benford | 
12 9th, 2009| 
Visited the Computer History Museum recently in San Jose, California, and the results were quite epic. To summarize, It was like looking through the combined Attic and Garage of the entire Silicon Valley. If all we wanted was a twitter post, my work would end here, but I have far more in store.
Nov
3
So one of my old machines managed to be deemed worthy of featuring in Technologizer’s “Worst PC in America” contest.
If it looks familiar, you saw it here first.
Oct
21
Good news everyone! I finally had the chance to get some more work done on everyone’s (my) favorite iShell. As per usual, there’s some good news and bad news.
Jul
19
TSo in today’s episode of computing anachorism, I present to you the Fujistu Stylistic 1000, one of the first mass market attempts at putting an ordinary computer into a touchscreen, tablet-based, form factor. Hailing from 1996 this fantastic piece of technology was not just the future, it was made of the future: A fully functional computer in a package weighing less than 10 lbs (~ 5 kg) with a battery life of much greater than 30 minutes, and multiple shades of greyscale. Instead of using a mouse, you could poke the screen with a special kind of pen to click things. It’s like having one of those funny PADDs from Star Trek or something.
Jul
3
No pictures today, but I have some progress to report on the iShell project. I needed to regrind the clamps that I made last time so that the monitor section of the case could fit cleanly into the rest of the unit. During initial fitting I found that the area near the LCD monitor mount screws was far too close to the edge of the case, or on the lower half, the clamps would run right into the speakers. I marked the excess metal with white out, as black sharpies would not show up so well. Then, one at a time, I took each clamp and ground out the white out marked sections. By removing them one at a time, then replacing them, I could guarantee that each clamp returns to its original spot, preventing further need for grinding.
Jun
7
Okay folks, another weekend, another ishell update! This time I got to play with a number of sharp and / or blunt tools, and used them to persuade metal to bend into different shapes than it would originally have liked. My goal this week was to fasion and install mounting brackets for the ishell’s LCD monitor, securing it safely to its newly found plastic frame for many a future LAN party, or $tarbuck$ visit, or more significantly, the rare LAN party hosted at a $tarbuck$ establishment. Randomly assorted bits that happen to resemble JPEG images follow after the break.
May
15
Threre’s more progress on the iMac project now; the iShell (iMac sans the blinky bits) now is notably less shell like. Instead of being an empty vessel, fish tank materiel or a catbed, it now has a working lcd screen, and furhtermore, takes the cake as one of the world’s largest lcd monitors relative to its screen size.
How, you might ask? More deatils after the break…
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Apr
19
So one day I had the need to programatically resize images using a php webserver. Subsequent research leads me to imageMagick, a port of the java library of the same name. The best part is that the library is Open Source, and therefore freely available to the public at large. A more difficult part was configuring it to play nicely with my local development server, XAMPP running on my MacOS 10.5 box.
With occasional fumbling and chasing after red herrings I eventually succeded in installing the imageMagick library, enabling all kinds of OO image resizing goodness.
Apr
8
After nearly a week of great anticipation, the wonderful Postal Service (the United kind) delivered my desired computer components to my parent’s house. My mother was in town Saturday, so she decided to bring “that box” with her. Unfortunately she forgot to tell me about it, and I forgot to ask, though I knew that she would likely bring them. As a result, she drove back to their hometown, with “that box” still in her possession. It was a noble effort, at least. I stopped by the next day to finish the delivery, and within a few days, had the opportunity to put the pieces together. The parts list begins after the break.
Feb
21
After keeping track of technical and practical features of the cuirrent lineup of computers branded as gaming consoles my friends and I have come to some conclusions about what is available today. And also, directly due to its triviality, I’ll be sure to cover our logic in extreme detail.
To restict our focus to a managable amount, we’ll restrict the argument to home game consoles (not portables), and since PC games are another can of worms entirely we will leave those out as well.