Notices by vxo (vxo@digipres.club)

@foone i was thinking this looked a lot like the snag I ran into while trying to install Bonzi Buddy on either modern Windows or WINE (I forget which). 16 bit installer.

@foone do they have the word "democratize" in there too?
(If so, run away)

@foone I still remember setting the DOS environment value NOSNOWCONTROL = TRUE for *something* but damned if I remember what

@foone I hear you, I've just got an IEEE 488 interface

@foone i wonder if this is why the tandy sound stuff wasn't well supported by other software... I remember having a Sound Blaster in my Tandy 1000TL because not that much would use the onboard

@foone I can hear the floppy seek noises

@foone I mean wavelab itself is a bad idea, I cannot count how many times I used to have it eat people's projects in the radio studios
@gsuberland

@foone now I'm just imagining this on one of the HP Z820 (?) workstations we used to have where the Option ROM output got put in a little picture-in-picture looking window on the bios screen that was labelled "Mini OROM Display..." and it's just got Tetris in it

@foone naan, naan naan naan naan naan naan, naan Katamari Damacy---

@foone there was a peculiar failure mode that'd sometimes hit the power supplies on Harris Z series FM transmitters where the fuse holders in the rectifier boards would gradually lose their grip and the fuses would heat up and blow, along with the holder clips being all roached and in need of replacement. If they blew WITHOUT overheating this though it was just due to the SCRs shorting. The fuses were there to keep a shorted SCR from being delivered the full amperage of the supply and going BANG

I love how BRIGHT my hair is under blacklight now

@foone I pretty much have to use mine on one of those fan board things if I want it to not get mad on the couch or bed

@foone I once blew up a 5532 op-amp (easy, socketed DIP) ... and an irreplaceable, bespoke sound card in an old Telos audio archiver system in a radio station by accidentally completing a circuit between surprise 120VAC on exposed screw terminals right below the desk the console was on and the audio cables where they ran to these giant barrier strips also exposed inches away under said desk.

The moment wondering why I smelled burning electronics immediately after being shocked was interesting.

@foone oh if you wanted to be a broadcast engineer - Belden 8451 audio cable.

Every old-ish radio station has at least one place where someone ran 120VAC to some control relays, an RF relay, or an on-air light on 8451. Bonus: it goes through an unprotected 66 block somewhere mid-run.

A broadcast engineer rite of passage is to be the "lucky" one who finds the Spicy Audio Cable by thinking it's abandoned piffle and tries to cut it out and winds up with a fireworks show

@foone is that..... is that cat 5 or speaker cable or something

i love it, it is exactly the correct level of cursed

@foone shameful. they should have used infrared... or something... cursed. maybe acoustic transmission.

@foone oh you must be trying to dissect something I wrote! oh hi.

@foone https://youtu.be/WBICUXikKqQ

@foone I had an old ATI VGA Wonder that did that once and I always wondered just how it managed to pass POST with it being that borkinated

@foone I'm pretty sure a track 0 switch was just always part of the PC floppy disk specs.

I wonder if the PC world ever supported hard-sectored disks in any way. Those had a punched index mark for each sector angle. I would kinda love to know why some systems required and used this!