@paulrickards@mastodon.social
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paulrickards

@paulrickards@mastodon.social

Artist exploring vintage plotters with modern code. Retrocomputing repair and collecting. Mixes the best of new and old. He/him #plottertwitter refugee #penplotter #c64 🏳️‍🌈

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paulrickards, to random
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Noticing a lot of eBay descriptions clearly written by AI lately. Like a 4th grader trying to boost the word count of an essay with sum-zero phrases.

I’ve not sold on eBay in years so I’m curious to know if they’ve added an AI description service for sellers or are sellers getting them from an external service?

paulrickards,
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@jcdenton It seems the eBay AI uses that refrain often. It’s just so, so bad.

dillera, to random
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printing is alive and well. Just got a nice print from biosrhythm @paulrickards

video/mp4

paulrickards,
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@dillera Reply acknowledged!

paulrickards, to random
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@dillera Heyya! A couple of days ago I tried printing to your ImageWriter over GlobaTalk. It seemed like it was working but it took a really long time so ended up stopping it. Did anything come up on that side?

paulrickards,
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@dillera Printing now (I hope)!

paulrickards,
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@dillera Dang. Ok, I tried 3 times and I'm not seeing anything heading out. I think there's a routing issue on this side.

paulrickards,
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@dillera Trying some things here but not having any luck. I think the combination of things I have running are making the routing break.

paulrickards,
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@dillera Cool! I cheated and used the same Mac that the router is running on.

Are you able to see my zone and my IW II?

paulrickards,
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@dillera Cool! Interesting to see what’s working and what doesn’t. This helps, hopefully figure this out so everything is working. 😀

paulrickards,
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@dillera Yeah, it's pretty neat. It feeds paper correctly about 60% of the time. Makes boring videos since the paper emerges face down.

The ImageWriter is an early one (Apple II perhaps?) since there's no text next to the Apple logo. It's faded and yellowed so much! But it has the AppleTalk card in it 🙂

ef1j, to random
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Here's one from the archives:

Remember folks, when swimming, repairing CRT’s, and checking out junk stores, always use the buddy system.

paulrickards,
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@ef1j 😳

paulrickards, (edited ) to RaspberryPi
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I’ve been rebuilding a installation that supports my classic Mac habit 😄

I used to use the awesome image which includes a ton of pre-configured software like . But it hasn’t been updated in a while so I used it as excuse to start from scratch.

I used this Pi Zero W as my starting point. HDMI video stopped working on it for unknown reasons. I added an Ethernet/USB hub hat and a 2 hat for devices.

paulrickards,
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@billgoats Yeah.. gotta figure out a way to plumb CUPS into MacPalette II!

paulrickards,
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@Cdespinosa Ahh yes, thanks! I've got a script mocked up now and it does work to the point the print dialog comes up, waiting for a mouse click or enter. I can't figure out how to send a return keystroke. The usual tell "system events" results in "where is system events" on MacOS 9.

paulrickards, (edited )
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So I have a new MacOS 9.2.2 Folder Action attached to a network share via netatalk. It works only if these conditions are met:

  1. The folder is open already in the Finder. If it’s closed, it never triggers.
  2. The new item is added to the folder from the current machine. Items added remotely to the network share do not “refresh” therefore never trigger the action.

Is this expected?

paulrickards,
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Ok, I've abandoned Folder Actions as it just doesn't seem to work. I've now gone with an always-running to scan the folder.

And.. it works! Almost? It seems that MacPalette II crashes (and takes Acrobat Reader with it) after it completes a print and there's a finder dialog that's proving difficult to dismiss in AppleScript.

paulrickards,
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The way it works is this:

  1. A print is initiated from a device to the CUPS-PDF driver on my Raspberry Pi.
  2. The resulting PDF is placed in the AFP share of netatalk/afpd.
  3. An emulated PPC Mac 9.2.2 running the below is watching for new files in that folder and will print them using Acrobat Reader to the via using the MacPalette II driver.

It works, but crashes with dialog that I can't auto-dismiss.

paulrickards,
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@billgoats In theory yes. System Events is supposed to do that, but I can't seem to summon it, even on this fresh MacOS 9.2.2 + AppleScript 1.8.3 install.

To get keystrokes to work, I had to use to "Sigma's Additions" OSAX and use the "type text" command (that's all it has).

paulrickards,
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Ok, so this centipede printer workflow isn’t really reliable so I dove into CUPS to try and see if there’s a way to alter the dithering.

I tried adding different settings to the PPD file but nothing produced any changes.

Until I added “DitherPPI” (a GS option) and it produced a result that was pretty good! I tried various values (30, 80, 120, 180) but they all looked identical. In any case, this is good enough for me!

paulrickards,
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@ChartreuseK Yeah, the defaults seemed a little heavy handed all over. Happy with this new setting-- although not entirely sure why it's working.

paulrickards,
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@billgoats It's a big improvement over the defaults for sure. It's a little posterized in the dithering but I don't mind it.

paulrickards,
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@ChartreuseK The three images in the example were all set to the same highest dpi setting (160x144) which does the two-pass slightly offset Y "in between" print.

paulrickards,
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@ChartreuseK Interestingly, adding the DitherPPI setting for GhostScript says

"forces all devices to be considered high-resolution, and forces use of a halftone screen or screens with lpi lines per inch, disregarding the actual device resolution. Reasonable values for lpi are N/5 to N/20, where N is the resolution in dots per inch."

I tried several DitherPPI settings without any change.

paulrickards,
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As promised, I wrote a blog post about creating my own classic Mac support server using a Raspberry Pi Zero, a TashTalk 2 hat, netatalk, and a few other tools. It's very much like MacIPRpi with everything current.

https://biosrhythm.com/?p=2791

Boosts appreciated!

paulrickards,
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@dbarros Yeah, it looks like my host is doing scheduled maintenance. Should be back up later. Thanks for the heads up!

paulrickards,
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@dbarros Site is up now. Cheers!

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