Blog entries from May, 2023

I hadn’t realised that it has been over six months since I (and many) switched from Twitter over to Mastodon and the Fediverse. Most of the people I followed on Twitter were tech related, either people I had met through conferences or people that were posting interesting things.

A handful of the people I followed (a couple tech but mostly those related to comedy, podcasts or photography) continued to only post to Twitter, so I kept my script running that would use the API to get their tweets. The main benefit was that this isolated me from the locking out of the big third party apps and also the (even more) usability pain of the Twitter website.

At various points there were announcements about having to pay for API access, but then that was postponed multiple times with no useful communications around it. My plan was let my script run and eventually turn it off once it stopped working. That day is today because I could see from the cron output that it was now getting a “Could not authenticate you” message and then after digging back into the developer console I found this:

What policy did I violate? A policy about not paying? A policy about only viewing tweets and never seeing ads? I guess I will never know because I am not opening a support ticket to find out, you would have thought a courtesy email would have been sent…

I hadn’t tweeted since moving to the Fediverse (not that I ever posted often anyway) but I did make a final post saying goodbye to anyone I followed that were not also posting somewhere else. I will make a final pass through those I follow to find accounts on other services, but I think I already have them all…

For a long time the remains of my computer collection have sat in my old room at my parents house, with the occasional suggestion that I go over and do something with it all.

Where to start? It has been a long time since I downsized and I am not entirely sure what I still have. Then of those what items are cool and/or have sentimental meaning?

Tackling the sentimental angle first should be easy as that leads directly to the Apple IIGS which was our first family computer (I think in 1988) and our only computer until a 486 (in I think 1994). This GS was nothing special: a ROM01 with 1MB RAM expansion, two 3.5″ drives and a single 5.25″ drive, the AppleColor RGB display and an ImageWriter. This setup and the boxes of floppy disks will definitely be retained. However I do want to have something running that I can play with, so I do have a ROM03 unit and I think that will be the one that I expand with modern technology.

The mistake I want to avoid is to simply plug this old tech in and hope that nothing blows up, so a few weeks ago I ordered a couple of Universal PSU Kit‘s from ReActiveMicro. These arrived last week and over the weekend this was the result:

At the top is the Universal PSU installed in the power supply housing, and at the bottom is the original power supply that will now be discarded.

I don’t yet dare turning on the original CRT display, so for now I have connected it to my TV with a composite cable. I do want to get the CRT running, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

I need to go back over and collect more items (I only grabbed the minimum to test out the upgraded power supplies) and figure out what I have and what I want to do. For example I do have a CFFA card so I can boot from compact flash instead of floppies, but that is from twenty years ago and it is tempting to get a CFFA3000 which would be so much easier to use…

I think I have an ethernet card for Apple II somewhere, as well as an Apple II SCSI Card, though before those I will need to sort out a display, possibly taking the approach of both working out how to safely use the original AppleColor RGB display and also how to get HDMI output (going as far as retrofitting an LCD would be ideal).