colin@colino.net

After successfully adding support for the Kodak DC-50 camera in Quicktake for Apple II, I investigated what else was there that had vastly overblown “System requirements”.

In the Quicktake for Apple II project, where we butcher low-quality 90’s era VGA images into even lower quality 256×192 grayscale pictures then dither them to 512×192, it is rather important that the images are correctly contrasted to make the end result…

I have just released a new Quicktake for Apple II version, and it is a quite large upgrade!

Earlier today, I shared a challenge.

Three years I got Quicktake 150’s thumbnail decoding in, and it’s “basically good enough” that one can recognize an image in the 80*60 output: But as you can see, I think it’s wrong.

Problem with this Quicktake 150 was that it didn’t respond to the computer.

The CISD is a custom-made serial switchbox that allows me to do everything I want to do with my Apple II’s serial ports, without having to plug and unplug cables all the time.

Last year, I upgraded my serial setup: before, I had to plug and unplug serial connectors from the back of the Apple //c each time I wanted to change the hardware plugged to it: A Raspberry Pi, plugged to both ports, to browse Mastodon, listen to music wi…

So I’ve been looking for Mac serial cables for this project.

A few weeks ago, I had the surprise to get an email from PCBWay about the BurgerDisk project.

General availability Since the end of the Kickstarter, a few people who missed it contacted me to get a device.

While I’m still waiting on the next step of the Kickstarter (finalizing the pledges and addresses should take them another week), I’ve kept myself busy and imagined variants on the BurgerDisk device.

This post originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of Juiced.GS, and has been expanded with more details.

This table summarizes the different tests I made of the BurgerDisk device on various computers.

(For those who missed it, BurgerDisk is a device I am making, a daisy-chainable Smartport hard drive for the Apple II.

Following the release of BurgerDisk, I have been asked what it would take to handle daisy-chaining in Fujinet.

The SPIISD is one of the rare possibilities to add mass storage to a non-slotted Apple //c.

In the first part of this article, I focused on the algorithm itself, removing parts I wouldn’t use (like color), making it simpler, less loopy, etc.

When I set out to write a program that would allow me to do basic digital photography on the Apple II, I decided I would do it with the Quicktake cameras.

This is mostly a documentation of my setup for when I will need to remember what I did.

Usually clocked at 1MHz, with no hardware support for multiplication or division, and limited support for bit shifting, it is often important to take a step back from an algorithm in order to make it do the same thing, hundreds of times faster.

The cc65 cross-compiler is my compiler of choice for my Apple II projects.

A little technical post to document something that was apparently not obvious to everybody.

Dear lovers of old computers, it is with great pleasure that I feel I can push the beta versions of my Apple II port of the famous Shufflepuck Cafe.

1.

I am currently in the process of porting (or rather, reimplementing from scratch) an old Macintosh game to the Apple II, and I wanted it to have acceptable sound.

But please do, at some point.

I have tested a new thing and recorded my screen while I tried something I wanted to do: port a Fujinet program to my own serial proxy protocol.

Capitalism is the reason we can’t have nice things1, and in the latest incarnation of it, Youtube’s war on privacy-protecting frontends means that mere months after it became possible, it became impossible again to easily watch Youtube videos on an Apple…

Following my previous successes in streaming audio to an Apple II, then video to an Apple II, I combined both to stream audio and video at the same time.

(For the impatient : Example videos at end of post) I wanted to try and stream video to my Apple //c since a while, but so far, I was unable to do so because I hadn’t found a good way.

Connecting The Quicktake 100 and 150 are connected via serial.

After investigating what my options were to help me trace and understand the execution of my Apple 2 programs, which I write using cc65 and test using MAME, I could not find anything that would help me understand easily where I was in the code, where I was

It’s been a while (seven months, apparently) since I started using the #pragma(code-name, “LC”) feature of cc65 to get a few extra kilobytes of RAM for my retrocomputing programs, and when I did, I noticed random crashes from time to time.

It is quite hard to use anything on the web with a vintage computer.

Apparently powering on the Apple //c in December re-ignited a spark of “let’s do cool things on a forty-years old piece of hardware”, and I set out to a new goal: be able to access (parts of) the Internet on that 1MHz, 9″ green-phosphor display thing.

Well, running on the Apple //c.

Pour le jour 3 de l’Advent of Code 2022, je me suis un peu amusé et j’ai fait l’algo en Basic AppleSoft sur mon Apple //c !

I’ve noticed that my articles did not have their carefully chosen thumbnail images displayed when shared on Mastodon and investigated a bit on that.

Since a few weeks, I’ve done a lot of home automation, and especially of consumption tracking in the house (gas, electricity, water).

I’ve built an elliptical table to replace the current one which was a bit wonky, hard to clean up and too dark in my taste.

I made a second RuneAudio player this weekend..

Because it took me a while to figure out how to do it cleanly, here’s my solution for adding multiple users with multiple public SSH keys on a server, using Ansible: in login-vars.yml users: - login: "user1" pass_hash: "$6$G1Q........"

This week-end I remembered that when I got my new phone, it counted my steps on its own, and I looked up why.

After having seen the latest Star Wars movie, I, like numerous other geeks, fell in awe with the BB-8 droid, and, like numerous other geeks, I wanted to try and build one.

Here’s how to disassemble the fuser on an HP LaserJet P3005 printer, and replace the gear kit (which is a part that fails often, reference CB414-67923).

A few monthes ago, a user made us a €5 donation for Claws Mail’s Windows version.

First of all, happy new year to everybody !

After testing various complicated solutions to embed a QR Code into iReport Jasper reports, the easiest way I’ve found is this: 1) Put ZXing’s Core and JavaSE jars in the classpath (using Tools/Options/Classpath if compiling locally, or the classpath prop…

(English version – see also French version) ESA’s ATV-4 Albert Einstein was successfully launched yesterday and is now orbiting Earth for nine days prior to its automated rendez-vous with the International Space Station.