ZSA Offers A New Keyboard!

About a year ago, I woke up to an email informing me that my three Moonlander Keyboards now had the option to be mounted on new tenting platforms… so I got them as soon as I could. Just out of the blue, this was announced (that is how announcing works!).

This morning, ZSA dropped the news that they have an entirely new keyboard! Which for me, is a little stressful as it was a lot of money to get the boards I have now… if they make something new and fantastic, and even more ergonomic, what do I do?

Fortunately for me, what they have come out with is for the notebook user on-the-go, but wow. Such a cool keyboard. I would get one just to give it a go! The mounting possibilities for it alone are very interesting.

I’m going to stick with my Moonlanders for now, as it is way too soon to start throwing money at another board. The Dygma Defy is tempting, but like I said, way too soon. That one is brand-new and I’d rather wait a while, let them work out the bugs. No plans for a new keyboard of any kind anytime soon!

https://www.zsa.io/moonlander

https://www.zsa.io/voyager/

https://dygma.com

Addition To My Apple Computer Setup

Today, a good hockey buddy gave me a loaded Mac Tower, with two Apple Cinema Displays, and a really strong arms base for them. So now, when I’m working from home, I use the two big Cinema Displays for work, along with my work Powerbook (as usual), and for my home computer I have another dual display instead of the single cheap monitor I had been using. Plus, thanks to the arms that hold the new displays, my scanner is still usable, right underneath them. A great use of space!

This Big Mac (bottom right, on the floor) has so much potential, and I still have to hook it up and see what it can do. Curious to see how fast it will render my hockey video files. I might be able to use it as a RAID setup, or a server, it would be nice to not have six external hard drives like I do now (they are not in the photo here). In any case, it’s really neat to have an upgrade to my setup! My buddy told me that this thing is not a lower-end model, and has a lot of good upgrades. I don’t stay up-to-date on Mac releases anymore, so all I know is that it is a far better tower than the one I used at a job ten years ago.

It’s always fun to get a new-to-me Mac and play around with it, and if lucky, find a good use for it. Back in the day, I got a hold of a lot of different Macs, which was really neat. After a certain point, though, I just wanted things to work and didn’t really care as much about modifying things. (OSX, which came out around 2000 or so, crashes on me maybe once a year, if that, whereas OS9 used to crash all day long, and that was normal. Now I’m just used to things working!) And evolution of my work flow, maybe. That is the way things have been for a really long time now. What is also neat about my new arrangement is that I can slide my old G4 tower next to where this aluminum tower is, and fire it up easily, without having to drag a monitor out of storage and find a place to set it up. I really, really want to play SimCity 2000 again, and now I have an actual way to do it that doesn’t involve a lot of goofing around with setting things up.

I still have my Mac Quadra 605 from 1993, a G3 tower, and the G4 tower. I had to let my nine-year-of-constant-usage Mac clone go years ago because I had no room to store it, which is sad. That computer was so Frankensteined, it was amazing. What a great value, as that was my main computer for nine years running, and anything that could be upgraded in it, was. Bought that in 1995.

Currently, I’m running a 2019 Mac Mini, which, while I’d like to get an M2 Mini, it hasn’t caused me any issues whatsoever. I haven’t had to upgrade the RAM in it or anything else. My previous Mini, a 2014 model, was not as great as I didn’t buy it with enough RAM, and that one wasn’t upgradable like my 2019 Mini is. That’s the way things are these days, one has to purchase it with the right specifications on day one. 

The bad thing about this is that if one needs more RAM in the future, it’s not upgradable (I think the newer Minis are like this), but on the other side, this is less and less of a problem, and the benefit is that things run faster and better with integrated RAM. It’s nice to just buy a computer and not have to open it up to do anything with it. It’s nice to buy stuff that changes performance, but it really is better if that simply is never needed to be done, that there isn’t a need to upgrade until the inevitable day comes when one needs a whole new computer. 

But, I’m not that big of a power user so maybe I’m not the guy to ask about such things.

I got about five years out of my 2009 iMac, which my dad used after that, until about two years ago. My aunt is using it now, so it is still doing fine, at fourteen years old. 

Also, I know that these monitors are eighteen years old, but they work great. One of the Mac reviewers I follow did a big review on my 30″ Cinema Display earlier this year, talking about the benefits of this old monitor, one of which is that nobody makes one with as tall of a screen, so there is a little more real estate on it. I’m not saying that newer monitors are bad, they aren’t. And they very much don’t weigh anywhere near as much as these dinosaurs! Plus, they don’t need two or three adapters to work with a more recent machine. But they were of high quality when they were new, and they still work just as well as they ever did. (And they match my other Apple devices). Plus, I’m not a fan of Plastic Fantastic computers and monitors. Plastic is an amazing material that really does make our lives better, but Apple enlightened us as to how much better things are with the materials they tend to use, such as aluminum. Speaking of which, this tower is HEAVY.

Which is fine. But one of the reasons, or more accurately put, one of the side benefits of this tower is that it really is a work of art. Apple is just great at designing these things. That Frankenstein Mac clone I previously mentioned? It was basically PC parts and generic wherever-it-fits design. Cut my hands a lot working on it. But these Apple designed computers? They are works of art. They simplify and beautify the things they sell us. I opened a white (Plastic! This was right before Apple moved to non-plastic cases) iMac a few years ago, and the innards of that thing were amazingly laid out. Didn’t expect that. This tower, same thing. I had a tower like this at a job years ago, and I always wanted to just have it, even if just for a display piece, much less use the thing.

My G3 tower, as old as it is, all one had to do was hit a switch, and the tower would fold out into three pieces, for really easy upgrading or maintenance! The G4, just pull a handle, and the side swung down. My iMac? Use a suction cup on the glass of the display, and what do you know? It’s held on with magnets, and that’s how one accesses the innards of the thing. Just pull the glass off. Simple. And this tower, just hit a switch, and all of the inside is super-easy to work on. But again, it’s even better if one never has to open one of these things.

I will say though, that my Mini, based on videos I’ve watched on the subject, are just awful for upgrading the RAM, but that is probably by design, as Apple didn’t make that machine for upgrading, and was moving to the integrated RAM. And if you need more hard drive space, there are some really neat external solutions that also add ports and memory card slots. But the Mini isn’t meant to be opened, same as the iPhone.

At some point, I’m going to get some sort of improved desk setup, but that looks to be a really tough endeavor as I need a lot of space, and am going to want a desk that transitions from sitting to standing, but can handle all of the weight my stuff has. Maybe two standing desks? And how am I going to get my current “desks” out of this room, where will they go, and what will I do with the stuff I store in them? (What’s left of my comics collection, drawings, thousands of slides, boxes of photos, stuff like that). So, I’m going to put that off… maybe forever?

Anyway. Just my thoughts. For free! Feel free to post your setup, I always find other people’s (inferior!) setups to be interesting! 🙂

Atari 2600+

I had a nice collection of Atari 2600 games back in the day. When I really wanted a Nintendo, I had to make do with a 2600, and this was after years of having to play at friend’s houses, wishing I had my own. But I did acquire a nice library, something I lent out, and never got back. The entire system and games, just gone. I think I had my Nintendo by that point, but still.

So, a very low priority project I have on the brain is to re-aquire all of the games that I had, and after some research, I have the list.

The good thing, though, is that Retron has a nice console for playing 2600 games, and also this week, Atari has a brand-new, updated 2600 console coming out.

I’m in no hurry for either one of these, but whenever I come across games (pretty rare), I’m going to pick them up. The good thing is that 2600 games are very cheap, but video game stores don’t stock them much as they don’t sell.

In any case, here is my list:

Asteroids
Space Invaders
Defender
Defender II
Phoenix
Galaxian
Missle Command
Combat
River Raid
River Raid II
Robot Tank

Jr. Pac Man
Ms Pac Man
Pac Man
Frogger
Q-Bert
Donkey Kong
Pitfall
Pitfall II
Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Atlantis
Fathom

Riddle of the Sphinx
No Escape!
Chopper Command
Starmaster 
Demon Attack
Spider-Man
Journey Escape
Spider Fighter
Sea Quest
Laser Blast
Cosmic Arc
Demon Attack

I know that there are mini-2600 consoles with more games on them, but those are emulated, they’ll have games I don’t want, and miss games that I do want.

It would be nice if there was a new Odyssey 2 console, but unfortunately those didn’t sell enough for anybody to make a retro console update. They sell for a reasonable price on eBay, but I can’t bring myself to get one, because of the room I don’t have for it. And, I can only remember two games that I really, really liked on it, although there were probably some other games for it that I liked.

The ColecoVision had a few games I liked as well.

All of these, are just things I’ll get if the opportunity arises. I’m not sure how much I’d play them if I had them, but it sure would be nice to have them around. Especially when not that many people seem to care about these ancient consoles… go into any video game store, and you’re lucky if you can find any of them, or their cartridges.

Helene Grimaud Concert

Just bought a third-row, isle ticket to see my all-time favorite pianist, Hélène Grimaud (I celebrate her entire catalog) next month, performing the Brahms First Piano Concerto with the Colorado Symphony. I’ve never been so close to the stage, and the only other time Hélène has come to our little town that I know of, she couldn’t play due to a finger injury (She seems to play all over Europe and major cities across the United States, but not our city. I keep forgetting that Denver really isn’t that big). This was years ago. She became my favorite pianist in 2009, I have all of her albums and pre-order every new one as they come out. And if you know me at all, you know that I get 99.9% of my albums for less than two bucks apiece, so her recordings are special, and, worth it. I’m pretty excited for this, and, even better, the orchestra is also going to play the best symphony of all time, Beethoven’s Fifth! Couldn’t ask for a better concert. 

Watch a War Movie.

“When good people see evil raise its head anywhere in the world, and do nothing about it, and become indifferent to it, that’s the consequence, because evil, conquers. Evil triumphs.”

– Survivor of the holocaust, from this video.

I get asked the question of “How can you like that movie?” when I talk about something I’ve seen lately, such as “All Quiet on the Western Front”, or “1917”.

I never get my point across very well, in part because I am always confused as to why someone wouldn’t want to see these attempts to recreate the past in a way that we can today get a view of what it might have been like to go through these events.

Anybody who reads history for a decent amount of time will see that we actually don’t know that much about the past, and of course, the further back we go, the less recorded history there is. There is far more history lost to time, than there is recorded. When you see something on television about how amazing it is that the Pyramids in Egypt were built, or some other puzzling ancient accomplishment, that is just a really obvious example of how little history has been preserved.

Actual recording of history didn’t become much of a thing until the time of Henry VIII, due to logistics, social and physical. And as far as humankind is concerned, that is relatively recent.

I saw these “Man-on-the-street” interviews in Hiroshima on the anniversary of the bomb dropped there in 1945. Actual citizens of that city had no idea what the significance of that day was.

Most Americans are the same way. Zero understanding of important events, so many of them in regard to war. And a total avoidance of anything, book or film, that might remind them of such.

The most difficult book I’ve ever read, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners“, gets detailed into the reasons of how one of, if not the most advanced society in Europe at the time, could descend into such a barbaric state. To think that we, today, are automatically so much better than the Germans of the early 20th century is total hubris. It very much could happen again, and in our country. It comes at us in other ways which would hide the obvious, like it did in Germany. Which is why avoiding anything resembling something that could possibly educate us about our past, is a mistake.

How are we as a society going to avoid wars and holocausts if we don’t understand how they happen? That is what ignorance is, and in this case, completely willing ignorance. Because there’s another popcorn movie or television show to go watch. And I like those too, of course. But historical topics are just as, if not more interesting, because they are based on actual people and events that can be looked into, there is more depth to the topic of the film. So much to be learned, and most of it very interesting.

Wars aren’t just battles and horrific events. They are logistics, politics, psychology, humanity, examples of selfishness and selflessness, strategy, and on and on. To just avoid the topic because there was the obvious horror of it, is not a good thing.

There is a guy who lives near us who fought on Iwo Jima. He’s in his 90’s. I’ve talked to him a little bit, and it was fascinating. I didn’t run away because it might be about war. I have to think he’s really disappointed that most people couldn’t name ten battles, places, events, or people, related to that massive event he experienced. Something that made the world we live in today.

Go watch a war movie. Then read about it. It’s fascinating and worthwhile.