Checking in from El Paso

[NathanAllan]

Hi guys, I'm still alive. I havent' been posting much, nothing much to post about in the vintage computing area. Plenty of projects but no time to do many of them. Just a few I have kind of working:

SD to IDE adapting in place of flaky CD drives for older machines,
Acquired a Itronix ruggedized laptop, trying to get a pcmcia hdd for it at some point to boot to,
Got an ISA backplane for whenever I can build a system around it,
Was given a boatload of Apple GS and ][e expansion cards and documents I still need to go through,
Acquired a Tandy labeled 8-track player just because it's cool.

Otherwise been working (currently doign early morning clean up at a local bar, hey it's something), got to the VA and they're keeping me busy some days, trying (sometimes I think in vain) to build a 3D printer.

Which brings me to another point. If anybody has two 19" dot matrix printers that similar if not identical are broken or useless, but have the carriages, to include the bar, print head and motors I'm looking for those parts.

Otherwise just checking in, I'll try to be more available if anybody needs me.

Nathan

 

[barythrin]

Good to hear you're ok and still around. You're working on a 3d printer for yourself or for the VA (think I know the answer but thought I'd check)? Is there an active robot group or hacker space in El Paso? That'd be a good place for like minded people and sometimes parts

 

[NathanAllan]

Oh, it's for me, not the VA. I can't find any hackerspaces here, the closest I *might* have found is in Las Cruces, but not sure they are still there. I was approached by some people abotu creating a hackerspace, turns out they just wanted me to finance it for them. The people are here, they're just really hard to round up into a group of keep anybody focused. Life here is pretty tedious, hard to break away from it.

I'm definitely still in the hobby of vintage computing, though, never going to leave that behind. It's just too darned interesting!