We Saw a Chicken …

Day: 7 February 2010

  • amiga: blank hdf images

    I’m trying to get running an Amiga again, to see if I can remember what was rocking my computer world twenty years ago. I want to run that code, swim with the Fish disks, and generally muck about with what was my life back then.

    Emulation is interesting. Variants of UAE (which came with an Amiga Forever CD set I bought in 1997 or so) rule the roost. Quality is variable – on Windows, WinUAE is very comprehensive, even making grink-gronk noises as the floppy spins. On Mac, E-UAE is really not worth the bother kinda okay – it doesn’t want to emulate anything above a 68000, and falls over quite often but has decent sound. On Linux, it’s plain and stable, and I happen to have an old Thinkpad going spare I can dedicate to emulation.

    I would have expected all the old disk images to be readily available for download. It seems that the current owners of the Amiga name (this week, at least) still cling on to the old IP as if it has real value. The Amiga games market (which was the market) basically collapsed with Commodore in 1994. I really wonder who is buying the PowerPC based, vastly overpriced new hardware? For now, I’m relying on good old-fashioned torrent sites for my data.

    I want to emulate two machines; the A500 I had for all my cringe-worthy magazine writing running Workbench 1.3, and a fast thing maxed out with all the processors and RAM I never had, probably running 3.1. While I did have Amiga[D]os 2.04 (can’t remember if they’d dropped the D by then), it wasn’t the main focus of my interest by then.

    The biggest problem I have is getting hard disk image, even blank ones. UAE is picky. Here are a couple I formatted under WinUAE, both blank.

    I wonder if they’ll work under 1.3?

    Update: yes, they should. I formatted them FFS under AmigaDos 1.3.

  • well, they did ask

    BizRate had a survey regarding Ticketmaster‘s service. Here’s what I wrote:

    Just whose convenience is your 25% “convenience fee” for? You guys are a scandalous monopoly. I’ve had better customer service from the Mafia – at least they’re family-run.


  • stick it up yer nose

    toothpastefordinner.com: mouth breather
    from toothpastefordinner.com : original image

    If you’d told me even six months ago that I’d be scooting a quarter litre of warm saline up my nose every night, I’d be all like, “yeah, chinny reckon”. But sadly, and this may be heading into TMI territory, it’s true.

    For many years, my nose wasn’t much more than decorative. Too blocked to provide a useful means of breathing or sensing smells, it got only occasional use as a sunglasses bracket. It also had unpleasant nocturnal habits, ones best not described here.

    A month or so ago, I decided I’d had enough. I went to the pharmacy and got one of those squeezy bottle things that comes with the little sachets of salt+bicarb. I can smell again! I can actually use my nose for breathing!!

    Those two benefits are pretty awesome, but the whole process isn’t a bed of roses:

    • yeah, you really need to do the kha-kha-kha thing with your throat, unless you like aspirating saline.
    • every night, it still feels a little like drowning, and hasn’t really got any better.
    • A sinus can still surprise up to an hour later, when an unexpected head tilt can produce a deluge too large for any tissue.
    • if the water’s too cold, it feels like being stabbed in the head. From the inside.
    • I’m much more in touch with my mucus than I want to be, and far, far more than you’d want me to be. I mean seriously, some of the things that I get out … well, let’s just say I’ve measured from nostrils to bronchi, and these luminous sinus puppies would easily stretch that far.
    • The results are nothing like the video. They’re all serene, like they’re getting their Deva Premal on; me, I’m left snotty and spluttering.

    So, it works for me. But we’re all glad that I’m not sharing the details, aren’t we?