#MARCHintosh 2024 – What a Ride!

First off, Happy St Patrick’s Day! Éirinn go Brách! 💚🤍🧡

This has been what I can only describe as an unexpectedly, heavily, Mac-flavoured March.

Yes, I know it’s #MARCHintosh – but I don’t have any retro Macs! What projects could I possibly contribute with?

Oh, boy, let me tell you!

My Project

It started out innocently enough, with a post from a Mastodon mutual indicating their project was classic Mac virus-related.

That triggered the memory of doing a “MacViruses” article for PC Support Advisor when I worked for Paul Zucker, and I knew I had the original PageMaker file for at least one of the two articles I wrote for that publication in 1991, and print copies of both.

So, I thought, my project (note the singular at this time, please), would be to find them, archive them, and have that info available online. I found the printed copies quick smart, and the PageMaker file (both PageMaker 4.2 and 5 versions) for the other article (“Macintosh Resources”) soon after.

As a proof of concept, I fired up PageMaker 5 in mini vMac, printed to the PostScript file printer I’d already set up, used GhostScript to convert that .ps file to PDF, and I ended up with a modern, clean, searchable copy of the resources article quick smart, which I uploaded it to The Internet Archive.

You might think I’d be happy about achieving 50% of my project, but then I considered the viruses article. With no copy of it in PageMaker, I was left with scanning, OCRing and uploading that to IA.

But that felt just plain wrong!

When I scanned the pages in colour as 600dpi TIFFs, they were 400MB each! The whole PDF of the resources article was only 200KB, and it had more pages and screenshots! Scanning two colour spot printing as a colour TIFF, even with a limited colour depth, was blowing out the file size. And I was worried about how good a job OCR would do, anyway, especially for the figure captions which were printed over a dot screen of the second colour.

So I considered my options and thought what I would do was just use the scanned pages to extract the text and graphics, and use the resources article PageMaker file as a template to recreate the viruses article, and inherit the file size and format benefits by converting that to PDF.

I embarked on this path and after a significant amount of fiddling (and advice from noted Australian digital image manipulatoreditor NanoRaptor), I was able to extract six “clean” 512 × 342 1-bit Mac screenshots identical to the originals.

The project stalled at that point because of an unexpected hurdle: I’d started taking notice of the GlobalTalk networking project, and wanted to get involved.

GlobalTalk started as an attempt by Paul Rickard and dan on Mastodon to get their AppleTalk networks joined across the Atlantic. While it looks nothing like the original proposal (it now uses Apple Internet Router [AIR]), to say it has taken off would have to be the understatement of the year! As of today there are roughly 60 zones intermittently showing up on GlobalTalk, with usually over 45 online at any one time.

But…I have no AppleTalk capable Macs, so what can I do to participate?

Well, emulate, of course! I (totally sensibly) down tools on Project 1 (temporarily, I assure myself), and enthusiastically join…

The GlobalTalk Revolution! (a.k.a. My Second Project)

It’d be pretty straightforward, I surmised – look how easy it was to use mini vMac to create a PostScript file from a PageMaker file almost 35 years old!

Okay, Houston…we’ve had a problem here…

First of all, my favoured classic Mac emulators are not currently being very co-operative.

SheepShaver and Basilisk II are both crashing for me immediately upon launch. I’ve tried changed settings, creating new settings, new downloads of the apps – nothing is working to get them going. I’ve subsequently seen that using OpenCore Legacy Patcher to run later macOS versions on officially unsupported hardware is at fault, but I haven’t seen any reasons why that is the case.

“But hang on,” I hear you ask, “what about mini vMac? You were using that just a few paragraphs ago!”

Indeed I was, but this is where I expose my selective laziness and technical chauvinism – when it comes to emulated systems, I like to use bridged networking (if the emulated systems are network-capable at all), whereby they appear as independent/peer network devices to the other devices on my network.

It means I can play with different network protocols (inbound and outbound) as if the emulated system was a physical device plugged into my network.

If necessary (and appropriate), I can easily forward ports from my router to those emulated systems for external access without funky TAP/TUN/SLiRP/BURP networking shenanigans (that last one is made up if you didn’t guess, but who could really be sure these days, eh?).

I seem to recall having bridged networking working with SheepShaver and Basilisk II, but they’re useless to me at the moment, so I couldn’t check and looked at mini vMac.

Every time I tried to enable AppleTalk in mini vMac, the boot system would crash on restart. I’ve even tried Beta Branch 37 with UDP enabled for LocalTalk by default (which I thought would do the bridged networking I was looking for) with no luck.

On looking around, however, I saw that another emulator, QEMU, can do bridged networking on macOS, and its Motorola 68k emulation can emulate a Quadra 800, which runs the OS version Paul Rickards’ instructions said I needed (System 7.1).

So I settled on QEMU as my fastest path to getting set up for GlobalTalk.

Famous last words.

QEMU to the Rescue…Eventually

I downloaded QEMU and a helpfully provided System 7.1 installer linked to from the QEMU download page on emaculation.com.

In the interests of brevity (ahem!), I’m going to take a deep breath and blurt it all out in one go: 3…2…1…

Download qemu-system-m68k; download System 7.1 installer disk; struggle for hours to get it right – both the blank image file I created and the installer disk have to be “scsi-hd” in the command file’s options; vmnet is mistyped on the Emaculation guide, so copy/pasting that killed networking for an hour until I noticed the typo; vmnet requires root privs (fine…I’ll just sudo the command each time); trouble mounting additional software installer images required for GlobalTalk!; more trouble mounting additional software installer images required for GlobalTalk!!; even more trouble mounting additional software installer images required for GlobalTalk!!!; Disk Copy 6.1.2 requires AppleScript (not on installer drive!); extract bare partition image with Disk Jockey; use mini vMac to mount System Update 3 images and bare partition (which probably won’t work if brought back to QEMU, but I’m desperate); won’t boot; try loading bare disk image after booting mini vMac with my usual System 7.5.3 boot image to import NDIF disk images mounted with Disk Copy to make net install folders, then use the QEMU disk converter to make it right again – will this even work?!; Disk Copy 6.1.2 on installer disk runs in System 7.5.3 in mini vMac, but importFl doesn’t bring any filetype information over (already lost?); assign filetype and creator code to .img – still doesn’t work; import suggested Apple Internet Router compressed archive to mini vMac with importFl; it’s a StuffIt! .sit file, and no expander is installed on my mini vMac boot disk; install Stuffit! Expander from mini vMac site; no filetype and creator code on AIR .sit file; assign filetype and creator code to AIR installer .sit – DOESN’T WORK!; download a different AIR 3.0.1 archive I find online – it includes 3.0 installer disk images!; they mount with Disk Copy, huzzah!; I’m able to make a network installer from the three disk images and install AIR!; I’m able to install the Router IP Extension and Network Software 1.4.5 Installers!; I’m ready to take this back to QEMU, but how should I do that?; I try Disk Copy’s “Create Image from Disk” feature, hoping it’s QEMU compatible…QEMU doesn’t boot with it!; I try Disk Copy’s “Create Image from Folder” feature, but choose the installer disk; I create Read Only, Read/Write and Compressed versions of the disk image; I try to mount them all in QEMU – none work!; Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh!

I feel so close! I have all the necessary software installed, I just need to find a way to load and run it on the compatible “hardware” in QEMU.

I’m not exactly sure what I did next (I’d stopped taking notes, just looking at them was stressing me), but somehow, soon after the above I landed on the necessary command options to load one of the pre-installed disk images I’d made in mini vMac as a Read/Write boot disk in QEMU with my modified installer disk as a second disk. Huzzah, indeed!

Most everything after that pretty well followed the script prepared by Paul Rickards (other than some port naming differences). I was soon on GlobalTalk with (by this stage) quite a few other zones.

I’d done it! I was online and my machine was connected to other AIR routers around the world!

I eventually got to packaging up my disk images for others, creating a Read Me on how to use them to boot QEMU with AIR pre-installed (with update installers ready to go beyond the base version used by Paul) or leaving it as an exercise for the user to install from scratch using my installer disk.

I could close off that chapter, and leisurely move to the next chapter, which was really the first chapter: finishing my original project, finally

Next Chapter: I Catch a Virus

Before I did return to Project 1, I thought I’d just quickly find the Quadra 800 icon the System 7.1 Finder’s About This Macintosh dialog. I thought I could use it as an avatar or something.

So, I dived into a copy of the Finder (where that icon was likely to be stored) with RedEdit, the trusty old resource editor from back in the day (you can read about it and icon resources in the above article!).

Almost immediately upon opening the file (even before opening any icon resources), my heart almost stopped. There, sitting in amongst all the innocent resources, was one I well remember as not being innocent at all – nVIR.

“$#!+”, I thought, “that’s the nVIR virus in the Finder from my boot disk! A copy of which I made available globally last night!”

I immediately cancelled the iCloud share of the packaged files and announced the problem on Mastodon and in the spreadsheet used to coordinate GlobalTalk admins.

I then rode the “find a disk image that works in QEMU” merry-go-round again (well, a much smaller version of it, “only” an hour or so this time) to install and run Disinfectant 3.7.1, an early Mac antivirus program I knew could deal with nVIR.

I ran it on the boot disk, but it couldn’t do a full clean while some infected system files were loaded. I also ran it on the installer disk, which it cleaned completely – so then I booted from the installer disk mounted in Read Only mode, cleaned the boot disk, and then mounted the distribution copies and cleaned those.

I then rebooted back into my usual system setup so it could get back to running AIR, amended my Read Me, and sent out links to a new version of my packaged files all fresh and clean.

Apparently, mine wasn’t the only distributed disk image which had a virus infection. Subsequent to my announcement, other GlobalTalk admins ran antivirus on their installs or disks they’d distributed, and at least one other infection unrelated to mine was found on someone else’s distribution disk. Welcome to 1993!

When trying to nail down the source of my infection, I revisited that helpful installer disk image Emaculation linked to – a fresh download was, indeed, already “helpfully” infected with nVIR, so I notified the admins there and they quickly cleaned it up, as well.

Thankfully, nVIR was pretty innocuous and easy to clean.

So, now I can get back to Project 1, right?!

Wrong!

Next Chapter: Get in the Queue!

There was still one GlobalTalk thing nagging me – printing.

So far, all I’d achieved in that area was a disastrous attempt to print two small SimpleText files, print jobs which I cancelled as nothing seemed to be happening at my end, but which actually resulted in hundreds of blank pages going through the printer, and every 20 pages or so my small one- or several-line messages would appear. Oops! Sorry, Eric!

What I wanted even more than sending print jobs was for people to be able to print to my printer, a nice Brother colour laser printer I’d only gotten mid-last year. However, it’s too new to understand AppleTalk, older Macs (pre-System 7.5) can’t properly speak lpr/lpd/ipp, and I didn’t want my printer just available to the wider Internet via port forwarding, I wanted GlobalTalk participants to be able to choose LaserWriter in the Chooser, go to my zone, select my printer, print, and have it appear in my printer’s physical output tray. Is that really too much to ask?!

I knew what I had to do – I needed to run, in Linux, netatalk 2, which understands old-style AppleTalk and IP-based AppleTalk, and which could present printers from the CUPS system as AppleTalk printers.

Now, you might think, here we go again, this sounds über-complicated, judging by the above, there are going to be numerous roadblocks here, how many words is he going to wring out of this part?

Well, the answer turns out to be (as it should) “42”:

I installed a small Linux virtual machine in UTM (a nice QEMU frontend for x86 virtualisation on the Mac), installed Webmin (my preferred remote admin console), CUPS, and netatalk 2, and had the whole thing installed and working in a single afternoon.

OK, well, actually, that’s not the whole story, as it turned out – I subsequently decided I also wanted people to be able to print straight to PDF from their GlobalTalk devices, so:

I installed CUPS-PDF, probably spent as long as I had on the above install getting CUPS-PDF to accept jobs as an AppleTalk LaserWriter queue, PDF them the right way up without mirroring, and allow users access to grab their PDF print files.

Oh! Look at that – only another 42 words, what an amazing coincidence! There must be some significance to that number – but I’ll have to look into that another day, maybe after a cup of tea, or after a few pints and peanuts down the pub with a good (or at least not unfriendly) friend.

A Pause, for WOzFest and Words

All the above was in place by 15 March, halfway through .

I’ve not yet returned to poor old Project 1, but I have two very good reasons:

  1. I had to host WOzFest 33 yesterday, and I had a ball, and even helped some others get on the GlobalTalk bandwagon (or should that be “the GlobalTalk bandwidth”? ::boomtish::), spoke to some International GlobalTalk admins, and successfully printed a colour JPEG to Jason Griffiths’ LocalTalk-enabled ImageWriter via his now-GlobalTalked WorkGroup Server 60, acting as an AIR host.
  2. I wanted to get all the above written down before it disappeared from my head, and before progressed too much further.

So, those are now done, and I still have two weeks to complete Project 1, and document its progress along with that of the other minor side-projects/quests I have omitted from the above, or which I will no doubt encounter in the next fortnight.

Interestingly, there’s been a lot of crossover between Project 1 and the GlobalTalk work through the virus infection, and the CUPS-PDF printing solution will actually allow Project 1’s PageMaker output to go directly to PDF.

So, as Dirk Gently might say, “There seems to be a lot of interconnectedness going on here.” (OK, you’re right: Douglas Adams would write that at least marginally better.)

While I work on the next stages and before I provide my next update, please look out for and posts on your favourite social media – yours truly is only posting/seeing them on Mastodon, I do hope to see you there.

So lastly, until my next instalment – keep on Maccin’!

Paul Zucker

I was drawn to think of Paul again after settling on my 2024 #MARCHintosh project – preserving a couple of articles I wrote while working for him.

But this is actually a pretty hard post to write – how do you do justice to a friend, a mentor, a great boss, and a larrikin like Paul?

Words were his life (after his family), but words fail me to truly capture him.

It’s a testament to Paul that 30+ years after meeting him, 7+ years after bidding him farewell, his loss still hits hard, and the words I have seen regarding his life and his passing have drawn laughs, groans, and tears.

Paul could elicit those reactions…not infrequently at the same time.

I first met Paul when I worked at an inner City Sydney desktop publishing bureau, Creative Computer Company, which Paul then utilised for International Technology Publishing artwork output.

He tried to head hunt me – but at that time, I was happy where I was, so I said no.

Things change of course, and I became unhappy and asked Paul if he still had a position for me, but by then he had hired someone in the role he was originally seeking me for. He suggested another bureau, which ITP had moved to outputting their artwork through, and so I worked for Lyno’s at Artarmon for a few months, holding the fort over the Christmas Holidays of 1989.

During that time, when discussing an ITP output job for Paul, he asked out of the blue if I’d be interested working with him after all – the person he’d hired had not worked out – I jumped at the opportunity, and have never once regretted that choice.

We slotted in very well from the start – I laughed at his jokes (not as a sycophant, they were funny!), we had the same pedantic nature, and we had the same love of technology – he was way more outgoing than me, though.

I never witnessed him getting angry (passionate about things, yes, but never angry), but I saw evidence he could get angry – namely, a blemish in the carpet behind the “third seat” in our office.

That seat had been my predecessor’s (I think he made me use the second seat for a reason), and to say there was a clash of cognitive styles between Paul and Gavin would be putting it mildly. That blemish was the result of Paul becoming so frustrated with Gavin once he went to the back room of the office, where his workbench was, grabbed a hammer, and hit the floor behind Gavin’s seat in utter frustration.

That strike was so forceful, the concrete below the carpet exploded like a meteor-struck landscape, blasting the carpet fibres outwards. While not a tall man, Paul was a strong man, a barrel of a man, and that small blemish in the carpet reminded me always how he was not normally prone to physically striking out in any manner, despite his strength.

That was the prompting for Paul reaching out to me again, so, I guess I need to thank Gavin – thanks, Gavin!

Working with Paul was an utter joy. He prodded and encouraged me to extend myself. He always offered positive and insightful advice/criticism of my work.

He encouraged my writing, first with Newsbytes (archives available on the Internet Archive Site), then with MacNews, a Newsbytes customer who, through its incarnations as MacNews, then MacUser, then Australian Macworld saw me writing features and regular columns for over a decade. I had pieces published in PCWorld, Computing and Desktop after he introduced me to them.

Paul instilled in me a love of writing which endures to this day, but which I now seldom get the chance to indulge – I think Paul would probably encourage me to “take up the pen” more often, and he’d be right.

He regaled me with stories of his childhood (full of pranks) – like the time he survived the making (and detonation) of a pipe bomb, with all 10 fingers and both eyes remaining!

How his father was captured in WWII after bailing from his stricken aeroplane, and the Germans were bewildered someone with a German name would be fighting against them.

He was overjoyed to meet Nigel Planer (of The Young Ones fame) at his parents’ house on the Central Coast – Nigel’s parents were neighbours of Paul’s parents.

He loved trying to pull a joke on others. He was excited to try a new one when he got his first fax/modem card for his PC. He was going to fax someone with an intro from a fake stationery company extolling the virtues of their fax paper, with the promise of a free sample to follow, then he’d send pages and pages and pages of vertical text saying

A
C
M
E

F
A
X

P
A
P
E
R

C
O
M
P
A
N
Y

F
R
E
E

F
A
X

P
A
P
E
R

S
A
M
P
L
E

But he wasn’t sure it would work, so he did a trial run to his own fax number first – but he couldn’t stop the whole file sending and ended up with metres of his practical joke on his own office floor.

He literally burst out laughing, and couldn’t wait to explain to me about how he had pranked himself. As far as I’m aware, he didn’t prank anyone else that way.

If someone sent SPAM faxes despite repeated requests from Paul to stop, before leaving for the weekend he would start to fax the page/s back to the sender late on Friday night, but tape the top of the page to the bottom as it went through, so the SPAMmers would arrive on Monday morning to a floor covered with their own SPAM. We rarely got more SPAM from them.

Once, when visiting the US, he posted back a slingshot (illegal in Aus) with a “child’s toy” customs declaration – it actually arrived at the office and he started a campaign of terror on a neighbouring business.

We overlooked the car park of the Pennant Hills Shopping Centre, and at the diagonal corner of the car park was the Pennant Hills Hardware Store.

Paul made special efforts to arrive early, and, with the vertical blinds turned to just allow enough of a gap, and the window slightly open, he would wait for the manager to start bringing out the external display items (wheelbarrows, brooms, that sort of thing) at 7am, and use his slingshot to shoot a 1¢ piece at the metal awning above the shop entrance (he had a pile of “ammunition” at the ready).

It would make an almighty bang, understandably startling the manager no matter how many times it happened, but Paul in his “blind” (he’d love that pun) was never discovered. He revelled in the mayhem.

NDAs were occasionally times for him to play word games. I remember him coming back from an Apple-paid trip to Cupertino, and he said, “I’m afraid I signed an NDA, which means I’m not allowed to tell you that Apple is about to release a laptop which fits in the paper tray of a LaserWriter!” (which is literally how they revealed them to the pack of journos in attendance). I think that must have been the PowerBook 100 series.

Working with Paul was the most fun job I have ever had, but all good things come to an end. ITP decided not to renew their production contract, which was Paul Zucker Computing’s bread and butter. This meant he couldn’t afford to keep me on staff, and I ended up moving to a print shop in Liverpool.

I kept writing for years after, though, and always appreciated Paul’s encouragement on that front.

Learning Paul was no longer with us hit me hard.

Despite his pranks, he was one of the most generous, loving people I have ever known. He valued family above all else, and was overjoyed as each of his children joined his tribe.

But he expressed his passions for other things, most especially technology and journalism, every day of his working life.

I think I would have been pretty pleased just to know him – but to have worked with him for two years was definitely an honour.

While I don’t think of him every day, when I do, it’s always with gratitude that he brightened my world.

After he passed, I wrote my “last” (despite that service’s demise/amalgamation decades past) Newsbytes post as per its house style. Here it is, as my final tribute to Paul:

(EULOGY)(IT JOURNALISM)(SYD)(00001)

Australia - Veteran IT Journalist Paul Zucker Farewelled 12/09/16
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, 2016 DEC 9 (NB) -- Long time Australian IT journalist Paul Zucker was farewelled today by family, friends and colleagues at a well-attended ceremony in Sydney’s north-west.

Paul had been a mainstay of the Australian IT news industry for decades, and wrote for and/or edited many local IT publications, and also for Newsbytes News Network as Sydney/Australian Bureau Chief.

The list of publications Paul was involved in was testament to his skills as a journalist and editor: he wrote for and edited International Technology Publishing titles, was Sydney Bureau Chief of (and contributor to) early online IT news service Newsbytes, was Founding Editor of Australian Reseller News, and wrote for PC World, PC User, Computing, to name a few.

Paul passed away suddenly on 29 November 2016 at age 64.

He is remembered by all as a fun-loving prankster, pedant, considerate boss and devoted husband and father. He will be sorely missed by his family and those who knew or worked with him.

(Sean McNamara/20161209)

Announcement of 2024 WOzFests (33-37)

Where did the last two years go?

Oh, that’s right

Things certainly stayed hectic at home and at work over that time and, while Dylan is no longer living with us, I don’t expect 2024 to be particularly calm.

So…2024, eh?!

2024’s first WOzFest, WOzFest 33, will be held on 16 March 2024 – start time is midday Sydney time (UTC+11).

While I’m using a basic pattern again this year (the fourth Saturday of the odd months), this will only apply May to November, as I needed to shift March a week earlier.

This means the full scheduled looks like this:

WOzFest 3316 March 2024
WOzFest 3425 May 2024
WOzFest 3527 July 2024
WOzFest 3628 September 2024
WOzFest 3723 November 2024

The changed timing for WOzFest 33 gives me a little more time to prepare for – drumroll, please – the due date of my first grandchild!

OMG WTAF GTFO!1!!!one!!

Time certainly is marching on, but 2024’s still got a few excitements in store for this old geek.

I’ve not set a theme for any of 2024’s WOzFests yet – themes are hard to maintain (especially when holding five a year!), so they’re usually pretty low key these days. If any themes pop into my head I’ll notify accordingly.

I’ve returned to Google Meet to stream/videoconference WOzFests, relying on my ACMS account – let me know if you’d like the link so you can connect up with us.

Run time is 12:00 to 22:00 local time – UTC+11 for WOzFests 33 and 37 and UTC+10 for WOzFests 34-36.

As always, I’m continuing to raise funds via Ko-Fi or PayID.

Ko-Fi allows small (or large!) donations to be made via PayPal – check out my intro post there for the lowdown, and feel free to drop anything you can in the can to help me to run WOzFest moving forward.

PayID is great for Australian donations as there are no processing fees – just reach out and I’ll send the mobile number to use.

Time flies…

I’m not getting to post here as frequently as I’d like to – real life really does get in the way. Looking for and starting a new job, having an 11yo living with us now, renovations, shopping for a new car (so many EV considerations!)…it all adds up so quickly!

That said, later this month (22 July), I will be hosting WOzFest 30! It’s hard to believe we’re up to 30+ gatherings (some minor ones between mainline ones) over the last 8+ years.

Attendee numbers have waxed and waned, but my enthusiasm has not – it’s still a lot of fun to just dedicate a day to not just my Apple ][‘s, but those of attendees (and virtual attendees – Steve in Brisbane is again simulcasting QFest on the same day) several times a year.

I recently scored four (yes, four!) europlus lids on eBay, which I’ll be allocating to my machines on the day, not sure what other work I’ll get to, but I’m sure we’ll have a ball.

We’ll also be trying to setup a video hookup with KFest 2023.

I retrospectively (is doing something on the day retrospective?) dubbed WOzFest 28 (held on 1 April) “WOzFest 28 Apple Fool’s Day“, and WOzFest 29 was held on 20 May 2023 – we had a good time mucking around with our gear, as always, and enjoyed the cider and pizza.

I had the pleasure of meeting (and hosting for a mini gathering after WOzFest 28) Ken Gagne, editor of Juiced.GS (amongst many other accolades) when he visited downunder. As my son is wont to say of good kids everywhere, “he’s a good kid”, and it really was a pleasure to shoot the breeze with him and show him some local sights.

I’m also excited that late October 2023 will see the return of Oz Kfest – the first one in 6 years.

The plan is to gather at the old Portland School of Arts just west of the Blue Mountains. The old SoA is the future site of local Apple über-enthusiast Adrian’s Apple museum. Adrian is also President of the Australian Computer Museum Society (see June 2023 Juiced.GS), which I volunteer for (as do many WOzFest attendees).

The last Oz Kfest, Oz Kfest 2017, still feels so recent in so many ways – it’s going to be great to catch up with some of my old Apple ][ friends who haven’t been able to get to WOzFests over the last few years.

But I do have to say, it won’t be the same without Tony, who attended Oz Kfests 2015 and 2017 and a few WOzFests (including WOzFest-1 in April 2015 immediately after Oz Kfest 2015). Gonna miss ya, mate.

But life relentlessly moves on, and I know Oz Kfest attendees are going to have a blast, just as Tony would want it to be.

Post-migration Twitter and Mastodon Thoughts

Note: While I recently dealt with my flight from Twitter, I’ve had some more time to think about my relative experiences, some of my motivations and changing expectations, and just where it is I feel I am heading. While originally meant as a series of Mastodon posts, it seemed to quickly outgrow that mode of expression. This topic remains, and may always remain, a work in progress for me…

I’ve been full time on Mastodon (here) since the deal closed, but had preempted that by registering soon after the deal was announced so I could start to settle in, and I fired up my own instance not long after that.

I couldn’t abide staying on Twitter (there) long term, even if the deal fell through, simply because of who the shareholders and board were choosing to approve the sale to.

Like many, I’d built a comfortable set of follows and followers on Twitter, and knew it would take a while to settle in here. I honestly resented the board for recommending the deal, although from a fiduciary standpoint I understood why they would pursue it given the tanking tech stock market.

While there are many I follow here (or am followed by here) who were on Twitter, it’s certainly not a complete overlap. But it’s certainly at least as interesting a mix!

I’m not sure if tools like Movetodon and Fedifinder will capture many more of the Twitter accounts I followed in their new home here if Twitter continues its URL ban. I may need to rely on others finding me while my Mastodon-referring Twitter account remains active, or just through mutual follows or serendipity.

As per my earlier Mastodon post, I struggle with potential rationalisations of people I followed on Twitter who it baffles me have not yet come over (or at least left Twitter).

I know for many disadvantaged folks the community there can be a literal lifeline (and I hope that can become the case here), but for those not facing those challenges, ignoring (or abetting) the cesspit that it’s becoming just seems like an especially wilful sort of ignorance to me.

And there’s certainly no point staying to try and fight the good fight – that fight is so heavily weighted in the opposition’s favour it’s no fight at all.

The “Mastodon’s too hard“ argument doesn’t cut it for me – Twitter was hard once (I can’t tell you how difficult it was for me to learn direct messages in the early days, or how to effectively use the . tagging method!), Facebook has a learning curve…in fact MySpace, Insta, Yahoo Groups – they all had learning curves!

For some, I think it’s a handy and especially wilful sort of laziness to just stay where they are. As in physical reality, inertia can be pretty powerful.

I’d originally intended on leaving my accounts there as zombie accounts to prevent my handles being overtaken, but that is seeming less and less useful as time goes by. If I’m never going back (and I am never going back), what do I care if my handles are snaffled? They weren’t even my first choices!

But I haven’t decided between just deactivating or deleting tweets then deactivating (would be interested in pros and cons). And I do want some more time for my inactive accounts to grab a few more of my contacts from there.

As it started to be the case on Twitter, I find I’m struggling to keep up with my timeline, but I think a not insignificant part of that is discussion about Twitter, so I’m going to filter relevant terms and obfuscations to improve the signal-to-Musk ratio. I don’t quite feel ready to unfollow anyone at the moment, so I’m hoping that brings things back under control. At least I’m not suffering the sort of low level anxiety I did on Twitter at not keeping up.

At least I can check in on my instance’s Federated Timeline every now and then in case I feel I’d like an update on Twitter goings on – I do still care about what’s happening over there, but I need some clearly delineated space, too.I

I very quickly settled on a strict rule that I don’t cross-post from my main account – Twitter gets nothing from me now.

And while I intended to extend this to phasing out posting to the Applesauce Fluxes Twitter account, I cut that offf early after one of the many egregious decisions Musk made (I think it was unbanning Trump, but it’s honestly all becoming a blur now).

I’ve seen so many interesting introduction posts here, not all overlapping my interests, but I’ve made an effort to boost as many as I remember to in case they overlap my followers’ interests. Now is the time for community building, and this seems a low effort contribution I can make towards that goal.

I still have to get in the habit of using more (don’t forget to !), but I think I’ve been remembering image descriptions/alt-text pretty reliably – CamelCasing hashtags and adding image descriptions are low cost (especially for what my time is worth!) ways of supporting accessibility here which I endorse wholeheartedly.

I know hashtags improve discoverability, but I’m not on a “get followed” drive, which is why I may have a lower impetus to actually utilise them more (for now).

I think that’s pretty well it at this stage. I’m enjoying Mastodon, recommend it wholeheartedly, and am still considering other fediverse usages. But for now, I really want to bed Mastodon down and feel as comfortable as I can.

P.S. Oh, and enough with the “John Mastodon” stuff already – I personally think owning that RWNJ would have been better by saying he either misread #JoanMastodon as , or, in typical RWNJ fashion, downplayed any role Joan Mastodon, John’s partner/mother/predecessor/whatever, had in establishing Mastodon the social network. And now I want to subvert the subversion, but it’s probably too late…

Flying free

Wow, what a year!

I’ll save you the boring details…well, most of them – I have something in particular I’d like to discuss today: joining The Federation.

No, not that Federation! Seriously! That Federation doesn’t even exist (yet).

I’m talking about the “federated universe”, or “Fediverse”, which has been in the news a bit recently with the shenanigans going on at Twitter (has it really only been 6 weeks since the takeover?!).

I’ve now abandoned Twitter and have hung out my shingle on Mastodon.

Note: don’t worry, I won’t provide a manifesto on why I’ve abandoned Twitter. Suffice it to say, I won’t be going back, and I’m very happy on Mastodon at this time.

For those new to the concept, the Fediverse is not a “Twitter replacement”, it’s really just all the servers online running an open protocol call “ActivityPub”, which is published/supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Similarly, Mastodon, while a microblogging platform like Twitter, is not a “drop in replacement” for Twitter. It has some very basic differences “baked in” at the design level which are beyond the scope of this post. Mastodon is also not the Fediverse – it is just a part of it.

The CliffsNotes version is that ActivityPub allows servers to talk to each other and clients to present a data model that allows sharing data across different server types.

Imagine if you could directly subscribe to/follow an Instagram account from Twitter, then like, repost, and respond to Instagram content from within your Twitter client.

For the various social networks which support ActivityPub, that sort of cross-network interaction is supported and designed into the protocol. Additionally, no single person or company (or group of people or companies) owns the Fediverse.

Me being me, I have created my own vanity Mastodon instance (server) which is the home for myself, WOzFest, and my Applesauce Fluxes image bot. I’ve actually consolidated that Mastodon server with my WordPress blog and image-posting bot code on the OCI instance I’ve discussed previously, in an attempt to simplify my life – of course, instead, it has introduced some complexities while I got things sorted, but it does make sense moving forward.

I honestly do feel better not being on Twitter and being on an open standard, non-algorithmic social network. Only about ⅓ of the accounts I followed on Twitter have migrated to Mastodon (or at least advertised the fact they’ve migrated), but I certainly feel it’s fulfilling my retro community social networking urges already.

I’m also considering the following ActivityPub servers (self-hosted or externally hosted) for my various needs:

  • OwnCast (streaming, to replace Twitch [WOzFest livestreams])
  • Write Freely (blogging, to replace WordPress [this blog])
  • Mobilizon (events, to replace Facebook Events [for WOzFest])

If I had the desire to post pictures or videos beyond the basic needs of this blog, I’d consider Pixelfed and PeerTube respectively, but I don’t foresee the need to do so in the near future.

For now, I’ll settle into Mastodon and possibly roll out the above useful (to me) instances/accounts, and hope to see many more do so as well across my many interests.

I’d love to hear about others’ experience with the Fediverse – feel free to comment here or reach out to me on the Fediverse: @europlus@europlus.zone.

Note: this blog is also available as a Fediverse account to follow: @europlus@blog.europlus.zone.

Update 8 December: manually reviewed my list of Twitter follows and I’ve found some more on Mastodon, so it’s not ¼, but ⅓ that have accounts there (out of a total of about 200).

WOzFest 23 Announcement (and 24, 25, 26, and 27!)

Wow, life sure is moving fast.

We now have frequent WOzFest attendee Dylan living with us (restarting Tween parenting in mid-late 50’s is proving…interesting), I have had to look for a job, and I found and started a new job – it’s just “Go! Go! Go!” here.

And, in two weeks I’ll have 2022’s first WOzFest, WOzFest 23 – start time is midday Sydney time (UTC+11), 2 April 2022. QFest 2022/1 will be held on the same day.

For the first time, I can actually announce the proposed schedule for all of a year’s WOzFests – after 2 April, the rest will be on the fourth Saturday of the odd months from May to November

This means the full scheduled looks like this:

WOzFest 232 April 2022
WOzFest 2428 May 2022
WOzFest 2523 July 2022
WOzFest 2624 September 2022
WOzFest 2726 November 2022

WOzFest 23 was going follow the “fourth Saturday of an odd month” scheme in March, but my son’s engagement party (!) is on 27 March, and we’re in voluntary pseudo-lockdown for the two weeks leading up to that to try and avoid being in isolation on the big day.

This means WOzFest 25 will align with KansasFest 2022, as has been the case with the July WOzFest for several years. In fact, this alignment is what I’m intending to use to determine the schedule moving forward for the 5 WOzFests I’m hoping to hold each year (which means, technically, I can announce the next year’s WOzFest schedule as soon as the next year’s KansasFest is announced).

I’ve not set a theme for any of 2022’s WOzFests yet – in the first instance, WOzFest 23 will just be a celebration of allowing attendees again into WOzFest HQ.

I will likely try to pick up some of my RetroChallenge 2021/10 projects, but may just be too caught up trying to catch up with my Apple ][ friends in person.

It’s highly unlikely there’ll be any government restrictions imposed between now and 2 April – however, if I get COVID before then and am isolating, I’ll have to postpone. There’s just no way I’m going to miss it!

Please note: even without a government stipulation on the vax status of visitors, I’ll be requiring WOzFest attendees to be double-vaxxed for the foreseeable future (don’t @ me).

WOzFest 23 or 24 will be the last WOzFest to use Google Meet to stream what I’m up to as Google is deprecating their free legacy edition I’ve been relying on – let me know if you’d like the link so you can connect up with us. I’ll be looking for an alternative as the year progresses.

I won’t be able to prepare the day before as I’ve not yet built up enough leave to do so, so for the moment I can just commit to the Saturdays being from 12:00 to 22:00 local time (if I can last that long) – UTC+11 for WOzFests 23 and 27 and UTC+10 for WOzFests 24-26.

As always, I’m continuing to raise funds via Ko-Fi. This allows small (or large!) donations to be made – check out my intro post there for the lowdown, and feel free to drop anything you can in the can to help me to run WOzFest moving forward.

New server, new look…new headaches!

Save some money, I thought.

Have some fun, I thought.

I’ll set up a free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) instance and host this blog there, and, while I’m at it, I’ll set up another instance and post to the Applesauce Fluxes Twitter image bot account from that instance, I thought.

Easy-peasy, I thought.

Well…no, I discovered.

I know if I laid out what I did I’d be here longer than it took to set up(!), and, while I understand video guides can be really annoying, it actually makes sense for me to just post this handy video representation of what happened next:

Yes, this is really what happened 😞

In the end, I went through probably eight OCI instances, four WordPress setups/migrations, two nervous breakdowns, and one case of wine (only three of those facts are true, no matter how you swap the numbers).

I’m happy to discuss at length what I did/learnt throughout this process in direct messages or e-mail (or via a Zoom if [and I {very much} doubt it] there’s enough interest), but I won’t inflict every step I took on anyone who’s paying me the respect of reading this blog – I have too much respect for you.

However, I will offer some takeaways:

  • Nothing, and I mean nothing, is easy – OK, the decision to go down this path is way too easy, but after that, a big fat nope!
  • OCI works well and is performant enough for the tasks at hand – I would definitely recommend it for technically-savvy self-hosters;
  • Don’t bother if (often) being elbow deep in a Linux CLI scares you;
  • SSH key-based login is your friend;
  • Webmin is your friend;
  • OCI Boot Volume Backups are your friend;
  • Don’t expect to get it right the first (or second [or third {or…}]) time;
  • Unicode characters in WordPress posts don’t migrate via the Duplicator plugin I used (or its MySQL code is unable to cope with them);
  • twitterImgBot has bugs (and extraneous code for most uses) – but it’s generally clear enough to work through the code;
  • Custom Permalinks vs Virtual Hosts…OMFG, WHY?!;

Why did I inflict all this on myself (other than being a techno-masochist [of the geek {not perverted} kind])?

Well, I’d been forced to migrate my G Suite legacy free edition mail hosting services, and I chose to migrate them to iCloud+, so I was out AU$10/month more for the additional iCloud+ subscription…but I was saving about AU$2/month not needing extra Google Drive storage (I have a lot of archival e-mail)…and I would have been paying about AU$6/month for my hosting next year so I thought I could eliminate that and almost break even compared to my current setup…and I had unexpected free time (due to some dodgy employment shenanigans [not on my part])…and I’d done all this before at one time or another so it was going to be smoooooth.

NARRATOR: It was notsmoooooth”.

But I’m here now, I think I’ve squashed all the WordPress issues (Permalinks work, Unicode characters updated, incompatible table-generator replaced), I have the Applesauce Fluxes Twitter image bot humming on the same OCI instance (after a few glitches, some also Unicode-related, some bug-related) and I’ve even decided to update from the old Twenty Eleven WordPress theme to something much more modern – Twenty Sixteen!

Yes, I’m a techno-masochist luddite – put it on my gravestone.

Remembering Tony Diaz

Mid-afternoon during WOzFest Twenty BOO! 👻, frequent attendee Andrew, who had dialled into the Google Meet, announced in a shocked voice he’d just discovered Tony Diaz had passed away earlier in the week.

To say Andrew, Michael, and I were bewildered is an understatement. A real jolt, not only because Tony was only 54, but also because some of us had been in communication with him about a week before his passing.

Between then and now I’ve had time-consuming work and family matters to attend to, hence the delay in this post, but I was given the opportunity to contribute to the memorial for Tony published in the current issue of Juiced.GS, which can be found as a free download on the mag’s Samples page.

I’ve said much of what I felt I needed/wanted to say in that piece, so I’ll keep this short.

Tony was anti-exclusionary, loved to share his knowledge, and revelled in being around people who were enthusiastic about retro Apples and flying, his two great loves (actually, should extend that to three to include In-N-Out!).

I feel lucky to have met and known him, and to have seen him share his rare prototypes and knowledge, including at WOzFest-1 and WOzFest S7,D2.

He’ll be sorely missed at the next Oz KFest, and I’ll miss his virtual and occasional in-person WOzFest drop-ins. Take care, mate.

RetroChallenge 2021/10 Endgame, WOzFest Twenty BOO! 👻 Report.

What a month October was – while not a complete wash out, I certainly did not complete as much of my projects as I’d like (please put that on my gravestone). And I was subsequently swamped with work and family matters through into the New Year (Happy New Year, by the way!).

I’d pretty well done nothing between my last report and WOzFest Twenty BOO! 👻, so there are no missing updates to catch up on.

But progress is progress, so let’s get the lowdown on what progress there was last weekend…

  • europlus Refurbapalooza Resurrection – No progress. Work was just too busy to get to this one. I’ll have to save this Resurrection for another day (RetroChallenge 2022/04?!).
  • Lockdown WOzFests – Completed! Well, this was a sort of a cheat one, but I did get to chat with some people, which was especially comforting at WOzFest Twenty BOO! 👻 (see below).
  • Pirated software manual scans – Incomplete. The progress I made on this project was to finish removing all the hundreds of rusty staples holding each manual together. Now it’s just sheet feed scanning to follow – a pretty simple, if lengthy (there is a 13cm pile of paper to scan!), task.
  • Applesaucing – Incomplete. I did do some imaging at WOzFest Twenty BOO! 👻 for Call-A.P.P.L.E. of some of their original disks I had in one of my multitude of boxes which Bill Martens (a virtual attendee) suggested they didn’t have copies of, so at least what progress I did make on this was pretty targeted!
  • Citizen Science – No (effective) progress. I now have a funky magnetic field display film which I can use in conjunction with flux images of disks to get a sense of how the physical layout of magnets on modern devices relates to disk damage. When I get to work on this one, there’ll be some cool graphics to include in the findings.

WOzFest Twenty BOO! 👻, held on Saturday 30 October, was meant to see me get more done than staple removal and imaging 15 or so disks.

In my defence, the day was severely marred by the news received mid-afternoon that my friend, Tony Diaz, had passed away in America earlier that week.

I’ll leave my thoughts on Tony and his passing to a separate post, but sharing grief with other enthusiasts both locally and internationally was indeed comforting.

I had elected to keep WOzFest Twenty BOO! 👻 as (almost completely) virtual-only as my wife and I are keeping ourselves in an almost-lockdown for some time to come – only Michael from RCR was in attendance as he is in similar almost-lockdown circumstances at the moment, and he had a delivery for me. Sharing a 42m² room with one person who’s pretty well not seeing others seemed OK.

That meant I got to share pizza and ciders in real life, and remembrances of Tony in person and via Google Meet.

An additional project I took on for Saturday was setting up a 21″ iMac 2012 I’d been gifted the prior week – I have two 21″ iMacs I use for Applesaucing and scanning, and with the 2012 replacing a Mid-2010 machine, I was able to have the new one and the other one (2015) both set up for High Sierra and Catalina dual booting. This allows me to use 32-bit software (iWeb and scanner software) when needed, but also have more recent OSes on them.

Between OS installs and data and app migrations, that went on for much of Saturday, but the new machine is significantly lighter than the one it replaces, which makes puttering around in WOzFest HQ easier as I move things around for optimal placement when doing work.

I’m now trying to plan for this year’s five WOzFests – I think I have a schedule sorted, and will make an announcement as soon as I can.