Last updated August 2026

This is my now page, most sites have an /about page, but a /now page lets you know whats going on now. Simple concept, easy to start, but I want to keep up with it.

August 2026 Projects & Goals

A lot has happened since April. The move went from a maybe to a thing that is actually happening, the floppy site is live and finally telling the truth, and there are two dot matrix printers in my house now. Back in April I wrote that I was building faster than I could blog about it. That has not improved.

Right now I am working on the following projects:

  • The Move: It’s official. I’m headed to Denton this week to meet with realtors and start walking through houses. This is the first time in my life I’m looking at a place and thinking about whether a room could be a real studio, and whether the house can actually handle the homelab instead of just tolerating it in a closet. Every other place I’ve lived I fit my life into whatever was already there. Spare bedroom full of storage, gear stacked wherever it landed. This time I get to plan around what I need, and honestly I’m still getting used to that. I keep catching myself looking at bedroom counts and thinking about acoustics.
  • Failing Sectors is live: The site serves off an actual 3.5 inch floppy disk. You load the page, a drive spins up, and it physically reads the page off magnetic media. Takes about a second. The internet is built to do the opposite. There are so many layers of cache sitting between the data and your browser, and all of it had to be broken for this to work. The internet wants to be fast. I slowed it down. Except for months it wasn’t really doing that. I thought I had beaten all the caching and it turns out I had only beaten four layers out of five. The last one is buried in the Linux floppy driver itself. It keeps the last track it read sitting in memory, and my file never moved, so after the very first visitor everything came out of RAM while my counter happily reported a disk read. Looked correct. Wasn’t. So now the content lives as eight identical copies scattered across the platter, and every visit reads a different one, far from the last, which forces the head to travel before it can answer you. Reads went from around 20ms to over a second. It got fifty times worse and that’s how I know it’s finally real. There’s a disk surface view where you can watch which copy got hit and how many cylinders the head had to cross to get there. Go break my disk a little: floppy.er1c.win
  • PRINTWIRE and the Okidatas: I’ve got two Microline 320s. The Turbo works and prints beautifully. The non-turbo does not, and figuring out why has turned into its own little project. I was sure it was the tractor belt, the old one came apart in my fingers, so I put new belts in and it still blows fuses. Turns out the 320 non-turbo has a protection circuit that sacrifices the fuse on purpose to save the printhead, so the fuse blowing is the symptom and not the problem. New logic board is on the way and we’ll see. Meanwhile the working printer has a job. PRINTWIRE pulls curated news and prints it to fanfold paper on a schedule. There is something about walking over and tearing off a page that a screen does not do. It ends. You read the paper and then there is no more paper.
  • Cassette as data storage: This one is brand new and I am at absolute zero. I picked up a GE 3-5160A data recorder and a Behringer UCA202 to get audio in and out of the Mac mini, which has no line input at all. Still need mono cables and I need to build a little resistive pad, because line out is about a volt and the mic jack on the recorder wants around ten millivolts, so plugging it straight in just smashes into distortion. The plan is three steps. Loop the interface back into itself and prove a text file survives a round trip with no tape involved. Then actually write to a cassette and read it back. Then keep pushing the baud rate up until the deck’s wow and flutter eats the decode. That last part is the one I actually want to know about.
  • GeoCities Mode: Click it in the sidebar. Starfield background, visitor counter, under construction badge, the rainbow rule bars, all of it. I also went back and tuned retro mode while I was in there. I tried to keep it honest instead of turning it into a joke, so there is no autoplaying MIDI and no cursor trail. I wanted it to feel like a site somebody actually kept up in 1998, not a parody of one. It is more fun than it has any right to be. Building it also finally got me to go sign up for a Neocities account. Haven’t done anything with it yet. I don’t even know what I want to put there, but it felt wrong to spend a weekend rebuilding 1998 and not have one.
  • Claude Code & Building Things: Still living in Claude Code every day. Agents, little tools, stuff for work and stuff for fun. This is the part I do not talk about enough, and it is where most of the fun is. Things are moving so fast I can barely keep up and write about it at the same time. It has never been a better time to be a computer nerd.
  • Retro Computing With Actual People: This one is new for me. I went to VCF Southwest, came home with a 486, and found out there is a whole DFW retro computing community that I did not know about. For years this was a thing I did by myself in a room. Turns out other people are doing the same thing and are happy to talk about it for four hours. Once I land in Denton I want to get involved with DCARA too and get back on the air.

Ongoing stuff:

  • Homelab Organization: Still sloppy. Still fine. The cleanup is coming with the move, whether I want it to or not