Mike, First of His Name @mike@chinwag.org

Honestly my favourite thing about the fediverse at the moment is the #breadposting - more please. Never stop not breadposting.

#bread #baking

Hi #Chinwag - please consider yourselves informed that @dolldolldoll is now your official "backup admin" if a hit-by-a-bus situation should occur - follow her main at @dolldolldoll if you want!

I've known Ivy for close to two decades now, we've co-sysadmined things previously and I vouch that you can trust her as you trust me.

Ivy will have access to all the backend systems and accounts, not to run things on a daily basis, but to ensure continuity of service if I can't.

#mastoadmin

Hey, I just wanted to say a quick #welcome to the recent Chinwag arrivals!

Chinwag's reason for existing is to provide communication tools for people, which is something I've always been interested in. I kind of target #Australian users, but welcome anyone from anywhere.

Please read our rules: https://social.chinwag.org/about/more

And our privacy policy: https://social.chinwag.org/terms

There's a basic guide to using Chinwag Social here: https://chinwag.im/social/

If you have any questions or concerns hit me up!

I have a great idea for a cartoon. There's a mouse, and he's driving a steamboat, doing a little dance and whistling. Hijinks ensue.

I reckon this could be huge if I could just figure out what to name the mouse.

Guessing this is the agency behind the other crap attempts at SEO for NZ businesses that I've had register accounts today.

Having a bit of fun now leaving negative Google reviews for the people they're spamming profiles for.

How can it be 2020 and we can't slap people over the internet yet?

Oh hi, "BBT Digital". Yet another terrible company going around creating profiles under the username bbtdigitalnz everywhere that allows a profile as a very poor SEO technique. BBT Digital is a company that's very bad at everything, obviously.

OK I'm feeling somewhat good about having accomplished things today.

I managed to create disk images of an obscure CP/M system's floppies on an MS-DOS machine, and I also tracked down the documentation for said obscure disk format and managed to get cpmtools to read the fucking images under Linux.

So now I've got a good backup path for those old floppies, and tomorrow I might see if I can write a whole new disk and add stuff to it.

Oh shit it's 1am, how did that happen?

#retrocomputing

Urgh so downloads are working fine, but uploads die constantly. Tried every protocol under the sun and it's still flaky.

I suspect flow control issues, but this USB serial port on my PC is being weird and won't do anything other than 9600 baud anyway.

I think I'm just going to wire up an ESP8266 to a serial port and put this PC on the wifi network.

No YOU'RE procrastinating!

Just sent a file from my desktop PC to my 486 via Zmodem at 9600 baud like a total pro.

Installing a pirated copy of QEMM and Desqview on my DOS machine like it's 1993.

I just registered for the first time those EEPROMs in the corner, with DEC88 stickers and suggestions of firmware versions on them. Anyone out there with any clues as to whether dumping the contents would be of value to anyone? They're just 2764s, I could get the contents into a file quite trivially.

Here's something slightly further retro than my usual #retrocomputing output. This is an ethernet card for a PDP-11. A nice feature is the big Motorola ceramic and gold 68000 CPU in the middle of it.

This is the only PDP-11 thing I have, I don't have parts to build up a whole on kicking around in boxes anywhere or anything.

A whole new Amiga magazine could be happening! If they hit 500 pre-orders, it goes ahead.

https://www.simulant.uk/shop/amiga-addict-magazine

I really like the amount of #retrocomputing stuff out on the fediverse, and the net in general, but I have a huge nostalgic soft spot for old computing magazines. If this gets off the ground I'll be very happy. If about 380 more of you people could also put in an order that'd be awesome.

Look, any other year and the headline "Escaped cloned female mutant crayfish take over Belgian cemetery" might have concerned me, but it's 2020 ... just tell me if they're wearing masks and washing their claws properly.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/escaped-cloned-female-mutant-crayfish-take-over-belgian-cemetery/YZDGK4GTJKKML7Y76OELOTHGPA/

I decided to rewatch The X-Files and there's this one episode where they keep doing closeups of someone typing on a very clean and new-looking Model M keyboard and I keep getting distracted by it.