A timely reminder
We all make regular backups, right? These days, it's easy to setup something largely fire and forget - things like crashplan, backuppc, timemachine, etc. What about our older systems? Making a working copy of your disks used to be standard practice; likewise saving your important files to more than one disk. How about backing up hard disk based systems? Sure, there was software out there to backup everything, but unless you had a tape drive you needed to use a lot of floppies. I remember backing up my Commodore A590 wasn't too bad - it was only a 20MB disk, and writing out to 880kb floppies meant you only needed 15-20 disks. When I got my A1200 with it's massive 60MB disk, I don't recall if I ever did a full backup - after all, I had all the programs on floppy, and I had my data backed up on floppy. Even if I had a backup from the last time it was in use, it wasn't in amongst all the disks I brought over with it. Nor, it seems, were any of my workbench disks. I'm sure you can see where this is leading.
Replacing the A1200 PSU
So January has rolled around and all my stuff from the UK is still sitting in the basement untouched. January is Retrochallenge time - I had intended on working on my 48k Spectrums, but I don't think that's going to happen for a while yet. However - getting my A1200 and +³ up and running seems like a good start.
My A1200 was purchased, second-hand, for a friend at highschool as a replacement for my much loved A500, which by the mid-90s was getting a little long in the tooth. The A1200 represented quite the upgrade, going from a 68000 to a 68EC020 and it had a massive 60MB hard disk (compared to the 20MB I had in my A590). If memory serves, it set me back £60 - which without a job is rather a lot. It was my main machine for a while, before I got my first IBM PC (we had a family PC for quite some time), but that's a story for another post.
Unpacking the big box of goodies
Twas the day before Christmas and all through the house... Ok, maybe not - but it was Christmas Eve when the movers appeared with my big box of toys. As you can see, it didn't quite fit under the tree 🙂 With family descending on us the following day, I thought it would be a good idea to unpack it, take it downstairs, and snap a few photos in the process.
Retrochallenge 2016/01
As I'd mentioned in a previous post, when we were over visiting my Mum last year, I filled a 4.5cuft box with fun bits and pieces from my childhood, including my Amiga 1200, Spectrum +3, and two 48k ZX Spectrums that aren't very happy. Well, the box arrived on Christmas Eve, just in time to go (almost) under the tree.
My love-hate relationship with pre-lit trees
It's that time of year where we start to pull out the Christmas decorations. Now before you start, yes - I know it's only November, but when you have six trees to put up and decorate along with all the other decorations, you need to start early. If you've looked at Christmas trees in the shops recently, you'll see that there's a big trend toward pre-lit trees. If you haven't, the idea is that instead of having a long string of lights in a box that you have to slowly unwind onto the tree, the tree has several strings of lights already attached to the branches so all you have to do is fluff the branches and plug it in.
Incandescent Christmas lights are pretty neat little things. They're not just a simple filament bulb - they also have a shunt which is intended to short out the bulb in the event that the filament breaks. This means that when you have a long strand of bulbs wired in series and one fails, it doesn't cause the whole strand to go out. It usually works, but not all the time. As bulbs fail short, the overall resistance of the strand drops, and in accordance with Ohms law, the current in the strand increases. This in turn means that the likelihood of another bulb failing increases, and so on until either a bulb fails open or the whole strand is toast.
Gaining traction on an old interest
I've always had an interest in old computers - especially those systems contemporary to my youth, be it systems that I owned or wished I could have (or even just get access to). Back when I was at university, I amassed quite a collection of various systems, both small and large. Most of this had to be re-homed when I left the UK (Mum and Dad refused to store everything indefinitely), but a few systems I really cared about stayed. These included my ZX Spectrums (two 48k models and a +3), a TRS-80 Model 1, and my three Amigas (an A500 with A570 and A590, an A1200, and an A2000). After holding onto these for approaching 10 years, I finally bit the bullet and found a new home for the A500 (plus bits), the A2000 (along with all *those* bits), and the TRS-80 over at MicroMuseum.co.uk. The A1200 and Spectrums I decided were small enough they could probably find their way home with me at some point.
When technology conspires against you
Usually all my tools and toys behave for me, but every now and again things things don't go so smoothly. Last weekend was the first F1 race of the season and being Australia, was on at a silly time of night. Because the TV networks over here don't consider F1 to be sufficiently important, in order to get the feed I prefer (TSN grab the feed from the beeb, and I do like their commentating team) I'd have to grab it live. For this sort of reason, I have a MythTV box setup, which usually performs so well I tend to just let it got on with recording what I like and don't worry too much about scheduling. I set it the night before to record the race and when I sat down to watch the race the following afternoon (after ignoring the repeat of the race on Speed) was dismayed to discover that at some point in the past few days the box had rebooted and the ivtv drivers hadn't initialized properly so the recording had no sound. Easily fixed, but annoying.
This weekend was the second race, so cue repeat of the above - only this time I thought I'd got it sorted - I set up a rule last week to record the races whenever they're on and checked upcoming recordings to make sure the Malaysian race was in the schedule - so far so good. This afternoon I sit down to watch the race, only to discover it recorded the qualifying, but not the race! Bugger. Luckily, thanks to my fantastic wife, I discovered this only a short while after the Speed coverage started, so I managed to see most of the race after all, the old fashioned way.
Welcome!
If you're reading this, chances are you already know me and I pointed you at the site myself. I don't expect hundreds of new readers because I post masses of witty and exciting posts - I just thought it might be nice for my friends and family I don't get to see very often to have a little window into what's going on in my life. If you don't fall into that category and found this site entirely at random then welcome 🙂 If you like what you read, feel free to stick around and I'll try and keep you interested with more of the same.
You might be asking yourself why I don't just post stuff to facebook and twitter. Well I do, but those who know me know I'm fond of telling long stories which take forever to get to the point, which occasionally doesn't exist and sometimes isn't where I stop. Basically - I like to ramble (case in point). I like to think it's all part of my charm, but you may have a different opinion 🙂