Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Year 50 Day 331

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Me wearing a t-shirt with a parody of the famous Joy Division image, this one says 'Nimoy Division' and the imge shows a Vulcan salute. I'm standing on a stage in front of a large screen with graphics showing turntables, wave forms, and my DJ Wüdi at Norwescon logo.

Day 331: Norwescon day one is done! (So done, in fact, that I’m actually posting this on Friday morning, though I’ll backdate the post so it shows up on the right day on my blog.) Most of the day was running around, socializing, and helping out where I could, and then the evening was me DJing for the Thursday night dance. The dance went well for a Thursday night (since it’s the first night and still in the work week, it’s always a little more sparsely attended), and as always, I’ve recorded the full thing and in a few days will have it posted for anyone who wants to listen to four hours of music (with only a few fumbles).

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📚 Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

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22/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1994 Hugo Best Novel

The colonization and terraforming of Mars continues, as does the high quality of Red Mars. Managing to balance the hard sci-fi of the terraforming processes and effects and the associated technological advances with political maneuvering among multiple parties across two planets and the interpersonal conflicts and relationships of multiple generations of Martian residents is no mean feat, and Robinson pulls it off well. Easily as good as the first book, and I’m looking forward to when I get to the next and final book in the trilogy.

Me holding Green Mars

Year 50 Day 318

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Me holding the 4K release of The Abyss.

Day 318: It’s Abyss day! The Abyss has long been a favorite film of mine (particularly the special edition cut), but the best quality release it’s had for years was the 2000 DVD release, which was a non-anamorphic presentation. Even at the time that was a disappointment, but as the years passed, and there was no word of an anamorphic release, and then no word of a Blu-ray release, it got more disappointing. As recently as 2020, many people figured that was all we’d ever get. So it’s quite exciting to finally have it released and in my hands!

Amusingly, it’ll likely be next weekend before I actually watch it. My only 4K drive is attached to my computer, and I use it to rip movies, not watch them directly. So before I can watch it, I have to get it onto my media server, and my particular process is, admittedly, somewhat time-consuming (rip both versions of the film in both 4K and HD, plus all the special features in whatever quality they are, extract the subtitles from all of them, OCR and correct the subtitles, compress the .mkv files to .m4p, and move everything onto the media server). I’ve waited 24 years for a better release, I can wait another week.

📚 Firewall by David Mack

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20/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

While Picard is (imho) overall the weakest of the modern Trek series, its literary side is doing quite well. This does a great job of filling in some of the time between when Seven returns to Earth with Voyager and when she appears as a Fenris Ranger, and exploring how the character changed in those years. It’s unfortunate that some are upset that this book discusses Seven discovering her identity as a queer woman; it’s neither propagandistic nor heavy-handed, but simply experiences that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if they were heterosexual. Also a lot of very pointed commentary about what happens when a major power that had been providing very necessary support for a region just up and disappears when something else catches its attention. Definitely worth reading if you’re a fan of the Picard series or (and especially) of Seven as a character.

Me holding Firewall

My New Osborne 1

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Thanks to the 3D printing wizardry of @trevorflowers@machines.social, I now have an adorably tiny replica of an Osborne 1 on my desktop!

A small 3D printed Osborne 1 and two tiny floppy disks sitting on my desk in front of a modern Apple keyboard.

The Osborne 1 was my first computer (well, my family’s)…and second, and third, as we picked up a couple more from friends as they moved on, allowing me to swap parts around to keep one running.

The top of the computer, showing the Osborne logo embossed into the case.

Two 5.25″ floppy drives, a 5″ 52×20-character green screen, ran CP/M. A “portable” computer, it was the size of a suitcase, weighed 25 pounds, and didn’t have a battery, but because you could flip the keyboard up and latch it onto the front to lug it around, it counted as portable!

The front of the Osborne, showing the floppy drives, disk storage slots, screen, and keyboard connected to the case with a curly cable.

I typed early school papers with Wordstar (which coincidentally doubled as early training for HTML, as it used printer control codes to tell our dot-matrix printer to print \bbold\b or \uunderlined\u text; when I discovered HTML, it was an instant “oh, yeah, this makes sense” moment), played Snake before it showed up on Nokia mobile phones, and taught myself the basics of BASIC by translating a Choose Your Own Adventure book into a simple text-based adventure game.

Another view of the front of the Osborne.

Though our full-size Osbornes were disposed of years ago, I’m ridiculously pleased to have this lil’ guy on my desk now.

The mini Osborne sitting on top of my Mac mini, next to a teddy bear skeleton, Lego figure pendant, two tiny 3D printed skulls, and a 45 single adapter pin with the Norwescon 45 logo.