Blues on a bagpipe
File this under something you don’t see every day – Gunhild Carling rocks a bagpipe in a way that no Scotsman ever experienced.
GreaseWeazle
Have you wanted to read and write data off your old 5.25″ floppy disks with a modern computer? Or how about reading/writing floppies for Apple II, Amiga, ST, or a host of other systems? Or maybe even hooking up a 8″ floppy? It is possible!
There are solutions out there, but they can easily run $100 or more. I, however, picked up the GreaseWeazle and read some of my old 5.25″ disks. Best yet, it only cost $31 Canadian and is one of the more capable solutions. You can supposedly even use your old DOS floppy drive to read/write images for other platforms.
If you’re interested in seeing it at work on some unusual formats, this fellow gives a walkthrough of using Greaseweazle to read 3″ Amstrad disks. Pretty darn cool.
Items you’ll need:
- GreaseWeazle by Decromancer – the plug-in USB board that makes it all possible. Plug in 3.5″, 5.25″ and 8″ drives and read/write the flux data for hordes of different formats.
- Floppy drive – any 5.25″, 3.5″ or 8″ floppy that uses the Shugart interface. This is almost all old PC drives. Even better, GreaseWeazle can use these older DOS drives to read and write Apple, Amiga, ST, and a host of other formats.
- Floppy disk cable – CablesOnline (ebay store) has a universal floppy cable Item # FF-002 for $9.99
- IEC.net also has a selection of floppy cables, and can custom-make floppy cables for you.
- Power supply with Molex connectors for the floppy drive. Either using a PC power supply with a Molex connector, or a stand-alone power supply with Molex connector
- USB A to B cable (commonly known as a “USB printer cable”) to connect the GreaseWeazle to your PC
Setup:
Your floppy drive won’t show up in a command prompt like they did back in the old DOS days or like modern USB plug-in 3.5″ drives. Instead, you have to load and write whole images to the drive in one go. This means you need to work with floppy disk images.
- Set up your physical floppy drive to be used with GreaseWeazle.
- Attach the power cable to a power supply
- Attach the data cable to the floppy drive and the GreaseWeazle
- Follow the instructions on GreaseWeazle setup and software setup guide.
- Plug in the GreaseWeazle to your computer’s USB port
- Install and run GreaseWeazle GUI to format a disk, read a disk image, write a disk image, etc. Again, this only works on whole disk images. You can’t browse at a command prompt or read/write individual files/directories.
Optional but helpful tools:
- WinImage is a great tool for creating and converting disk image formats.
- Use the HxCFloppyEmulator to examine and covert the raw disk images to anything you need.
Learn more:
Tech Tangents talks about how preservationists use tools like GreaseWeasle to back up disks.
Resource Links:
- Order your GreaseWeazle
- GreaseWeazle V4 setup: https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki/V4-setup
- GreaseWeazle V4 software setup: https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki/Software-Installation
- GreaseWeazle GUI – very handy if you don’t want to use the command line
- HxCFloppyEmulator – amazing tool for examining and extracting files you read from the raw flux files you read from disks using GreaseWeazle.
- Look under the USB HxC Floppy Emulator and download the ‘HxCFloppyEmulator software’ (https://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_drive_emulator/HxCFloppyEmulator_soft.zip)
- WinImage – great tool for creating/extracting/editing floppy .img files. https://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm
USB-C iPhone
Apple is going to have to change the charger for its iPhones in the EU starting fall 2024. The European Parliament overwhelming passed a single charging port rule that will require all phones to use USB-C for chargers. Maybe now we can bring some sanity to Apple’s less than stellar cables.
If you can’t wait that long, perhaps you can do what Restore Technique does – modify his iPhone to use USB-C. Definitely NOT for the faint of heart as it involves some serious micro-surgery skills. Not only does it charge, but it also works with iTunes. Amazing work.
This video sort of puts a solid nail in any complaints Apple might claim that changing the port isn’t possible or would present serious issues.
McBroken
Why is the ice cream machine always broken at McDonalds? Isn’t there a way to find out if it’s broke before I go? Yes – rashiq came up with McBroken to tell you.
Projection mapping your dinner
Le Petit Chef brings projection mapping to your plate! I first ran into projection mapped dinners when I was at Inamo in London. One of the best aspects of Inamo wasn’t so much the projection mapping on the plate that showed their different dishes – but the fact you could order more food, drink refills, and even hail a cab and see a livestream of the front door cam to know when it arrived – all from the interface and without having to call over a waiter. Just make your selection on the simple table interface and a runner would bring you whatever you wanted. THAT was a fabulous dining experience.
AI illistrated book get unprecedented copyright
Earlier this year, the US Copyright Office ruled against awarding copyrights to AI systems themselves. “The courts have been consistent in finding that non-human expression is ineligible for copyright protection,” the Office reasoned in February, citing previous cases involving attempts to copyright based on “divine inspiration,” as well as that time someone tried to secure copyright protection for a monkey selfie.
In the face of this, New York-based artist Kris Kashtanova claims to be the first known artist to receive a US copyright registration for Zayra of the Dawn, a graphic novel featuring latent diffusion AI-assisted artwork.
“I was open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page. It wasn’t altered in any other way. Just the way you saw it here,” Kashtanova wrote in an announcement posted to Instagram last week. “I tried to make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI. I registered it as visual arts work. My certificate is in the mail and I got the number and a confirmation today that it was approved.” Kashtanova also noted that they first got the idea to show that artists “do own copyright when we make something using AI” from a “friend lawyer.”
The industry starts taking sides
On September 21, Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the company would no longer accept AI-generative artwork into its catalogue, citing concerns over copyright legality and privacy. “There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery”
Or embrace it!
Even more interesting is that there is now a whole website for comic books created by generated AI artwork.
Links:
How to Talk Minnesotan – or Midwestern
Learn the finer points of non-commital conversational style, body language, eating, hot dish, offers, and the long goodbye. Applies pretty much equally to anywhere in the Midwest like where I grew up
Of course, there’s also Charlie Berens who lets you know nothing has changed over the decades
Hard Drive Clicker
Retro computing enthusiast Matthias Werner has shared his design for a device that recreates the old school clicking operational noise of a hard disk drive (HDD).
The HDD Clicker v0.2 is said to be both nostalgic and useful. Nostalgic for the ambience, and useful for providing audible feedback in sync with data access and transfers on silent solid state devices.
If you want one, they’re available here for 25€
The Line
Saudi Arabia is planning to construct a mirrored building that will be 656 feet wide, 1,640 feet tall, and 105 miles long. It’s called The Line. It will house 9 million people in a eco-friendly paradise. It’s part of a $500 billion Saudi building project called NEOM being plaanned in the country’s Tabuk Province. It’s become a controversial initiative from the start because around 20,000 people will be forced to relocate by its construction – along with the unknown environmental impact of such a structure.
It’s remains to be seen if it will even get off the ground or will end up like many of the other utopian-like efforts that have gone south in Dubai.
Dall-E results
Michael Green did some experiments with Dall-E2 – and it’s pretty mind blowing what it can produce. He tests it out by asking it to reproduce various kinds of photographs in different artists styles.
These are just two of the images that are completely generated by AI:
