Good weekend

The weekend was great. After the radio rally I had lunch with my Dad and then headed home to get ready to head over for Vicky's house for the Mexican food fest. This was great with loads of excellent food and snacks, and loads of banter and hilarity. Highlight of the evening was Andy's announcement that he had proposed to Maz, which is wonderful news.

Sunday was spent having a retro fest with some missions in GTA III using the PS2 and the VGA converter. Did I just say the PS2 was retro? Fuck. Mind you I did buy it in 2002, eight years ago.

In the evening it was off to Ed and Kats for their Halloween get together. It was pretty good and they had really put loads of effort into decorating the house and garden. Also met their new puppy who i the cutest softest dog ever, and he knows it. Also experience Kat's really nice cakes and pumpkin soup.

Day off today, had a bit of a clearout and a bonfire, taken the bike into work to top it up with fuel and then probably the rest of today is going to be generally lazing around and relaxing.

The little Compaq I got from the radio rally is a P133 with 32mb RAM and a 2gb hard drive. I sorted the keyboard issue by reseating the connector which is a bit of a strange arrangment where the connection is made by a ribbon pressing against a series of pins and which are held together by the case. If the screws aren't tightened in the right order, the keyboard doesn't work properly.

Somewhat amazingly drivers are still available for it from the HP website for everything back to Windows 3.1, so I rebuilt it with a fresh install of Windows 95, which was a real retro blast. It might be a good platform to play with Windows NT 3.51 which was back when it still had the 3.1 interface.

Just finished rebuilding the HP 2133 with Ubuntu as it sold on Ebay. It's a tragic machine I think, it's beautifully built, looks great, has a superb screen and keyboard, but is let down by the sluggish VIA processor and chipset HP decided to use. The succeeding 2140 is very similar but has an Atom processor and a much lower resolution screen.