krpalmer: Charlie Brown and Patty in the rain; Charlie Brown wears a fedora and trench coat (charlie brown)
After resorting to one of my library’s ebook lending services to read a volume of the Peanuts Every Sunday colour collection I’d never quite got around to buying as a proper printed book, I didn’t rush into the following volumes. That delay could have contained an element of “is it better to look forward to some things than to look back?”, but maybe I should also admit to wondering if that would get to the point where I couldn’t say anything about them here at all (although I suppose I’d managed to say something about the Sunday pages and daily strips together...)

“I go by the colors of the countries on the map... See? Some are pink.. some are yellow..” )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
One motivation in the mix that got me installing Linux on another of my old computers was to take one more crack at getting a particular emulator running. To begin with, I had compiled “Virtual T” on macOS. As I poked away at it, though, I found its emulation of the floppy disk drive that could be interfaced with the TRS-80 Model 100 didn’t quite work. This wasn’t the only way to get programs and files into and out of the emulated portable. However, after I’d found the disk drive did work with the Windows version of the emulator (running via Wine, but an earlier version lacking a few features), curiosity had me trying to see just what the situation was with Linux.
Curious byways )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
Not that long ago I got to thinking about just one of the old portable computers I have lying around. My old MacBook Air, bought not that long before a trip from a store selling used computers as well as new machines, had been a thoroughly portable machine. However, it only had four gigabytes of RAM with no way to increase that. This made me refrain from upgrading it to the final operating system versions it could support, even if the absolute final version among them has passed over the “no security updates” horizon. At last, the thought of installing a version of Linux on it occurred to me, and perhaps just before the latest burst of general lugubriousness over perceptions of rotten software from Apple. (Many years ago, during a previous burst, I set up an even older black-plastic MacBook to dual-boot into Linux, so I suppose that setting up just-in-case escape routes has been something I’ve been proving I can do for a while.)
Booting and rebooting )
krpalmer: (kill la d'oh)
Before I made the trek back to the Anime North convention this year I repeated a step I’d tried years before and dropped in on the Uniqlo store in my city’s shopping mall. This time, though, I couldn’t find the “45th anniversary Gundam T-shirts” I’d somehow picked up on Uniqlo selling this year, and in the end I donned the very shirt I’d worn the first time I visited the convention.
Looking ahead )
krpalmer: (anime)
That I scraped together the resolve to step outside weekend routine and head to my area’s big anime convention in 2019 could feel in the immediate years afterwards like “at last yet almost too late; at least I can say I once saw what they were like.” Even after starting to get on cruise ships again I was at least noticing warnings that conventions had never been healthy places. In the leadup to this year’s “Anime North,” though, noticing [personal profile] davemerrill’s panel announcements might have tipped a balance that had already been shifting. (That had something to do with being invited to describe a university anime club experience at the time of the very first Anime North.) A few daydreams about taking the chance bounced through my mind, and then I bought a Saturday pass, perhaps a few more days before the convention than I’d managed back in 2019.
Preparations and panels )
krpalmer: (anime)
Whether or not “three volumes of manga the anime was adapted from; four volumes of manga continuing the story beyond where the anime left off” altogether reduced thoughts of those old warnings about Dark Horse’s spotty track record in translating and releasing manga to an amused memory, it was pleasant to get around to the seventh volume of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! The story even happened to include something that made me hope I could say something here a little more profound than “this happened, and then this happened.”
Before that point, though... )
krpalmer: (Default)
Last May, certain technical difficulties (that went away without my doing anything) as much as trying a new program got me posting that I’d continued drawing on my iPad for a number of months. Since then I’ve kept drawing; bringing that up again is pretty much a matter of going back to that new program at last.
Some evidence included )
krpalmer: (europa)
After “Episode I” had followed “Episode VI” as an “anniversary theatrical re-release” (and scotched a certain residual suspicion the people at Disney would go only so far in acknowledging the Star Wars movies they’d bought as opposed to making themselves), I’d taken note of certain speculations as to what anniversary might be marked next. I’ll admit to once again pondering how two “divisible by five” marks would show up in the same year, even if I’d seen a comment or two about a “fortieth anniversary” re-release of The Empire Strikes Back back when it might only have been able to have been shown at the residue of drive-in theatres that had endured to that point. To be brief, I also have to admit that as we got closer to the next anniversary there were certain troubling thoughts of “the fall of the Republic” being too ominous an event to put on movie screens. However, a “twentieth anniversary” re-release wound up being announced for Revenge of the Sith, and I bought a ticket only to then recall certain dire predictions (not about the movie) from twenty years ago too.
Revenge of the “sixth” )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
“There were computers from other companies than Radio Shack?” seems just amusing enough a realisation for me to use it in explanations of how I got to delving into “old computers,” but I do wonder about it oversimplifying things. In any case, there have been things about the particular computer I was using when I came to the realisation just mentioned that I learned well after the fact. It doesn’t seem that many years ago that I was looking at the list of software on a Color Computer archive and really picked up on a program named “TW-80” to the point of wondering about its name. From reading old issues of The Rainbow magazine I’d known about a word processor for the “CoCo” called Telewriter. When The Rainbow’s editorial content had still been dot matrix printout, full-page, typeset ads for Telewriter had promised to transcend a text display that might seem unpromising for word processing (with sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each and no lowercase, just capital letters in “reverse video” boxes to indicate them) by drawing characters on the highest resolution graphics screen. I’d known how the program had become Telewriter-64 as the Color Computer reached the 8-bit memory limit and then transformed into Telewriter-128 on the Color Computer 3, which had a much improved text display. The not quite in-between number, not mentioned in a Rainbow article on word processors that had shaped my awareness of the options there at the end of the 1980s, tickled my fancy enough to load TW-80 in an emulator. I sorted out it pressed the equally improved graphics of the “CoCo 3” into service.
Listing included )
krpalmer: Charlie Brown and Patty in the rain; Charlie Brown wears a fedora and trench coat (charlie brown)
In keeping up with the “Cartoon Brew” web site, I noticed reports of two “Looney Tunes movies” that had been made only to become entangled in the run-down state of their studio. Coyote vs. Acme became a cause celebre, or at least one recent example of “people want what they cannot have.” Amid rumours of other companies trying to acquire the rights to it, though, the other movie did get to the point of being picked up. With the impression it was connected to “new Looney Tunes” shorts I’d heard about but never quite got around to tracking down, I did start thinking it might be interesting to see The Day the Earth Blew Up.
More than a few surprises )
krpalmer: (europa)
An announcement from Rick Worley that he was getting around to the “Part Three” of “How to Watch Star Wars” did excite my interest. He’d closed “Part Two” of his video series with a promise to next put together the publicly available scraps of what’s known about “George Lucas’s sequel trilogy.” Time has passed since then, but maybe that just gave the promise’s impending fulfilment more impact.
“Star Wars is forever...” )
krpalmer: (anime)
As the new year started I was intent on getting back to the anime Blu-Rays I’d only just begun in the first days of October before breaking my hip. With family staying at my place afterwards to provide considerable and welcome assistance, watching anime on any screen larger and less private than an iPad had got to feeling awkward right away. Once I’d started making trips to and from their home so that they could keep meeting appointments of their own, that didn’t help either. Returning to those shows, my thoughts also turned to some Blu-Rays that had just come in, if in some certain way just to “get them out of the way now rather than leave them lurking in the pile.” Around that point, with schemes in mind to watch two episodes a week of some longer series, what wound up giving was any intention of seeing new titles streaming. The problem there was that I started thinking how sometimes not very many sour dismissals tossed into reaction threads to end-of-the-season reviews will nudge me away from trying to form my own opinions or just dampen my own best efforts at that. There does seem a threat of “always expecting the worst when it comes to recent anime.” It wasn’t until months later that I happened to wonder whether there’s that much difference between “a three-month-old series you gather you’ve been granted an all-clear for,” “a three-year-old series that’s still being mentioned but you haven’t quite found time for yet,” and “a three-decade-old series you suppose is worth watching because Discotek just licensed it, and they know what they’re doing...”
More than a footnote: Albegas )
A risky return?: Attack on Titan )
Also getting around to it: Demon Slayer )
Newer and older: Urusei Yatsura and Minky Momo )
Streaming efforts: Blue Box and The Apothecary Diaries )
Mecha movies: Macross DYRL and Gundam GQuuuuuuX )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
With what keeps being said about the TRS-80 Model 100 more than four decades after its introduction, there are moments I imagine being accused of insufficient appreciation of that pioneering portable. One of those computers has been in my family for more or less forty years now. In recent years, though, when I’ve switched it on that was as much to see that it could still be switched on as anything.
Software via hardware )
krpalmer: (mst3k)
Looking again at the Wikipedia articles promoted as recently improved, I glanced at one about “sports fans,” got a bit more specific by looking up “fantasy sports,” and then turned to the description of an IBM computer applied to that pastime early on. Heading on to how that computer was constructed from “cards” combining what would now seem simple electronic components, I then looked at the similar system of the Digital Equipment Corporation. That had me thinking back to the AltaVista search engine, and then I looked forward to Kagi, which I still haven’t sampled yet to see if I want to start paying for its service. An offsite link did appear critical of it, though, so I took a look at it and noticed the piece offered some faint praise of a small search engine I hadn’t quite heard of before. Once I’d managed to find Marginalia Search through a different search engine, my first impulse was to type in “MSTings,” and that managed to list part of my home page first. As gratifying as that was, I did then remember that the very first time I’d connected to the Internet (somewhat in advance of even AltaVista) I’d been thinking about the Infocom adventure games that hadn’t had a hint book in their economy collection (even if the first such collection’s hint book, in not being able to use the special ink and developer pen of the original “InvisiClues,” pretty much gave me the solution to everything any time I tried to find the subtlest starter hint). I didn’t have quite as much success now just turning up results with my first effort, but a bit of prompt refinement did work a bit better.
krpalmer: (Default)
When I checked the Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday morning, I saw an image from a probe approaching the moon. One of my first thoughts was that I must not be keeping up with space missions as well as I could to be sort of surprised at the impending landing, even if the probe had taken a lot longer to approach the moon than the “three days” I’m familiar with. (If someone was to explain a longer coast out means a given rocket can deliver more mass to the moon, I suppose I’d accept that.) I was also thinking, though, of a number of other recent moon probes that didn’t manage soft (or at least upright) landings.

Even if I’d missed or forgotten initial news of the mission, I did at least see an announcement the next morning in my RSS reader, and it was a report of a successful touchdown. Still uncertain about what might happen afterwards I managed to look up an official mission site, and one of the pictures there included the shadow of a probe standing on its landing legs. With apparent proof one of these new-type missions has worked out at last, I went on to ponder the suggestion it’s only supposed to work through the lunar day and not last out the fourteen Earth days of a frigid lunar night.
krpalmer: (anime)
Advance reports of a new Gundam series did get my attention. It hadn’t been all that long since The Witch From Mercury; for all of the complaints from other fans feeding into my self-pitying thoughts that “mecha series don’t get a fair shake these days,” perhaps the temptation was to now think the franchise was actually doing all right. (In reflecting on the years between that series and Iron-Blooded Orphans, though, I did wind up reminding myself the “Build Divers” shows had appeared in between them.) The peculiar subtitle of the upcoming series “GQuuuuuuX” at least got my attention too, for all that I felt very tempted to anticipate knocking out the “u”s in private record-keeping of episodes watched. (While it’s not the exact same thing, I’ll admit to forever being tempted to think of “The 08th MS Team” as “Gundam MST08,” even if this didn’t extend to trying to cast that OVA’s characters in yet another “non-standard MSTing...”)
At the very least, hints at a surprise given away )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
After reading a book about calculators and then a weblog post about a brief slice of their history when pocket electronic machines became available in the early 1970s, I happened on an emulator program for some of the first Hewlett-Packard pocket devices. That got me thinking about their particular method of data entry, and whether I’d brushed by “Reverse Polish Notation” just because of the unfortunate potential for inappropriate smirks. I did get to the point of looking up the manual for the HP-35 calculator, the original “electronic slide rule,” and then I started searching in my phone’s “App Store.” One free application offered the layouts of the HP-35 and two of its immediate successors, the enhanced HP-45 and the cost-reduced HP-21. It did offer “haptic feedback” when you pushed on-screen buttons, but when I realised it didn’t quite offer the multiple memory registers of the HP-45 I started looking at calculator programs you had to pay for. One person offering quite a few programs had a “free sample” ready in the form of the HP-70, a simplified financial calculator, and that was enough of a preview for me to buy an HP-35 program for my phone and a HP-45 program for my iPad.

Once I’d become used to it I could see how “RPN” entry worked with complicated calculations; the question was just how many of those complicated calculations I actually do. I also got to the point of thinking I ought to see if I could still multiply and divide by hand on paper, and found myself prone to errors while multiplying at length. My only hope is that practice would help there.
krpalmer: (anime)
Dropping in to the area bookstore not that long ago, I had definite thoughts of looking for a single new volume of manga by an artist I’d read some works from before. The consciousness I haven’t been grabbed by all that many new titles of late, bringing me pretty close to confronting those stacked-up volumes “waiting until I’ve seen their anime adaptation first,” did get me at least passing by a display table. One title I’d been aware of caught my eye again, and this time I picked up a first volume of Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated, then looked around a little more and saw the second volume in the series was also available. The small wrinkle that this was a manga about Magic: The Gathering, which I’ve never played, was still in effect. Now, though, I was at least wondering if this might be a marshmallow-light example of “even if a story isn’t ‘meant for you,’ you still might come to understand another small part of humanity a little better from it.”
It’s in the cards )
krpalmer: (anime)
Advance reports the latest release over in Japan of “the Macross movie” Do You Remember Love? would have English subtitles got my attention. That particular piece of the Macross franchise hadn’t been included in the recent rollout to streaming services outside Japan I don’t have a subscription to. While I am quite aware a good number of other fans assign all the blame for that continued absence to Harmony Gold, I have to admit to being willing to wonder if there might be something to the occasional counterarguments the number of entities involved in the production of the movie four decades ago could have something to do with particular problems with its overseas rights. (I also understand that when the English dub of uncertain provenance was released on videotape years and years ago, Harmony Gold didn’t appear to have been involved...) In any case, I did start contemplating taking a rare step indeed for me.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence )
krpalmer: (apple)
In the final stages of preparing a post about some new-to-me Apple II emulators, I went back to the GitHub page for the “Mariani” emulator to retrieve its URL. While there, I happened to notice the number of “branches” to the code, and was curious enough to take a look at them. Spotting something called “delete-key-mapping” was sufficient to get me thinking I might keep delving into Mariani after my post was up.
To correct your mistakes )

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