Accidentally purchased an Apple //c last week on eBay. I never expected to get one for less than $20, but figured I’d take the chance… Due to incorrect title, the thing never got another bid, so now it’s mine!

Anyway, it came with a disk containing a couple of games, but in very poor condition. The //c itself is yellowed (of course) but otherwise seems pretty good. Something I hadn’t noticed was the UK keyboard instead of US. No big deal. Running print peek(64447) reported 255, so it’s the original ROM version.

Since I had no disks, I was wondering how to create one from a PC when I found the ADTPro project on sourceforge. Turns out that since Apple II series was designed for potential cassette-based loading, there is a way to load the O/S through the serial port and then write out to disk. Fortunately, I’ve scrounged several 5-1/4″ disks from around my old stash, so now the only problem is that I’m getting an error every time I try to transfer the O/S. I just haven’t found the right speed, or my cable isn’t sufficiently shielded. But it does work. I get the ProDOS screen after transferring, although it craps out depending on what you try to do (due to the transfer error). Still, I’m on the way.

Pics later.

Well, the sugar gliders now have new homes. The boys (Max and Boba) have a blue frog, while the girls (Zoe and Munchkin) have a pink frog and a pink condo-block. Jess made these and the ‘gliders love them.

The Condo-Block

Zoe and Munchkin

Max, Boba, and The Frog

Recently, I needed to install Server 2008 R2 on my MacBook for development purposes, but I found the wireless driver doesn’t work out of the box. For anyone experiencing this, make sure you have the latest BootCamp version installed (so the drivers are present). Then, use the Server Manager, select Configuration from the left side tree, then Services. Scroll through the list until you find a service called WLAN AutoConfig. It will probably say disabled at this point, so double-click on it, set it to Automatic, then click Start. You might have to reboot, although my system enabled after a few seconds delay. At that point, Wireless networking should work much like Windows 7.

I decided to dust off the AOA-150 Netbook that I have, even though the battery no longer holds a charge due to some wrecked BIOS and a failure to know about it until the damage was already done…

PuppyLinux has always been a nice, small distro to use and I figured it would probably be nice on the Aspire One as it tends to run on nearly anything. One problem: after downloading the newest release, using unetbootin to copy it to a usb flash drive, and rebooting, I found that Puppy locked up with a message about not being able to find the system.

Further investigation revealed that a number of users were having this problem on some systems, but that at least one of the maintainers was blaming the users and Windows people for being unable to properly install the system. A quick bit of investigation revealed that the system was booting up from the flash drive but disconnecting it before the operating system came online. The quick fix?

boot: puppy pmedia=usbflash

Use the line above when initially booting and your problem just might go away. No flame wars with maintainers and users, just Puppy goodness.

Turns out this is remarkably easy to fix. Silverlight 4 apparently has issues under Netflix for users that upgrade after using Silverlight 3. Not sure if this affects users who start with Silverlight 4, but I suspect that it doesn’t. After the upgrade, Netflix is unable to write to a file that needs to be edited frequently. I found the solution at http://www.kristoferbrozio.com/2010/06/25/fix-for-netflix-error-code-n8156-6013/ but not directly in the text. Reading down through several comments, the file name is mentioned that is causing the problem. Simply rename this file .old on the end and you’ll be able to resume playback.

This file is actually located at C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataMicrosoftPlayReadymspr.hds on XP with SP3 installed, but could be at other locations for other operating systems. To see this file, you must be able to see hidden files (from Windows Explorer, select Tools -> Folder Options -> View and then click Show Hidden Files and Folders. In order to rename it, make sure all Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other browser windows are closed. From the Tools -> Folder Options -> View, uncheck Hide Extensions for Known File Types. Then if you right-click on the file and select rename, then add .old to the end of the existing filename, you will have a nice working installation again.

BTW, for those that might be interested, I use Windows XP SP3 through VirtualBox on my Linux-fied MacBook 6,1. Works fine with Netflix, although I really hate having the Windows license installed. Still, in my line of work, I have to have access to a full-blown Windows machine as well, so this is a good enough option.

Happy 4th of July!