What are you going to build today? (I'm actually asking)

In a world ruled by AI, real face-to-face moments will stand out. Online content—emails, posts, ads—will be so perfectly polished by machines that people will just tune it out. But when someone looks you in the eye, that’s when you’ll feel what’s real and true. It’s pretty exciting.

Osborne 1 restoration day 5 (non consecutive): Have it flipped upside down so I could pin out the motherboard while connected to the power supply. It now passes the RAM test and boots to CP/M. Woot!

Morning before the work week starts shenanigans: Have you ever had a dumb idea for a project, and you want to get it out of your head, only for it to come out in a rush and work the first time? Weird but... simple RSA (12ish Bit) on a Commodore 64 in BASIC:

I put these albums up in my office and then realized that you can see the reflection of my dual monitors behind me in video calls. So, I either need to anti-reflect them or move them. Anyway, happy Friday. Get out there and make cool stuff!

Does anyone have a VX-4 or FX-870 that would be willing to take a video of this one liner running for me? I can run it on the emulator but it’s better for my project on the real thing.

PicoCalc arrived today. It boots directly into BASIC, so naturally, the first thing I did was a 10PRINT.

Happy Pi Day from one of my VIC-20s!

You don't have to pay attention to "what's going on" for as long as you want. With few exceptions, quitting the news will not affect anything. AT ALL. Other than the fact that you'll not be filling your brain with "the news." Whatever that even is.

Finished this in just a couple hours, it’s a lot of fun. On to books two and three.

The Penultimate 3+ "Turbo" arrived yesterday. I've now purchased EVERY iteration of this cart.

With a cheap Starlink mini and a standard drill battery, and I can literally work from anywhere. I bought this during Helene (I live in the Asheville area) and it has become a standard part of my equipment setup. Almost flawless.

MOS Technology documents from 1976 scanned and published: First Edition KIM-1 User Manual, Product descriptions, Floating point sources and more: retro.hansotten.nl/mos-technolo...

I need a native Japanese speaker to translate "Next time, don't marry a stripper" into Japanese.

I'm sure I'm in the minority, but BS is full of hate, just like the others. Gimme a retro computer network, or a network for my sports team, etc Another one-size-fits-all social network clone isn't going to work. They all eventually start looking like each other because people are people.

When you must dive deep into a subject, a book is still the best format.

I have... a lot of books on Kindle from the last however many years. But the total number at the moment is something else, isn't it? This is gonna take a while...

This is new in the wrapper, but we must open it, right? It does have 1984 air inside it, though. Plus, an Atari floppy.

The BEST iPad model is the MacBook Air, and it's not even close. I'll die on this hill.

Turns out Indian food is super easy to freeze dry. Chicken Tikka Masala is done.

Journal entry this morning. Sheesh I had a lot to get out:

Behold: the best computer book cover of all time. I've been trying to get a physical copy of this book for a long time, and it's finally arrived. So much to unpack here. Let's discuss

I’ve been a pilot for a long time. The “maintain visual separation” instruction at night has always seemed like a crazy thing to me.

My go-to "this meeting should have been an email" is this game. The @8BitDo controller works great on a Mac with the Redream emulator.

A random find in my basement: Unopened Windows 3. It's still wrapped in plastic. Does this mean there's 1992 air inside?

The complete series is only 29 hours in total, but it is worth every minute.

100 Doors on PICO-8 imapenguin.com/2025/01/pico...

I will not have time to assemble this today, but my PAL-II arrived. Serial number 2. Woot!

It would be cool if they made it in Commodore beige, but red will do :)

Surprisingly, this vintage Apple Intelligence is more interesting and useful than 2025 Apple Intelligence.

I am currently looking for a Tower Hobbies Catalog from 1986 and 1987. If you have one, I want to chat ;-)

One act of kindness a day.

In today's episode of stupid races between computer things: Been using Lua lately because of my Neovim setup and with PICO-8. Then, had an ADHD moment and made a ridiculous speed comparison instead of doing actual work. Thanks to the internet, you're now looking at this instead of doing work.

My TrimUI Brick came with an SD card. It has a whopping 24983 ROMs on it. There's zero chance that a bunch of these (maybe most) have copyright issues with people doing this sort of thing, right?

Make wired headphones great again! (Also, happy Monday!)

(1/2)This weekend, we're playing a multi-evening game of Cashflow. Calculators are handy when finances become more involved. Interestingly, the three of us have different calculator preferences.

You can find me at: x.com/mrdoornbos mastodon.social/@mrdoornbos michaeldoornbos.com imapenguin.com offglobe.com evadot.com

Just think, you could be getting into the Holiday spirit with the soft glow of a restored PET 2001 from 1979...

I'm working on a new app in Rails (It's been a while). I've been on Django for the last few years. I forgot that Ruby doesn't type-convert integer division. I know this is lazy programming, but it took me an hour to realize what I had done.

ALL computer (and recipe) books should be spiral-bound.

Happy Friday!

If you're looking for me (pfft yeah right) you'll prolly find me on X...

I love this keyboard with one glaring exception: the ~ and ` keys are accessed with the Fn key. If you use Vim a lot, this is a problem. So, I'm keyboard shopping. Does anyone have something with a cool look that I must take a look at?

I've decided to start manually curating my own music collection(buh-bye streaming). I wonder if I have a charging cable for this to use until I can build my own stand-alone music player.

I am still working on this PET 2001-8N board. Both 6520s are bad. That's unfortunate.

On today's episode of "Stupid Races Between Old Computery Things," the Radio Shack PC-4 (1983) and the TI-74 (1986) are competing. Both will run the same 10,000 loop addition in BASIC. The 74 is quite a bit faster, which isn't surprising. It's still fun, even if it's stupid ;-)

So, now we signal by which social media we use? Y’all have lost your damn minds.

I can't say enough good things about this book—easily in the top five favorite books I've read in 2024.

Here’s my shot at #10print on the TI-74. It has the ASCII table, but curiously, character 92, usually the backslash, is the Yen symbol on this device, so I used other characters. It’s my continuation of my “10print on all the things” quest. This is essentially @8bitshowandtell ‘s fault.

Everyone uses snow to wipe the flux off of their copper pipe solder work right?