A while ago, I trimmed back a couple of my Patreon subscriptions to focus on a few favorites; one about audio, one about comic book art, and one about the Beatles
Audio Unleashed is a podcast with Brent Butterworth and Dennis Burger. Brent is a friend of a friend, from when they worked at Dolby Labs.
Andrew’s Parlogram videos are mostly about the Beatles. Another Andrew of impeccable quality and integrity, named Sandoval, who I have met, has given a thumbs-up to Andrew’s work.
When I visited the Museum of Printing a month ago, I saw an Apple Lisa that, unfortunately, is no longer working. Here’s one that is.
Lisa was famously inspired by Steve Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC, where he saw a demonstration of the revolutionary Alto office system. The Alto project was headed by Bob Taylor, after he got the pre-Internet Arpanet going, and before he went to DEC to create the pre-Google search engine, Alta Vista.
Bob Taylor, 1932-2017
In early 1983, I was flying around to install operating systems on minicomputers for medical laboratory systems at hospitals. In addition to my hi-fi magazine habit, I was reading computer magazines. One of the best was Byte. The February issue that year featured the introduction of Apple’s Lisa.
As seen by enlarging the page at right below, PARC’s influence was acknowledged.
But it wasn’t Lisa that caught my fancy in that particular issue of Byte. It was that little word “STANDARDS” in the bottom right corner of the cover.
I read that article over and over. A year later, The RS-232 Solution, by Joe Campbell was published.
What I learned from studying that book became second nature to me. The next step was buying a portable RS-232 breakout box.
I took that thing with me everywhere on my business travels, for whenever I needed to figure out the interface pin-outs for a particular device. I’d draw the wiring diagram and add it to my collection.
Eventually, I wrote a RS-232 Wiring Guide that was distributed to all customers. It was one of those things that nobody told me to do, but it needed doing, so I did it.
My interest in data communications, later superseded by computer networking, served me very well all the way through to retirement. Everything I’ve written here about keeping my music network running is just another expression of scratching that itch.
I’m gob-smacked. Over the moon. Bloody well delighted, and any other British expression of excitement there may be. My Logitech Squeezebox Touch is back from the dead! Because, as I now know, it was never dead.
What was almost dead was its aging, 5V/3A power supply. A multimeter check with no load showed 4.95V, which is okay, but under the load of powering up the Touch it must have been sagging.
Thanks to persistent suggestions from the Lyrion enthusiast community, I bought a new power supply for seven bucks. Now, all is well again. This is just freakin’ wonderful.
I’m doing my part to encourage the departure of CEO Tan from Intel, glorious leader Trump! Yesterday, I bought a Windows 11 laptop computer with a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It will be interesting to see how well, or not, software emulation of the Intel x86_64 architecture will work for legacy applications.
First the Panasonic DVD recorder died, followed by the Logitech Squeezebox Touch audio streamer. As trouble always comes in threes, what else can go wrong? Ah, there it is. The touchpad on my Lenovo Yoga laptop computer has stopped working. Not all of the time, but mostly. As it’s either working or it isn’t, I suspect it’s due to a loose internal connection.
Last December was when I said this: “The touchpad on my Lenovo Yoga laptop is awful. I will never buy another Lenovo product again, based solely on this one deficiency.” That trouble must have been an early indication of the failure I am experiencing now. Just as the previous outages of the Touch were hinting at its inevitable final countdown.
I’m using the Lenovo now, but on my desk with a USB mouse. What to do… what to do.
R.I.P., my beloved Logitech Squeezebox Touch streaming audio player. It’s been a long journey, with more than a few technical detours that, as with this WordPress installation, I successfully navigated along the way. The failure that appeared today was fatal. The sad tale is told here:
