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Another Extended BASIC game for the Ti-99/4 line; Star Merchant. Back in the 80's there were several variations of this game where you traded merchandise between star systems. The game dates back to at least August 1981 when Creative Computing published the game but probably goes back even further to the mainframe era. I seem to remember playing something like this on the TI mini-frame in school. Simple game, you buy merchandise in one star port the 'Warp' to another star port and try sell it at a profit. The version I am posting is a modification of a Atari 8-bit version that Creative Computing sold through a 3rd party. I again use Harry Wilhelm wonderful 40 column routine as I used with the Civil War program. Only difference is I'm using the inverse utility in T40 to livin' up the text. Translating from the Atari 8-bit was fairly straight forward for this program (not like the Mille Borne which took and almost total rewrite). The two things that were the big difference was, of course, string usage and the fact that with the Atari you can have a variable line number in a ON GOTO and ON GOSUB statement (can't with the TI ExBASIC). Included is a copy of the manual for T40, the auto LOAD .dsk of the game and a copy of the original text from Creative Computing Aug, 1981 where the game was printed. Enjoy, HLO star-mech.zip

Recently I acquired an old Bondi Blue iMac G3 with a PowerPC @266Mhz and 64MB RAM. I upgraded the RAM to 128MB and installed Debian GNU/Linux on it. Runs like a charm. I intend to use it remotely to test big-endian compilations, so I wanted the built-in monitor to be turned off. After searching the net extensively, I was unable to find a solution. setterm -blank 1 does not work (no APM support on a G3), xdpms doesn't work either (no DPMS) and pmset is only available under Mac OS X. I did find a solution though. If you configure Xorg wrongly and select a resolution the monitor can't cope with, it turns itself off. I'd rather not have X installed, but well, a dark server closet is worth the extra few megabytes of disk space And if I need the console because I locked myself out remotely or something, CTRL-ALT-F1 brings back the framebuffer console and turns on the monitor again.