Geek

This is a 1983 press photo taken in a Kmart. I don’t know the location of the Kmart, though I can tell you this is one location I had never been in. It would appear the photographer is standing on the checkstand for register #1. I’m surprised to see both registers two and six are designated as express checkouts.

The cashiers are using NCR 255 cash registers, which I’ve never seen in a Kmart. As a vintage technology buff I can tell you the NCR 255 was capable of scanning as early as the mid 1970s, but Kmart really struggled with bringing their store systems into the electronic era. Notice there’s no scanners in the checkstands and the cashier doesn’t have a wired wand anywhere. Undoubtedly the cashier was entering a price and selecting “Key 1”, “Key 2”, etc., as that was the way Kmart designated their departments at the time. Announcements over the PA system would refer to personnel as “Clock” and a number, you had to listen for your “clock” number to know when to respond.

The NCR 255 cash registers were quite sophisticated compared to what I remember from that era at Kmart; the Kmart in Mattydale kept their mechanical cash registers well into the 80s and the Kmart at “Western Lights” in Syracuse had loud NCR 225s that made a lot of banging sounds. Another Kmart near where I went to college had something completely different that wasn’t made by NCR at all.

I have a lot of useless information in my brain.

One thing I found surprising is the stacks of cartons of cigarettes along the express checkout. I had completely forgotten that was a thing back in the day, though now that I think about it I remember the grocery stores in my hometown having a similar arrangement at the registers.

I took a look at the visitor stats for this site for the first time in a very long while; most people come here to visit a page I wrote years ago about the department store chain “W.T. Grants”. Many former employees stop by to reminisce. Other visitors stop by to read about my memories of early computers and cash registers.

I really do enjoy vintage technology. I was doing research on NCR’s minicomputers of the 1970s when I came across this photo via a Google search. Kmart had a huge mish-mash of registers across their stores in the early 1980s until they finally settled down onto one somewhat cohesive system around the same time they ditched the big red “K” with the turquoise “mart”.

That Kmart sign is much bigger than any “Big K” sign I’ve ever seen since that unfortunate switch a couple of decades ago.

Now there’s hardly an Kmarts left in the country. Times are certainly different.

During the downtime of the pandemic I’ve been playing around with my Raspberry Pi setup. A few weeks ago I picked up a 7-inch touchscreen and case. The Raspberry Pi is mounted in the case with the touchscreen, so it’s all one compact unit. Eventually this will become a home automation control station and be mounted on the wall in our front hallway. The display will also provide the current weather and information on the nearby CTA ‘L’ Line. We’ll know if we have to run or walk downstairs to catch the train when it’s prudent to go outside again.

I’m able to do this because the CTA provides this data for developers to include in their applications if they so wish. I can also use data from Accuweather for my app. Because the data is open and available.

I believe most data should be open and available.

Now, while there’s a perverse side of me wouldn’t mind having a national database of who is attached to the license plate number of the person that just cut in front of me on the expressway, I understand there are limits and common sense barriers around many personal bits of information. I’m not saying I want all the data available to the world but I am saying I want data the furthers the common good.

Last week, popular weather app developer Dark Sky announced they were purchased by Apple and that Dark Sky and its data set were now property of Apple. With this change of ownership, Apple will be discontinuing the Android version of Dark Sky and then will discontinue the availability of Dark Sky’s API. This means that any other app dependent on the data collected and shared by Dark Sky, for example, the Weather Line app, now needs to find a new source of weather data if they wish to continue to power their application.

I have an issue with this.

While I have loved Apple hardware and most software experiences over the data decades, one thing I have never been completely comfortable with is the concept of a “walled garden”. Apple seems to be doing more and more of this approach as time goes on. FaceTime is only available to Apple users. iMessage is only available to Apple users. And now Dark Sky data will only be available to Apple users.

Apple touts this approach as part of their security measures. Live inside the walled garden and you’ll be safe from bad actors on the ever growing Internet. Ad companies will not bother you and your data won’t be mined.

This is only true if you have *only* Apple developed products on your device and Apple doesn’t decide to share data with any third parties. It’s a step in the right direction when it comes to data privacy, but at the same time it’s a step in the wrong direction. Because when you look at the price of Apple’s iDevices and compare them to similar devices from other companies, you’ll find that Apple’s devices can be quite pricey.

In today’s rapidly declining economic environment, who has time to drop a boat load of change just to live inside a “walled garden”?

When it doesn’t compromise privacy or personal safety, data should be free to flow between varying devices, different ecosystems, and distinct “walled gardens”. This is one aspect of Google and Microsoft’s applications I actually like, they’re ubiquitous. Google searches work just fine on any device and Microsoft has made strides to make Office available on just about everything. I can create a Word Document in a web browser on a Linux computer and open that document on a Windows computer and then share with a person using a Mac.

For the world to move forward we need to be cooperative with our data. I would love to see Apple change their mind about Dark Sky data but I don’t have a lot of hope.

In the meanwhile, my little Raspberry Pi setup, all told put together for less than $100, will display weather information from Accuweather.

And it will be awesome.

Back in 2007 I sold a bunch of slave clocks on ebay to a school in Wisconsin. As I was looking through old photos on a hard drive this evening, I was reminded of the fact that I had designed a custom clock face and put my little one-man business logo on the clock face.

I worked with a company in Dassel, Minnesota to get the clocks produced; the clocks were a square version of their “All Sync” clocks that would work with pretty much any clock system found in a school built from the mid 1950s and onward. The clocks could run on either 24 or 110 VAC. The school in Wisconsin was looking to replace some of their clocks but not all of them and couldn’t afford or even find replacements for their antiquated system. They were searching through clocks on ebay they found what I was selling and asked if they could buy a bunch of them. I was happy to oblige.

The clock was face design was a modern take on the clocks that were in the elementary school I attended back in the ’70s. I thought the face turned out well and now I’m wondering if the clocks are still running in the school that bought them.

As modern time and signaling systems hit the market in the early 2010 and many schools starting moving to wireless systems, it didn’t make financial sense for me to stay in replacement clock game.

As mentioned in the previous blog entry, I’m such a dork.

This ad from Apple is brilliant. I remarked on Twitter yesterday, the iPad is best described *not* as a laptop replacement, but as a new kind of computer.

https://youtu.be/w0P0FQ770dE

Today is Pi Day, at least in the way the U.S. and Canada write out the 14th of March, and there is much excitement to be had in our merry little household. For not only do we have multiple Raspberry Pis doing a ton of work for our electronic efforts, but also we are going to go searching for pie today. Because Pi and Pie!

Happy Pi Day!

One of the most productive things my mother did for me was teach me how to type using the proper fingers at a very young age. I wasn’t even out of elementary school and I was typing on manual and electric typewriters at an amazing speed, especially for someone not even in their teen years. My mother’s theory was, “if you’re going to play with the typewriter, you’re going to do it the right way”. I took a typing class my senior year of high school just to dial in my technique and I’ve been typing away like a maniac ever since.

I type for a living. I actually do more than just type for a living, but I spend 9-10 hours in front of a computer for work and then a up to a few hours in front of a computing device of some sort for entertainment. Even though I crow about the wonders of the iPad and tablet computing, I’m still very dedicated to laptops and regular sized keyboard. And since I’m a bit of a typing aficionado, I tend to be quite picky about the keyboard I’m using.

As a Gen Xer I learned to type on the aforementioned manual and later electric typewriters. I’m used to a keyboard with some heft to it. I want to have a decent amount of travel with each keystroke, I like the positive response of each time I press a key, and I don’t mind a bit of noise while I’m doing so. My absolute favorite keyboard was made by Digital Equipment Corporation, a company I worked for in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The LK201 keyboard that came with a wide variety of their desktop offerings was amazing.

I also really enjoy the original IBM Model M keyboard. It’s the really loud keyboard that’s been around since the mid 1980s. They’re still made by Unicomp. I’ve had a few of them over the years and honestly, while I love the typing experience the noise can be a bit much, especially on conference calls.

The newest version of the Apple Magic Keyboard makes my wrists ache. I’m not a fan of the chicklet style keys with the butterfly switches; I don’t know how Earl types on his MacBook Pro every day. Thankfully I have an older MacBook Pro with the older style keyboard, but I’m not a huge fan of that either. It’s functional but nowhere near perfect. And don’t get me started on what happens with these Apple keyboards if you get a piece of dust stuck in a key or something.

Another thing I’m rather fussy about is the width of my keyboard. I want it to have full sized keys but I don’t want to reach way over to the right to find my mouse. A “tenkeyless” keyboard is a good layout for me; it’s a standard PC style keyboard but with the right hand grouping of keys chopped off. I still get a full sized keyboard experience, complete with the arrow keys in their traditional inverted “T” layout.

I found a damn-near perfect keyboard on Amazon earlier this week. It arrived today. Enter, the Velocifire TKL02.

This keyboard is amazing. It quite substantial in weight, has a very solid feel, and is backlit with white light that can rotate through various patterns. The keyboard features Cherry MX Brown Keys, so they have a decent amount of travel, a solid bump of response, but are not so overwhelmingly noisy to be annoying. The sound reminds me of mid 1980s Apple IIes or the TRS-80 Model II I wrote software for back in the day. It’s very comfortable and even after a few hours of use I feel very comfortable and efficient with the typing experience. I took a self typing test online earlier today and I was able to hit 112 Words Per Minute on this keyboard. I’m pleased with that result.

A louder, hefty keyboard like this isn’t for everyone, especially in this day and age of software keyboards on our phones and tablets. But I’m loving this keyboard and it is a great addition to the home office. In fact, I’m typing this blog entry using my work computer setup just so I can use this wonderful keyboard.

If you’re a keyboard aficionado like I am and you enjoy mechanical keyboards, you might want to give it a try.

Happy typing!

Melissa McCarthy recently featured a young lad who really likes vacuum cleaners on her show “Little Big Shots”. This young man had little interest in video games; he was more interested in vintage vacuum cleaners and apparently he knows a great deal about them. He’s not the first young guy I’ve heard of with an interest in vacuum cleaners. A boy with a similar interest was featured on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” years ago. The son of one of my husband’s former employees had a similar interest when he was in elementary school.

It’s just the way some folks are wired. At that age my interest was in washing machines.

When we went shopping at Two Guys or K-mart (this was long before Ames came to town), I would browse through their appliance departments to see what the latest models of washing machines looked like. I was most interest in those made by Westinghouse and General Electric, though Frigidaire (with its bouncing agitator), Whirlpool, and to a lesser extent, Maytag, also grabbed my interest. I had little interest in the “store brands” like Kenmore and Montgomery Ward because I figured someone else made them and they just seemed like knock-offs.

We had a Westinghouse washer-dryer pair when we lived in the mobile home. I believe it was older than me, purchased new, and it eventually moved with us in 1977 across the street to the house my dad built. In its later years the washer had a habit of flooding from time to time so, after my mother shrunk a bunch of clothes because the only working cycle was a hot water wash, and I had tried filling the washing machine with a garden hose (which made quite the mess), Dad relented and bought my mother a new washing machine. I can easily tell you to this day it was a WWA 8450.

I was interested by this washing machine because it had push buttons instead of flip switches for water temperature and operational speeds. The family hardware store was selling GE appliances, hence the reason the Westinghouse (with Lock ‘n Spin) was replaced by a General Electric. The Westinghouse dryer lived on for a few more years until it made such a racket in the laundry room that my dad finally replaced it. The laundry room was adjacent to the family room and before he bought a new dryer he put a door on the laundry room first, trying to muffle the noise of the increasingly loud dryer. When that didn’t work and he couldn’t hear his airplane and war movies, he bought a new dryer. It didn’t quite match the washing machine, as there had been a couple of years between the manufacturing of the two, but they were close enough and the color schemes were close and I finally got over it.

My grandmother across the street had a washing machine a couple of years older than our GE because her previous GE (from the early 1960s) had begun spitting grease on all the clothes. When Gramps bought her a new washing machine (maybe in 1974 or 1975) it was a GE WWA 8350. It didn’t have extra rinse like mom’s did but it did have a soak cycle where the washing machine just sat there and did nothing.

I don’t remember her ever using the soak cycle, but when it was on its final spin she was grow impatient and flip the spin speed from delicate to normal and that would make things seemingly hurry up. I was fascinated with this and I was also fascinated by the clunk-clunk of the tub brake kicking in when the lid was lifted or the end of the cycle was reached.

Both of these washing machines went to live for well beyond a decade. I would be very surprised if the washing machine here at home lives for five years. It seems to gasp for help on every cycle and it sounds like a bunch of crickets having some sort of soliloquy. Not impressive at all.

Years ago I discovered there are many folks, mainly men and seemingly gay men, that groove on washing machines like I did back when I was in elementary school. There’s a pretty lively forum at AutomaticWasher.org (it’s where I grabbed the screen shots of the controls). I don’t really have the interest in them anymore; the new machines are excessively boring, but I do have memories and can identify various models of Westinghouse and GEs within a year or two.

But I totally get the young lad interested in vacuum cleaners. I hope he enjoys his groove and writes about his experience with Melissa McCarthy in a decade or two.

To be honest, though, I’m thankful we didn’t have shows like that when I was a kid.

I’m upgraded the monitor in my home office. After staring at two 24-inch Dell monitors that were provided by the office I went ahead and made the decision to move to a single monitor. Chris was selling one of two 31-inch monitors he had and this E series 31-inch curved monitor from Philips is a beauty.

I can fit all the windows I need to do my job on this monitor and still leave a little breathing room between the windows. This helps reduce my stress just a little bit. No more turning back and forth between two monitors with a low resolution and fuzzy fonts.

Interestingly, my Mac Mini runs a heck of a lot cooler with one monitor at 3840×2160 resolution than it did with two monitors running at 1920×1080.

I’m a very happy geek with this purchase.

Just to give you an idea of how random my brain can be, here is a picture of a set-top cable box identical to the one my city grandparents had in the mid-late 1970s.

Sing with me if you know it, “Eleven! Eleven ALIVE!”

That was the jingle for WPIX out of New York. One of several “superstations” they received through this analog box. Others included WGN-TV out of Chicago and WTBS-TV from Atlanta. My uncle would fall asleep on the floor in the wee hours of the night watching movies on “Home Box”. We now call that HBO.

The stuff I remember. Whew.

Oh, and the television tuner was always tuned to Channel 4, because in Syracuse we already had channel 3 and that would conflict with the signal coming from the cable tuner.