January 6th:

	Happy New Year!

It's been an interesting couple of months since my last phlog entry.  I 
won't rehash everything (see my Mastodon toots!), but the big news is my 
old Thugs co-hort Slam is back in the picture.  We'd largely gone our 
separate ways for the past decade, but we're making more of an effort to 
hang out a few times a month.

It's been productive, Slam used his electronics skill (improved since our 
last meeting) to repair my MSX2 computer and Sega Game gear handheld, and 
in return I gave him a bunch of the Amiga stuff I had in surplus.

I'm kinda glad to be rid of my extra Amiga stuff, to be honest.  Slam has 
wanted an Amiga to play with, so I gave him my spare Amiga 500, them my 
CDTV and my own boxed Amiga 500, along with a few expansions for each.  
This not only frees up space in my lab, but also decreases the amount of 
projects I have waiting unfinished.

Speaking of projects, I have three projects I want to finish this year: my 
Amiga 4000, TRS-80 Model 4P, and my retro video project.

My Amiga 4000 crapped out back in the early summer, and I still have yet 
to fix the hard drive issues.  At this point, I may cut my losses and will 
replace the 1 gigabyte IDE HD with something bigger and more reliable.  I 
may get Slam to replace the 4000's capacitors as well.

My 4P is actually almost finished.  I ordered a hi-res Grafyx card for 
improved graphics, and a FreHD sd card solution to replace my aging 
external hard drive.  The FreHD also confers autoboot capabilities, a 
real-time clock, and the ability to mount .DSK images as logical drives.  
This will greatly improve my 4P's capabilities!  Now I'll just need to 
track down a rare accelerator card for higher speeds - as it is, 
compressing files with LZH takes forever.

As for my retro video studio, it's finally going to happen!  I've finally 
picked up a power supply and cabling for my Sony DXC-1820 video camera, 
and once I'm reasonably sure the camera is in good working order, I'll 
need to test the rest of my equipment to see if it works.  Project 
Acromegaly lives!

Lastly, I created a Pixelfed account, hopefully to replace my Instagram 
account and bringing me one step closer to being fully FOSS in my social 
media life.  

So, that's my winter and foul weather project list for the year.  As one 
is nearly complete and the second one easily finished, it's really only 
the video studio that'll take time.

See you next time.