Author Archives: paulrickards

ImageWriter II Color Ribbon Fix

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If you’ve attempted to use an original color ribbon in your ImageWriter II recently, you’ve quickly found out that the pinch rollers inside the cartridge have disintegrated over time. More specifically, the foam that goes around the rollers that pull the ribbon through the cartridge have fallen apart and turned to sticky dust.

I recently got a few new NOS color ribbons for my ImageWriter II and I wanted to see if I could salvage them. Sure, brand new ribbons are being made again [MacEffects, $29], but I wanted to see if it was possible to clean these up and get them working again.

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iPod 3G: SD Card Upgrade, New Battery, and Flex Cable Repair

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My first iPod was the iPod 3G so I was a little late to the game. I’ve own several iPods after that but the iPod 3G I felt was a perfect distillation of the original iPod experience. Four separate buttons in a row and a touch wheel (nothing moves) seemed like peak iPod design to me (not necessarily UX as you’ll later see).

In this blog post, we’ll cover facts about the iPod 3G, which compact flash and SD adapters work (and which ones don’t), how I prepared my SD card for the iPod, and replacing the battery with a higher capacity one.

My original hard drive no longer works so an update to solid state memory seems like a perfect upgrade.

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Building a Classic Mac Support Server

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If you’re a classic Mac enthusiast, you know that it’s sometimes difficult to enjoy if you don’t have the right tools. Things like the choosing the right system software, the right version(s) of Stuffit Expander, and so forth. Then, getting that software to the machine can be a challenge. Floppy disks are problematic for a number of reasons. Using AppleTalk to connect your classic Mac to a modern network if challenging as support was removed years ago from MacOS X.

Luckily for us, there’s a great pre-made installation called “MacIPRpi” for Raspberry Pi. It delivers a suite of tools that are already configured and ready to use. I’ve used it for a couple of years and it’s worked great. For most folks, this will serve you well!

However, recently I’ve attempted to do certain things it couldn’t handle. This is mainly due to netatalk being updated since the image was created. This blog post contains my notes as I set out to create a newly updated version of this suite of tools from scratch.

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HP 7585B Pen Plotter Repair

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This blog post is a repair thread from social media that began on February 24, 2018.

February 24, 2018

So, this happened. My latest retro delivery. Any guesses?

It is, yet, another plotter. An HP 7585B wide format plotter with a 36” wide paper path.

Unfortunately it failed the first power on test and now it smells bad. So it’s been taken to bits to find the culprit.

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Hayes Please: Preserving Software History

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Hayes is best known for modems and for establishing the ubiquitous AT command set as the standard for all modems that followed. Their external modems, made of aluminum, fronted with jewel-like LED status lights were the top shelf of modems. As a kid, Hayes modems were a status symbol. Hayes also made other hardware products like the Chronograph, Transet, and InterBridge all with the same footprint designed to stack on one another– the “Hayes Stack” was a brief marketing campaign.

Say… please button from the Computer History Museum catalog.

While you may be familiar with Smartcom, the series of terminal programs for their Smartmodems, you may be surprised to learn that Hayes also created a database application.

What follows is my journey over several months in 2021 in researching, salvaging, repairing, and archiving an unknown piece of computing history.

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Macintosh Emulation and Printing using Mini VMac on a PocketCHIP

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Alternate title: I want to print from an emulated Mac on a pocket computer to my ImageWriter II over AppleTalk.

The PocketCHIP that wants to be a Mac. Yes, that’s a pencil sticking through the pencil holder being used as a stand. The hole on the left is for a pen (it’s round). Clever, yes?

I’ve had a PocketCHIP for several years now. I picked it up right after the Kickstarter campaign was finished sometime in 2016/2017. It’s a great little Linux-based handheld device that combines a lot in one package (touch display, keyboard, storage, battery, sound, USB port, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.). The novelty wore off and I stowed it away in a box. The company Next Thing Co. went out of business shortly thereafter in March 2018.

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Self Referential Pen Plotter Floppy Disks

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In November 2021, I posted a short video on Twitter of my Roland DXY 1150 pen plotter drawing a generative wobbly circle design on top of a 5.25″ floppy disk. A few people responded that they would buy one of the floppies. This got me thinking about the medium of a floppy disk that I was using.

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