Posts by vga256@dialup.cafe
(DIR) Post #AxRMF3mCciMgsDLKme by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-08-22T19:04:56Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@foone me too. i'm <3 for 16-bit windows trashware. i hope it's a director projector
(DIR) Post #AxRREAwoyVMmb0hvbU by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-08-22T22:00:37Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings i'm always amazed at the lucy/charlie brown football dynamic that has been around since at least the y2k days in big tech. there's always some miracle money promise waiting around the corner that investors are just drooling to throw money at. ten years ago it was VR which crumbled apart and disappeared.
(DIR) Post #AxT6WdmanQOCW8o4GW by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-08-23T16:53:55Z
3 likes, 4 repeats
bbs enthusiasts might remember the name Telegard - a bbs server written based on wwiv's source code and hugely popular with the ibm pc/ms-dos crowdtelegard had a long and tumultuous history by its authors, and its own source was eventually leaked and was modded into many more popular (pirate-friendly) ms-dos boards like Renegade, Oblivion and Iniquity. while i was doing research a few months ago on the history of those systems, i found out that telegard.net - the original home of tg - was taken over by a domain squatter in 2010, populated with ads for the past 15 years.two months ago, i noticed that the squatter had not renewed the domain, and it went into the long grace/redemption/auction/expiry cycle. i checked on it every single morning, and to my absolute delight, it was released this morning for purchase. šø the domain will be used purely for historical preservation of telegard and its many descendants#bbs #warez #softwarePreservation
(DIR) Post #AxTVo9XgSwgUnLHRpI by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-08-23T22:19:32Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings can confirm. left my boiled eggs in the fridge over night - woke up to very dry shells and peeled like shit.
(DIR) Post #AxZGAy5Qn7DNbkgMAC by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-08-26T16:39:16Z
0 likes, 2 repeats
some time ago i discovered the 1940s General Electric Epicure 2QH2 kitchen wall clock and fell in love with the modernist face designit took a few months, but i finally tracked one down today for $20 locally. i was surprised to learn that the movement is continuous, so the hands sweep gently across the face instead of the harsh thok-thok-thok of cheaper movementsiāll be taking this apart to remove the face plate and scanning it in for archival and clock repair. #clocks #typefaces #design
(DIR) Post #Axbmm1GZW9op28WZA8 by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-08-27T22:02:09Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
instead of memorizing our birth years, most millennials could just have logitech logo tattoos inked at birthdespite technically being born pre-logi, i firmly identify with cohort 3source: logitech logo history 1981-2015 https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Logitech
(DIR) Post #Axdquy7RNQ5e0lhCe8 by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-08-28T21:25:21Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
today's retro rescue is a palm tungsten T5 - the late flagship model in the tungsten line of PDAsten years ago i had nothing but a tungsten for all of my computing needs - i wrote emails and letters on it, and played a lot of Infocom text adventures at night. with a wireless keyboard (which uses the IR port!) it was surprisingly useful and got me a year and a half of daily driving.the T5 is just the right balance of features and performance - it has the fastest intel XScale processor @ 416 mhz, built-in bluetooth, and a beefy 320x480 lcd.the previous owner appeared to have turned this into his mp3 player.#retroComputing #palmPilot
(DIR) Post #Axq2m4GIhNYzntshd2 by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-09-03T19:12:35Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings although this article and the book are more focused on economics, the concept of "process knowledge" is an interesting one that received much deeper treatment in the 70s and 80s (second-order) systems theory and cybernetics academic literature. thinking here of michael polanyi's book "Personal Knowledge".. which is basically about how we come to embody (in ourselves) a practical and tacit relationship with the world.those ideas got picked up by sociologists and psychologists, and some of the best work produced really deep phenomenologies and cultural studies of work environments. the vast majority of theorists still believe that knowledge is information that you can beam/transfer from person to person (via the aether!). these cyberneticists really decimated that 19th century view and offered an ecological/human perspective to replace itfor me, the sad part about working remotely, and solo, has been the absolute dearth of creative problem solving that can only be done in pairs or threes. i miss being able to think out a problem as a group, and come up with a bunch of very different solutions out loud. my software development has totally suffered for a lack of it.
(DIR) Post #Axq3iKPknnJQhC5Fpo by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-09-03T19:13:10Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings although this article and the book are more focused on economics, the concept of "process knowledge" is an interesting one that received much deeper treatment in the 70s and 80s (second-order) systems theory and cybernetics academic literature. thinking here of michael polanyi's books "Personal Knowledge" and "The Tacit Dimension".. which are basically about how we come to embody (in ourselves) a practical and tacit relationship with the world.those ideas got picked up by sociologists and psychologists, and some of the best work produced really deep phenomenologies and cultural studies of work environments. the vast majority of theorists still believe that knowledge is information that you can beam/transfer from person to person (via the aether!). these cyberneticists really decimated that 19th century view and offered an ecological/human perspective to replace itfor me, the sad part about working remotely, and solo, has been the absolute dearth of creative problem solving that can only be done in pairs or threes. i miss being able to think out a problem as a group, and come up with a bunch of very different solutions out loud. my software development has totally suffered for a lack of it.
(DIR) Post #AxwoGFqM44qTClOvPU by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-09-07T01:32:57Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings i seriously appreciate those prepunched binder holes.
(DIR) Post #Ay11wzmlieM9tIH3Sq by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-09-08T14:07:03Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
sometimes life presents you with a choice: you can spend a sunday in the comforts of home, or you can drive 4 hours to rescue 40 issues of Wired mag from hitting the recycle binthe seller planned to toss these the next morning if someone didnāt pick them up. these 42 issues span 2000 to 2004 - fairly fascinating time in big tech, during and after the dotcom crash.when he handed over the magazines he noticed I was smiling. he asked what I was planning to do with them. āRead them!āI handed him $20 and he looked genuinely sad, like he had just sold a six year old a bag of magic beans. #retrocomputing #vintageApple #macintosh
(DIR) Post #Ay4WxMCg3AIVTJvOfg by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-08-29T20:12:47Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@captainarcee these are great little drives. i use them for cold storage backups and toss em in the safe
(DIR) Post #Ay6SffAulSZbb9KMq0 by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-09-11T17:10:10Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
discovered this ad for a Panasonic PV-SD4090 in a march 2000 issue of Wired mag99% of the time i see sony mavica posts for retro digicams, but this one is a real treasure. those LS-120 drives did not really catch on at the time, and itās a shame because iomega zip/jaz sure were shitty products. iād love to see some stills taken from this camera some day. i never liked the mavicaās webcam-like optical quality even back in the day, and always thought olympus and other companies produced far more interesting prints#cameras #retroComputing
(DIR) Post #AygBONm2SGEKp0u7rk by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-09-28T22:54:08Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings amazing to see someone shooting on 4x5!
(DIR) Post #Ayjp9MAkhohf9UjXtI by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-09-30T16:34:16Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
two years ago our resident hare dug herself a soft spot on the front lawn, and sat in it for weeks. twice a year - in the spring and autumn - she returns to that exact spot and has a good sit for a few days. she arrived this morning#rabbits #urbanAnimals #animals #yeg
(DIR) Post #AykKUh6TB3XojENvVI by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-09-30T22:54:59Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@tomjennings go back to your timeline - Notifications is its own icon - a bell, right below the Home icon. on the Notifications page, click on the options icon which looks like a group of small sliders in the top right.
(DIR) Post #AylsWmx9zQwd3BA1Pk by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-10-01T16:47:17Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
holy crap: mastodon server does not support domain name changes. ši now have to give some serious thought to migrating dialup.cafe -> dialup.partyit would mean setting up a new server from scratch, migrating users to the new server, and losing all of their post history in the process. i am truly dumbfounded at how bad this architecture is.#mastoAdmin
(DIR) Post #Ayo0T3ex7d4vegIQLo by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-10-01T20:12:57Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Due to technical limitations with mastodon's architecture - which does not support domain name changes or data migration - dialup.cafe will be closing permanently in one month.Dialup.cafe instance users: please see the server announcement and get thine affairs in order. š
(DIR) Post #Ayo0T4g3L1YKoNoohk by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-10-02T17:07:19Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
in case anyone is curious about the underlying cause of it being impossible to migrate a mastodon server from one domain to another, this limitation is due to the activitypub protocol itself, which (simplifying for brevity) uses the equivalent of absolute/hardcoded URLs for posts@silverpill wrote this fediverse enhancement proposal that would allow for relative domain names. given that it was written a year ago, and with the molasses-like development the protocol has, i sadly suspect it's unlikely to be integrated any time soon.more here:https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/e3e9/fep-e3e9.md#mastoAdmin #fediverse #activityPub
(DIR) Post #AzBZASCnbPIlJQ4PmS by vga256@dialup.cafe
2025-07-30T15:29:30Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
now nearly 20 years after it was first published, rob oāharaās Commodork remains to be the most faithful recollection of the bbs era. iāve re-read it almost every year since it was printed, and iām always struck by how accurate his memory for the warez and modeming scene is. iām amazed that we still do not have a comprehensive written history of BBSes to this day. #bbs #retroComputing #warez #commodore #books