lost things & lost sleep (-)
Have you ever been up all night tearing your house apart, looking for just one little thing that you know for certain you've hung on to for literally half your life? I can now say I have, unsuccessfully at that, & my body's going to pay for it tomorrow. (Oh crap, it *is* tomorrow!)
retrocomputing
Also, I learned the hard way that even though the 5150, XT, AT, & pre-PS/2 IBM clones all have physically compatible keyboard sockets (5-pin DIN, just like MIDI sockets), the 5150 & XT use an incompatible protocol, so AT-style keyboards won't work unless they have an XT-mode switch.
retrocomputing
If you thought IDE hard drives were becoming scarce, just try what I spent the last few hours doing and shop for an ESDI hard drive.
I'm trying to restore a trash-picked (& VG condition) IBM 5160 (the PC XT) that turns out to have been complete except for HDD & keyboard. The rescue included an amber MDA monitor & ESDI controller with cables, though I didn't recognize the controller until today.
Going with an IDE controller & CF or SD adapter is an option, I suppose.
I came across & re-read a computer magazine from January 1998. An average laptop cost $3,000-$5,000, an average decent desktop cost $2,000-$3,500, and a barebones desktop without even a hard drive might've been had for $1,000 if you shopped around a lot. I remember eventually buying a Compaq Presario 1690 later that year (or early '99) for $4,000. It's amazing how much prices have changed in the 20 years since, even without adjusting for inflation.
💿
Adding picture captions in Tusky is a little less obvious than on your instance website but still easy. After picking the picture, tap on it & choose "Set caption."
Add captions for the sake of the fully sighted as well, not just the partially or fully impaired. It saves you from "what am I looking at" questions whose answers may be obvious only to you.
Hey people, I've been noticing the number of posts with alt text going down. It might be because of all the new users who haven't learned about the feature yet, so for them and everyone:
yall should use alt text when uploading images! what are they??? hover over the images to find out! why are they good? the tldr of it is that visually impaired computer users exist and it helps them navigate the INFOBAHN better
I’ve done a lot of art in the past, but this is still my absolute favorite series of pieces!
Remember everyone, #SylveonIsTrans.
The keyboard ribbon has breaks going too close to the keyboard itself, so it's looking like I'll have to hit up sellmyretro after all.
✨ Kind 'Net Help Desk fairy by day. ✨
✨ Weird & furry Unix fairy by night. ✨
✨ Sometimes a retrocomputer fairy. ✨
✨ Pays the ComputerFairi.es bills. ✨
✨ Sparkly✨shellscript✨princess. ✨
✨ Age: Mere days younger than ✨
✨ the Intel 4004 & Unix 1st Edition. ✨
✨ Follow requests welcome. ✨
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