It's not a terribly flattering photo of her, so here's a better one from earlier, showing off her green eyes and impeccable eyeliner skills.

#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon #Cats #猫

She howled in the back yard until I came out, then flopped down proudly next to the gift she brought: a crushed water bottle, crinkly and brittle from seemingly years in the sun.

She's done this a few times before. A coffee pod, half a watch band, a takeout drink container lid; all of them old and sun-damaged. I don't know where she finds them or why she feels compelled to bring them to me, but I always thank her and give her pets and treats.

#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon #Cats #猫

Huh? It's Caturday again? Already?!

#Caturday #cats

"Psst, hey you. Yeah, you! You got any of them... treats?"

#Caturday #Cats

I saw this DEC InfoServer 1000 and my mind went instantly to "classy as shit Greaseweazle omni-enclosure." No budget for that kind of thing at the moment, sadly!

#VCFWest #VCFW #VCF2026 #RetroComputing #DEC

Today's #VCFWest consignment area was brought to you by loads of PCjr stuff.

#VCFW #VCF2026 #RetroComputing #PCjr

As a semi-normal, semi-sane person, I've always viewed 3½" floppies with the label end being the top.

So much so that it didn't click until a few years ago that the weird "CH" logo was actually... HD inverted. 🤦

Today, I'm archiving and scanning disks, and what do I notice? LOOK WHAT APPLE DID.

Wait, was that common? Did I overlook it all this time? No, I flipped through hundreds of disks, and this is the ONLY one I have with the HD right-side up!

#RetroComputing #Floppy #Floppies

If you'd like to listen to the whole thing, I've put up FLACs on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/xerox-de-colombia-volumen-v

Not a lot of these albums seem to have been been catalogued online (let alone archived), sadly. But Discogs does list a Volumen 9, which has absolutely wicked album art and I want it.

#Xerox #Colombia #Vinyl #RetroComputing

Found this album at a swap meet a few months ago and couldn't pass it up. Finally got my turntable fixed and gave it a listen, and hot damn is it a lot less boring that you'd expect from the Xerox name.

If this is the kind of fire that was pumping out of the Xerox de Colombia office sound system while they were messing with Xerox Altos (and copiers, I guess) in 1976, sign me the fuck up.

#Xerox #Colombia #Vinyl

DUDE.

Floppy. Disk. Rolodex.

#RetroComputing

Retro truck for retro equipment.

Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market!

- Wake up at stupid o'clock!
- See tons of neat stuff!
- Reeeeally test the limits of your self-control when it comes to said neat stuff following you home!

Vile.

Had the thought of using a few of these to more quickly swap hard drives between old systems. Like what a normal person would use CF cards for.

Both of these are new in box. Same brandless Taiwanese provenance, same model number, same packaging. The metal parts are stamped from the same die and the plastic parts are from the same mold. The carriers are 100% physically interchangeable.

One small hitch: The electrical connections are *disastrously* incompatible.

#RetroComputing

Mystery possibly solved.

I found some reference to TSRs and BIOS extensions that would allow such a DSQD format to work properly under DOS, but it turns out this was something that the Tandy 2000 could do out of the box. Even saw one person mention that the 2000 format is exactly the same as on 3½ 720k disks. There ya go, I guess.

86Box doesn't support the Tandy 2000, but the disk works on an emulated Tandy 4000!

FORMAT.COM under MS-DOS will not allow you to format a 5¼ disk as 720k, returning "Parameters not compatible. Format terminated." PC-DOS 3.3 says "Invalid parameters".

ImageDisk running on the same system, however, given the right parameters, will image the disk fine, and even write it to a new disk.

I found a disk with a odd format: 720k. Normal for a DSDD 3½" disk under DOS, but this is a *5¼"* disk.

Greaseweazle will image it just fine if you tell it to read an IBM 720k 3½ disk and point it at a 5¼ drive.

PC98 had a 720k 5¼ format, but this ain't it, at least according to GW's pc98.* tools. Plus, it's all English, so.

IBM DOS & MS-DOS will give a file listing, but trying to access any files causes the drive to make awful noises.

#RetroComputing #Floppy #Greaseweazle

The cash register this place uses is also two layers of #RetroComputing interest:

The physical computer is what I believe is a Mac Mini G4 running OS X (which would mean 10.3-10.5).

The register software it runs is much, much older, however. I can't be sure of the software's resolution, but it *looked* like the 512x342 of the original compact Macs, and it was definitely rendered in 1-bit B&W.

I commented on the setup, and the guy just kind of shrugged and said it was an antique shop.

Fair.

This cassette jumped out at me at an antique shop today.

Not because of the content. It's just someone's mixtape from 1988.

But I love that whomever made the tape then went over to their computer, loaded up a template or a dedicated piece of software, and printed out a custom j-card on their dot matrix printer. The future was now!

#cassette #RetroComputing

In case anyone's interested in the settings:
20mm @ f/1.8, 15 seconds, ISO 250.

For extra quality, I made sure to miss the focus by a smidge and clamp the camera to a wobbly old handrail.