It has been a very long time since I have written an entry
on this phlog. Looks like the last published entry was December
2022, but I haven't been publishing regularly since December
2020. I used to really like writing these, and it seemed to help
a lot with keeping my thoughts focused. I guess I kind of use
Mastodon for that type of thing nowadays, but that isn't a great
platform for more long-form thoughts.
I am writing this on my HP Vectra VL2 4/100, using a
legally-acquired secondhand copy of Textra 6. I was checking out
some of the entries I made using Textra 7 in Textra 6 and they
don't really look right, which seems strange to me because I
always made a point of saving in a raw generic .txt format. There
are a lot of other strange things that happen when I'm using this
computer too, so maybe the problem is somewhere in the hardware,
even though it passes every test I can throw at it.
If you have read my older entries, you may recall that I had
to pretty severely curtail my retro-computer activities as a
result of my old computering space developing a moisture problem.
That is still a whole thing, though I am actually working at
resolving that issue finally, after several years. I made a point
not to store anything too terribly sensitive back in that part of
the house once I knew we'd be abandoning it, but still I'm
concerned about the condition of the stuff that is back there now
that we're trying to move back in.
For the time being, I'm at my old desk, in a corner of the
living room. It's an interesting turn of events that allowed me
to get the Vectra set up here. I packed away my 'main' computer
as well as my Atari and Amiga stuff a few months ago as part of
puppy-proofing the house. The only computers still accessible in
the house were a few laptops. The puppy is now old enough to know
this corner is off-limits to her, so I decided to pull out the
Tandy 2500XL I got some years ago but never really had been able
to use. When I retrieved it from the old-computer closet though,
I discovered a roof leak had opened up directly above all of that
stuff. Thankfully it seems only my 486 tower has suffered any
real damage from that, but I had to remove everything from the
closet so I could repair the damage to the house, and that meant
piling it in the corner next to my desk.
Well, I was pretty determined to not lose any more ground in
my headspace to the slow-motion failure of my house, so I set up
the Tandy 2500XL on the desk, but discovered it needed some work
to get into bootable shape. Again I was determined not to give in
to despair so instead I plopped the Vectra on top of the Tandy
and decided to use it instead. I realized that I had enough space
under my LCD monitor's riser to fit the laptop I use for work and
a full-size keyboard, so now I have my deskspace configured with
both a reasonably-modern computer and a vintage machine both
ready to go at a moment's notice.
The guy that came to check out the roof discovered that it
really wasn't a roof leak as such, but that a ventilation shaft
from the bathroom wasn't sealed very well and some snow melt had
made its way in. No major repairs should be required, just fix
the plastering in my closet and reseal the rooftop vent pipe. I
asked him about the moisture problem in our sunroom / my old
computer space, and his response was kind of a serious facepalm
moment for me - "It looks like you just have a condensation
problem. A dehumidifier should be good enough until you can
reinsulate." We had at no point in the last however many years
even thought about trying to get rid of our moisture problem by
just getting rid of the moisture, and had convinced ourselves we
would need to rebuild half the house just to make it livable.
It is now getting quite late and I'm getting quite drowsy,
so I think I will stop my entry here. I'm hoping this time to
maybe stick with it and make entries a little bit more frequently
again. If you read this and found it interesting, please feel
free to email me or let me know via Mastodon.
