Despite the raging COVID-19 pandemic, I moved back to my university.
These past couple of weeks have been stressful… moving back, unpacking everything, going to classes and work. Thankfully, things are finally starting to calm down.
Recently, I posted a separate update on the Sedona. In case you missed it, the Sedona is going to be down for a while as a major component bent. I also tried to do another tubeless setup and had some luck, but in the end I reverted back to tubes.
One thing I neglected to talk about in the recent “Bike Check” post was the Pinnacle, mostly because nothing has happened with the Pinnacle. Over the summer I did some look-overs of the Pinnacle and thought about the potential of restoring it – something that I’ve thought about for years. However, a shortage of money, time and desire is going to delay such a restoration for at least a few more years. The Pinnacle needs a lot of work and TLC to get it road-worthy again: new wheels, tires/tubes, seat, chain, handlebar grip tape, etc. My priority is currently to keep the Sedona going.

Lately one of my daily drivers – the Lenovo ThinkPad W541 – has been running low on storage. Depending on what I’m doing, it gets really low. In fact, the lowest it got was 298 MB free while working in Audacity. Guess I’m going to have to purge some unwanted files to free up some space.

As for the 1991 Macintosh Classic, unfortunately nothing new has happened. I located a guy in Minnesota who was willing to recap the analog board but COVID-19 has made this not a very good time to repair the Classic. So it’s probably going to be at least a couple more months before I can restore the Classic to operation.
In addition to not being able to play around with it and actually play games on period-correct hardware, I was really looking forward to producing a video celebrating the Classic’s 30th anniversary. The Macintosh Classic was introduced alongside the Macintosh LC and IIsi at an Apple event on October 15, 1990. My plan was to give a tour of the machine, talk about the Classic, and demonstrate some software. Unfortunately, it appears those plans have to be scrapped – or at least the demonstration portion. Perhaps I can produce a video on May 2, 2021 – which will be my particular machine’s 30th birthday.

I do plan on getting the Classic fixed as soon as I can. I’m hoping all the analog board needs is a good cleaning and recap. I’ve read that the electrolyte which leaks out of the caps over the years can cause some strange issues, some of which the machine has been exhibiting. Worst case scenario the analog board is toast and needs to be replaced – which hopefully isn’t the case.
I even lugged out the IBM ThinkPad T42 to do some playing. I wanted to see if Windows95 would run on the T42, but unfortunately it no longer wants to connect to the university WiFi. (It detects the WiFi networks, but will not authenticate.) So I settled for converting some MIDI files in OpenMPT and playing some 3D Pinball.
