was n te mddle of wrtng a blog post on my laptop wen my keyboard’s buttons started fallng off. You migt be able to guess te letters tat ‘m now mssng, and t’s really ard to type lke ts. ope to get t fxed ASAP, ten wll blog more. Computers, ug .
It holds the Guinness World record for best-selling single computer model of all time, so who had a Commodore 64?
My family had one when I was growing up, and I enjoyed playing hours of games on it. I remember how novel it was that we could create a sign, card, or banner on the computer and then print it out – complete with pixel-riddled graphics and what-do-you-call those side strips on the paper with the holes in them that you tear off and either discard or twist them together and make art out of them. My uncle had a subscription to Loadstar, which was a Commodore club of sorts – he would get magazines and new games monthly in the mail. I used to love some of those Loadstar games, unfortunately, I can’t find them to play on emulators now. I really enjoyed an Activision game called Toy Bizzarre, and my all time favorie game for the Commodore 64 was Maniac Mansion – I was addicted to it until I won it, and then I had to go back and win it with all the different character combinations. They did make a version of Maniac Mansion for the original Nintendo, but I was biased toward my Commodore version. I always thought that game would make a great movie (think Clue), and when I was younger, I tried to write the game into a novel but never finished it.
So what’s got me thinking back to the 80’s days of the Commodore today? I came across an article on cnn.com about how advance orders are being taken for the resurrection of the Commodore here in 2011. It’s being made to look just like the Commodores of the 80’s, but it will have today’s computer capacities since the ’64’ in Commodore 64 referred to the unit having 64 Kilobytes of memory – about the equivalent of one long email, according to the article. If you’d like to read the article, click here.
I woke up a little before my alarm this morning. Wide awake at 4:00 am. I realize this is because I went to sleep much earlier than normal, but still that was an hour of sleep I could have used. 😉
Oh well.
Hard drive restore is going slowly, but is making progress. So far I’ve been able to restore 1 partition from the drive and I’m working on reading data off of the primary partition. It looks like all of my recent additions are completely corrupted. That just means more time spent doing what was just finished. So much for digitizing my CD collection.
I think, but I’m not positive yet, that I will be able to get most of the important stuff restored. The drive itself is on its last legs, so I’m not sure how long it will keep spinning. Most of the restore software I’ve been able to get my hands on are telling me the same thing. The drive is failing, and I should back it up. Unfortunately, the drive is failing and doesn’t like being ‘backed up’. Different software does allow me to restore different parts of the drive, so that is a plus.
For those interested, I’m now using some restore utilities on Ubuntu Linux to access the drive. After this is done, I’ll mount the drive in an external bay and see if Windows will see it better. It may take some time before the Linux is finished, because it stops when it doesn’t fix/copy a file. The more problems it runs up against, the more it stops. Unfortunately, when I am at work I can’t hit the button to make it continue. It does try to do multiple reads before saying it can’t copy it, so that is a plus. It also does a file compare after the check, to make sure it was a clean copy. That just takes forever when the drive being copied is failing.
Since I woke up early, I was able to continue the process 10 times, for files that could not be copied. Every one of those was something I can live without. I just have to wait until it is done before I can see what I got back.
I made chicken for dinner and thought that it would taste good with some salsa on it. It did, but I put on a bit much. Now I’m paying for it. Up late at night waiting for antacids to kick in. You can’t put it back in the jar after it hits partially cooked chicken. And it was the good stuff too, lots of heat.
Ahh, the joys of aging. I still like all the spicy stuff, but it doesn’t like me as much as it used to. The cast iron stomach seems to have some rust.
On another note, I miss my laptop. Even though I got the tower up and running again, it was so easy to have the laptop with me wherever I wanted to be. I have an old machine going, but it is very, very, very slow. I think it is slower than my internet connection. I do have it loaded with a full version of Unbuntu Linux at this time, maybe that is pushing it a bit. I wonder if it would work with the netbook version of that OS. I may have to try it and find out. I need to get a list of USB or other wireless cards that work with Unbuntu or Puppy Linux. I have two old laptops that I have installed Linux on and only 1 wireless card that works. The newer of the two laptops has an internal wireless, but Linux doesn’t like that one either. I even tried a backdoor way that was supposed to allow the use of the windows drivers. No go. I guess for now I share. I really can’t use two laptops at once can I?
I’m making sure that the internet access and printer are hooked up for my youngest at college. If this posts, I know everything works.
So the drive was very damp as rain fell during the entire trip. It is sometimes fun to drive on the expressways when the rain falls. The trip today was uneventful.
Yesterday’s trip to and from Toledo were not as uneventful. I saw two semis driving erratically. One on the way in and one on the way home. The one on the way home bothered me enough that I pulled into the rest stop to let him get farther ahead.
Well, I made it home so that may have been a good decision.
While reading my daily geek.com, I came across this article they blogged about. For those of us in our middle years it is really quite interesting. To get you started, I have reprinted two or three from each section, but to read them all you will have to click the title or end of the article to go to the source. What really makes me feel old is the inclusion of 90s things like the Playstation… 😮
Oh, be sure to click the link at the source about the young teen trying out a Walkman for a week, the MP3 player of the 80s.
UPDATE: I just visited Worthy Christian Forums, and apparently someone posted this same article, but with 37 more things (plus more in the replies)! At a glance, I could see they weren’t just tacked on to the end and I’m too lazy to figure out which are new, so CLICK HERE TO GO TO READ ALL 137 THINGS
Audio-Visual Entertainment:
1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
8. 8-track cartridges.
Computers and Videogaming:
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
The Internet:
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.
Gadgets:
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.
Everything Else:
70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
81. Han shoots first.
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
(beginning of actual article follows below)
100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About
By Nathan Barry
July 22, 2009
8:00 amThere are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.
That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …
I had to re-install windows on my laptop today. Now I have to make sure that everything that should be working is. Then there are some other programs I use that will need to be re-installed. This machine is getting older, so I may have to shop for a new hard drive soon. Seems like there are more ‘bad’ sections recently. I’m glad I backup my data files with some regularity. I would hate to lose pictures of my kids, grandkids, weddings, and other fun occasions.
The bigger problem is the small fact that I have a lot of computers in this house. It seems like I was re-installing some operating system just last week. Oh, I was, it was on my ‘play’ machines where I keep installing different versions of Linux.
I have noticed one thing, my touch pad seems to be a bit more sensitive. I keep having my cursor jump all around the screen as I type this. I’ve had to go back and correct mistakes as the cursor jumps to places earlier in this post. I need to check that out too. Grumble….
Oh well, I got the sound to work again….. Now if I can just find my CD with 100 card games on it…. 😉
Monday: Industrial technology in hometown district.
In near-city district, only 7th and 8th grade take this class- I think this year the teacher at one of these schools only teaches for four periods. What does he do with the rest of the day? In hometown district all three middle-school grades take this class. The other two districts I’m in don’t have 6th graders in junior high (they don’t call it middle school) so…
Anyway, I arrived at about 7:30 and headed across the hall from the office into the IT room. Dropped my stuff and looked for the plans. Dug around a bit on the front table- there were the seating charts, buried, but no plans. Hmm. Open his office door, looked, no plans. Right then. Fortunately I knew he had an assistant so I shrugged it off for the moment, though last time I subbed here the assistant was gone too so we watched videos all day. In other words, there was still a chance everything could go wrong. Ah, there she was walking in, and sure enough she knew what we were doing. Because she was there, the students would work on their projects or modules. For 6th grade, their work was enlarging drawings of cartoon characters by using a grid, which they had to draw themselves on the large sheet of paper. Tweety Bird, Marvin the Martian, Woody Woodpecker, Dumbo, Pink Panther, and more could be seen all around the tables. Students had to carefully draw the character making sure every line was in the correct grid box. It was interesting tho see the different ways students accomplished this. Most outlined then filled in the details starting at random spots, but there were a few who worked from top to bottom, filling in everything for one row before moving to the next. Several I couldn’t tell as they were far enough along that they were going over it in marker or even coloring. I was called on to do spot checks when students felt they were ready, so I had to compare their drawings with the originals and let them know if I saw something that wasn’t right. The second period of this I actually had a line at one point waiting to be checked. As it turns out, 6th grade hands for the most part still aren’t attuned to finer writing as most looked no better than I with my poor fine motor control could draw, but there were definitely a few exceptional ones and I said so.
7th and 8th grades were on modules. That meant that pairs of them were in different areas doing different things like building roller coasters and other objects with K’Nex; working on computers on audio engineering, electricity & magnetism, and more; working with woods or plastics; and a number of other things. This time my job generally worked like this- I would see a help light on, go over to see if I could help, then ask the assistant when I couldn’t answer the question. Seriously, I last worked with plastics and woods when I was in high school or lower, and I just didn’t have experience with the software they use. I think out of a couple dozen help calls throughout the day, there were maybe three I didn’t have to refer to the assistant- not that I should really call her that because today I was the assistant and not a very good one due to lack of experience.
During the middle of the day the regular teacher came in with several people from administration. Apparently he was trying to get the computers updated as they were about seven years old- a difficult proposition for this economic climate. I wish them well in this. Following the last class chess club came in, but I had no part in that so I bid them farewell.
On to Tuesday…
Earlier this evening I was saying that I’m not much of a geek. Shortly after I wrote that post, I had 5 computers running in the house, and I was using all of them. Timeshare to be sure, but I was popping from one machine to the next just relaxing…
Yes, I did say relaxing. I was into my 4th or 5th setup of Puppy Linux, trying to get it to recognize and use one of my wireless adapters. No go so far, even when two of the adapters are readily recognized by my other versions of Linux. It looks like it recognizes it, but for some reason it will not log on to the network. I guess I have more studying to do.
I had my other Linux box working updating some software to try out for video editing. If it works out on the current box, Linux may replace Windows on my main box. I like the software so far, but I want to make sure it does everything my current programs do.
I was doing some picture and video filing on my main box and that was just computer time intensive. I was just there to press the OK button.
The 4th computer was my main laptop. It was busy moving files to and from the 5th and final computer. I was also busy touring the internet while all this was going on. I switched back and forth between my laptop and my Working wireless Linux box. Depending on which one had the most/least processing going on.
I think I was able to turn off the text messaging on my cell phone. I’m fairly certain it got my daughters’ phones too. Oh well, it was pay by the message, so I won’t miss it, I hope they don’t. If they do, they can get their own phones. They aren’t the ones paying for it, so I get to choose. [evil grin]
Wow, three posts in one day!
I’ve been working on a very old laptop (Compaq Armada), and installing Ubuntu Linux on it. This little machine has just been collecting dust for the past few months, patiently waiting for me to install a working operating system.
With an old wireless card, I am now able to use this computer to access the internet anywhere in my house.
Why in the world would I want to do that? Well, I’m looking forward to download updates to this machine. Of course, I’m enough of a geeky nerd to like playing with a different OS. And finally, I really like giving this old machine new life for at least a while.
The machine is much too slow for any serious work, but it will give me a chance to work with something different. I may start converting some of my other old boxes to linux of one flavor or another. If I can find good video and picture software, this may replace windows on one of my everyday computers. Still too early to tell on that.
So far so good. I was able to post on my blog, and read email. Maybe with additional memory, this things wouldn’t be that slow either…. Nope, the processor is very slow.