Taking AppleTalk on the road: a mobile GlobalTalk retrospective

Earlier this year I had lots of fun participating in GlobalTalk, a fun collaborative experiment where a bunch of folks interconnected their home AppleTalk networks into one global network that allowed their classic Macs and other devices to communicate across vast distances. While AppleTalk is normally tied to a physical location (contemporary uses were usually limited to offices or schools), I was eager to experiment with using it on the go.

Mitigating the CrowdStrike outage without BitLocker keys + how to get into Windows Recovery mode via SecureBoot toggling

The organization I work for thankfully wasn’t affected by the CrowdStrike incident, but I ended up assisting a subcontractor who works at our site since their IT team was of course swamped all day with calls. This article covers two issues I ran into: Getting into Recovery mode via SecureBoot toggling This particular machine that was affected by the faulty CrowdStrike driver kept BSOD-ing, but it wouldn’t actually get to

My GlobalTalk Setup: Apple Internet Router configuration

It’s the middle of MARCHintosh! Thanks to the unexpected GlobalTalk craze, I spent the first two weeks of March having a great time participating in the world’s first global AppleTalk network. The first few days were wild — I’ve already documented my setup to interconnect a mini vMac emulator to my SE/30 running the Apple Internet Router to connect to the rest of GlobalTalk, but as of March 16 this

Using TashTalk with Mini vMac to participate in #GlobalTalk from your emulated Mac

It’s MARCHintosh! The month when the vintage computing community celebrates the classic Macintosh experience. This MARCHintosh started with a bang – seemingly overnight, the #GlobalTalk network took over Mastodon and soon many of us were networking each other’s disparate home AppleTalk networks into a #GlobalTalk network across continents. We’re still in the middle of the #GlobalTalk craze and I expect to write more about my experience further down the line,

There and back again: a Macintosh 512K saga

Note: this post is based on a Mastodon thread. Last summer I got a Macintosh 512K at the VCF Swap Meet in Wall, NJ. I’ve been wanting to get a Fat Mac for a while, ever since I read Andy Hertzfeld’s book Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. Well, technically I wanted a Mac 128K, but I had no interest in paying

Yugoslav adventure games

Note: this article was originally written for the Club de Aventuras AD magazine. You can read it in Spanish translation starting at page 68 of Issue 60 of CAAD. Home computing in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, was quite interesting in the 1980s. The geopolitically unique position of this socialist country during the Cold War produced a unique situation in terms of access to computers and technology. Yugoslavia

TRS-80 Model I restoration

Introduction In early June I went to the VCF Swap Meet in Wall, NJ and picked up a supposedly functional TRS-80 Model I. I haven’t been very interested in TRS machines (other than owning a CoCo 2 for a moment) until I watched a video by Dejan Ristanović, one of the creators of the Galaksija project, who shared some less known facts about the history of the Galaksija and its

Sourcing a replacement iPaq 3600-series battery

A few months ago I got a Compaq iPaq H3650, the same model that I had almost twenty years ago. This device left a strong impression on me, so even though I had (unfortunately) long ago gotten rid of my original one with a broken screen, I wanted to remember what these strange proto-smartphone devices were like. I got an iPaq on eBay for $10 (Pocket PCs are apparently not