Another busy work day. I'm not sure if it seems more hectic
than usual because of how slow we were leading up to the holiday,
or if it was the 4-day holiday weekend. Perhaps we really are
just more busy than usual? Whatever the case, I came home from
work, sat on the couch after dinner and apparently fell asleep
for like an hour without even realizing it. The early onset
darkness this time of year really messes with me, though to be
honest I should really start going to bed earlier again anyway -
I have kind of fallen into the habit of working on <6 hours of
sleep, which is... not great.
I think I have settled on some solutions for the issues that
have been plaguing me re: a quality DOS word processor and a way
to upload files directly to sdf from here. The word processor
isn't FOSS or freeware, which are my usual gotos for DOS
utilities, but it isn't a bloated ugly mess like WordPerfect 6
either(which comes on 10 disks! Ten! That's more than Windows For
Workgroups 3.11!). There was a small company based out of U of M
called Ann Arbor Software that released a pretty lightweight word
processor called 'Textra' back in the 80s and into the early 90s.
Admittedly I was drawn to it by the name initially, but upon
checking it out, it seemed to be everything I was looking for - a
relatively lightweight word processor that has some more advanced
options available if I were to choose to use them.
I appropriated a copy of Textra 7, the final version which
was released in '94 (and only needed two 1.44mb 3.5" floppies)
and have been playing around with it this evening. So far I'm
quite happy with it! Unfortunately, my solution for direct
uploading to sdf was not quite as elegant - I know it is frowned
upon by the sysadmins, but short of kludging something together
out of a Raspberry Pi or sneakernet-ing a floppy to my Linux Mint
machine, the only good way for getting files from here to the
internet seems to be ftp. Not sftp, just normal, old, unsecured
ftp. It works, and that's what matters for the moment. In future,
I probably will look at setting up something using a Pi as a go-
between. Should be fun - maybe I can even figure out something so
I can start using the Arachne browser again instead of just Lynx,
haha.
My next project I think is going to be attempting to restore
the old Digital Mavica I have in my closet to working condition -
maybe turn this into a photo phlog, hahaha. That may have to wait
a bit though, with the snow setting in I see myself being pretty
busy between finishing the winterization of the house and the car
in the near future. For now though, I think I'm going to start a
very important project immediately: trying to get more than six
hours of sleep tonight, haha.
