Here’s what might be the original Motorola 68000 processor from my Amiga 1000:

I believe this might be the processor I swapped out for a 68010 in a vain early attempt at a speed upgrade (the Amiga 1000 was architected to be synchronous with PAL and NTSC video frequencies so overclocking wasn’t even a dream back in the day).

I recall severing one of the pins during some overenthusiastic and too-frequent brain transplanting, but the one you see above is bent up a bit yet doesn’t have any missing pins. It’s in better condition than my own brain’s recollection of where this processor came from, it seems.

The 68010 was mostly indistinguishable in performance from the 68000 and screwed up many of the games of the day, possibly because of their reliance on the 68000’s loop speed as a precision timing mechanism. I used to pop it in and out while I was searching for the 68010 emperor’s new clothes.

Eventually the 68000 and 68010 gave way to a 16MHz 68020 & 68881 LUCAS board, which provided excellent bang per buck in terms of performance and ram upgrades, and allowed the 68000 to be switched back in for games compatibility.

This is the “Agnus” chip from either my Amiga 2000 or someone else’s Amiga 500:

This was the chip responsible for most of the bling in typical Amiga graphics demos. It contains a hardware blitter, video coprocessor, DMA controller, and a bunch of other functionality. I can’t recall the fault, but I can recall that replacing it made life a little better.

I believe this is the Intel 8088 (actually made by Siemens) that occupied the strange little expansion box called an Amiga Sidecar:

The Amiga Sidecar was an IBM PC clone in a box that, as you can tell from the Wikimedia image, did not make the Amiga any prettier, but it did provide an inconvenient and expensive way to run PC programs and a relatively inexpensive route to hard disk capacity. If I recall correctly the PC ran independently but through “Janus” software the PC screen was accessed through a program running on the Amiga Workbench. There were also a bunch of utilities for sharing data and text between the two computers.

The processor above was supplanted by the almost perceptibly faster NEC V20 processor.

SCSI controllers and drives were insanely expensive, if technically superior, when the Amiga 1000 was ascendant. With a Sidecar you could get a relatively cheap PC hard disk controller and PC hard disks to share with the Amiga side.

All of this brings painfully to mind the startup scripts that I used to write and debug to deal with booting from a floppy, and handing off to the hard disk with subtle timing and software incompatibilities between booting with the Sidecar and LUCAS boards in different modes.

Yesterday I downloaded Season 2 of the best TV ever.

Thankfully HBO have been gradually adding seasons of The Wire to the US iTunes Music Store, and I’ve been buying them and making my way through them.

I was a bit concerned with how big a season is. 7.5GB is a good chunk of my 30GB quota. Not too big a deal but last month iTMS Daily Shows & Colbert Reports, work VPN and random tinkering put me over the 20GB mark.

I checked the Optus web-based usage meter how much of my quota I had used in the first 5 days of July: About 2.5GB.

I set off and downloaded four episodes. About 2.5GB of files. When they had finished downloading I waited a couple of hours and went back to check the Optus usage meter. It had registered 259MB of activity. Maybe it was being particularly slow to update. Anyway, I downloaded the remaining 5GB, watched two episodes and went back to check my usage: 3.8GB.

Curious.

Because I needed to put one of my Office 2007 Home licenses on the kids’ PC, I downloaded it (298MB) and checked usage again: 4.1GB and holding steady.

7.5GB of “The Wire” from iTunes cost me about 1.3GB in usage quota. 298MB of installer from Microsoft (via Digital River) cost me about 298MB of quota.

Cue Twilight Zone theme.

I’ve hunted through my contract and I can’t see anywhere where it says Apple is some Internet usage metering haven. My only explanation is that Optus can’t, or won’t, just give iPhone users free access to Apple Internet resources and they’re engineering their network to treat everyone like an iPhone user.

I can’t think of any explanation for why Optus is charging me somewhere between full rate and zero in quota. Is there something I’m missing? Secret Optus brownie points for not using BitTorrent? Most people who complain about the Optus usage meter say it over-counts their traffic.

For fans of robots, this model screams “Fire. Fire. Get down!” deafeningly and something else we can’t make out. Non! Stop! All the while swivelling its randomly illuminated plastic torso and waggling its arms up and down. He falls over due to being newly hatched from a Styrofoam incubator — and he’s obviously not yet accustomed to his roller skates.

“Could sound a beautiful music” (which we assume is a rough translation for “emits loud screaming and gunfire”) led to Dobo Arigato Mr Beat Magnum having a nasty run-in with J.

Mr 5 couldn’t hear his mother screaming at him to make the bad robot stop. He’s is missing an arm now (Mr Beat Magnum, not Mr 5), complete with dangling wires. This makes him look much cooler and we have a war story about the time he sacrificed an arm to save Mr 5 from harm.

From the outset, they adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy, gaining notoriety for various anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and unusual performances on Top of the Pops. Their most notorious performance was at the February 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance announced The KLF’s departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue.

Esoteric novels? They were the finest of their indescribable genre.

Rather than kick off a del.icio.us linkspam bot, I’ll just refer you over to the rightleft. My Google Reader shared items change far more frequently than this blog.

That widget is powered by the wake of my leveraged synergy drive.

Short review: Wubi Rocks.

I thought that if I had a tablet I’d be able to pick up any drawing package and quickly render those few boxes, circles, arrows, classes, use-cases and swimlanes with a pen in double-quick time. Surely a pen is the natural way to draw, and therefore faster and easier.

I had my eye on a Wacom tablet for a while. I had used a few casually and found them awkward. Designer friends told me that it takes some getting used to and a rigour about the way you set up and use applications. I had also worked with a UK-based engineer who used one for illustrating and annotating shared applications, presentations and documents during design collaboration conference calls. I was convinced my first impressions were wrong.

“Cool” I thought. “Let the tablet-led communication-effectiveness and R&D begin!”

After I saw that Julian had a tablet, I abandoned rational thought and cool-headed evaluation while toy envy took over. I dropped about AU$100 on a cheap Wacom-like tablet to figure out if it was a worthwhile addition to my professional and home-tinkering life.

After getting used to looking at the screen and not the tablet, and making the mental switch from mouse-relative pointing to tablet-absolute positioning seem relatively natural I worked on using a few applications.

In a week or so of trial use I came to the following conclusions:

• EverNote is way cool for doing shape-drawing, but I was still about half as fast at constructing diagrams with the tablet as using a mouse and keyboard. I also made lots of mistakes with the tablet that were kind of painful to correct. I wish more applications had EverNote’s (and the Apple Newton’s) shape recognition/fixup mode.
• Visio is kind of awkward with a mouse, and even more awkward with a pen.
• Few applications have big enough icons that can also be positioned conveniently enough for tablet use.
• Unsurprisingly, the best applications are painting programs like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Primarily it’s because with a tablet the curve you render on the tablet is the curve you see on the screen. With a mouse, you have to convince your body to implement a kind of feedback and control system to modify your physical action to produce the curve you want to render.
• Tablets are cruel and frustrating.

I gave up on the Wacom-style tablet, though I’m not sure that I gave it a fighting chance. I got to a point where my frustration was greater than the residual value of my AU$100 investment and abandoned it.

Time passed… and the opportunity to get a tablet PC at less than extortionate prices presented itself. Quite apart from the X61 being a tablet PC, it’s far more portable and usable than any laptop I’ve owned since my Mac PowerBook 170.

In summary, in the contest between tablets and tablet PCs, tablet PCs win.

Direct manipulation of screen pixels is much more approachable than separate tablet hardware. They’re more portable, convenient for more applications and they don’t get your colleagues confused about whether you’re a graphic designer or a developer.

That’s not to say tablet PCs are the perfect tool for diagramming.

Bear with me while I offer some completely un-benchmarked productivity estimates.

When it comes to drawing diagrams with perfect boxes and lines in an application like Illustrator or Visio, I’m about 20% faster with a mouse. If the requirement is for nicely typed text, then the mouse and keyboard wins by about 50% over the tablet PC.

But there’s a diagramming mode where the tablet PC shines: freehand diagrams.

If the boxes, lines and arrows don’t need to be perfect, and if the text is handwritten, and if the diagram won’t need to be maintained, then drawing freehand using OneNote or EverNote on the tablet PC is probably 50% faster than using a keyboard and mouse.

After recognising this my primary use of the pen mode on my X61 Tablet has settled into these tasks:

• Quick and dirty diagrams to capture notes or communicate information, often projected on a meeting room display or web conference, and sometimes to be later transcribed into a “proper” UML tool or Visio.
• Annotation of documents, spreadsheets and presentations with Office 2007’s pen reviews.
• Note-taking & annotation of typed notes.
• Painting.

For me personally, the dream of being able to use any illustration package more effectively with some kind of tablet is gone, yet note-taking with freehand illustrations is something I now find indispensable.

If I go back to using Bloglines from Reader and pretend Billmon is still around I’ll be blog-partying on teh Internets like it’s 2004.