raudette

I wonder if any of the Apricot-era software is still going? If the services side became ACT, which was bought by Misys, Misys bought by Vista Equity and merged with Canada’s D+H to form Finastra - still a going concern in software for financial services. Or any former Apricot employees still at Finastra?

The author writes: "I discovered the IBM Model M in 1993 ... It took me many years to find one. I vividly remember the Craigslist ad for a dilapidated computer shop in a Toronto suburb. Inside I found piles of them, stacked six feet high. All of them had some kind of damage so I picked a few for $20 apiece and rebuilt one that looked pristine."

My Model M story:

I'd heard of the famous Model M for years.

I found a Model M in storage at a place I worked in 2004-2005 and started using it, loved it.

In 2006, I found one for my home PC at the Salvation Army Thrift Store on St Clair W at Christie in Toronto. I paid $20, and it worked!

I still have it, but stopped using it around 2010 - I was asked to use a quieter keyboard :(

I agree - it's worth doing just for fun.

I did the same recently just for fun - I really enjoyed "Gravity Force" on the Amiga - itself a lunar lander variant.

Could a model build a Gravity Force like game I could run in-browser? Yep! (I never made it as good as Gravity Force - just got the basics down)

Yeah, this is so bad - I struggled with this as well, why did they make it hard?

this

It drives me nuts, I look at cumulative CPU time, and this is all my work laptop does.

Agree - but even for the basic use case, it has not been trouble free for me. With a simple 1080p display on a desktop running LTS Ubuntu on an older 3060: - I've had updates where stuff just stopped working and I had to futz around with drivers - Just the fact that you have to 'pick' from a selection of drivers (which one won't you hit issues with for your use case?) - At least on mine, there have been display glitches on suspend/resume - as it's a desktop, I just leave it running

Just anecdotal, but I never had these issues with the desktop AMD APU I had before it or Intel on board graphics on numerous laptops.

- IBM creates PC and its BIOS - Phoenix creates clone of BIOS - At some point, IBM/Lenovo stopped using its own BIOS - IBM spins out Lenovo - Lenovo buys Phoenix

In-house firmware, outsource, then in-house again.

Same experience here. Was getting flats all the time on my commute, bike shop recommended Schwalbe Marathons, haven't had an issue since.

Safari still supports MV2

Just FYI - That defect only impacted systems which boot from ZFS - mine did not.

The installer would stop an upgrade if it found a mounted volume - it apparently checks for zfs volumes as follows: sudo zpool list -H

I could get around the installer's ZFS check by unmounting the drive: sudo zpool export poolname

I upgraded.

Then remounted the volume: sudo zpool import poolname

Then I was up and running...

I hit this recently - nVidia issues with a Flatpak, I spent about half an hour on it, gave up, and just decided to try the app out on another laptop.

May be of interest - here's what running Linux and NetBSD on Amiga is like these days: https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/02/running-netbsd... https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/01/running-linux-...

The way Find My has been built, it doesn't really matter what they do with the tags, it's fairly straightforward to build your own tags, or modify tags, that bypass any stalking detection.

A phone's stalking detection just looks for a tag that's not yours that has been around you for a while.

But you can modify a tag such that it selectively powers up, or build a tag that changes identifiers, such that the stalking detection tools don't pick it up.

I've written a bit about this here: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/further-thoughts-on-stealth-ai... https://www.hotelexistence.ca/exploring-bluetooth-trackers-a...

Story to share - my kids are well into her their teens now, but my youngest, in particular, loved Tux Paint, and used it long before she could read, she'd just click away.

One day, she's playing in Tux Paint, and a print out of her image falls from the sky. We had a desk with shelving. Two shelves above the monitor was our printer. She'd clicked on the print button, without knowing what it would do, or for that matter, even knowing what a printer was or that we had one.

She was SO excited, "look, look, what I was drawing came out on paper from the ceiling"

I have been buying Brooks Adrenaline GTS shoes for 20 years.

My first pair, they were just on sale, so I bought them. When they wore out, I bought a different brand/design. And I noticed that I was wearing the completely worn out old pair of Adrenalines more than my new ones - they were just better.

And it makes it easy to buy a replacement - I've just buy another GTS shoe of the same size when the previous one wears out.

Related: for fun over the holidays, I created an ePub of a paperback copy of "I Brought The Ages Home", by Charles T. Currelly, which went out of copyright in Canada in 2007 (copyright in Canada changed from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author in 2022, but this did not affect works that were already in the public domain).

I couldn't find a ebook online, so I found an old paperback copy and created one: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/create-epub-from-paperback/

Charles T. Currelly was like a real-life Indiana Jones, he was the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and sourced much of its early collections.

Even with modern OCR (I used Mistral's here), and a book with limited formatting, it's funny how hours of touch-ups are required just to get a glitch-free reading experience (no stray headers, paragraphs, page numbers sprinkled through the text).

In my experience, no, but still worth doing.

You end up finding and chatting (often off-mesh!) with people who are within Lora-mesh-distance of you, who have similar interests.

Maybe a centralized Op Ed page?

Like my primary storage, with the old storage in a sub folder.

There's still a WP51 folder in there somewhere...

I had equipped the family with identical corporate-refurb laptops - when you have any of 4 laptops in a family room, it was a way of not getting my laptop taken by my kids to school one day...

Back in the office days, it was also a way to identify a corporate laptop among a sea of identical models.

Also, like I don't wear branded clothing, I like to cover the device brand.

I am not a huge gamer - maybe a dozen hours a year. But I feel that, say, Mario responds differently to controls in an emulator than how I remember Mario responding on an NES with a CRT.

But I was never very good, and it has been decades, so I don't know how much of this is just poor memory - I actually don't think I'm good enough/play enough that the latency of modern input/displays makes a difference at my level.

I would love to try both side-by-side to see if I could pick out the difference in latency/responsiveness.

Funny to have read this today - I read this this morning, and just happened to go to a small gallery in Guelph (small town near Toronto) presenting similar ideas: https://artgalleryofguelph.ca/exhibition/soft-internet-theor...

May be of interest to this thread - I created a script that drives the Kindle web reader, captures screenshots, runs OCR, and creates an ePub - this wouldn't be as good as the pixelmelt solution, as it requires OCR.

Overview: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/remove-drm-with-kindleocrer/ (there's a sample conversion at the bottom, so you can see if it works "good enough" for your purposes)

Script: https://github.com/raudette/kindleOCRer

In action: https://youtu.be/3-07wMCKlkw

Flinks is also an often-used aggregator in Canada.

"Connecting" savings accounts from EQ Bank or Wealthsimple to an account at TD Bank requires providing TD credentials to Flinks.

No one has mentioned Calgary's inter-office skyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_15

10 miles/16 km.

I've actually never been, but saw it featured in a CanCon movie, waydowntown, where a group of office workers wage a month's salary as to who can stay inside the longest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waydowntown

My issue with corporate laptops isn't so much the PC's hardware but the antimalware. I'm not even sure what the antimalware does, and I think, at one time or another, I've probably had all the major ones installed, and they've all managed to slow down my PC down to frustratingly slow speeds.

I don't think it was so much the business practices, but the market that shifted - I think it was a viable business for most of the 90s - there were a lot of these shops, but most have disappeared. It made sense to build for a use case to save on parts, but now, the most basic PCs handle most computing tasks with ease.

Purchasing decisions in business and government were more ad-hoc - I can remember selling and servicing a small number of PCs to embassies, even federal government offices buying 1-5 units. Now they'd buy standard off the shelf boxes in huge quantities.

I just can't imagine now, a foreign embassy calling in to their local PC shop for service, and having a local 17 year old walk in to service a diplomat's PC.

In high school, I worked at a local PC store in Ottawa - Dantek Computers, 1994-1996. Prior to leaving for University in August 1996, I built myself a Pentium 120, with the Asus P55T2P4 motherboard mentioned in the article.

The way our store worked, every PC was built to order - we had inexpensive cases with sharp edges, we had higher end ones as well. I assembled a TON of PCs over those two years. We had a PC configuration app the owner had built in QBasic - it was very much like pcpartpicker.com , with all the parts we had available.

We played with a bunch of hardware and were familiar with it, we'd walk customers through the decisions - the impact of increasing cache, the differences in video cards. I believed it at the time, and in retrospect, still believe that it was an awesome shop - I can remember, by policy, we would sell customers printers if they really wanted one, but always recommended they buy one at the big box shop down the street, as we couldn't match their pricing. I loved that job.

I was reading some of the Amiga 1000 material that was surfacing earlier this summer for the 40th anniversary - the Infoworld review ( https://books.google.ca/books?id=cC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&redir_... ) had the following highlight: "Connecting printers is equally easy, since the Amiga uses standard plugs and cabling schemes used by the IBM PC; you can actually unplug an Epson dot-matrix printer from an IBM PC, plug it into an Amiga, and expect it to work without rewiring the cable" I love that this was worth mentioning in 1985.

Similar story, a bit later - my parents had a TeleVideo 1603 system that ran CP/M - I remember my father making a custom cable to connect a Daisywriter letter quality printer to it.

I love this.

My great grandmother, who lived into my 20s, wrote a 10 page memoir about growing up - life stories, people, places etc... And I found it super interesting - I built a vacation around the places last summer.

I asked her daughter/my grandmother to do the same, but she wasn't interested. And then I've thought about the exercise myself - it's hard to think of things in my life that a future great-grandchild might find interesting. And it's not clear if my great-grandmother's story I find interesting, in contrast with financial hardships I did not face? How do you pick out the interesting from the mundane? What is most interesting about today 100 years from now?

And I can see the potential for core interview questions to help draw it out.