Starwatcher2001

Been in software dev for 43 years. Done the 6am and 96 hour weeks. Then realised I'd missed a big part of my kids growing up, and once they were dead, spending little time with my parents. Too busy you see.

I'd recommend people really think about the costs.

I seem to recall that "Drain" spun up the motor on the floppy drive to create the spin dry cycle.

One of my first "serious" electronic builds in the 1970s was a variable, current limiting PSU from Heathkit. (Advertised in Practical Electronics). Used that together with a breadboard kit to launch a life long interest in electronics. Still have the PSU in the loft and a handful of old circuits lovingly converted to Veroboard, or homemake PCBs made from copper-clad board etched with ferric chloride (until my mum got the vapours about me "messing around with chemicals" and stopped that route).

“what have you been up to lately?”

Be a little careful with this one. I asked a similarly worded question at an event over Easter got the answer "Burying my husband."

Thankfully the lady was good natured about it and we managed to pull the conversation around, but for a minute or two I thought I'd stepped on a landmine.

I think in future I might lead with, "what do you enjoy doing?"

My wife leaves the toilet door open when she's in there, which annoys me. One day I asked her why and she told me she used to do it deliberately when the children were little so she could hear what they were up to, and talk to them if they needed it. It's now just a habit. Makes sense now I know.

I'm doing something similar. I've decided at 62 to learn to play the keyboard and be able to read music. It's late in the day but I'm slowly getting there 30 minutes a day.

Nicholas Carr's book "The shallows - What the internet is doing to out brains" is a little old (2011), but an eye-opening read.

"One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It’s not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book."

He's railing about the internet being a designed distraction machine, rather than youtube specifically.

You might consider humanism. It provides purpose and community, without requiring a deity.

That looks great. Bookmarked to have a closer look. I cut my teeth on a Model 1 Level 2 in 1979 and have been coding ever since. Still have my original working one, a spare and a model III in the attic. Probably a decade since I switched them on though :-(

The manuals were excellent and even showed a short machine code program to white the whole screen. Having used the "poke" statement in basic to do the same thing (which took around 2 minutes), I was blown away that machine code was almost instant. I taught myself assembler with the Zaks Z80 book

Did lots of hacks to the hardware, lower/case, speech synthesiser, motor control, added a parallel EPROM to hack the ROM code. So many memories.

>Replacement of nice physical controls with touch screens and touch panels. It's so nice to have tactile feedback when you turn a knob compared to pressing some virtual button.

And vital to anyone visually impaired.

I'd put it back in the box and return it as defective.

> I am terribly afraid of death

That's understandable. I'm concerned for my loved ones and the impact it may have on them when I go, but I have no fear of death for myself. I have no memory of the millions of years that passed before I was born and expect to have no memory, feelings or consciousness after I have died. I just won't be here any more and that's perfectly okay.

The TRS-80 level 1 ROM was 4k and the BASIC had the luxury of exactly 3 error messages: What? How? and Sorry.