July 24th, 2010: Pedal-pushing Retro-mo-blog!
Finally managed to take that little road trip. Originally planned as a test session for a couple of my entries this year, it served a secondary purpose which I will elaborate upon later. In the meantime, here's my blog entry, written in the field on Gibraltar (my Model 100) and documented with my Kodak EasyShare C300 camera.
Our trip began this morning at 5:57 AM CST. Yes, I'm usually up this early on a Saturday morning.
I had the presence of mind to load my bike up last night before bed, to save myself some time this morning.
I'd originally intended to take Sigrid, my TRS-80 Model 4P, but in addition to being rather ungainly, there'd be no place for me to plug her in! ;)
(*snicker*)
I arrived at my usual spot at 6:10 or so, a little further along into the sunrise that I would have liked. Ah well.
I bought this camera mount for my bike for $1.99 w/ free shipping on eBay. I was originally going to build one myself, but the whole cost me less than the sum of its parts would have had I bought them separately. Seen here is my Olympus D460Z camera, which has been acting up today. While I'd ordinarily use the Olympus to take these pics, I ended up using my 2002-vintage Kodak C300 instead. I really missed the Olympus' digital zoom today...
So, let's get to the meat-and-potatoes of this expedition (dig the 80's retro-stylin' on my Gameboy tote!).
Today's trip was to serve as the first field test for my Gameboy Camera tripod hack (which worked beautifully). However, I also had another experiment in mind...
A pair of dissimilar telescopes, each bought for a buck (plus shipping) on eBay. What are you going to do with those, Mr. Jerk? Oh my dear lord no! You... you wouldn't?!
As a matter of fact, I would! Heh heh heh... After a small degree of success at using this particular telescope as a zoom lens for my GB camera under controlled conditions at home, I decided to try my luck in the field.
Despite spending a half-hour fiddling with the 'scope, no bananas were to be had. None of the shots I took turned out satisfactorily. If I were to build a proper mount and maybe a sun shade, it'd probably work, but I won't have the time this go 'round.
Alright then, time to fire up Gibraltar and start blogging away...
The Retro Road Trip has been a mixed success. My Gameboy Camera tripod works great in the field, however my idea for a cheap zoom lens didn't work so well. It would probably work if I built a proper mount for it, but I won't have the time to do it by RC's end... I know there are some lens adapters available that can be made to work on the GB Cam that would enable me to use actual photographic lenses, but I'm not sure I want to spend the time and/or money tracking them down just yet.
Apart from that, it's a beautiful day so far. Caught the sunrise and took a few pictures, but they didn't turn out too well on the GB camera ;) Nigel hasn't woken up yet, so there's no rain thus far. The sheep guts have predicted a 30% chance of thunderstorms this afternoon, so I want to wrap my usual Saturday morning errands up by then.
In case you're wondering where we are (because I've brought you with me), we are in one of Winnipeg's nicest parks, Kildonan Park, which just happens to be a few blocks from my house. I spend a lot of time here, as it's very photogenic and is distant enough from traffic noise and electrical interference as to be very relaxing. Many of the benches in the park have these little memorial plaques, which I've always thought was a nice touch. One of these days my name will be there too... it's in my will. Another prominent feature of Kildonan Park is world-famous Rainbow Stage, which I haven't visited since I was in preschool (30+ years) but have plans to do so this year!
I brought one of my portable shortwave radios with me - this here Degen DE1123, to do a little bit of SWLing and DXing. The DE1123 has built-in recording facilities, meaning I can record straight from the radio. Unfortunately, the reception on these things isn't the greatest, and the audio is very distorted. I did manage to pick up the BBC World Service, which I normally can't pick up in my house... I recorded about a minute of the broadcast on the DE1123, which you can hear here. Lousy quality, isn't it? Blarg, there's not much to hear right now, so I think I'll do a bit of TV DXing.
Not much here either apart from this fishing show. TV Reception is about as good as it ever is with my old Casio TV-470... can pick up two channels with any degree of reliability (I used to be able to pick up many of the American channels from North Dakota, but this hasn't been the case since they switched to digital broadcasting). Unfortunately, the batteries are running quite low, so picture quality suffers. One of these days, I'll invest in a cheap portable antenna to plug into the external antenna jack... will probably have to invest in a digital conversion box too, as all television signals will be digital here in Canada next year.
At any rate, I'm hungry and getting eaten alive by mosquitos, so it's time to wrap this up. Good thing too, as it appears Nigel is awake, and got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
--
I ended up riding around for another hour or so after I finished my blog entry. The clouds blew over and the sun came back out, so I took a few dozen pictures of the park and some of its features. I'll be putting up a gallery tonight or tomorrow, once I figure out how to use the watermark plugin for GIMP...
Today was also the beginning of my training regimen. I'm going to be riding my bike constantly until snowfall in order to get in shape for next year. You see, I'm going to start bike touring next year, and am planning to go on a road trip with my Model 100 (and cameras) for next year's Retrochallenge! And I'll do it using only batteries charged by solar or dynamo power! Should be fun if I can pull it off!
July 23rd, 2010: I have a name for my pain, or "Say it with Sheep Guts!"
There, it's settled. Wgoodf has decreed that the Canadian God of Rain shall be called Nigel. Nigel it is. Damn you, Nigel! Damn you and your tortures of constant rain!
Tonight's project will be getting everything ready for the oft-postponed road trip. The soothsayers and augurers have predicted that Nigel will awaken late tomorrow morning, so we'll have blue sky and sunshine for our little excursion. ( EDIT - I shouldn't insult soothsayers and augurers by comparing them to Environment Canada. Your work is generally more accurate, and I do wholeheartedly apologize!)
6am CST (1100 UTC) sharp.
Be there.
July 22nd, 2010: AAARGH!
Rain. Again.
Wet basement. Again.
Anger. Again.
No bananas. Again.
No Art. Again.
Anger. Again.
On the plus side, I'm getting lots of cleaning done around the house...
July 20th, 2010: No bananas, and no blueberries either...
Man, now my fucking Blueberry iMac 400DV is dead. Hard drive crapped out,
can't seem to bring it back. Only had it for a year, too. Is it just me, or has
the quality of hard drives decreased exponentially in the last few years? I
mean, I still have the original 20Mb drives in both my Tandy 1500HD and 2800
laptops and both still work flawlessly. Even my old Syquest 40Mb cartridge hard
drive still works with all but one of the twenty cartridges I have. Big
dog's cock! Fuck!
I wouldn't be so upset, but this is the fourth drive that has failed on me in the past two years, all bought within a couple of months of each other.
Will have to use my Lombard to update my 4th Generation iPod (20gb upgraded to 80Gb)...
So, I was cleaning out the basement last night (a result of the constant rain), and came across (among other things) an old SCSI magneto-optical drive I forgot I had. Perhaps I'll have a look at it before the RC is through. Don't think I ever had disks for it, but in this eBay day-and-age, I'm sure I'll come a cross a few.
Anyhow, haven't had a chance to do any retro-stuff. Hopefully the Sun will come out tomorrow and I can go for that ride...
*update 10:39pm CST *
Holy shit! While going through another box in the basement, I found a complete set of CDROMs, 13 in all, containing HP-UX 10.10 and 10.20 for HP9000 machines (labelled for Series 700 and/or 800), a set of bound manuals for something called "NonStopUX", a sealed software bundle containing a print server package for Xenix386, and a couple of copies of OS/2 Warp 3! Christ on toast, this is the motherload! I gotta get some pictures of this stuff!
July 18th, 2010: A couple of belated updates
Sorry for the delay, I was without electricity for a few hours yesterday. One does tire of thunderstorms after a while... this is, like, the eighth one in the last few weeks! Thankfully it was only the second power outage in my area.
The lack of electricity means my artistry has been pushed back another day or so... ah well. I'm hoping to get out sometime during the week to shoot phase two of my art project, then do all the graphical manipulation on my Amiga 1200 in one fell swoop.
While I was in the dark yesterday, I wrote up an update on Gibraltar (my Model 100) and took a few pictures with my digital camera. Didn't have a chance to upload it until this evening, so you may want to check last week's update for details. I've also started work on a piece called "Sustainable Retrocomputing" which I was going to post in my "Running Commentary" section, but decided to further refine it and submit it to 300 Baud Magazine when done!
Sundays are usually "Household drudgery days" and thus today was spent cleaning the house, so no update apart from this.
Tomorrow, we're going for a ride...
@ wgoodf: If you like Duvel (as I do), you'd do well to try Gulden Draak or Piraat, both from Brouwerij Van Steenberge. Good Belgian beer indeed!