It's an itch I scratch when I come across something that seems interesting, and is priced right (usually, this means "free"). For instance: I've got a teletyp

It's an itch I scratch when I come across something that seems interesting, and is priced right (usually, this means "free"). For instance: I've got a teletype. It's not as impressive as it sounds; it's a little TI SilentWriter that prints on rolled fax paper with a thermal head and talks RS-232. I recycled it from an equipment cabinet we were replacing in 2008, where it looked like it'd been sitting there untouched -- and switched on -- for the past 20 years. It was fun getting that working correctly with a modern Linux box (no, 3-wire serial is Not Good Enough), and one of these days I'd like to put a Linux box inside of it. (I've even got some proper MAX323 chips here...somewhere...to do it "right", but I haven't decided yet what other hardware to use for it. But I'm not dead yet -- there's still time!) Or: I once scored an 8088 clone machine with two low-density 5.25" floppy drives, Hercules graphics, no hard drive or evidence that it ever had one, and 10base2 Ethernet built into the motherboard. That was a fun thing to get online with on the post-dotbomb Internet. I even had a graphical web browser working and an FTP server -- at the same time -- and I also got it booting over the network as was probably always its intent. I got to spend some quality time at the local computer shop (RIP) buying stuff from their junk bin in the back corner to get it to happen, which was a hoot. Someone gave me a trash-picked 24" G4 iMac nearly a decade ago. That was a very strange and beautiful machine, and it seemed like it would be quick enough to use in the garage for reading manuals and playing music from Spotify. It failed miserably at both tasks; it seemed like a bad combination of being too old to run current software, and too new to be interesting enough for people smarter than me to do clever things with. I spent more time on that box than I should have, since a freebie x86 closet laptop did both of those things easily, so utility won. (I remember playing games on the Atari 800 back in the day. If I had one today, I'd probably try to find a CRT TV and do that again.)