Another Word for Nerd

I took some pictures of my “Every Day Carry” stuff.

One example is the Logitech Trackman Marble FX. Logitech discontinued them after 2-3 years of production, and has yet to introduce a replacement that feels or works as well in my opinion.

My wife and I buy them whenever we find them available, but a shrinking
supply has driven the prices up into the stratosphere - we paid $75
for one from a friend a year ago, and used prices on Amazon are almost
$300 the last time I checked. I can occasionally find one for less than $10 in the bin at Goodwill Computerworks, but they’re few and far between.

I would love to see Logitech introduce a modern version of the Trackman
Marble FX, or even run across 2-3 of them in good shape for a decent
price.

I ordered the upper (a Stag 1H with carry-handle sight) for my AR15 from AR15Sales on Friday. I should have a completed gun within a week!

I’m looking forward to taking it down to Top Gun and giving it a workout.

I bought a slide rule on eBay today.

Sometimes I think I was born 10-15 years too late; I have a strange affinity with 1960s and 1970s technology.

I’ve not had time to work on it in almost three months, so a friend is on his way here right now to take the Amiga hardware (two A2000s and an A4000) off my hands. He’s buying the A4K, but I’m giving the rest of it to him for free.

I’ll continue to work and play with the Amiga via emulation, but I’ve had to realize that I just don’t have the room and the time to work with actual hardware nowdays.

I got Wordperfect 5.1 running in DOSbox under OSX.

Now I just need to find a DOS-native version of Lotus 1-2-3 and a copy of DBase III+, and my quest will be complete.

Update: Borland has made Turbo Pascal versions 1.0, 3.02, and 5.5, as well as Turbo C version 2.01 and Turbo C++ version 1.01 available here.

I’ve now got a multi-floppy-image of a later version of Lotus 1-2-3, but I’m still looking for a 2.x version and a distribution of DBase III+.

I managed to get AmigaOS 3.9 running on WinUAE, while waiting on parts to arrive so I can get the A4000 up and running.

Decided to fiddle with the Amiga a bit and see if the GVP ‘030 board works. Once I dug up the correct jumper settings for the 3001, it managed to boot to the “please give me a Workbench Disk” screen.

The floppy drive is bad, so I “temporarily borrowed” the floppy drive tray from the second A2000:

Using it and a Workbench 2.04 floppy, I managed to get a basic floppy-based system up and running:

Once that was successful, I installed the other cards - an Amiga 2091 SCSI controller/RAM expansion, and a SupraRAM expansion. So far, they appear to work together and give me a total of 1M “Chip” RAM, and eight megabytes of “Fast” RAM:

Now I just need to find a couple 50-pin SCSI ribbon cables and a small (4G or less) SCSI hard drive…

The box with the rest of the cables, mice, etc, arrived - but the monitor cable is a DB23 to DB9 for use with a Commodore 1080/1084 monitor.

I had to order a DB23-to-HD15 adapter cable. It will take a few days to arrive, so all the Amiga work is put off for another week or so. Hopefully my LCD will sync up to the native Amiga video frequency coming out of the A4000.

The Amiga 4000 and Amiga 2000 arrived today, along with their keyboards. The box of other parts and cables should be here tomorrow.

The 4K came with a slightly-fuzzy battery (which I quickly removed), a Retina BLT Z3 video card, an Emplant card, and a Warp Engine 68040 accelerator.

The 2K came with a GVP Impact A3001 68030 acclerator and two floppy drives. It had a fuzzy battery as well, and it was removed as soon as possible.

If the 4K works properly, the only thing I’ll need will be a Zorro-bus Ethernet card.