Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

my customer has the user's guide that came with microsoft word 2.0 for windows way back in 1991. it's an 800-page tome. fast forward 28 years, & neither word nor the rest of the still-expensive microsoft office suite come with manuals anymore.

i just turned on a customer's laptop for the first time in months. the battery was completely drained, so i had to find & plug in their charger. after the laptop powered on, windows immediately logged off & shut down.

why?

because the laptop lid was closed right after the owner clicked on shutdown. windows stopped the shutdown & went into sleep mode instead, so it didn't finish shutting down until today, & it stayed in sleep mode until it drained the battery.

default windows behavior.

oh, btw, why i was hired to replace the battery: in the 100, the ram doubles as semi-permanent storage like a disk drive, & the ni-cad battery is what preserves it when it's turned off. when it fails, a symptom is random memory corruption even after a cold start.

i repaired vintage computers before, but up to now they were all mine, so it wasn't really a profession. now, after thorough testing of the Model T in my care, i can at last call myself a PROFESSIONAL vintage computer repair tech. *level-up.wav*

today, my computer fairy wand is on: someone else's TRS-80 Model 100.

the soldered-on nicad battery needs to be replaced. the original's been in there since 1983.

They introduced it with a Macromedia Flash Player animation channeling School House Rock. The original has been lost to time because Flash is dying & the server with the loading content is long since dead, but not before being captured & uploaded to YouTube. It was called "Get Perpendicular": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II

In 2005, Hitachi claimed advancing hard disk storage density with what it called Perpendicular Magnetic Recording in its Deskstar line and embedded Microdrive: https://web.archive.org/web/20110711171907/https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/index.html

But that's only the context for what I wanted to share.

How did we arrive in the timeline where a pocket computer a million times more powerful than the first supercomputers is simultaneously the single slipperiest personal possession AND the single most fragile personal possession?

Guess what just broke, how it broke, & what parts suffered the most damage.

If I accidentally dropped a 20th Century portable computer gadget from waist high, it would usually survive either completely undamaged or with light cosmetic damage.

If I accidentally drop a 21st Century portable computer gadget from waist high, it's destroyed beyond repair.

#inktober #inktober2019 day 3: bait. When you're fishing for starfish (starfishing?), what better bait can reach the stars where starfish live than a star balloon?

Despite resigning from the FSF, rms is still the leader of the GNU Project. Today, project members released a statement saying that maybe he should go. https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/

One of the #FreeBSD maintainers replied on birdsite to my upgrade woes a few weeks ago, and I forgot to remark here what became of it: This is apparently a regression, and I have a bug open on it. https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=240760

I think I can sustain two quick ballpoint drawings a day. #inktober #inktober2019 day 2: mindless. If you follow the news at all, read it at your pace, don't watch it at the TV's pace.

It's been so long since I drew anything on paper, & I'm way late. #inktober day 1: ring. My av in feline form has bells on the end of her tail, & I never showed any detail of how the band (ring) holds them on.

Every programming tutorial on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MAlSjtxy5ak