I now saw the Connection Machine CM-2 at ZKM Center for Arts and Media Karlsruhe exhibited by @KIT_Karlsruhe . One can even choose between a number of programs controlling the blinking lights when idle, and admire the Sun SPARCstation that used to serve as […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Königsee near Salzburg. #silentsunday

Morning in Mauritshuis in Den Haag today. #silentsunday

This exhibit from @KIT_Karlsruhe is an excellent reason to visit: https://zkm.de/en/2026/03/connection-machine-cm-2 Maybe on my way back from Munich in May. CM-200 was the first really parallel computer I learned, after some limited experience with CRAY "microtasking". Our group got a very short […]

A completed puzzle with (supposedly) 300 cats. #caturday

All March, I was far away from my retro Macs, so I could not and did not do anything important related to #MARCHintosh. But I did acquire an Apple JIS keyboard, which may or may not help me with improving my hiragana memorization. It was sold as junk, but […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Rising oil and gas prices? Engie in Belgium started their Happy Hours program today. When the forecast predicts surplus solar power, your electricity will be free for a few hours, to charge the #EV or load up the #HeatPump buffer tank. Even if there are no […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I'm visiting University of Western Australia as Gledden Fellow for the first time. I must say that Perth and the UWA campus are just stunning! #mastoscience

Even though we don't have a furnace anymore, I still have a bookmark for a price tracker for heating oil. There are some stunning parallels between 2022 (Putin) and 2026 (Trump). #heatpumps

It's always fantastic to visit Prof. Kazuo Kashiyama's CMLab at Chuo University in central Tokyo. I visited over 10 times by now, and every time, it's a delightful experience. Here, we enjoyed demos of an upgraded VR Cave system. Also on the program […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Goodbye, oil heating! We won't miss the noise, the smell, and the soot. No matter how high-tech the furnace is trying to be, at heart it's still a caveman technology. #heatpumps

Another attic find: 12-inch Apple PC Compatibility Card from 1997. Includes Pentium 166 MHz CPU with serial and parallel ports, and a special video cable to switch between Mac and Windows displays. Apparently, I would have to downgrade my PowerMac G4 to MacOS […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

And yet another constant end-of-the-year thing is preparing and sending an annual report to our institute's friends and alumni. This is of course best done before everyone leaves for the break. This year, the alpaca picnic graced the cover.

The other predictable end-of-the-year thing is posting here, on Mastodon only, my latest Wordle stats. It was said that nobody wants to see such things. That may be true, but tradition is a tradition.

There are just few predictable things about the end of the year for me. One of them is definitely reading Dave Barry's Year in Review. https://davebarry.substack.com/p/the-year-in-review

Replaced leaking capacitors on another Mac LC 475 board. I’m beginning to like it! Not a dramatic improvement, but the speaker crackle is gone. #retrocomputing

With retro-computing projects on hiatus, I post a photo of an attic object. It came with surplus MicroVAX II, and is a Q-Bus board from 1992 labeled Super SRCC. With a 68020 and Xilinx FPGAs, it seems to be a co-processor. Included tape had code for radar […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

There should be a dedicated word for this: Thinking about asking Siri a question, imagining the resulting disappointment, and deciding not to ask after all. As a frequent iOS user, I experience this several times daily. #appleintelligence

Don't we just love MS Outlook? Never mind that the message deceivingly invites you to switch to "new" Outlook, which apparently has fewer functions than the old one. I'm so happy to have to use this abomination only in order to remove attachments which Apple Mail is not able to remove. #mastoscience

What a beautiful illustration from the MacsBug Reference and Debugging Guide, from 1993. I always wondered where the high memory is! #retrocomputing

Not sure if anyone has used @BlueSCSI this way, but here it is: Apple Interactive TV (1995 vintage) is booting from a 7.1 disk set up previously in PB 520c, and being controlled via Timbuktu remote desktop. That also uses BlueSCSI network interface. #retrocomputing

My wired connection has (supposedly) IP obfuscation set to off. And yet, unless I turn off iCloud Private Relay completely, it does hide the IP, leading to all sorts of problems accessing university services. How long ago was the Private Relay introduced? #sotiredofbugs #grumpymonday

I thought I'll use built-in Outlook support tool to nag MS about a) senseless prompts to update time zone (from Brussels to Berlin, adjustment of zero hours), and prompts to disable auto reply whenever one has the audacity to open Outlook while on "vacation" […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Outstanding in the field. #caturday

I could not write better about the Friday circus in the White House than Timothy Snyder: https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/the-war-trump-chooses?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Maybe the greatest value of that televised event was to give us a bit of an insight into toddler's mind, to […]

Keeping the cancel culture alive. #twittermigration

A LinkedIn post by Yan LeCun (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yann-lecun_hey-europe-you-want-a-vibrant-tech-industry-activity-7299096239625695232-ORyx) is making waves. It's ostensibly about the chance EU has in poaching US scientists. But it's really a simplistic put-down of the EU landscape […]

US government's irrational crusade against electric cars makes our daily use of EVs into tiny acts of civil disobedience. #ev

It’s a kind of a burying-one’s-head-in-the-sand #caturday .

How did I miss that there exists a Severance TV show podcast? Covering both seasons? I had to search for it on a whim while preparing for a trip, if you believe it... #severance #idontconsumeenoughsocialmedia

The mysteries of MS Exchange: On MacOS Sequoia, I cannot see my Exchange calendar. But I can see delegates' calendars for the same account. On the iPad, I see my calendar, but not the delegates'. #retrocomputing

Belated #caturday

Keeping the cancel culture alive. #twittermigration

That felt kind of good... #twittermigration #despicablezuckerberg

Like every year since 2015, I spend part of my last days in the office working on the CATS institute report for the alumni and friends. It's a chance to review the year, and pick the most amazing stuff. This is probably the most fun thing I do at work! #mastoscience

Windy and rainy #caturday is best spent on the sofa.

It's a tradition since more than a year ago. Every time a new OS from Apple comes out, I restore and update my HomePod, which then invariably fails to set itself up. Now there are rumors on Reddit that "iCloud encryption reset" by some high-ranking Apple […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Late for Caturday, but in a Christmas mood. #caturday

My Mastodon posts are visible on Bluesky under a bridge account, not my regular Bluesky account. When I repost them using the latter, here on Mastodon it looks like I boosted my own post. Oh well, why not. #twittermigration

We now learned that our defense in August bore fruit and that the SFB Transregio 402 DediGrad is going to be funded starting in 2025 for the initial period of four years. The project is coordinated by the @tuchemnitz, and IKV, CATS, ANTS and WZL at RWTH […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

It was great to visit Austin again, for the 6th annual meeting of the International Research Training Group 2379 on Hybrid and Hierarchical Approaches in Modern Inverse Problems! The meeting took place at the Oden Institute at the University of Texas. The […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Wordle 1,214 X/6 ⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩 🟨⬛⬛🟩🟩 ⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛ 🟩⬛🟩⬛⬛ 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩 I think I speak for almost the entire Wordle community: I hate you, NYT. #Wordle

Hide and seek. #caturday