Too many hobbies, not enough focus
Back in the nineties, before USB was the common way to connect everything from keyboards to RAIDs to junk from Temu, SCSI was the king of fast storage connections. Macs had a form of SCSI since the 1986 Mac Plus and an entire ecosystem of hard drives, scanners, and removable storage drives were built around …
The photo above includes some very unique “Macs” that I’ve picked up recently, alongside a real one that I’ve had for a while. Let’s explore them, from left to right: the pico-mac-nano the Maclock, the Wokyis M5, and a real Mac Plus. pico-mac-nano The pico-mac-nano is a functional Macintosh measuring roughly 2 x 2 x 1.5 inches. It embeds …
Apple transitioned to Apple Silicon starting in 2020, replacing the Intel CPUs transitioned to from PowerPC 2006. This book was written during Apple’s first transition: from Motorola 68K to PowerPC in 1994. Why the heck would I read a book from 1994 about a microprocessor that's now two transitions defunct? History! I love history and …
I spend a fair amount of time on eBay looking for items to add to my collection and I’ve learned that there are just some things you can’t get in America. Sometimes products aren’t popular in the U.S., leading to fewer options and higher prices; other times they weren’t sold in the U.S. market at …
When it comes to MiniDisc devices you’ve often got to get something recorded on one before you can enjoy it. It’s true that there were some albums released natively in the format, but there weren’t many (and they're obnoxiously expensive), so recording to a blank disc is often necessary. You’d think that the USB-based NetMD …
I recently got into Sony MiniDiscs based on a couple of great videos about the format and its hardware by This Does Not Compute. I recall the MiniDisc as a competitor to the iPod during the MP3 era, but never knew much about it. It was always on the periphery as yet another “proprietary Sony …
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 ⅔ 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 …
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 …
After purchasing a Keychron K6 from eBay to test it out, I learned a lot about what I wanted and didn’t want in a keyboard. I’ve settled on another Keychron model, this time a K8 in the Pro series. The Pro series has better stabilizers for large keys like space and shift, better keys with …
Soon after I purchased my Keychron K6, I purchased a Matias Tactile Pro 4. This is a keyboard with an interesting lineage. It attempts to recreate the feel of the Apple Extended Keyboard (and Extended Keyboard II) by leveraging the same key switches. Well, kind of. The Extended Keyboard, and Apple’s other 1980’s keyboards, used …
Relatively Ambitious 