I honestly don't know if it'll be hell or heaven, but I know whatever afterlife I end up in, I'll spend the rest of eternity installing operating systems
COPY THOSE FILES
that was fast
and we've got first boot
don't tell anyone, but when it demanded a password, I made it "steve"
now let's see if I can get online
Yep! We've got Online.
QUICKTIME TIME
oh come on
this company hasn't existed for 19 years, where am I supposed to get a serial number?
it turns out the answer is "google"
so now I gotta figure out how to ffmpeg a video to some kind of maximally lossless video that QT5 can open, just so I can use QT5 to re-encode it for me
what the heck? I copied over a MOV and it plays for like 2 seconds then triggers "you need more codecs"
HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN 2 SECONDS INTO A VIDEO?
I converted it to DV format, since QT supposedly supports that, but at DV format the video is 610 megabytes and for some reason my network connection is surprisingly slow
there we go! it took 16 minutes to download, but it works and plays fine.
and I hit "export" and it seems to have frozen.
I wonder if it's doing some kind of processing before it shows me the dialog? or if it is just hanging because TOO MUCH VIDEO
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fun fact: for a brief period in the early 2000s, Microsoft tried to increase the number of users who would register their software by employing hypnosis
This is actually the registration card that came with this odd piece of microsoft hardware. It's a set-top box from 2001 which displays JPEGs on your TV, off floppy disks.
I guess the idea is that it let you use a big living room TV to look at photos, instead of a small PC CRT?
shout out to ebay who periodically decides my search on "minisport" isn't getting enough results, so it decides I must have spelled it wrong, and corrects it to "mini sport", then suggests "men sport", and I get emails like this:
I DO NOT WANT TINY BASKETBALLS, EBAY
I WANT ZENITH MINISPORTS
anyway I went in and fixed the search to have quotes in it.
ebay will fiddle with your searches unless you quote it, but sometimes it may take months before that has a noticeable effect
Here's a CPT Phoenix Jr Terminal on ebay.
And wow, it's... weird!
Check out that portrait CRT, and angled keyboard!
It seems they tried to make the keyboard symmetric for... reasons, but the left numpad isn't a numpad, it's just got a bunch of custom keys, like TASK and PARA and LINE/SKIP/OUT/ADJ.
I imagine that was designed for customizing for the specific terminal task in mind?
fun fact: the 25th amendment has two sections which allow the vice president to take over from the current president: section 3 and section 4.
They've only been invoked three times, though one is debatable. In all three cases, it involved the president's butt.
Section 4 is the one everyone is talking about recently.
It's the one that lets the vice president take over because they've judged the president to be "unable to discharge the powers and duties of [their] office"
It has never been used, though there have been a couple cases where it was considered. Two with Reagan and two with Trump.
So the last part of the Datachecker that I haven't even done a basic overview of is this huge thing, which I've been calling "the analog box". Spoiler alert: that name is inaccurate
This was mounted right behind the front panel, between the two hard drives.
It turns out each one has a separate on/off switch.