Dave 🌱

Fellow retro fedi folk, I need your advice/recommendation; I'm selling off a bunch of things, including all-but-one of my 68k Macs. I'm keeping my LC, but will be selling off the Color Classic I have restored over the past two years. With it I'll be selling a keyboard and mouse (of course), but I'm torn between which one I should sell along with the CC, and which one I should keep for myself. On the one hand I have an "Apple Keyboard" that originally came from the US. It's working nicely, cleaned inside and out, and is not yellowed all that much. Actual mechanical keyboard, although it does have some odd decisions like a guiding poke thingy on the enter key that basically makes it harder to hit the key depending on where you mash, but whatever. On the other hand I have an "Apple Keyboard II" (gotta love these names, thx Apple). Also working nicely, cleaned inside and out, has Korean keys, and is the less nice or premium feeling membrane style keyboard (kind of mushy). Slightly more yellowed, but not really all that bad I think (plus, I don't really mind the yellowing). I'm torn because I think in basically all ways the "Apple Keyboard" is the better keyboard, but I like that the II is Korean, and is technically the correct matching keyboard with the LC, at least based on what I have been able to find through photos and whatnot. If I ever leave Korea and am able to bring my old Mac stuff with me, I suppose it'll also be nice to have that be this matching Korean keyboard? So, my question to you is; Which one would you keep for yourself, and which one would you keep? Bonus points if you can share the why's. Thanks so very much! And yes, if you think this is worth a boost, please by all means share and share alike :D (I know this would've been a good thing to post as a poll, but my Fediverse corner does not support this. And so, old-school ask-and-answer style it is :D) #AskFediverse #RetroComputing #VintageComputing #MacOS #Macintosh #68k #Keyboard #Korea #Korean #ADB

#SQLite has quickly been gaining my favor for various reasons. This is the recent-most reason:

https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/sqlite-agents/

#LLM #AI

Thanks to a very kind soul over on the #68kMLA forums who was willing to mail a working #Macintosh LC sound chip across the proverbial pond to me, I'm very happy that the "sold as junk/broken" Mac LC is now fully operational!

To celebrate this, I decided to do a fresh installation of System 7.1 on it. I had up until now been using a modified 7.5.3 based off of the pre-installed images available on the #BlueSCSI website, the same one I had been using for testing and whatnot on my restored Color Classic, but I figured going slightly back in time would help these old machines perform a bit better.

Sadly I don't have an original boxed version of 7.1, those seem exceedingly difficult to come by, so I made some copies and installed it that way.

The difference in boot-up time is already incredible, though I do miss the expandable folders in the Apple menu. Perhaps there's an extension for that under 7.1, not sure.

Either way; everything seems to be running nicely, including the Presto 040 clone card, which really makes a noticeable difference in performance.

Now onto its companion CRT monitor. Recapping it wasn't enough, it seems like there's some more components inside that have gotten damaged by a leaky capacitor, so that journey continues. For now, though, I can at least use a VGA monitor thanks to one of those adapter thingamabobs.

Right after I had replaced the sound chip and had the Mac happily beeping and booping, I actually sat down and played SimAnt for the first time ever (!), and actually was able to complete a whole campaign. I had a blast!

#RetroComputing #ClassicMac #VintageMacintosh #Macintosh #System7 #68k #Apple

I tried to play a bit of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Adventure Game today, and am once again reminded of how bad I am at adventure game logic. No matter how much I like them, I just struggle to find a way to make my brain think in the "right" way. I'm sure there's a trick to it.. Is there? Other than the whole "click on and try everything" general and somewhat vague suggestion, are there any other tricks you can recommend I try to follow so I actually have a chance of succeeding?

#IndianaJones #LastCrusade #Adventure #RetroGaming #ClassicMac #VintageMacintosh #Pointnclick #PointAndClick #Gaming #Macintosh

#Microsoft has been passionately ruining everything #GitHub was to many, duct taping #LLM slop anywhere and everywhere. And #GitLab looks at this and thinks... Yeah, let's do that too, that looks awesome? This is pathetic. I guess all hope for open source and hopefully slop-free solutions that can help build and maintain communities around code now really truly lie with #Forgejo, #SourceHut, #GameOfTrees, and something like #cgit I suppose? But for how long will that remain true? Damn.

Big yikes.

Alternatively: Et tu, Brute?

This whole industry has gone mad. I should've been a baker of something.

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

#GitLab #AI #Sigh

@jorijn@toot.community @kagihq@mastodon.social nice, I hope it'll work out well for you! Either way; I'd love to hear how it ends up working out for you. I've got no skin in the game other than that I hope Kagi succeeds so it can continue doing what it does so I can keep using their service, I'm just curious how it ends up working for folk other than myself :). About my cover photo; huh, odd. It's showing up fine for me. If I may ask, what Fediverse client are you using? I'd like to take a peek to see if it's something I can fix on my end. Groetjes! 😊

@jorijn@toot.community I think some (groups of) people tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and stick with much worse options. I'm not saying there aren't potential issues around relying on Yandex, but what are we comparing it to? The recurring issue I see is that certain (groups of) people hide behind or use an excuse to not make the best-most choices by having much higher and unrealistic expectations applied to "the alternative" choice than they do the (billionaire owned, privacy invading, stealing, citizen bombing supporting, monopoly, etc.) default. The dominant search engine is Google, I'm pretty sure you already know about some of the awful stuff they've been directly contributing to. Duckduckgo is better, you might think? But they heavily depend on Bing as their primary source of search results (besides the fancy stuff they sprinkle on top, which comes from other places too), which us a Microsoft product. Long list of "Democracy" introducing adventures they've directly supported over the years, just to name one kind of fun thing they've contributed to. I totally support the idea of comnunicating directly with @kagihq@mastodon.social about the improvements we'd like to see from them, including which partnerships we'd like to see more and less of. There's always room for improvement. But I'll always recommend that we keep what we're comparing something to in mind. I like to set realistic expectations, and work from there. I obviously don't think Kagi is evil (even though I wish they'd offer a package without all that AI garbage, as I feel icky for paying for it), but if because less than 2% of their search results being provided by Yandex somehow makes them evil, I'd still continue to pay for their service, as I know the alternatives are demonstrably more evil in every way you look at it, especially when applying the same expectations to them. That's just simple math, isn't it? 😄

@jorijn@toot.community hi! I've been using Kagi as my primary/only search engine for about a year and a half or so now? It's honestly been great. Search result quality has been very consistent for me, and much improved over when I was primarily using DuckDuckGo before it. I had to switch to Google quite often back then, to be honest. They're not the cheapest and in this modern day and age it might feel unusual to pay for search, but I like the clarity in the relationship we have, not to mention the clarity in the business model. If you can afford it, I can highly recommend it! (I'm not affiliated in any way other than being a paying customer.)

@niccolove@fosstodon.org thank you for sharing your thoughts! I fear it might be a bit too naive to not think we need some kind of guard rails in place, but I'll be more than happy if I end up being proven wrong on that. We're certainly dealing with interesting times, to say the least. I feel for FOSS developers/maintainers who are struggling to deal with the added burden they're faced with these days. I can understand the desire to try to find ways to deal with this more proactively, even though there's obviously no silver bullet.

@niccolove@fosstodon.org @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online fair point, but doesn't this then also suggest that you don't think clean room projects are actually possible, as there's not necessarily a way one could make absolutely certain everyone involved hasn't at least peaked over the proverbial fence? It feels a bit like the suggestion here is to not even try to have people adhere to certain code of conducts and/or contribution guidelines, simply because it might not be 100% detectable (or otherwise provable) that someone broke the rules/guidelines. I do understand your point about unenforceable rules, I guess I just don't like the counter proposal of just letting everyone go nuts with these tools, consequences be damned. Surely there has to be another option?

@niccolove@fosstodon.org @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online It's impossibile to determine for sure whether a PR contains AI generated code. This feels like an odd reasoning against possible policies prohibiting AI-supported contributions though, isn't it? Just because some might willfully attempt to circumvent or otherwise break a project's contribution guidelines does not in any way seem like enough of a reason to not even try? To use a slightly hyperbolic example to further explain what I mean; isn't that kind of like suggesting there's no point making laws against theft or murder, because some will try/succeed at either anyway? Please do let me know if I misunderstood what you meant!