Geek

My friend Chris offered me a Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 that he had destined for the recycle bin. Apparently the unit had an issue with Windows and he thought I might have fun installing Linux on it to give it a whirl.

Giving devices a second lease on life is right up my alley.

The laptop arrived today and I have successfully installed Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS (Long Term Support) on the device. One would think it wouldn’t be an easy thing installing Linux on a device made by Microsoft but the experience was mostly painless.

I’m writing this blog entry on the laptop.

This is my first time messing around with a Surface Laptop. The build quality is very reminiscent of Apple’s MacBook Air line. I like the cloth-like covering of the keyboard and dare I say it, the keyboard on this Surface Laptop exceeds the keyboard on my M2 MacBook Air.

It was very kind of Chris to offer me this machine for tinkering. It keeps my geek juices going, and that keeps me in my happy place.

You’ll notice the display is quite reflective.

Over the weekend I used a little bit of saved up money to purchase a new watch band for my Apple Watch. I’ve had my eye on the Braided Solo Loop and decided to make the purchase while we were in Las Vegas.

I asked the kind Apple store representative if the band would stretch over time. She said for the most part it shouldn’t stretch, but it might stretch a little bit after putting it on for the first time. Apple has one try bands of this type on for size before making a purchase, so we went through a couple of bands for sizing and I found a band that felt comfortable.

Two days later I’m not really enjoying this band that much. After 40 hours or so of wear my watch already feels loose. It’s not going to fall off or anything, but it does feel like the watch is sliding around a bit more than I enjoy. I switched back to one of my older bands this morning and things feel a bit more normal. Perhaps I’ll try the new band again over the weekend or something.

I’ve been on the fence about how I feel about my Apple Watch in general for the past several weeks. It’s starting to feel extraneous to me. I have purposely shut off the vast majority of notifications because they’re just annoying. I work around some of this by using Apple’s “Focus” modes baked into their infrastructure.

I’m likely going to continue using my Apple Watch until it is no longer a viable gadget but I don’t know that I’m going to buy another Apple Watch to replace it when that day comes. I miss the look of a classic wrist watch and I definitely don’t need the constant stream of data coming to my wrist that I once thought I needed.

I just don’t know if I’m going to use that new band I purchased. We’ll see if it gets too stretchy over time.

So I’m trying out the latest social craze, BlueSky. Or is it Blue Sky. Or is it bsky?

Whatever it is called, I’m called @machias@bsky.social over there.

I think it was 1982 when my parents bought me a Commodore VIC-20 for Christmas. I was very excited to have my own computer that had a keyboard and such; up until then my computer time was spent in the Apple ][+ lab at school and I was only allowed to sign up for time in 30 minutes increments per week. This was because I was an underclassman and wasn’t officially in a computer class. The VIC-20 allowed me to do a lot of experimenting with BASIC programs; a vast majority of my early programming learning came from retyping programs that appeared in magazines like “COMPUTE!”. I programmed my first cash register program on this computer and used that foundation to build the same program on the Apple ][+ (and later //e) systems at school, in half hour increments. The Apple version was much more robust because the computers had a bit more power; I saved enough money to get the 8K RAM expansion cartridge for my VIC-20 a few months after receiving the computer as a gift and I was very excited.

The computer lab at work quickly expanded with the adoption of technology and we had more robust machines by the latter half of my sophomore year. Since there were more machines I was allowed to sign for more than 30 minutes a week in the computer lab and I dutifully worked on my cash register program. It became fairly robust (for the time) and I would mirror the work on my VIC-20 at home. I was always (and still am) very interested in electronic cash registers and point of sale systems, so building a program to emulate what I saw at the local stores was a great way to learn good programming skills. If entering the same data in my program produced the same results as the computations I would see on saved cash register receipts, I was doing something right. It was my rudimentary checks and balances of my work.

Between my junior and senior years of high school I worked for the school district for the summer, cleaning the school with a handful of other students my age. It paid well and the work wasn’t too hard. It was actually something I enjoyed. I was able to save up some money and bought my first car and my next computer, a Commodore 64.

Since my cash register program worked well on the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 was mostly compatible language wise, I was able to build a much more robust version of the program for the Commodore 64. I tested this program out at the family hardware store (much to the chagrin of the older generation) as a “second checkout” that was used a handful of times when the store was busy. I made a nifty little setup by adding a few accessories to make it behave more like a cash register. All of these photos are from various eBay auctions.

The mini TV worked will with the setup and I used some scrap lumber from the family store and lumber yard to built a little stand that held everything neatly in place. I tweaked the cash register program enough to build in some error checking. There wasn’t enough memory to hold a list of items, UPC or other codes, and price reliably, and I was still loading everything from cassette at the time. So, I divided everything up into departments and required an entered price obey parameter rules, for example, paint would be department 001 and the cashier couldn’t enter a price less than $5.00 or more than $50.00. I found myself to be clever.

I repeated the school cleaning job after graduating from high school and was able to add a few more accessories to my setup, namely a 300 baud modem and the coveted 1541 floppy disk drive.

With the disk drive I was able to introduce item price lookups by UPC or other coding, albeit all manually typed in by the cashier, but it worked and I was pleased. I also beefed up the interface, moving it from prompts that resembled a 2 line by 40 character display to something more like filling in an invoice. With the modern I was able to connect to local BBSes (bulletin board services) where other programmers shared their wares. I also had an early account on GEnie, or the General Electric Network Information Exchange, which used GE’s timesharing systems after business hours. I was able to get some time on an IBM PC, continue use of the Apple computers at school, and keep the Commodore 64 versions of my program all going at the same time and I shared them all through the local BBS (which was a long distance call my mother didn’t appreciate) and through GEnie. I continued the practice during my freshman year of college and I ended up creating floppy disks of the program and selling them through the mail as shareware. This funded my spending money during my freshman year of college but distracted from my studies and mandatory instrument practice routine for music school.

In 1987 I received a message from a man on GEnie named Patrick. I don’t remember his last name. He offered me a decent amount of money for my program, all three versions (Commodore 64, which also ran on the 128, Apple ][, and IBM PC), if I promised not to share it through the BBSes anymore and take it off GEnie. I told him I’d send him my disks, my notes, and would take things down when the check was in my hand. I figured he was full of crap. He was not. I received a check, deposited it in my account, and sent him everything I had promised. My program was no longer mine and I wasn’t making and mailing disks anymore, but it was the end of my freshman year and I wouldn’t be returning.

The family was still not interested in computerizing point of sale operations at the family business, but the aging NCR posting machine was starting to require more maintenance than usual, so they did let me use my skills to write an Accounts Receivable program on a used TRS-80 Model II computer they had purchased for $100. The program grew as we added hard drives to the used system and subsequently upgraded the computer to new incarnations with more modern technology. The family used that A/R program up until the store was sold to new owners in 2010. At the time I had converted it to run on Linux, it stored everything it needed to maintain history for a customer, and quite frankly, was an exercise in amazement that something written in 1987 still chugged along 10 years into the 21st century.

During my years at Digital (DEC) I purchased a Rainbow 100+, DEC’s version of an IBM PC compatible, and rewrote the Point of Sale program from scratch. It was much more robust than the earlier variant and just needed a scanning mechanism to be fully like scanning registers at the time. I didn’t pursue sharing and selling the program, but once or twice in the early ’90s I believe I spied a variation of my original program in small businesses running seemingly MS-DOS point of sale software on a computer. The original screen layout I had introduced late in the game before receiving the check had a few of my quirks and this software I had seen in the wild had the exact same quirks. That was pretty nifty.

Ever since I was a young lad and first discovered reruns of “Star Trek” (The Original Series) on CKWS, to be enjoyed after school, I have loved the series. As a Trekker, I have a Starfleet uniform, an outfit I call my “Starfleet Shore Leave” wear, and I have followed along with most of the various series.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is one of my favorite series, and probably my absolute favorites of the “NuTrek” universe. “Star Trek: Lower Decks” is also a series I look forward to and I’m looking forward to season four coming out later this year.

There was recently a crossover between SNW and LD and I was really looking forward to seeing what that was all about. We sat down to watch the episode last night and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I won’t go into details of the episode and my only review is that it is an awesome experience, but there is one element from the show that I had to integrate into my daily life. You see, the structure of Starfleet, and the mind set of most of the characters on the show, is something I work toward. As a kid I hoped I’d see a more “Star Trek” type of society come to fruition with the arrival of the 21st century. I knew we wouldn’t have transporters and the like, but I was hoping we’d start figuring out the homeless and food shortage issues and all try harder to get along. Unfortunately the 21st century has swung us in the wrong direction and sometimes I get mired in the chaos and I find it brings me down.

A fellow fan of the show recreated a Starfleet recruitment poster spotted on the recent Strange New Worlds / Lower Deck episode (entitled “Those Old Scientists”) and I was delighted to find it was in high enough quality to print in a decent size.

The picture frame is ordered and scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I look forward to hanging this in my office, as a daily source of inspiration, before the end of the week.

Ad Astra Per Aspera.