Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Posted 12/30/2024

Hello everyone! It's been a little while, what with the holidays and everything. I've been occupying my time with a little bit of computer repair. I got OpenSuse running on my old Thinkpad 450s (which strangely is more powerful than the newer thinkpad I'm writing this on now. It previously had Ubuntu 04.14 LTS on it because I couldn't seem to get anything newer on it. I'm not sure if it was just me because I had no clue what I was doing, but it's working great now!

I've also been working on an ooooold Librex NSC320SNT which is a 386SX laptop from somewhere between 1990-92. I found it for $7 at a local thrift store and it mostly worked. It was lacking a hard drive and a power cord, but the cord wasn't too difficult to find. The harddrive was a little harder, and my first purchase yielded me a dead drive. I've since tried an sd-card adapter, and I was able to get MSDOS 6.22 installed onto it using its floppy drive, but the BIOS refuses to recognize the sd card (I think because it's several GB) so I still need to boot to the floppy disk. It's mostly just annoying, especially when the drive has a fit and doesn't read the disk properly, but it's not too bad.

The only big downside is of course that I can't get any data onto or off of the damn thing because I need the floppy drive in order to use it at all. I just bought some smaller sd cards and they should be here tonight even. So I'll give those a go and see if I have any better luck. I had bought a usb-to-serial cord because the laptop does have two COM ports, but I couldn't get it to work, and I suspect the laptop may need a usb driver in order to function properly. Maybe I'm just missing something, but it's not working for me now. As last thought on the laptop for now, I tried plugging it in to an external monitor and to my surprise it worked without issue! It even displays in color, whereas the built-in screen is monochrome. We'll see where I can go from here.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my rambling. I'll talk to you all again in the new year. I hope to be posting more regularly, and I intend to create a "projects" page where I can organize full posts about each my machines (complete with pictures!). So keep an eye out for that!

The Little Fujitsu Lifebook U820

Posted 12/16/2024

Hi everyone! I want to make a proper, full post about this at some point soon, but for now I'll just go off the cuff. I have in my possession the tiniest little laptop I've ever seen. It's about 7 inches by 6, and I'm a little unsure as to its intended purpose. I would guess that it's meant for business types who don't want their laptop taking up more space than absolutely necessary in their luggage as they travel for work, but it's small size makes just about everything difficult and tedious. The keyboard is about half the normal size which makes fat-fingering keys unavoidable, and I have rather small fingers already!

With all the negative aspects of this weird little machine, though, I can't help but be a little enchanted by it. I want it to be enjoyable, and so I'm trying to find some purpose for it. My first thought when starting to play with it was to use it as a dedicated journal, but typing on that thing for anything more than a minute at a time makes me want to huck it through a window. I then thought it could be good as a dedicated emulator machine for old video games. Surely they'd run on its 1GB RAM and 1.5GHz processor, and if I just connected it to an external display, keyboard and mouse, it wouldn't be that bad. I could even hook it up to a tv and use a wireless keyboard and mouse and that'd be great! But alas, it seems it was not meant to be. The damn thing doesn't have any video ports. It seems there are port extenders for it, but they seem to be somewhat rare and cost more than I'm willing to pay. There are even usb to hdmi adapters out there, but most don't work on Linux, which I've installed on it, and those that do are, again, more costly than I feel is worthwhile right now. Furthermore (and I'll go into more detail in a second) I can't seem to get any emulators to work on this tiny source of frustration. It's even too weak a machine to allow for browser-based emulation.

I have antiX Linux currently installed on the little laptop, and overall it works amazingly well. When I got it, it had Windows 7 and did not run smoothly. But with antiX, it runs as smoothly as one would hope a computer would. It's fully usable, assuming you don't try to push it too far by, say, having the audacity to try to watch a youtube video. There is hope for it to be able to do something well. I'm just not sure what that something is for me. I'm don't know if the emulators don't work because of some clash with antiX specifically, or if it's the laptop itself. I did install antiX on my husband's old laptop which really isn't that much stronger despite being almost a decade newer. Maybe I'll try running a GameBoy Advance emulator on that machine to troubleshoot. And in the meantime, I'll keep racking my brain and playing around with this most confusing of devices to see if I can't find something to do with it. And maybe I'll get around to making a full review/documentation of it for posterity.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my ramblings and I hope you have a great day!

Byeeeee

First Blog Post and Games made in Godot

Posted 12/15/2024

Hi everyone! Welcome to the ribbon-cutting ceremony for this-here blog. This is where I intend to post updates about my various hobbies. Today I want to bring attention to my itch.io page. There's only a few games at the moment (including one I altered specifically for my wedding anniversary), but one of them is a janky first-person tennis game, so doesn't that sound fun! Feel free to give them a go and leave a comment if you wish. I'm very new to gamedev and I've learned so much even just following tutorials and playing with Godot over the summer.

For anyone who doesn't know, Godot is a free game engine that is decently powerful and really not that tricky to use once you're up to speed. I first heard about it through Youtube recommendations of videos showcasing small indie games made using it. There's a huge community and lots of support, so if you have some time and any inclination at all toward making games I'd give it a go.

It's been fun playing around with making video games, an artform so near and dear to me, and I hope to get back to it soon. I'll keep you all updated.

Blog