Zerock

What's that keyboard you have there? I'd love to get something like that for my TI-99!

Not sure if this is off-topic for this forum since the OS came out this year, but I just have to share. I recently acquired an IBM ThinkPad model 365XD with its fully upgraded 40MB of RAM. I intended to use this as a development machine for some things I want to use in a classic computing club I'll be starting soon, so I wanted an OS which would support popular development tools like Git. NetBSD was one of the first things that came to mind because of its reputation for running on everything including your toaster, so I gave the documentation a look. It said you only need 4MB to run it, so I thought it was perfect and gave it a go on my Pentium III machine to test. Well, I was slightly disappointed. The documentation was apparently out of date, because the generic kernel image was a whopping 19MB, and I was losing 21MB of available memory off the top immediately on boot. This wouldn't do. Some folks on IRC recommended building a custom kernel, and this seemed like a good idea. It was then that I discovered the GENERIC_TINY kernel config which was the one written for 4MB systems. Using this, the GENERIC config, and my dmesg log, I cut the kernel image down to a mere 5MB, and the memory claimed at boot is now less than 7MB, leaving my ThinkPad with almost 34MB to play with! I could definitely squeeze more out by removing SCSI support (I left it in on the off chance I got a PCMCIA SCSI controller), but I'm quite pleased with the result. The only thing almost as fun as true classic computing is modern computing on classic hardware. :)

Oh yeah I saw that before I even started this thread. A great video.

For sure. And getting into tapes for my computer has gotten me into tapes for audio, too. I recorded my first mix tape today, and I'm having an excellent time listening to it right now.

Just tested that Eiki today. Worked like a champ first try. Thanks a million!

That's a sharp-looking recorder (pun slightly intended), but for that kind of money, you could almost just get a disk controller instead.

So how do you hook up this recorder? White cable to a 1/4" adapter then into headphones, red into mic, black into remote?

What about ones which don't use words but just have an image of headphones?

I just get worried about built-in cords. Moving them all the time, I worry the shielding will start to fail.

Is that power cable built in? Do you foresee problems with that over long-term use?

You mean how it says "ear speaker"? Is that something that should be present on all such decks?

I've had my eyes personally on a Realistic CTR-58, but I've been hearing that the Realistic-brand recorders are questionable, and the original headphones that shipped with that model were stereo, so I assume the unit emits stereo.

Would you mind saying which model Eiki?

It seems we may be getting hung up on types of tapes. I did know from the beginning that type I tapes were all that were necessary. I was more interested in brand and length than type. Remember though, the primary goal here is identifying a recorder, not a tape. So far, the advice seems to be "just get a recorder", which is about where I was to begin with.