Reliving My Youth
17:22 Sunday, 8 October 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 60.39°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 61% Wind: 4mph
Words: 1338
I'll open with the happy fact that my knees feel great! I mean, they're still the knees of a 66-year-old fat man, but they don't hurt! I never even mentioned the pain in my knees to the doc, because I just thought that was part of aging.
It's pretty remarkable. It hurt just standing up. I was making a conscious effort not to groan every time I got up. And mostly failing. Getting into my friend's little Miata when I was up in New York a couple of weeks ago amounted to sliding my ass over the seat back and then just dropping into the seat. I hated carrying the luggage up the stairs in Martha's Vineyard, likewise the place I rented in Clifton Park. No stairs here, so it was mostly standing up and sitting down and riding the bike.
They would ache just lying in bed at night.
Anyway, I really appreciate the "miracle of antibiotics."
On to other things.
I've been playing round with BASIC on the old handheld computers from HP and TI that I have, and of course comparing them with Applesoft using Virtual II. That got me into playing around more with Virtual II, and cleaning up the directories full of crap I collected several years ago when I was more into the whole "retrocomputing" experience.
Well, I've always been kind of interested in the Apple ///. Like the Lisa, the G4 Cube and maybe a couple of others, the /// was expensive and a marketplace failure. But it was a pretty sophisticated design for an 8-bit machine back in the day. I recall seeing one in person at a computer show in Virginia Beach. It was the full stack, with the Profile hard drive, designed to fit perfectly between the CPU and the Monitor ///. It looked very cool. Very serious.
I was still running a 40-column 48K Apple ][+ with one floppy drive, so even the UI looked unfamiliar.
Today they're still expensive, so emulating them in software is about the only practical way to experience what using them was like.
The thing about the /// was there wasn't much about the machine that was defined in ROM. Back then, it was thought that people wanted to buy a computer and be able to do something with it, right out of the box. So nearly all of them shipped with a console or monitor ROM to handle basic I/O, like the keyboard and video output, and something to handle getting data in and out of a cassette tape interface (cassette recorder not included). And some flavor of BASIC was built in so it would "do something."
The /// was like the IBM-PC, in that all that stuff was built into the OS that was loaded from disk at startup. CP/M was like that as well. You know, "business computers" versus "home computers."
Anyway, running an emulator involves having a copy of the ROMs. These are usually binary files and they're not hard to find on the web, with people often being coy about where they are because they contain copyrighted code, so they aren't built right into the emulator itself.
The /// was based on the 6502 processor, same as the II, so it had a 64K memory space. There have been ways around that by using "bank switching" for many computers for years. The /// was designed from the ground up to do that, using MOS 6522 Versatile Interface Adapters to help manage that and other aspects of the machine. Partly for its design, partly for its lack of success in the marketplace and consequently limited "affection" from the retro-community, there hadn't been a really "good" emulator for the /// for many years.
Well, that's all changed now, and MAME has what I understand is the very best emulation of an Apple ///. I recall trying to run MAME many years ago and giving up in frustration. I use Virtual ][ as my Apple II emulator. It's very high-fidelity and offers most of the peripheral devices I care about. It's a turnkey solution, download and install that app, install the ROM(s), pay the license fee and you're good to go.
MAME is a command-line thing, and while I don't hate the terminal, I don't spend much time there. So this other guy, Apple retrocomputing wizard Kevin Sherlock, has made a MacOS GUI frontend called AMPLE, which also installs MAME. But not the ROMs.
Because of course.
So I spent Friday and part of yesterday trying to get an Apple /// up and running using AMPLE. There isn't a clear "how-to" anywhere that I could find. MAME likes its ROMs in .zip files, which wasn't clear to me initially. Then it was a bit of an easter egg hunt to find the right ROMs in .zip format. (They're at the Internet Archive.)
I couldn't get the thing to run. AMPLE offers a log window, and it was always complaining about not finding the ROM file, and some other nonsense. ChatGPT suggested my .zip files were corrupted somehow, based on the error messages. I basically kept easter-egging the thing, swapping files in and out of the ROMs folder, and it eventually booted.
Apparently the disk image I was using for startup has some kind of strange character set installed because the screen had weird characters instead of dashes defining the borders of the various sections of the SOS Utilities screen.
Having at least got the thing to boot, I stopped. Soon I'll easter-egg disk images until I get a clean one. I need to figure out ROMs for the clock and the hard drive emulator too.
I did get to play Andy Hertzfeld's Atomic Defense game. You launch your ABMs using the arrow keys, though I'm not certain about the mapping. You use the numeric keypad to control the aiming cursor. The game was mostly notable for using one of the graphics modes on the ///, which later became part of the 128K //e, that allowed 16 colors on the "hi-res" screen.
Ultimately, I want to get Business BASIC up and running, and Pascal ///, which is very similar to the Apple II version.
After I got the /// kind of running, I tried to find my Apple II Pascal setup. I recalled that I'd created a set of disk images that mirrored the setup I had on my real Apple //e. It had a RAMWorks 1MB memory expansion card installed, and I'd found the RAM-disk drivers from Applied Engineering, which included scripts for moving all the essential parts of UCSD Pascal to the RAM disk. You could go from editing your source code to compiling it to running it without any disk swapping, and it compiled much faster. Not as easy as just typing "RUN" from BASIC, but not much harder either.
Happily, I found those, and they still work.
One of the best purchases I made on eBay back then was a pretty much NIB ("new, in box") Apple Pascal package, for version 1.2. (The very last version was 1.3, but I.2 included all the new stuff to support a 128K //e.) Being the philistine that I am, I threw away the box, and gave the disks away with all the other Apple II stuff I gave away to that kid from Tampa.
But I kept the manuals. Because they are pristine. And they included the Luehmann and Peckham Apple Pascal, a hands-on approach, paperback. Along with the 1.2 spiral-bound supplement, and a bunch of errata sheets. Pretty sweet.
So I pulled those off the shelf last night and tried to re-acquaint myself with the OS, because it's different enough to be confusing.
I do all this because it recalls, at least for me, a faint echo of the "sense of wonder" I had for computers back then, and mostly haven't felt since.
It was a nice feeling.
Almost as nice as pain-free knees!
I suppose I should tag this post "tl;dr."
✍️ Reply by emailOpen Windows
19:42 Sunday, 8 October 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 58.48°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 69% Wind: 3mph
Words: 31
Note today's temperature: 58°F! Woo-hoo!
I've opened several windows in the house. The CO2 level has plummeted from 1440ppm to 502ppm and dropping.
I've also put on a sweater.
✍️ Reply by emailNo Difference
08:09 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 70.75°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 93
Gotta head out to the dentist's for a cleaning. Not looking forward to it with this tooth. Maybe an x-ray?
Anyway, I used Program Writer, an editor for Applesoft BASIC, to do a global search and replace on all the real variables and converted them to integer (added "%" after the variable name). Compiled the program and ran it, and it made no difference.
So I'm guessing that if Beagle Compiler doesn't see a decimal point in the value, it bypasses Applesoft's variable handler and treats it as an integer.
Anyway, gotta run...
✍️ Reply by emailMadness
11:29 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.41°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 16.11mph
Words: 424
The cleaning was, thankfully, relatively uneventful. Great tech and she gave me some kind of "ozone" treatment that's supposed to reduce tooth sensitivity.
To test that hypothesis, I stopped at Publix and bought a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Hey, you can't argue with research.
But Publix was very busy. The checkout bagger said it was nothing compared to yesterday.
I don't know. I think we're going to be fine. There's a front that passed over yesterday that looks like it's keeping the worst of Milton to the south of us. We will have some storm surge issues, and for folks in St Augustine, that's going to be a problem. But I don't see the Intra-Coastal flooding. I could be wrong, but I'm not worrying about it.
Milton was a big topic at the reception desk at the dentist's. I think it's because we haven't had a hurricane affect us around here very recently, and Helene was such a catastrophe, so folks' sense of anxiety is elevated.
There was no gas at the Shell station by Publix. Apparently they've been shifting the stock west to keep those stations full as the evacuations take place. They'll backfill us after. Again, I'm not worried, but we were down to half a tank and I figured I'd top it off. We don't have to do any driving, so the batteries should be adequate for the time being.
The bagger also said they were out of propane too. Everyone bought that up expecting to have to cook all the food in the fridge when the power goes out.
I don't think the power will go out. Again, most of the worst of it is going to be to the south of us and, this part of Florida has much of its utility infrastructure buried. Now, that may be a problem with severe flooding, but it pretty much limits the damage from a wind event. I think folks are just going to have a lot of extra propane for a while.
But the real insanity is constantly electing Republicans who are more interested in waging culture wars than dealing with the catastrophe unfolding before them. Part of me wants to say that we deserve everything that's going to happen to us. But I also happen to think that nobody deserves to experience this type of thing.
We didn't have to. But we didn't do anything about it either.
I guess it's like Clint says to Gene Hackman at the end of Unforgiven.
"Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."
✍️ Reply by emailEV Benefit
12:49 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.36°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 13.8mph
Words: 137
I'm sure we've all seen the videos of the Tesla self-immolating in a garage after a flood, but if you keep them dry (and "well lubricated"?), they will perform for you!
We rented an EV6 in Baltimore for the reunion. I enjoyed driving the car. It was the first time I'd experienced regenerative braking. It didn't take long to get used to it, and I really appreciated it. The dash was a bit of a mystery, and figuring out the "forward" and "reverse" thing took a few double glances.
The only things I didn't like about it were the seats (not enough lateral support), and the turning radius seemed pretty huge.
Anyway, as we adapt building codes to our new climate, we'll have to take into consideration using EVs as emergency backup power for household loads.
✍️ Reply by emailEaster Eggin'
14:13 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.45°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 19.57mph
Words: 936
Since I seem to be blessed with an abundance of energy this afternoon (I'm usually crashing in the recliner about now.), I spent some time screwing around with the IIe with some interesting, if ambiguous, things to report.
I pulled the 8MB RAM card and re-installed the 64KB card. I also pulled the Yellowstone Liron clone from Big Mess O'Wires. (This will, or may, allow me to connect a 32MB virtual Smart Port HD to the IIe.)
Next, I ran the onboard diagnostics for the SpeedDemon. Went through the whole series of 9 tests, error-free. The SpeedDemon is good!
So I had to get the utility program for configuring the RAM card onto a 5.25" floppy, so I could use it on the IIe. The Floppy Emu is quite particular about disks having contiguous blocks. (It resembles Apple UCSD Pascal in that regard.) So the procedure I've developed is to keep a copy of the IIc's external HD image on my iMac's desktop. I mount that in Virtual II, and then copy the files I need from the disk images I've downloaded from Garrett's Workshop within Virtual II. (The Virtual II is configured as a IIe with two 5.25" disk drives in Slot 6, and two hard drives in Slot 7.)
Then I pull the micro-SD card from the Floppy Emu and mount that on the iMac. I use Disk Utility to erase all the files, and then copy the "temporary" image to the micro-SD card. (This includes another 32MB HD disk image, and dozens of 5.25" floppy disk images in another folder.) This ensures that all the files are contiguous.
The only mistake I made today was that I'd added another lo-res routine to the fidget spinner program, and didn't copy that program over to the "temp" image. Not a huge deal, but it reminds me that I'll have to be careful and copy all the files from the micro-SD card first, as a backup, just in case.
Moving on... I got the utility to configure the RAM card onto the Smart Port HD image, mounted that on the IIc and then copied the config program over to a 5.25" floppy on the IIc.
If it sounds like a hassle, it kinda is. But I'm getting used to it.
Back to the IIe with my floppy disk. I plugged the 8MB RAM card into the Aux slot. Stuck the floppy into Drive 1 and booted the IIe, pressing "Escape" before the SpeedDemon kicked in, forcing the IIe to run at regular speed. It booted fine.
I ran the configuration utility and set the card to appear as a 1MB RAMWorks card. (1MB is plenty for the kinds of things I like to do.)
I power-cycled the IIe and let the SpeedDemon take control, and it booted right into ProDOS and BASIC.SYSTEM. Hurray! Success!
Believing I'd just solved my problem, I shut down the computer and put the Yellowstone card back in Slot 5. I have another Floppy Emu inbound that's going to live on the IIe.
Just to make sure, I started the IIe... and we never made it past the ProDOS splash screen.
Doh!
I wondered if it was a speed issue, so I powered down, pulled the SpeedDemon and set the dip-switch for Slot 5 to "slow," so whenever the computer polls Slot 5 it'll do so at 1MHz.
Reinstalled the SpeedDemon and turned the computer back on. Same problem.
Doh! Doh!
Well, my energy level remains normal, but my enthusiasm is a bit diminished. I decided to just pull the Yellowstone card and try again with the new Emu gets here. It may be that the card has to have something to talk to besides the cpu. I could figure that out with the Emu I have on hand, but I'm not sure I want to know right now. Maybe later.
I had the Yellowstone in Slot 5 because the 5.25" disk controller is in Slot 6 and the ribbon cables from the 5.25" drives really crowd into the space for Slot 7, putting some strain on the card in Slot 7.
As the IIe is currently configured, it resembles the IIc here in the office. I have the IIc configured to boot from the 5.25" internal floppy, but it sees the 32MB Smart Port HD image as a drive in Slot 5.
If connecting an Emu to the Yellowstone solves the problem, I'll keep that configuration. If it doesn't, I'll move the 5.25" controller to Slot 5, and put the Yellowstone in Slot 7 with an Emu attached. The empty Slot 6 will leave room for the ribbon cables without them pressing on the Yellowstone in Slot 7.
The IIe will try to boot from the highest slot that it finds a controller in. I'll start with the Emu configured to emulate a 5.25" floppy and see what happens. If that works, I'll try an 800KB 3.5" disk emulation. That'd give me Apple Pascal 1.3 all on one disk, and I can run a script to copy all the modules I need to the RAM drive, and we're back in business.
And if all that works, I'll try a 32MB HD image.
For now, I'm pretty happy that I know the SpeedDemon is good and I've got the AUX RAM card configured for 1MB.
I just spent a couple of hours not doom-scrolling! Of course, Mitzi has been doom-scrolling and giving me updates. (Cranes in downtown Tampa that they couldn't secure in time. If you live near a crane, hide.)
✍️ Reply by emailDrama
16:26 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.25°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 21.85mph
Words: 159
We have been "ordered" to evacuate.
In a bizarre example of cartography, we are in Evacuation Zone A, while right across the street, at eye level, is Zone D.
Mandatory evacuation for Zone A.
Zone D... you're good.
I think the difference in elevation is less than a foot, and I know that flooding is "a game of inches," but we're not leaving. It's crazy. I'm pretty confident the worst of Milton will remain well to the south. There will be some storm surge, but nothing that's going to flow up Deep Creek and into the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, on up into our neighborhood.
I will keep a weather eye out, but it's this sort of nonsense that really makes people skeptical about these evacuation orders.
Sadly, our former neighbor's mother lives in Fort Myers in a second floor condo. She's 80 years old and is not leaving. We hope she makes it.
✍️ Reply by emailGreen is Good
Current Wx: Temp: 80.01°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 83% Wind: 12.66mphWords: 155
I should have used that fancy "markup" thing that MacOS has, but this is pretty easy.
Red is Zone A. Green is Zone D. (Yellow is Zone C. I initially wrote that my neighbor across the street was in Zone C. Nope. Zone D. D!!!)
Anyway, see that corner down there where green kind of stabs into the red? That's where I live. That bit of gray road that forms a loop? That's Wood Pond Loop. The south end of Wood Pond Loop, where there's another, fractal, little corner of green marrying up to the red? That's the point where the houses on our side of the street become part of ZONE D!
Despite being backed up to the same swamp that we are!
So, yeah, we're not going anywhere. If we have to, we'll go knock on our neighbor's door.
✍️ Reply by emailOh! Fun!
20:34 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.33°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 40
Stumbled on this article from 1983 looking for something else. A lot of cool ideas for the fidget spinner.
And now to figure out why half of my web page is missing...
Update: And just like that...
It's back.
Weird.
✍️ Reply by emailPlainer Than Plain
06:19 Wednesday, 8 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 51.42°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 6.53mph
Words: 34
The other day I mentioned clay tablets as an alternative to "plain text" (Unicode or ASCII?).
Turns out, you can learn to write in Cuneiform.
Make a note of that.
(I crack myself up.)
✍️ Reply by emailUI Means "User Interface"
06:25 Wednesday, 8 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 51.4°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 6.53mph
Words: 263
Except at Apple, where it means "Palette for prima donna esthetes to manifest their superior taste and sophistication to the poor, benighted masses."
Unlike Manuel, I do complain just because things are different.
Because whenever it's different, then all the habits of use I've developed get fouled up. I stumble and waste time. The interface gets in the way of whatever it was I was trying to accomplish with no thought given to the interface because it's so familiar, it's habituated.
I used to read all the Apple corporate bloggers, Gruber, Snell, Sparky, Hackett, et al regularly. Partly because I was interested in Apple and what they were doing.
These days, I'm afraid of what Apple is doing. And I don't really want to know, because I've got enough shit to worry about.
It's a horrible company that has lost sight of what made it "different."
Most of the changes I've seen in iOS have not made anything better for the user. I can't tell how I'm doing against my brother in Quartiles anymore. The giant checkmark still seems way too large. This bullshit with the tabs Manuel mentions is spot-on and I've stumbled over that time and time again.
I may have been unfair characterizing the kinds of people who come up with these changes that don't help the user. They may not be self-superior esthetes, they may just be corporate drones struggling to justify their existence in a job increasingly at risk to replacement by AI. But if the AI respected the "U" in UI, that'd be an improvement.
✍️ Reply by emailFrom the Front Door
08:01 Wednesday, 8 October 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 51.12°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 8.3mphWords: 352
Photo doesn't do it justice. Sun's breaking behind the hill out back, illuminating the hill in front of us, while the hills on the other side of the lake are shaded by broken clouds.
It's about the only thing that's keeping me sane.
It feels, I don't know, callous maybe, blogging about UIs and text fetishes with all the crap going down in Washington and Chicago.
I follow The Bulwark on YouTube, I'm a paying member. I can't watch every video because who has the time? And it often makes me sick. But I watched Tim Miller's video from last night's Nicole Wallace hit. He says that he thinks that someday, some of these people (ICE) will be ashamed.
Well, not really. Defensive, yes. In denial, yes. Rationalization and justification will make up a lot of their internal monologue, and external dialogue if they're ever confronted about it.
But feeling shame? Many people, mostly men, can't name their feelings. They have them, and they often act out from them, but they don't really know what they are. They lack the tools of introspection. So, they may feel shame, but they won't know that's what they're feeling. It'll be an uncomfortable feeling, and all those usually lead to a feeling they do know: Anger.
Which usually compels them to lean in on whatever is causing the discomfort.
There was a documentary, not too long ago, interviewing former Nazis, some former SS officers. Some of them were self-aware. But some were still committed. I don't know if the commitment was due to the cause (National Socialism), or just a self-protective action to rationalize their history.
But I don't think that very many of these ICE thugs will ever feel shame for what they're doing. If you're the kind of person that can do these things, then you're probably not very self-aware in the first place. They're probably just really happy to have a job that allows them to act out their anger and their fear while getting paid for it.
In America.
It's sad and frightening.
We're a very sick society.
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