Travel, United States

Alabama October 2024

cjwl

Sloss Furnaces- Birmingham Is Birmingham, Alabama on your bucket list? No? Maybe it should be. I had never given a thought to going to Birmingham prior to last year but my daughter went for a music festival hosted at the Sloss furnaces historical site and my interest was piqued. She decided to go again this year and I tagged along, I wanted to see Sloss furnaces, enjoy the music and also see Birmingham a little. I didn’t venture outside the historic district and it was rather charming. I hit a couple excellent restaurants (Helen and Automatic Seafood) and enjoyed the…

Do It Yourself

Original Pac-Man arcade game

cjwl

I picked this up at an auction somewhat cheap, when I plug it in and press Start I can hear the game but there is no picture. This is a terrible curse, I have to get rid of it or fix it if I can’t see the game! It’s completely original, no internal modifications, original key for the back and manual in excellent condition. I’ve listed it online high but in the meantime look into fixing the CRT without electrocuting myself. Lots of articles online. I’ve ordered a video converter so I can hook it up to an LCD and…

Open Source

Cocotron still memorable

cjwl

Some recently asked on Hacker News “ What is the best code base you ever worked on?” and a couple people chimed in with Cocotron here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40819146 Unfortunately the economics of Cocotron don’t really work out, there aren’t enough people who want to port from Mac to PC in this fashion. I did implement a ton of it, but … Thanks to Lou for pointing this HN post out to me!

Do It Yourself

Scrapping 70 rack servers and 3,000 hard drives

cjwl

TLDR; Scrapping electronics isn’t a very lucrative hobby, but when you have a giant pile of hardware you need to get rid of it may be more cost effective than paying someone to take it away. When I decided to buy a large lot of surplus computers online I had one part of my plan in place, as a small number of them were worth Crazy Xserve G5 valuations , but the rest of my plan was not. The first problem was moving this stuff, the machines were only a couple hours away but when doing the math on the…

Miscellany

Crazy Xserve G5 valuations

cjwl

I’ve been using eBay for 25 years, selling personal items and often buying new, used and hard to find items. A lot of this is pretty normal, items sell for expected market prices. Every once in a while I have an unusual transaction, maybe I get a great deal, or maybe I have something which fetches a nice price. An out of print children’s book which has become a collector’s item, or a 200 year old watercolor paint set which has a bidding war between museum conservators. Possibly the most odd thing I’ve seen for technology is Xserve G5 values…

Italy

Italy April 2024, Venice

cjwl

Honestly, nothing could have prepared me for seeing Venice in person. The engineering accomplishment of all the stone buildings propped up by petrified logs in a lagoon is just mind boggling. The city is larger than expected and just an endless maze of canals and alleys, it did live up to it’s reputation of being such a unique place. I loved it! We stayed a little north of Venice in Mogliano Veneto, the train is regular, but does end a little early around midnight. The first night we had a mad scramble through the alleys and bridges to make it…

Italy

Italy April 2024, Bologna

cjwl

We didn’t stay in Bologna city center, we rented an AirBnB about 40 minutes outside the city on a hill in the countryside and I rented a car. Hertz doesn’t care if you have an international driver’s permit, but the police do, so I got mine before the trip. The funny thing is that we saw one of the Lamborghini police cars the day we arrived in Bologna and that was a fun sight. One for the bucket list – driving in Italy. This isn’t much different than Boston or New York, so easy enough. Bologna was interesting and nice…

Italy

Italy April 2024, Florence

cjwl

Do I have too many pictures of pizza? No! Florence quite a fun destination, yes, there are a lot of tourists, but the city can handle it and there are a lot of great shops and restaurants. By dumb luck we discovered Giovanni Santarpia’s pizzeria outside the city center, rated as one of the best pizzerias in Italy, and we managed to get a table, just amazing and fun. Looking forward to going back to Florence, what a fun city with amazing food!

Italy

Italy April 2024, Milan

cjwl

We had about 10 days in April we could use for a vacation and JFK airport in NYC has direct flights to Milan for reasonable prices. We planned our first trip to Italy around spending a few days in Milan and doing a high speed train loop around northern Italy. We stopped in Florence, Bologna and Venice, then back to Milan for our return flight. Unknown to us beforehand Design Week in Milan was going on while we were there, this was fun and added another element to the crowds but was only really apparent when we visited the Brera…

Miscellany

Kee Bird B-29 circa 1988

cjwl

You can read about the Kee Bird here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kee_Bird . It crashed in the Arctic and there was an attempt to repair and fly it out which ended in further destroying the plane by fire. This is the plane as it was in 1988. My father took this photo while in Greenland with the USAF. Not to be reproduced without permission. Photo Copyright (c) 1988, Christopher J. W. Lloyd.