Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

The AC in my server room seems to be working pretty well.

It's hard to tell from the label. The icky label is the Startup (boot) disk, & the good label is the Operating disk. The mylar of the Operating disk is just as damaged. It does explain why it wouldn't boot in my XT.

You'd think that a boxed set of disks still in shrinkwrap would be best protected from damage. Nope. this is the underside of a DOS 3.3 boot disk that sat unused & protected in a tyvek sleeve, in a special pocket, in a 3-ring binder, in a box, under shrinkwrap for 31 years. Look at the mylar disc visible through the oval access hole.

The IBM DOS 3.3 User Guide has a yellow bird character in some of its illustrations.

Be careful what you test your new Retr0brite techniques on, folks. This is the main case of a Macintosh Plus 1Mb, signed by Steve Jobs among others on the inside, and shows what happens when you guess wrong on something pretty valuable.

(This eBay listing sold, but I'm not the buyer.) https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Apple-Macintosh-Plus-1MB-SIGNED-BY-Steve-Jobs-Rear-Back-Case-DEFORMED-/263939311552?nordt=true&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.m43663.l10137

Who is General Failure, why is he reading drive A, & why does the question not make sense?

eBay recommendations are weird. It recommended absolutely nothing Amiga for my A500 2MB RAM upgrade, but it recommended a whole bunch of Amiga stuff for my Timex Sinclair 1000 16KB RAM upgrade. It even recommended I buy a $8,000 SGI system because I bought an MS-DOS guide.

Cursed image? Blessed image?

Spell check & grammar check can't catch every error journalists make.

Well, that's a new one... I left it alone for a while, then when I went back, it was doing this weird coloring thing. I started a game then took a photo:

I should look at the RF modulator in the nicer-looking one next.

But for the desperately modded one... Woohoo!

After so much Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Buck Rogers, & who remembers what else, when I think of starships, I still think of these real-world proposals shown in Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

Okay, I think I just found the kind of pajamas I want for xmas. Does anyone know who sells these? https://www.deviantart.com/blackshirtboy/art/Easter-kigu-599268194

Please insert the disk labeled

Windows XP Professional CD-ROM

into Drive A:

* Press ENTER when ready.

Imagine being so unscrupulous a marketeer that a complaint letter about you survives for nearly 4,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

If you asked me when I was a kid what repairing computers would entail, scrubbing cases with Lava knock-off in order to install replacement keyboards would never have come to mind.

I'm cleaning the other, amazingly-hacked ZX-81 I got on eBay.

It works! I should probably remove the RF modulator cover & see if that can be cleaned up, but it works.

The test keypresses were: P {Shift-P} 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 Q W E R T Y U I O P A S D F G H J K L {Space} {period} M N B V C X Z {Enter (now New Line)}

I also had a kaleidoscope program in a .wav file ready for testing. Android won't let you keep the headphone jack volume at "Marty McFly," but the Sinclair can't hear anything softer.

That looks about as good as I can get it.

A nearly clean surface & a toothbrush rendered filthy from scrubbing it. That's looking nice. :3 The surface where I'm scrubbing hard is getting scuffed up, but that's actually a good thing; the new keyboard's adhesive should grab better.

You can see my progress in the left corner. I got about 3x as much off in a few minutes with pumice soap than I did in several hours with Magic Eraser.