Monthly Archives: April 2016

25th annual “Last” Chicago CoCoFEST!

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Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer fans, take note. This weekend (April 23-24, 2016), the Glenside Color Computer Club will be hosting the 25th annual “Last” Chicago CoCoFEST! in Lombard, Illinois (near Chicago).

I attended the first “Last” CoCoFEST! there back in 1992, flying up from Lufkin, Texas with a CoCo friend of mine, Mark. That 1992 event was presented by Dave Myers of CoCoPro, and Glenside was the host club for it. Dave had gotten in to the CoCo convention scene in 1990 when he held his first CoCoFest in Atlanta, Georgia, with the Atlanta Computer Society as the host club there.

These CoCoFests were being started just as the long-running RainbowFests were winding down. Rainbow Magazine was the premier Color Computer publication, starting out as a photocopied newsletter and growing to a 300+ page monthly periodical. Rainbow had years where they held several events across America, but their last event was in Chicago in 1991.

Dave first stepped in to offer an event “down South” in 1990. Rainbow had held only one southern event in Ft. Worth, Texas. When the final RainbowFest was held, Dave decided to continue the tradition with a new event in its place.

Though CoCoPro would exit the convention scene after that 1992 event, the CoCo clubs continued. Atlanta Computer Society kept CoCoFests going there through 1995. The Glenside CoCo Club has continued to host events ever since the original CoCoPro event in 1992 (and they were host club for the RainbowFests before that). But this year is the last one. Again.

Dave chose the “Last” (in quotes) moniker for his first Chicago-area event knowing it could be the final event, and it become the “2nd annual ‘Last'” event the following year when Glenside took over.

Then the 3rd … and 4th … and 5th…

It’s hard to believe that was 25 years ago!

I last got to visit the CoCoFEST! in 2013. I would like to at least day trip to this one. Several long-time CoCo folks from the past are showing up (including our own monk, Brother Jeremy, and our Canadian pal L. Curtis Boyle). I have had several generous offers to provide lodging if I wanted to stay overnight, and even offers to fund my gas. These are some of the people I have called friends longer than just about anyone else I still have in my life.

If you can make it, and I am there, be sure to say hi. If I am not there, be sure to take photos and let me know what I missed.

Find out more: http://glensideccc.com/

Floating point is hard.

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In my day job, I am an embedded C programmer. Our devices work with flow measurement and use a bunch of floating point math for accumulators and such. In the past three years, I have learned some interesting things about floating point numbers and how they cannot represent certain values. I was therefore amused to see an easy example of the floating point problem when I was paying for postage last night:

floating_point

I wonder how much it deducted from my PayPal account . . .

Another Apple difference…

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I was shocked when I found an item from Apple that appeared to be in one of those plastic blister packs. I absolutely hate these things — it seems I have to tear the cardboard apart to get the memory card or whatever out of the package, forever ruining it. For anything pricy or significant, I like to keep the original packaging around so I can still have it when I sell the item later on e-Bay ;-)

Why would Apple do this?

Is Apple really using a "blister pack" style package that you have to tear apart to get the product out?

Is Apple really using a “blister pack” style package that you have to tear apart to get the product out?

Before I began to tear in to the cardboard, I flipped it over to see what I was up against. It appears Apple had a better way. On the back was a hole to get the item out with a piece of plastic covering it. There was a small tab on one end which made it easy to pull…

Flipping the package over reveals Apple included an access hole, covered in a small sticker with a tab to use to pull it off.

Flipping the package over reveals Apple included an access hole, covered in a small sticker with a tab to use to pull it off.

The plastic cover could be rolled back easily, or removed completely.

The tab can be pulled out of the way, or removed completely, and even stuck back if you want to put the item back for safe keeping. Nice.

The tab can be pulled out of the way, or removed completely, and even stuck back if you want to put the item back for safe keeping. Nice.

Someone at Apple knew the frustration with this, and designed a better way to do it. I was impressed by this.

Anyone who has experienced a high end restaurant, custom tailored suit, or luxury car already knows there are fine details you get at the higher end. I, myself, don’t really care. They never seem to be worth the extra money for the extra “goodness” you get. But with Apple, the bits of polish seem to be everywhere – from the boxes the products come in, to the interesting ways they design their booklets or even cable straps.

I don’t know what impressed me about this silly little plastic tab and made me want to write this article, but … it did.