a long zoom.
Mitzi and I went to a presentation by the Schuyler County Historical Society at the Watkins Glen Welcome Center. The Schuyler County Museum is over in Montour Falls, but it's still undergoing renovations and about a month behind schedule. They should reopen next month.
Two of the three brief talks presented discussed the Haudenosaunee people, and their experience during the Revolutionary War. There's going to be a book discussion group about the Sullivan Campaign that I think I want to participate in join. ("Never end a sentence in a preposition." Mrs. Perretta.) That was a military campaign ordered by George Washington as president to drive the indigenous people from their lands and villages after the war.
There's a lot of history that I don't know around here. For instance, Massachusetts claimed a lot of what is now New York State. There was some dispute that was ultimately settled in Massachusetts' favor, and apparently they just sold it all off to land speculators and it was ultimately incorporated into New York anyway. Apparently Connecticut claimed a piece around here too.
The latest struggle in the new house is choosing a front door. Why should a front door cost more than $10,000? Yet, they do. No wonder we have a housing and affordability crisis.
And the documentation for the rough opening size is sometimes conflicting. Brad built the bucks for the three-panel sliding door and the front door yesterday, but he's going to rebuild the front door buck to make it a fraction of an inch wider because of the aforementioned conflicting information.
Plus, it gives Mitzi a chance to find a cheaper door.
As for me, I'd just like to get this HVAC thing resolved, or get on the GLP-1, so I can feel like I'm making progress on something, instead of just marking time here.
Max the Electrician gets back from vacation next week, so hopefully we can get on his schedule so we can get the power line going, so we can get the water line buried, so we can backfill the excavation.
But the beat goes on, even if it's just marking time.
✍️ Reply by emailProgress
09:13 Thursday, 13 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 68.65°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 4.59mphWords: 314
Yesterday was a pretty good day. We had the crew down here at the back patio for a little burgers and dogs lunch. They finished the stairs and the subflooring so we won't see them again for a while.
Builder Brad and his trusty sidekick Derrick are up there today getting the bucks built for the doors. Bucks are wood frames that the windows and doors are mounted in, and the ICF blocks are stacked around them. They'll do the doors first, then start stacking and then build the bucks for the windows.
Today's "On this day..." has a post from 12 years ago that feels like it could have been written today, except for the part about Robin Williams. I noticed that all the images are missing from that month. I'll see if I can find them in one of the archived Photos libraries I have one of these external SSDs. Not optimistic.
Rained hard last night. A couple of thunderstorms blew through and the rain was pretty intense. We have a metal roof and it was louder than I'd ever heard it before in this place. Didn't last long though.
Filled up the Maverick yesterday and calculated 42.3 mpg on the last tank, which brought the lifetime average up to 39.3. Winter seems to be the worst season for hybrid driving. I only had 3 fill-ups between December and March, but they all came in below 30 mpg. Everything since then has been near 40 or above.
I'm corresponding with an HVAC contractor up near Geneva about our HVAC system. They're called Simply Installs, so I'm hoping they'll be able to take this design and equipment list and put it together for me. It seems it may be a little different than what they're used to, so we'll see.
The MegaFlash arrives today, and I'm looking forward to getting them installed.
✍️ Reply by emailFurther to the Foregoing
09:56 Wednesday, 12 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 70.43°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 3.51mph
Words: 47
I recall reading this story some years ago, but it was fun to read it again today. It's the story of how the mouse came to the Apple II, and it relates to how Bill Atkinson didn't think the Apple II could host a graphical user interface.
✍️ Reply by emailLooking Forward to Going Backward
07:58 Wednesday, 12 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 60.33°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 2.95mph
Words: 1086
Alternatively, Looking Backward to Go Forward.
But I think the first is right.
I've been listening to a lot of the Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld interviews on YouTube. It's inspiring stuff, but also a bit melancholy. The future didn't turn out the way we'd planned, I think. Or hoped. Humanity seldom "plans" anything.
Anyway, the thing I'm looking forward to is getting my MegaFlash card for my Apple IIc Plus. (The "official" name is "IIc Plus," I always thought it was IIc+, like Apple ][+.) The MegaFlash will, after I get everything configured, solve a lot of challenges I have with enjoying retro computing as a hobby here in this confined space.
You can do a lot on an emulator, but it's not the same thing. As embodied beings, there's a physical experience that accompanies using older hardware. Much like the renaissance of typewriters at the moment. I think people like the interaction with the keys, and the paper and the different visual experience, watching letters appear mechanically on a piece of paper.
With an old computer, you do want to experience the keys, but also the sounds of the disk drive, the feel of inserting a disk. Some of those sounds are very faithfully replicated in the emulators, but you never get the tactile experience of closing a drive door, or feeling the drive kind of grab the 3.5" disk and pull it in.
Of course, the MegaFlash is going to eliminate a lot of that disk experience. It'll essentially be like having four 32MB hard drives hanging off of a IIc, and it's likely that I'll seldom reach for a floppy. Which is fine from a safety standpoint today, since there are so many magnets in everything on your desk these days.
One of the things I heard Bill Atkinson say in this interview was that the Apple II didn't have the graphics capability to do the kinds of things they wanted to do with the Lisa and the Mac. In the same interview, he tells the story of how he developed a solution to overlapping windows in a graphical user interface by seeing it done at Xerox PARC. Of course, the punchline to that story is that PARC never developed an efficient solution to overlapping windows. But since Atkinson had seen overlapping windows, he assumed it could be done, and so he did it.
Well, Lisa and the Mac inspired at least a couple of practical graphical user interfaces for the Apple II and its supposedly inadequate graphics system. One was GEOS, the other was MouseDesk, later acquired by Apple and turned into the Apple II Desktop application, which was the first GUI that shipped with the Apple IIGS, though it runs on any Apple II with double high-resolution graphics.
Apple II Desktop is still being developed today, and the MegaFlash card is configured to boot a 32MB hard disk image into Apple II Desktop. I played with it a bit on my Apple //c before I broke the pin on the cpu riser. It's definitely slow, but it's also definitely usable. On the IIc Plus, I expect it'll be very pleasant to use, if I care to, and I may.
I also enjoyed watching an old Computer Chronicles episode with Atkinson and Dan Winkler introducing Hypercard. Hypercard still thrills me in a way that almost no other software ever did. Fontrix for the Apple II still gives me a bit of a thrill. That link is to the Internet Archive, where I uploaded the manual several years ago. When I gave away nearly all of my Apple II stuff back in 2019, I didn't keep Fontrix. It should come as no surprise that I spent $50 on eBay to buy it back again. Running Fontrix with a DOS 3.3 RAMdisk was pretty cool.
Anyway, it occurred to me that BASIC was supposed to make computers accessible to ordinary people. And it did, though not nearly as universally as might have been envisioned. Likewise, Hypercard was supposed to do the same thing for the Mac. I suppose Javascript and HTML were supposed to make the Web accessible to mere mortals, which it did, though again, perhaps not as universally as might have been imagined.
Now we have "vibe coding," and the opening salvos of the AI Wars. "AI slop," is the new "shovelware."
Back in the days of BBSs we had "flame wars." Humanity always brings all its shit with it to whatever forum will have it.
We have some notion, perhaps hard-won over many centuries, about how to get along (mostly) in "meat space." In "real life." We have public sanitation, waste disposal services (as flawed as those may be), sewers and sewage treatment plants. There are zoning laws and residential codes and HOA rules that kind of govern how we maintain our property and the activities we can perform on it. We have institutions and processes for resolving disputes, again, imperfect though they may be.
For the most part, we can live in peace with one another in our neighborhoods.
But not online. We have none of that. At best, we have "moderation," and some rules that vary depending on the platform. Mostly people feel as though they're entitled to be the very worst version of themselves on any day. And they can do it at any moment of any given day because, unlike our neighborhood and our neighbors, we carry "the world" in our pockets everywhere we go.
Computers have made all that possible. But they haven't solved the problem of human nature. "Freedom," and "empowerment" have meant that a lot of us feel as though we're finally allowed to be as bad as we want to be. It's not everyone, by any means. But it only takes a few, and when those few can find each other with ease in this hyper-connected online reality, "few" becomes a relative term.
We are kind of indoctrinated, or conditioned, in how to behave with one another in real life. Not everyone, and not always, but most of the time. But I fear that the sense of "empowerment" that computers offered has mutated into "entitlement," and that it is making its way into real life.
I enjoy retro computing because it recalls a time when the future looked promising. The machines and the applications were new and exciting. Today it feels as though it has all be done to death. It's depressing.
It's unsurprising that typewriters appeal to people again.
✍️ Reply by emailBasement
Current Wx: Temp: 74.59°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 63% Wind: 7.7mphWords: 200
It's interesting, the distortions of perception. Dividing up the basement with framing and putting the trusses up, and the sub-flooring above them somehow makes the whole thing feel bigger. I suspect it has something to do with how we orient our bodies in space and infer dimension from the experience of space and the visual cues of walls and surfaces, and how far or near they appear.
Beats me.
But it's not just space, it's time as well. Some things feel as though they're happening fast, while other things feel as though they're happening ever so slowly.
But we're getting there.
I keep thinking that once we get the HVAC solution nailed down, which may involve moving plumbing fixtures, I'll be able to relax. But there'll probably be something else to keep me up at night.
And as we make visible progress, I find myself feeling more anxious to get it finished and moving into a space where I can spread out, have all my books near to hand, my old computers and the space to set them up and play with them.
I'm sure it'll be finished before we know it, and this will all just be memory.
✍️ Reply by emailTaughannock
Current Wx: Temp: 69.08°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 9.42mphWords: 280
The framers were here at 0600 this morning, and I can see them from my desk as they stand on the walls of the basement, handling floor trusses as they're being handed up by Brad's excavator. This gave me anxiety, so we went for a hike at Taughannock Falls.
On our way home we stopped at Here, a restaurant in Hector. We'd heard good things about it, but we'd never eaten there before. Well, it's a popular spot. They opened at 0900 and we got there about 20 minutes after opening and the parking lot was full!
Mitzi had a breakfast sandwich and I had the huevos rancheros, and we agreed they were delicious. It was a beautiful morning so we ate outside at a picnic table, while the people near us played corn hole.
After all that we headed home. I was relieved to see that they'd placed a few of the pieces of subflooring on the trusses, so they could handle the trusses more safely.
Thunderstorms rolled in about 1300, so they knocked off for the day. They have only three more trusses to set, and then they'll start putting down the subflooring.
I'm still grappling with the HVAC design, and worrying now about how the plumbing for the primary bathroom and the half bath may interfere with the ducting. One small thing working in our favor is the happy accident of having the basement ceiling also be 9'4", which gives us room for soffits if we have to route plumbing below ducting, or vice-versa.
I will be so relieved when we finally get this figured out.
Other than that, it was a pretty nice day.
✍️ Reply by emailAnother Path
Current Wx: Temp: 75.04°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 7.85mphWords: 374
Took along the little E-PM1 on my walk this morning, this was edited in Photos.
Building a new house occupies a lot of my attention. Including in the wee hours of the morning when I should be sleeping.
Saw the doc the other day. I really like her, I was outlining some courses of action and she said, "This isn't the navy, Mr. Rogers. We don't have to plan for every contingency."
Habits of thought.
We talked about our dreams. I mentioned I dream about the navy a lot, she said she dreams about the army a lot. When she was in med school, she dreamed about being recalled to active duty, and I said, "Oh, no!"
"No," she said, "they were happy dreams because I hated med school."
Anyway, she's smart, funny and going to get me on the tirzepatide GLP-1.
Took the sleep test Thursday night. Probably failed it. Who can sleep with all that crap hanging off of them?
Saw the ophthalmologist yesterday. One eye is a candidate for cataract surgery, the other eye is less so. Wanted to know what my complaint was, and I told him about night driving and glare. Seems at least some of my problem is my "map dot dystrophy" in my left eye, and cataract surgery won't fix that. He said I should be using eye drops at least four times a day, maybe more frequently. Apparently I have "dry eyes." (Which is why they water so much?)
At least the new glasses help a bit. We're going to meet again in six weeks, see how I'm doing with eye drops.
They started landing floor trusses yesterday, then got rained out. Nothing going on today, more rain, though it's intermittent.
Got some more data on the HVAC design. Where we're going to put all this ductwork is a mystery to me. If you ever look at those photos from the interior of the International Space Station, you see a lot of duct lines. Same thing. Put humans in a sealed box without ventilation and bad things happen.
At some point it stops being exciting and interesting and becomes a source of stress and anxiety.
I am past that point.
The beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailFramed
Current Wx: Temp: 79.59°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 7.11mphWords: 240
Much progress yesterday and today. Builder Brad and Builder Bob were on-site with Bob's daughter and grandson, and Brad's right-hand-man Derrick to frame up the interior walls of the walk-out basement.
It looks different IRL than it does on paper. That long wall of doors for one thing. But it's a basement, it's not the main living space, so we'll get over it.
Met with Energy Vanguard yesterday to discuss details of the HVAC design. If there's one piece of advice I'd give to anyone building a custom home today, figure out how you want to heat and cool your house, and design the house around that system. I'm pretty confident we'll make this work, but there are a lot of ducts and pipes competing for the same space in the trusses.
I had my follow-up with the doc today. She's agreed to prescribe tirzepatide under the Medicare bridge program. That process is rather needlessly complicated, but it has begun. I also brought home a sleep study kit to learn if I have sleep apnea. I don't think so, but maybe? She said my hemoglobin was high, which can be a sign of sleep apnea. We shall see.
Weather permitting, tomorrow the crew will be back to set the floor trusses, and after that the sub-flooring. Then Brad can begin stacking ICF blocks for the main floor.
The beat, and the building, goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailBack to the Future
08:49 Wednesday, 5 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 68.99°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 6.26mph
Words: 643
Kanasfest, the annual get-together of Apple II enthusiasts, was a couple of weeks ago, so I've been seeing various reports here and there. Somehow, somewhere, I learned of a new product for the Apple IIc, the MegaFlash for Apple //c. The idea is to have four mass-storage devices, virtual hard drives, stored internally. It also offers some modifications to the Apple IIc ROM that correct a couple of bugs in Applesoft, a 400K RAM disk, and a routine that intercepts Applesoft floating point routines and performs them in the onboard Raspberry Pi Pico, in effect a sort of math-coprocessor.
Naturally, I ordered one.
It came in a while ago, and I've been preoccupied with house and health, so I didn't try to install it. Yesterday I decided I needed a break from house stuff and broke out my IIc to install it.
To make a long story short, it works! It has a wifi interface and you can connect it to your local wifi network, and it'll get the date and time from a network time server, then it provides that to ProDOS as if you had a clock card installed. It boots into a program called Apple II DeskTop, which is a GUI interface to ProDOS. I played around with it for a bit, and while it's definitely slow, it's usable.
I had some issues with my internal disk drive and to rule out any problems with the machine itself, I reverted back to the stock configuration and verified the drive worked fine and the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) disk interface was working. It may have been an issue with the BMOW Floppy Emu mods I installed, so I removed those as well.
In reinstalling the MegaFlash, I bent one of the pins on the riser socket for the cpu and broke the pin when trying to straighten it. Bummer.
Well, the huge advantage with this device is that you can have an enormous amount of software available internally. Which makes working with the IIc in confined quarters, like I have here, much easier and more entertaining. The Applesoft floating point acceleration is a nice bonus since I like playing around with BASIC and graphing programs.
When I ordered the MegaFlash for the IIc, they didn't have one for the IIc Plus in stock. When I checked yesterday, they did, so I ordered one of those as well. I also emailed Joe to see if he could throw another riser socket in the package, and he replied promptly and said it would be no problem.
So I'll be installing both boards when the IIc Plus version arrives. I'll probably mostly use the IIc Plus, since it runs at 4MHz and everything, except games, is a lot snappier.
I'm really looking forward to getting this house done, so I can get my two Apple //e computers set up. I've got another IIc in storage. I hadn't intended to buy another IIc, I thought I was buying an external disk drive for the IIc, but it came with the computer too! Unfortunately, the seller didn't package it well and the external drive did a number on the keyboard, breaking a number of keys and the drive door latch. I've since replaced all the keys but the space bar, since that seems to be unobtainium. The issue with the space bar is the stabilizer wire, and the two little clips that hold it in place.
It dawned on me the other day that those plastic clips are also present on all the other stabilized keys, like the Shift key, which isn't unobtainium. The challenge is those clips are glued to the bottom of the key cap, so I'll have to carefully razor-knife them off, then glue them to the space bar.
Anyway, keepin' me off the streets!
The beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailLooking Up
08:12 Wednesday, 5 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 65.91°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 5.79mphWords: 590
I've been deleting images from Photos trying to recover some disk space. That inevitably brings to mind various cameras I've owned and enjoyed. For reasons that are unclear to me, I've always just enjoyed the jpeg renderings from the 12MP Panasonic CMOS sensor Olympus used in several cameras, including the early Pens, the E-620, the E-30 and the E-5.
I had a number of those bodies, and sold all of them. Later, just because I liked that sensor and jpeg engine combination, I bought a used E-PM1 with a broken image stabilizer. I took it out yesterday and played around with it a bit. This image was taken with it this morning before my walk. I debated bringing along with me, deciding not to and thinking I'd probably regret it.
I did. Saw what I think would have been a very nice shot, shook my head and kept moving.
It's an unremarkable photo in most ways. If you pixel-peeped you'd see noise, and it really isn't a good example of what I like about that sensor, but I wanted to post a pic today, so this is it.
We're making progress on the house. Max the electrician came by yesterday and we discussed all the issues regarding bringing utility power to the house. It's probably going to be about $10K-$15K, which bites, but we really don't have a more affordable option. We talked about laying the conduit for the garage at the same time so we can do all the digging at one time. We'll put conduit in for the fiber at the same time as well, so all the have to do is pull it through conduit where it'll be at least 2' below grade and we're less likely to stick a shovel through it at some time in the future.
Energy Vanguard has completed their design for the HVAC system. We'll have a meeting to discuss it, and then I'll have to start shopping it around to get a quote or two.
We ordered windows on Monday. We couldn't get a price on the front door because it's not in stock at the local warehouse, but a comparable one is north of $8K, for a door! It is an 8-foot door, so there's that, but still.
Brad is working on the basement interior framing for the load-bearing walls. Once those are up we can set the floor trusses and get the subfloor down so he can start setting blocks for the main floor.
Mitzi and I were in the basement yesterday afternoon and noticed something that Brad had mentioned. The ICF is white and it reflects the heat inside the basement, kind of turning it into an oven. It's going to be a bit warm today, although not hot by any means. Working in that basement makes it feel otherwise.
Tomorrow I go see the doc to go over my bloodwork and talk about next steps. I'll be picking up a home sleep study kit to see if I have sleep apnea. I don't think I do, but we'll see.
Friday I have my first appointment to begin the process of removing my cataracts. I feel like I'm starting a "service life extension program," something the Navy used to do with its carriers. Hopefully get on a GLP-1 and drop 40-50 pounds, get my vision cleared up. Start working out on the regular.
If I take care of myself, I might live long enough to enjoy this place!
✍️ Reply by emailBreathing
14:43 Sunday, 2 August 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 69.35°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 16.28mph
Words: 512
Slowly beginning to get back in the groove after the departure of our guests. I was exhausted Friday and Saturday, and didn't sleep well last night, but today I've been able to make some progress on getting things back in order around here.
Loren offers a keen bit of insight on Apple's Upgrade program. Pay attention, or pay someone else!
I ordered a new Magic Mouse yesterday when my wrist started aching as I was using the track pad. Maybe varying the way I interact with the machine will reduce the risk of repetitive stress injury. (I should probably also practice more keyboard shortcuts.)
Michael offers some worthwhile relationship advice in case there are any single people reading the marmot. Intentionally oriented toward the younger demographic.
Another Mike offers a link to a story about modernity's layers of technical debt and problems begetting problems. Have to get to the root causes, and they are deep.
The slab got poured on Friday. Brad met with a friend to go over the plans and come up with a plan for framing the load-bearing walls so we can set the floor trusses.
I woke up at about 2:00 am, thinking about the plumbing the ducting and worrying how they might be competing for the same space. I really think anyone considering building a custom home needs to decide how they want to do their HVAC first. Ducts tend to be larger than pipes, which is why a hydronic system is often a big advantage. Hydronic piping is smaller than drain piping, and it's flexible, so it's relatively easy to route.
We'll figure it out, but it does cause a certain amount of anxiety and consternation.
The low-voltage lighting order is in and paid for, but we hadn't picked out the DC ceiling fans yet. So we did that yesterday. It was then that I realized that the only time you really care about how a ceiling fan looks is when you're buying it.
Because after that, it's mostly invisible. Which just means, don't obsess over how the damn things look!
I spent some time this morning getting Captain's Log caught up with email. I wasn't able to really do much in the way of recording things when our guests were here. As I got the latest emails recorded, I noticed I hadn't been keeping up with tagging entries so I did that too.
And that exercise also exposed a number of little utilities I'd purchased, but looking at them in the email, I couldn't tell you what they did. So I went back and found the web sites and included links and descriptions in the text of the entry. More about that later.
Maybe.
Hulu is streaming The Devil Wears Prada 2, Mitzi watched it the other night and I caught most of it. Gorgeous photography, and I thought the story was entertaining.
Hulu also has a two-part National Geographic documentary about Troy, which was fascinating.
Well, enough about all that.
The beat that can be counted is not the beat...
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