Category: Tech

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.

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.

https://archive.org/details/The_RS-232_Solution_by_Joe_Campbell

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_modem

My interest in data communications, later superseded by computer networking, served me very well all the way through to retirement.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.

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:

https://forums.lyrion.org/forum/user-forums/squeezebox-touch/1780379-r-i-p-squeezebox-touch

With the expectation of a tariff price increase, on a WiiM I ordered one of these as a Touch replacement:

https://www.amazon.com/WiiM-Pro-Chromecast-Multiroom-Compatible/dp/B0BJDY6D1W/

Oh, no. Jim Wild has died. This news is hitting me hard.

Jim was a computer system integrator who I worked with frequently and closely for 25 years, from 1982 until he sold his company, JJWild, Inc., to Perot Systems in 2007. Although I didn’t work for Jim, I visited his computer lab so often that he had an employee badge made up for me, so I could come and go freely, as needed. (Perot, later acquired by DELL, wasn’t so accommodating.) Jim had a quiet way about him as he pulled resources together from multiple technology companies to make things happen. He was one of those people who never seemed to be in a hurry, and yet everything was done promptly. Jim Wild was a rarity in the business, wanting to please everyone he could and, in every instance I can think of, succeeding.

I enjoyed every one of my countless dealings with Jim, and the feeling seemed to be mutual. The last time I saw him was at a social gathering in August, 2019.