Last year I had discovered that the display of one of my vintage computer - the Psion S3a [1] [2] - got damaged, I’m watching for a possible replacement through second hand websites, like eBay or Subito.it. This week I found a sale of a Psion Organizer II, a very different and older model. It was not what I was searching for, but the offer was good and I decided to take it.

🇬🇧 Translation revision in progress… please take this article as is.

In a previous article, I told about the Apple II of RetrOfficina with the broken floppy drive. This is a pity, most of the software for this old computer was distributed by floppy disk, and even tape software may require specific BASIC or DOS version, loadable… by disk. Looking around for already made project, I found floppyEmu and wDrive, very nice but a bit expensive. So I decided to create my personal floppy emulator, with the aim of releasing it with an open source license.

Summer, 2014. I was at a friend’s house studying for university, when I received a call from a middle school teacher, the school I attended years ago. “We’re cleaning out the old computer equipment,” she said, “Is there anything that can be useful to you?”. I was interested to know if there was anything useful that could be donated to the local LUG (Linux User Group), so I asked for more information. “I’m not sure, but I see an Apple label here; I can’t say anything more.”, she replied.

This winter, at the GOLEM association we received old laptops to be refurbished. Since they were not brand new, the battery power was practically unusable. In a couple of cases, the batteries were so worn out that they prevented the computers from turning on. As a result, we ended up with about ten batteries to dispose of.

I don’t have much faith in “prime day”-style events, but this time, I really wanted to get myself a decent pair of Bluetooth headphones and get rid of faulty earbuds and other terrifying gadgets. So, following a friend suggestion, I bought a pair of Sony WH-CH700 headphones.

Last year, I received a request to extend the firmware of an existing project for a new product. The code, which was already quite intricate, risked becoming an incomprehensible and bug-ridden mess. So, while chatting with a friend, we agreed that “if there were threads, the code would be much more linear”. And that’s how, after a series of searches on GitHub and similar platforms, I ended up implementing a multitasking system for AVR Xmega.