erickhill

A couple of years ago I discovered a way to make my modern Macs produce the “bonnng” chime on boot-up. It’s actually still there but hidden for some reason. IIRC I had to enable it via the Terminal, which seemed really weird. But it was a total joy when it sprang back to life.

The "Ruby" iMac was the first Apple computer I could afford to buy, and I loved it.

In fact, I still have it and it works beautifully (except for the CD tray, which to my knowledge is unrepairable as there are no replacement devices out there - I have to use a firewire external instead).

I'd used Apple computers throughout art school in the 90s, and absolutely loved the UI. I used Windows NT at work, and the iMac at home. Back then I used Earthlink to get online and check my email. I used Macromedia products for web design. And Adobe products for, well, photoshop mainly. Later in the early 2000's when I saw people upgrading to OS X, I clung to 9.2.2 and made that machine keep that OS forever. I later got an iBook with OS X and loved the new experience, but I always missed (and still do) the look and feel and sounds of the earlier OS.

Simply opening and closing the Control Strip was a joy.

The noseless Steve Jobs, in such a detailed illustration, was a curious choice by the illustrator.

I have a recurring nightmare where I'm painting the top of the Seattle Space Needle. I'm tethered to the roof with a belt and rope. I have a paint roller on a long stick about the length of a broom. I have to walk to the edge of the top of the saucer, and every dang time I accidentally drop the stick, which falls over the edge. Sometimes a seagull flies close to me startling me, or a stiff wind, or just a fumbling of my hands. Fearing for the safety of the families down below I scramble to try and snatch it and lose my balance and footing and go over the edge.

I'm tethered to the roof so I don't plunge to the ground. But I'm violently swinging hundreds of feet in mid-air unable to get back up. It's always the same. And I can feel the wind, my hands sweating, my feet tingling and my heart beating beyond belief. Usually when I start to fall over the edge I wake up. Sometimes I dangle for a second or two as I dizzily flip around hearing muffled screams from far below.

I can't imagine being one of the people forced to paint the Eiffel Tower, or Golden Gate Bridge - whatever. The thought of it makes me ill.

The internet era when it felt like anyone could sit down and read a 6" thick book from Borders Bookstore to learn to write HTML and go for it and create a career.

In fact, that's what I did - and I used a program located within Netscape to get started.

I would argue Reality Shows are indeed a new form of low budget Game Show (someone is always trying to "win" something).

It's cheap to produce, yet gets enough eyeballs to validate its existence.

No more paying actors, script writers (at least, not at the same level), etc.

Rad! Now I can rewatch MTV videos before the channel was utterly destroyed by low budget "reality TV" game shows.

"Only Amiga makes it possible" is being replaced by FPGA 30 years later.

Reminds me of our healthcare system. And military contractors. And..

I took a class in college that focused on Latino culture in the US. It was taught by a professor originally from Puerto Rico. For context, this class was taught in Los Angeles.

He said that even across central and south American cultures skin tones affected how people were perceived and treated as applied to class. The lighter the skin the better in most cases but not all. He wasn't proud of it or endorsing it, just stating it as a fact of life in many countries. And he'd been on the other side of that perception, too. He later intersected those prejudices with the interesting pride many take (or appropriate) from the art and symbols of indigenous and ancient civilizations (Aztec, Mayan, etc.) even if there were no direct biological ties. It's a very complicated topic with countless caveats and anecdotal experiences.

But the biases we witness and experience in the US are not unique by any means, that's for sure.

I lived in SF/East Bay across 10 years (eventually owned a house in El Cerrito) and moved up to Seattle in 2011. I love both the Bay Area and Seattle deeply.

What's happening to SF is very similar to what has become of Portland. That, my friends, is not a downtown I would recommend anyone visit until something changes. Simply walking around any time of day it becomes immediately obvious that if you're walking downtown you're either a hapless tourist or homeless. Most of the locals seemingly drive into downtown, jump in and out of stores and restaurants that are still in business, then they drive back home. The suburbs and surrounding areas are gorgeous, but large sections of downtown are just ... terrible. (And often scary.)

Seattle was teetering on this fate, but Amazon forced their enormous workforce to come back to the office. And, it produced a lot of blowback from the employees. But, local employees went back.

What has that done? It has created a TON of downtown traffic. Not fun at all. But it has also injected the downtown core with (you guessed it) lots of people and money, keeping small businesses downtown alive in some areas. At least for now, Seattle seems to have dodged the ghost town blues that have befallen beautiful SF and Portland.

Anecdotally, I've noticed a much higher engagement % on Mastodon compared to Twitter with my own posts as well.

On Twitter, with over 8K followers, I get very good engagement in general (imo). But on Mastodon, with only 1.7K followers, I'll get engagement of almost 50% that of Twitter whenever I duplicate posts. If I had 8K followers on Maston and if those numbers continued the same trend I'd probably drop Twitter altogether.

Off-topic I also find the folks that comment on my posts on Mastodon to be friendly by default. It's a very refreshing vibe.

For a much smaller audience, I'm seeing a very active user base for the topics at hand. It also helps that I tag my posts in Mastodon (like people do on Instagram) to help increase reach a little bit.

It also saves a ton of $ and resources supporting older versions.

That's how it used to work, back when you could go to MicroCenter and pull a box off a shelf then take it home and hope to hell you had the right drivers installed.

But it's also why when I run across a company that shockingly lets you buy their product outright I fully support their efforts and invest in a purchase. It really is cool to sometimes be off WiFi somewhere and use software to your heart's content.

Poor little thing really can't handle web traffic from HN. (To be fair, plenty of contemporary Wordpress blogs can't, either.)

I wish I knew! He lives in Florida, and I'm in WA.

Would be fun to give it another go, though.

My older brother and I used to play this head-to-head on my Commodore 64. He almost always won, but I never gave up. Thanks to random events in the game I sometimes won, too.

Last month I bought a gadget that allows the C64 to use 4 controllers instead of 2 because THIS GAME has an unofficial update that supports 4 controllers. Proceeded to play it at my Commodore Computer Club meetup here in Seattle. Great multiplayer game.

Agreed. Where I work, less than 10% of users even seen the footer regardless of the pages they visit.

Boy, I sure did. I found getting the fold absolutely perfect a bit of an obsessive compulsive experience that ultimately paid off big time once I nailed it.

The drawings and supporting copy were almost always jaw-dropping genius that blew my mind. The kind of thing I'd always want to share with someone else in the house once I'd done the fold.

Could you use a link redirecting/shortener service, like Tiny URL, to mask the fact something links to substack?

Thank you for creating this software, and for making it a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. Big breath of fresh air.

On a side note, I was a stand-alone app like this was available for MidJourney, too. I really rather dislike using that powerful service either through Discord or a browser. /rant

Indeed. My Commodore 64 nearly choked on its coffee just now. There was an entire 8-bit generation that followed this model.

Hear hear.

I have a Macbook Pro M1 Max. I upgraded from a 2015 MBP, which had previously been one of my all-time favorite Apple laptops (and I've had cough a lot).

The MBP M1 Max - to my surprise - destroyed the 2015 on virtually every level.

This is my current "from my cold dead hands" machine.

Is an anonymous user on Github protected from Twitter learning their actual identity?

So... several years out for use in the US assuming it passes clinical trials?

It has the juice. I can't imagine a more beautiful thing.

Hopefully breaking away from the continuously lazy loop of people in capes that now dominate Hollywood productions.

Yes, I have something called a RAMLink, which plugged into the back of an "ancient" Commodore 64 or 128. The RAMLink is expandable up to 16MB of RAM. Keep in mind the computers had 64 or 128K.

Anyway, the RAMLink was powered but you could also get a battery backup for it (using a sealed lead-acid battery, like a miniature one used in a car). I could move an operating system called GEOS over to the RAMLink and watch it boot in less than 20 seconds, where it usually took 1.5 minutes to read off disks and eventually load. I could then move programs (word processing, graphics creation, terminal programs - you name it) over to the RAMLink and open and use them in 1-2 seconds max.

This is from 1990 technology, running on computers from the mid-80s. RAM Drives/Disks are awesome.

So are you like Desmond on LOST where every day, after you and your dad play, you have to run to the computer to type in the latest Dad-Word to keep the machine alive?