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Tag Archives: retrocomputing
Welcoming the eMachines Netbook
For approaching two years now, I’ve had a big ol’ XP tower sitting under my desk. I call it the eMachines Box, a low-end eMachines W3507 from at least 2006, if not 2007. It needs a good cleaning and a ton of upgrades (RAM and a dedicated GPU being the big two), but even if it’s not ideal right now, it’s still a lot of fun to use on the occasion I bust it out.
Of course, you can’t just stop at one XP computer, can you? Suddenly having a job and seeing some numbers pile up in my bank account made me want to indulge a little. Through the lockdowns, I bought nearly nothing and asked for nearly nothing. I’m allowed a cool purchase or two, and a bit of longing got me thinking back to the netbooks of my (younger) youth.
I’ve now acquired one of them. Here’s my deep dive into the eMachines Netbook.
How Do the Somnolians Organize Their Desktops?
We at Somnolescent love old desktops. Not the fresh, factory Windows installs all the retrocomputing channels show off, but lived-in little portraits of someone else’s workspace from long, long ago. Whether it be DeviantART submissions showing off someone’s new, custom wallpaper or classic speedpaints with desktops and MSN Messenger windows incidentally in the background, we love seeing them and we post them in our Discords all the time.
The gradual move back to our chunky old PCs got us thinking about our own desktops and how they stack up to the workspaces of old, and honestly, to each other’s. As such, have a compilation of screenshots and a whole bunch of rambles about how we get around our machines and how we keep things organized (or not). Click the images for full-sized, lossless screenshots if you wanna peek at all our icons. Continue reading
Zip Drives!
It’s time for a pretty short blog post from me, mon! Made from an outline that I’ve had sitting around since almost a YEAR ago.
It’s well-known that I own a good bit of old Apple computers at this point. But along with the large-ish collection that I own, I also own a small collection of peripherals and accessories. I think the most notable out of these would be my two Zip Drives… Continue reading
The Raven LTE flies again
A couple of years ago, I used an Alcatel Raven LTE as my main phone. It was a very cheap phone ($30 new, albeit locked to my carrier TracFone), ran Android 7 Nougat, and had an impressive 16 gigabytes of storage and 2 gigabytes of RAM; it was no slouch for the price. One day, the hard classroom floor almost got the best of it.
Even after the screen got cracked, it still worked, even touch; the trouble only came from what in the world to do with a cracked $30 Android phone. It was way too cheap for a trade-in, and I don’t think many charities or repair shops would bother with it either. And so, it sat on my shelf for several months gathering dust, because I didn’t know what to do with it. Surely, it wasn’t destined for a landfill? Continue reading
More old Macs!
Old Macs. Also known as Old Macintoshes, Vintage Macintosh Computers, et cetera. Machines of which were made in simpler times, when Apple wasn’t as much of a shitshow of a company as they are today. Compact, distinctive from PCs of the time, maybe a tad yellowed – but that’s fine. Sometimes that’s what makes them beautiful.
Alright, here I am, at it again. I didn’t think I’d be able to make another one until after summer was over, but in surprising turn of events I got three new (old) machines up-and-running! Continue reading
Tools, Toys, and You and I
Been thinking a lot about simplicity, entropy, and how we’ve come to rely on computers in the past few decades. Here’s an essay about how technology should augment us in being people and nothing more. Continue reading
Old Macs!
I still remember drooling over compact macs like the Macintosh Classic or the SE in my early years on the internet. When I rediscovered the hard drive from my first computer a little while back, I found (along with a shitton of malware) a good bit of pictures and MacOS “simulators” and multiple copies of Mini vMac.
…Which reminds me – if me from two years ago saw my collections now, he’d probably be pretty excited for the future. I forget to appreciate my belongings sometimes.
As promised, here’s my first update in a series of updates on my sizeable collection of vintage and not-so-vintage Macintosh computers. Feels good to finally get this out. Continue reading