For those who are interested, check out the interview with Stewart on the Floppy Days podcast https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-78-interview-with-stewart-chefeit-computer-chronicles

Pay attention to what drivers are available for each OS. In particular, it can be difficult to find DOS sound drivers that work well with something that new. You can install Windows 98 and use it to boot to DOS as needed although I have personally found 98’s DOS mode configuration to be awkward to use. In these situations, I tend to use system commander to dual boot with a small DOS 6.22 partition: https://winworldpc.com/product/system-commander/2000-5x

I have found that the new adapters you can buy are very unreliable. I ended up buying a 20 y/o USB 2.0 dock on eBay and that seems to work with every drive I throw at it.

Surprised there is no mention of the eXoDOS collection here. It has thousands of DOS games that run through a launcher with tuned emulation settings for each title.

Personally, I like playing with real hardware but this is probably the best option right now for a jukebox style experience on a modern PC.

Plenty of BBSs around: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

Or for an old school web experience there is neocities: https://neocities.org/

Dude loves a speech synthesiser (who doesn’t?)

I built a C64 laptop using one of these. Here it is on a train ride connecting to a BBS.

It has USB 1.1, which is very slow. You can run software from a hard drive if you have a PS2 fat. It is also possible to run from a network share or a PS2 memory card to SD card adapter. Some methods are too slow to play FMV without skipping.

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Ragebutt’s advice is good RE: maintenance. I would take the back off, make sure it’s discharged then clean around the anode cap and in general make sure there is not excessive dust/soot that could form a path for electrical discharge. Clean the anode with alcohol, apply a little dialectric grease to the cup and put everything back together. There is a decent chance that will help, just make sure not to wipe off the black paint on the tube - this is called “aquadag” and it is important to the operation of the monitor.

This monitor has no OSD or button to trigger a degauss. The coil will be wired directly to AC via a posistor, so it’s entirely passive and will only trigger again when the monitor cools down.

The distortion is caused by the high voltage arcing over, which droops and interrupts beam deflection for a moment. I wouldn’t want to run it this way for very long, because it can damage the flyback transformer over time (although the flyback could itself be arcing anyway).

If you are looking for a retrocomputing meetup near you, check out retro.directory (created by our very own Rob Smith)

I disagree with this. New old stock floppies that have been stored properly are becoming increasingly difficult to find, especially 5.25" media. There are a lot of hobbyists out there that would love to get a hold of them for use with their retro systems. You should sell them on, not throw them away.

Network effects mean you can’t switch without losing all those communities.

When I left Reddit, I left behind the only active mental health community on the internet supporting those with my specific condition. I had the choice to leave, sure, but what did it cost me?

“Which paint is better: eggshell white or oyster white?”

I enjoyed the basic formula of past Bethesda games and Starfield delivered more of the same plus some cool extras like being able to disable and board/capture spaceships. I don’t understand the sentiment that’s it’s outdated. Modern AAA games are not dramatically different in design to games from 10 years ago in my experience.

All I want is more non-flat themes.

As an IT technician in a school, I have to repair Chromebooks of many different models on a regular basis, mostly from Dell and Lenovo. I haven’t seen one that I would consider durable yet. All of them use butterfly switches that break when a child rips off the keycap, meaning the whole keyboard has to be replaced. It is also common for the brass inserts into which the hinges are screwed to pop out of the plastic on most models due to rough handling. We also had one Lenovo model where almost every device we put into service developed a no power issue due to the same ceramic capacitor going short. Of course, the display panels are just normal panels that crack when struck - that is probably the most common damage we have to deal with.

This is nothing new. I was taught about analysing bias etc in news sources during “citizenship” classes 20+ years ago. Before that, it was called PSHE if I remember correctly.

I have fond memories of Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and the whole suite of KDE apps that were around back then. It’s nice to see that Amarok got a new release recently after such a long time.