Keith Graham

In the mid 1980s I bought a portable IBM PC through a friend who worked at IBM. These were not like laptops. They were basically full size computers with a handle. They were not really portable, but were called Luggable. I used it for a good 10 years. I have it in the cellar. I also bought another one as a backup that is down there somewhere.
I modified it over the years so it used a Intel ‘486 motherboard with lots of memory and a video card that can drive the little orange monitor like a VGA monitor. I packed 5 hard disks into the thing.
I did a lot of work on that computer. I carried it on many airplanes and was able to fix systems in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washing D.C. and other cities over the years. Eventually it was not practical to use it and I had an IBM Thinkpad the weighed about 10 pounds as apposed the luggable that weighed about 40 pounds.
The old luggable has sentimental value and I’ve wanted to get it going again. The last time that I tried I did not get good results. I could not boot it. I think that I don’t have something hooked up correctly, or else the motherboard has died. The onboard motherboard battery is supposed to be good for 7 years and it has been 35 years since I got it.
I just read an article about the Raspberry Pi being able to run MS-Dos or Windows XP. It has a composite output that should be able to drive the old orange screen built into the luggable. It is 1000 times more powerful than the original 8088 motherboard in the luggable.
I decided that a project this Spring will be to rip out the guts of the old PC and make a nice bracket for the Raspberry PI. It will not only be much lighter, but much more powerful. I can make a boot menu to load MS-Dos 6.22, Windows XP or even Linux. I can relive my glory days in writing MASM programs, something that nobody does anymore. I can load Visual Basic, which is a language that I loved. I can transfer my programs to the Linux system and get them to run on modern machines. …Or maybe not. These are great ideas. We’ll see how far I get.

Justine sent me an old desktop computer about 10 years ago. It is a little slow and old and over the last year it has started making fan noise an overheating. I considered buying a new desktop, but they go for about $600-$700 for the one I wanted. I vacuumed out the fans and it ran well for a few months, but it started making horrible noises again.
I bought a NVIDIA video card (because it has a fan). I bought a nice 1 TB ssd. I also bought a power supply on eBay. I had to return the power supply because it was not compatible with my computer, even though it was advertised as thus. I returned the power supply bought an inexpensive one (that cost less than the eBay one).
I replaced everything and now I have a very cool, very fast , quiet system. The ssd makes a huge difference in the speed of my 10 year old system. The NVIDIA card also seems to make all the graphics much faster. The power supply is twice the wattage of the old one.
I now have an old system that may be good for another 10 years for about $150.
Pretty soon I will be wandering the back roads of Rockland County and I might find a nearly new desktop computer in the junk. I’ll just transfer my hard disk to the new machine and have an even newer machine. The older machine might be good to run a local security server that runs a DNS server and VPN or maybe a media server.

Flatpress is an old blogging system. It has very few features and will run without any problems on most hosting services. Some hosting companies offer it as an automated installation. Since at 7 years it is very old, I am a little concerned that it has security issues and other bugs, but I took the chance.
I chose Flatpress because WordPress became way too complicated and I needed an old fashioned blog to use like a diary, but without all the headaches. The “themes” that come with Flatpress are all old-fashioned styles with fixed font sized measured in pixels. They look just awful on cell phones so I modified one of the standard themes.
I didn’t like the results that I got, and after some searching I found a “responsive” style theme for Flatpress. The bad thing was that it used a Germanic block font for the headings, but that was easy to fix. It is still using some “pixel” measurements for some elements, but it mostly works. I will continue to tweak it as I find things that annoy me.
I am using it for entries with limited interest to anyone other than myself (like this entry). General interest posts will still go on Facebook.
I will continue looking for simple blogging software, but this is good enough, if not perfect.

I found a folder in my bookmarks called Blogs. It originally had about 50 entries, but after deleting the dead blogs I wound up with about 12.
Many are well known and some I don’t remember, but I will be checking them regularly. Some of these are updated irregularly, and some are not all that interesting. I have another folder with science blogs and another folder with news related sites. I may list them here if this works.
Here they are:
https://www.useit.com/alertbox/
https://boingboing.net/
https://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/
https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/
https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/
https://slashdot.org/
https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/
https://jalanerwine.blogspot.com/
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
https://www.techdirt.com/
https://www.researchbuzz.org/
https://www.contrapositivediary.com/

I received the contract for my story The Tele-Med Murder Case this morning. I signed it and returned it. The anthology will appear sometime this month and I should be getting a free copy.

I received a nice rejection from Interzone today. It turns out the editor wasn’t the real editor and the original editor was going to be doing the slush readings. He encouraged me to try again with the new guy.

My story was acknowledged by Ian at Interzone overnight. He indicated that it might be some time before he could get to it.

Trying to make some kind of use out of the old domain names

I sent Interzone Magazine a short story.
I have only sent stories to Interzone a couple of times over the last 20 years because they usually don’t respond for 6 to 9 months. I would love to sell a story there, though.
Interzone has changed hands and there is a new editor. My hope is that the new editor will be trying to keep ahead of the slush pile and I will get my rejection quickly, perhaps even with a friendly comment.
I’ll try to post here if I get any response (unless I get bored with this site.)