quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur
(The feature picture for this post is one I took of JFK’s arrival hall around 9pm EDT on Friday March 13, 2020. Le Monde’s cover picture for that morning was almost identical). This is my first opportunity to write about the excitement of traveling back from Switzerland to the USA in the lead-up to the…
The Surface Pro 3 I bought in December is working well, but the specific SKU I own is limited mainly by the 4GB non-expandable RAM. As I stated in my original post, I was using it as a low-investment test of how practical this form factor is as a primary mobile computing device, and I’ve…
My travel kit until recently has been a 13″ MacBook Pro (work computer), a ThinkPad T460S UltraBook running Ubuntu (personal computer, mainly used for email and also running Quicken inside VirtualBox), and a 5th-generation iPad (an unwise impulse purchase used primarily for watching movies inflight). Naturally, all the chargers and various other cables and so…
Four months ago I was pleased to have put together a reasonably useful gaming system from mostly junkbox components plus an ancient Goodwill chassis. Unfortunately, on Monday June 24th I noticed that the machine was running extremely slowly. It should be noted as a matter of interest that this occurred after the PC had been…
I don’t read much poetry, or many plays. I’m a prose guy; I like to read prose, and I like to write prose; other modes of exposition chafe and irritate me. (I really wish the Divine Comedy was in prose…). One of the very few poems I remember is The Mouse, by Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth….
I work for a company that has been developing mobile software for ~10 years. As such, every so often Engineering decides to clean up and recycle all the old, totally unsupported dev phones; in the same vein, many people in the company (including myself, if we’re going to be honest) are tech-forward frequent-upgraders and also…
If I believed in New Year resolutions, I suspect I’d have to add one right now: “Don’t overthink things in 2019”. As this short tale will demonstrate, I just narrowly avoided going down a very deep, branching rabbit hole in search of something that was right in front of my nose. To give you the…
This is a “raw asset picture dump” post. It is a fairly un-annotated dump of pictures taken while archiving a vintage asset. Click any picture for the full-resolution version. The title indicates the asset catalog number. Raw notes for this asset: “No cleaning performed except light dust removal on PCB. Power LED bezel loose; rubber…
This is a “raw asset picture dump” post. It is a fairly un-annotated dump of pictures taken while archiving a vintage asset. Click any picture for the full-resolution version. The title indicates the asset catalog number. Raw notes for this asset: “Black screen. Chips dated late 1983 (8344 typ). Yard sale sticker “Commodore keyboard $300…
This is a “raw asset picture dump” post. It is a fairly un-annotated dump of pictures taken while archiving a vintage asset. Click any picture for the full-resolution version. The title indicates the asset catalog number. Raw notes for this asset: “Occasionally gives correct FG/BG color screen with random colored text garbage, usually just black…