Some of my articles and mastodon threads of interest

Long reads

• Windows 2 and 3 for the Apricot PC/Xi
• On recreating the lost SDK for a 42-year-old operating system: VisiCorp Visi On
• I'd like to speak to the Bellcore ManaGeR
• I see, I can improve my drawings!
• Cooking of a cooking game
• That's a Tabi, too
• I see, I can draw!
• Windows 2 notes
• Empathy and efficiency in hard conversations
• Emergency Kit Mk3
• Emergency Kit Mk2

Mastodon threads

Notes/rants

• Reminiscing about my bands and songs
• 80 column rule and the arm span of papermakers
• Distraction-free work in attention-seeking world: phone hacks, typewriters, and old computers
• Glitching the images with processing them as audio
• Wrong VGA palette in all emulators?!

RAM

• Let's make RAM at home, part 1
• Let's make RAM at home, part 2

DIY tapes and floppies

• Video of DIY magnetic tape heads and demo
• DIY magnetic tape head Mk 1.999 - demo
• DIY magnetic tape head Mk 1 - what went wrong
• DIY magnetic tape head Mk 1
• DIY floppy - proto 4&5, synthesis of gamma-Fe2O3 at home
• DIY magnetic tape heads - discussion thread
• DIY 5.25" floppy - proto 2&3, better results
• DIY 5.25" floppy - failed prototype
• QA on DIY magnetic tape
• DIY tape - demo
• DIY magnetic tape

Pixel?art

Orihime Project

• Announcement
• How to make nice window title bars
• Buttons and font

Misc

• 8bitYUV - a proposal for small RAM screen format
• Emoji/emoticons/smileys - where do they come from?
• Attribute clash on MSX and ZX Spectrum, in pictures
• Cling film scanning technique
• S;G Oopa
• S;G octet - detailed train
• S;G Octet banners
• S;G Octet opening
• Nae 2
• S;G Octet ZX - Nae
• Trying to find the first 88x31 banner ever - lots of old screenshots ** tl;dr Netscape Gold 2.0 was released in January 1996, comes with a home page generator that adds "Netscape Now!" 88x31 gif to pages it creates. As for why these dimensions, my guess is: if you want a 3:1 button 32 pixels tall, and insides of the button will be 84x28, but something went wrong, and the image was incorrectly resized. You can see how blurry insides of Netscape 2.0 Now is compared to 3.0 banner.

Screenshots and hacks

Rare/unusual stuff

• Windows 95 with EGA and CGA - including Quake running on CGA
• Converting Windows 95 MINI.CAB pre-install environment into a full desktop without using Windows distributions
• Windows 1/2/3 display driver backwards compatibility
• VisiCorp VisiOn (1983) - videos of the user interface
• Philips Ease Desktop for MSX, 1988
• BK-0010, soviet desktop PDP-11 clone, running all sorts of soft
• Windows 95 running on a monochrome 386SX VGA laptop
• Japanese operating system B-right/V version 4.5 running Chokanji system - BTRON implementation
• Japanese operating system EOSystem 3 for PC98
• Chinese operating system UCDOS and shell UCShell - Windows 3 simulacrum
• Soviet operating shell MASTER/МАСТЕР, plus Lexicon and Word&Deed text editors
• GEOS/NewDeal Office on 80286
• Kyocera Keitai 2, an imported Japanese flip phone running Android
• PC98 various editors, DOSShell, Win3, Win95
• GEM/3 on Apricot

Old stuff

• Visual Basic 1.0 tour + Turbo Pascal for Windows
• Windows 3.1 with true color VESA driver, Calmira XP shell and unusual apps
• Minix-vmd running XFree86 and Chimera web browser
• Plamo Linux 3.3 and Gnome 2.2 on PC-9821
• Installing Plamo/98 3.3 Linux/98 on PC-9821 Nw150 laptop
• Installing FreeBSD 8 on PC-9821 Nw150 laptop
• Dragon 32 - Welsh home computer from 1982. Booting up
• Olympia SM4 typewriter - overview
• NEC Versa - music making on i486
• NEC Versa - media and creativity
• NEC Versa - Windows 95 install
• Windows 2.x history - comments thread
• Importing colourful images to stock Windows 1.x/2.x
• Slackware 3.0 from 1995, XFree86, Andrew ATK and ez word processor
• Debian 2 and Debian 3 - XFree86 setup, Gnome 1.4, Gimp 1.x, some KDE 2.2 apps, Mozilla 1.0, WindowMaker, IceWM, FVWM95
• Debian 0.91 BETA - Linux 0.99, X11, gcc 2 and GIMP 0.60
• MS Word on Mac Classic
• Minix 2 for Apricot PC Xi
• Trying to figure out how win100.bin created
• Windows 1.03 for Apricot PC/Xi
• Norton Commander patch for Apricot Xi - broken
• OS/2 Warp 3 screenshots
• Internet Explorer 5 and Windows 95 installer using CGA driver. Bonus: EGA Win95
• Windows NT 3.51 screenshots

Tech teardown and repair

• Casio Caleid / Mobile Navigator / SIM3020 simulator and Caleid OS screenshots
• Casio BN-20 / PV simulator
• Casio BN-20 rom dump - screenshots
• Casio BN-20 teardown and keyboard repair
• Amstrad ALT 386SX repair
• vtech Media Desktop and its unusual low-tech mouse
• PC-9821La10 laptop to floppy cable
• Cambridge Z88
• Apricot PC/Xi
• Toy laptops thread + Sumikko Gurashi updates
• Sumikko Gurashi JTAG spoiler
• Teardown of Sumikko Gurashi - Japanese toy PC
• Exploring the Dora - from Twi

Primitive? tech

Are simple things as simple as they seem?

• DIY carbon paper copier
• Fire pit fried pottery at home
• Raw carrot sugar
• Glass from sand? Semi-fail
• Wheat blueberry cookie
• "Pottery is when you fire some clay" - half fail
• "bread is a baked mixture of ground grains and water" - success
• Corn bread and sunflower oil - fail but fun

Random experiments

• PET bottles into wicker, beads and tubes