My friend Bill Daniel does these shows. Filmmaker, train hobo, pink artist weirdo. Known him since the 80s. He's currently living in an art trailer park up in the Bay area Delta, which is a tremendously fucked up and fascinating place (Wikipedia Locke, CA).
I stumbled on a link to the PDP-8 FOCAL language manual... I used an 8 when I was 18 or 19, a baby programmer, and how lovely the 8 was to use with FOCAL. My memory of it is as "BASIC-like" but the comparison now is very rough, but it has the same sense of playful, as in just type shit in, see what happens.
FOCAL is a programmable calculator with (very) simple flow control. FOCAL was "usable" in 4K (12-bit words). No "OS", it was booted like an os with the bootloader.
Though not nostalgic generally it occurs to me to conjure up some ancient machine experience in say Arduino 2560 (4 serial ports, 8K RAM, 4k EPROM). Lots of pins.
I have a 240x320 LCD and a super cute tiny keyboard... Paper tape is a problem though.
Users were invited to play and experiment. The manual is still kinda friendly and neato.
Umm, this machine was a revolution. But wow what an instruction set! This and the Signetics 8x300 were the weirdest machines I ever wrote code for.
Hairless dogs are vigilant about where they plant their bald butts. It's funny to watch them inspect the ground before dropping back. Sometimes they get lazy and plant their butt on something unpleasant and suddenly leap up with a shocked face when they land on something unpleasant.
I had to go buy a bag of chicken food so I took the two knuckleheads, Disco and Devo. It's a short drive through Elysian Park, which has a 25mph that I generally stick to, half to piss off the speeding jerks who think of it as a high speed shortcut.
These kind of brief, arbitrary drives are totally joyous events for all of our dogs.
They partake of the Smell-O-Vision devices (vent windows) that in a car this old (1960) are LARGE and functional (A/C was exotic then) but also enjoy sitting in my lap (both of them) to rest their head on my shoulder with nose out my window. Possibly not legal... Safe enough.
Car is a 1960 Rambler American station wagon.
Cars without bench seats and vent windows are barbaric and oppressive. And dogs have difficulty navigating cup holders and consoles.
A pleasant assessment of The Little Garden ISP from a customer POV. It skips over the parts where I/we would be up at 4am sitting in the dark in my underpants in front of a terminal solving panics but hey time wounds all heels or something.
Good times.
We used a $1200 Telebit Trailblazer to connect to UUNET in Virginia at a blazing 112k three times a day back then.
We eventually had 20 phone lines dropped to our house in Santa Cruz and one day got a knock on the door from Vic, the local PacBell installer wondering what in the world we were up to.
Later we moved to the same building downtown as scruznet and shared their T1 connection to TLG.
A feeder that opens when they stand on a big paddle.
Chickens do not like mechanical things that move.
It's funny to watch, one puts a foot on slowly, watches it lift. Then steps up and eats. Then the rest arrive and pecking ensues (other chickens heads, pellets in the machine).
Can't video it, they all rush over to the fence when anyone is in sight.
@tomjennings yeah I was just checking it out. I have tried Briar before and had quite alot of issues with it. we tried last year with a group of 7 at an event and it worked great for 5 of the people and then two of the people just had tons of randomly dropped messages in the feed with no visible errors
I think part of the problem is the class of people who can pull off a coop aren't hungry enough to maintain a coop; if you have the buy-in (class portability, marketable skills etc) if things get tough even momentarily people can and do just bail. But market and legal forces literally work against you. Push and pull. People who are hungry enough get undermined and put back in their place.
Look at the shit the basque had/have to push through. Narrow circumstance there.
@tomjennings yup, sadly that is the story of MEC in a nutshell. it came to the grossest possible end too: an american private equity firm bought it out in 2020 and it is now just another "sell expensive jackets to rich dummies" company 😩
honestly, i wish more than anything else that canada had a co-op grocery store chain that could compete with he massive oligopolies here. it makes me goddamned insane that the markups have become 20-50%
anyway, i'm bitching about nothing new here. just frustrated at how little effort there is put into creative workarounds for really predictable corporate problems