[vcf-midatlantic] What projects are you working on?

[Jameel Akari]

The past few days I’ve been working on re-finishing a closet that I use for (vintage) computers & parts - insulation, Sheetrock and paint.  Just got that last part done yesterday and will be trying to put stuff away and organize.  Assuming I don’t get squirreled by the state of the lighting wiring in there.

That’s getting done now because we’re also trying to rewire and repaint my home office / lab, so everything’s gotta be moved somewhere else.

I have too much stuff, so I hope there’s a Spring VCF swap meet, or the VCF East consignment sale.

Other people are doing cool stuff that made me finally sit-down and reply:


> On Dec 29, 2020, at 9:19 AM, Alexander Jacocks via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> 
> Sounds like there are a ton of interesting projects going on!
> 
> I’m working on a bunch of things, as usual:
> - waiting for parts to try to install OS/2 on the museum’s PS/2 model 70

As per my OS/2 exhibit a couple years ago, I have not had great luck with the hard disks in these machines.  I’ve read suggestions to try re-capping them (the floppy drives certainly need them) but haven’t got back to that.


> - replacing failed Dallas chips on a variety of machines, including a
> sparcstation 2 and 20

I feel that’ll be a thing I’ll need to do soon as well.

> 
> Non-vintage, but I also wrote an published an Ansible role to use EntryDNS
> to answer ACME challenges. I really enjoy working with Ansible!
> 
I’ve thought about playbooks for less-common vintage UNIXes.  It’d be nice to be able to just push config onto a fresh base OS without spending hours re-installing and re-configuring every time I want to replace disks or whatever.  And to have that playbook configuration be code-as-documentation.


> On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 02:44 Ethan Dicks via vcf-midatlantic <
> vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 1:00 PM Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic
>> <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
>>> I'm curious what projects everyone is working on.
>> 
>> I've been doing a lot of software projects in recent weeks -
>> disassembling and commenting 6502 application code from the 70s and
>> 80s.  On the bench, I just received (after 2+ months of waiting) some
>> edge connectors to finish constructing the memory/expansion board for
>> my SYM-1, and I'd like to turn back to Commodore-128 keyboard overhaul

I was surprised on how expensive those card-edge connectors are.  OTOH, I haven’t managed to come up with anything to do on my SYM-1 that strains the 4kB on-board or needs more I/O than it already provides.


Meanwhile I still have the Lego Saturn V from last xmas to build…

— 
Jameel Akari