Notes

Anyone have a recommendation for a decent quality ultrasonic cleaner for PCBs?

Not looking for a huge one, but something that can clean maybe an 8x4" board at max.

Something I really like about working on my Macintosh Plus is that event loops in the system and applications often respond to the mouse and keyboard before window redrawing, so as I remember where things will appear in a window I'm familiar with, I can click or use a keyboard command to do something before the window is even fully redrawn. When I'm closing a dialog or an old window that was just brought forward, it saves time not having to wait for it to draw just so it can be dismissed.

It makes me feel like I'm able to think faster than the machine which seems like it would be a negative but it's rewarding.

On a modern machine, I'm so often frustrated at web pages that are mostly drawn but blocking on some stupid Javascript or font download that won't let me interact with it yet, even though I'm just trying to click something to get off of that page anyway.

Experience in programming comes not only from building things at lower layers, but also from the betrayal of trusting things someone else built at the layers beneath your things.

https://xuanwo.io/2023/04-rust-std-fs-slower-than-python/

Today I realized that my car had "Hey Google" turned on when my son in the back seat said something and it responded.

I couldn't figure out how to turn it off so I told Google to do it. It started responding but then stopped to listen to itself say "Hey Google".

My PowerBook 170 has been Siliconinsider'd

Those of you that like vintage computers: do you also like vintage cars? If so, do your styles align regarding preferred eras, restoration, preservation, modification, "daily" use, etc?

This Mac Plus that runs my Kludge BBS is approaching two years of being powered on 24/7 (though many reboots)

I've released Subtext 3 today:

https://jcs.org/subtext

Mostly bug fixes, but some other nifty additions.

And just as a disclaimer, most regular RJ11 phone cords like this will have the pins reversed at one end, so you'll need to crimp a new 4P4C connector on to make it straight-through like this:

I adapted a vintage light blue phone cord to make my Mac Plus fit in with the blue theme going on in my office

State your program at the tone

My kindergartener has his first "lock down drill" this week to practice hiding in his cubby with the lights off in case an armed psycho comes into his school shooting everyone.

What an embarrassing failure this country is sometimes.

A friendly reminder: I made a bot that posts a random episode of Computer Chronicles every day

@compchron

Well mine started leaking slightly and I took it as bad karma (but it probably just needed a hose clamp)

If you charge your laptop's battery to 100% all the time, eventually the battery life decreases and it will only ever be able to charge to like 90%.

So the solution is to have the laptop limit its charging to 90% to preserve the battery's life, but then any time you need to use the laptop away from your desk it only ever has 90% battery. How is this better?

We're told to do this with our EV but we usually know in advance if we're going on a long trip so we can change the limit and charge to 100% temporarily.

that could have been an e-mail, tim

I walked over to my local hardware store this morning to find a tube fitting, but they didn't carry the size I needed. Rather than drive to a big box store, I went to McMaster-Carr's website and found the fitting, downloaded their 3D model of it, and printed one in about an hour.

While I would never download a car, in this case I downloaded a Carr. Is this still unethical?

Not sure how this became my job now