So this thing started happening late summer and early fall: auroras started appearing across the U.S. in places that rarely see them. I'm not a great planner and missed most of them, but happened to catch one in our neighborhood in early October. Since I'm late with everything, now seems like the right time to …
My 2013 Mac Pro
There are times when items in my Mac Museum cross over and provide function in my real life. One example is the Mac mini I bought as a backup server – I didn't have the 2010 design in my collection yet and I actually use it for regular tasks. It runs the Backblaze client on macOS …
BlueSCSI
I've had success installing both CF-to-IDE adapters and 2.5" SSD-to-IDE drives in my older computers, but those only cover about â…” of my collection. The rest of my machines, Macs from the late '80s and early '90s, don't use IDE at all; they use SCSI – an older and more expensive interface. Replacing SCSI drives …
My Midlife Crisis
A Guest Post Written by the Wife For years, people asked me what I would do once the boys got older and didn't need me as much. They warned me that I needed to find something to do because they knew I didn't have any hobbies. Every time it came up I just shrugged off …
Adventures with a CF to IDE Adapter
The thing about having old computers is that parts inevitably fail and replacing them becomes more difficult as time passes. The most common items to fail are hard drives, and replacement drives are getting rarer and more expensive every year. Luckily, thanks to the ingenuity of the retro computing community, there are modern ways to …
Cracked & Restored
I’ve been taking a lot of photos lately and I’m a bit photoed out so I’ve drifted back into my vintage computer interest. In addition to looking for new items, I’ve pulled some existing ones out of the basement to catalog and explore. One such machine was a Toshiba Portegé 3500 from 2002. While touch …
A Day at the Zoo
I enjoy photographing animals and I've invested quite a bit into equipment, but I find myself frequently challenged to actually do it. I don't set aside time to go out, I'm not great at tracking animals (or blending in to hide from them), and I don't have the patience to sit outside and wait. What …
How I Came to Buy a Backpack from 2005
I bought a Nikon 180 - 600mm Z lens to replace my Sigma 150 - 600 for wildlife and sports photos recently. It’s an awesome lens, but one difference from the Sigma is that it does not extend to zoom, which makes it physically longer than the Sigma and harder to fit in a camera …
Adventures in Auto Capture
Auto Capture is a feature for the Nikon Z9 and Z8 that allows the camera to automatically capture photos based on a criteria. You can setup your camera on a tripod and configure it to take a series of photos that are triggered when movement is detected in certain areas of the frame, certain types …
The AI I Predicted is Coming
The camera AI, that is. Last year I published an article reflecting on photography predictions I made in 2011 after I bought my Canon 7D. At the end of the article, I made new predictions about what would happen in the next decade. It’s been a little over a year and many of those things …
Relatively Ambitious 