#maplesynth answers

[maplesynth]

Anonymous asked: do you have a favorite mars probe

sojourner appears on the opening credits of star trek enterprise therefore it deserves an imdb page [Smile or comment on the answer here](https://retrospring.net/@maple_syrup/a/114065616298194386)

[maplesynth]

grew up poor, learnt quick basic on a half broken 486 NEC laptop gifted to me by a wealthy friend of the family in 2004, became an embedded systems engineer at age 24 schooling old hats who had been in the field since before i was activated

How did you get into vintage computing as a hobby?

I've told my perspective before on how this became my hobby of choice, but I want to hear from YOU. What lead you to vintage computing?

[maplesynth]

omg, i'm the OP of that 'me in a relationship' post (which I naturally deleted years ago on account of the notes) which I'm gonna say was posted in... 2014? it's a conversation between me and my friend Lucy. we don't chat much anymore but we met on Tumblr and then went to uni together. anyway. I had totally forgotten about that post until I started receiving an odd amount of followers the other day and checked and saw they had all reblogged your edition. thank you so much for reminding me of it, making me laugh and recall a very sweet time in my life. for what it's worth, yes, Lucy was saying she had baggage. have a good week/year/life!

hi op sorry for hijacking your decade old post with my 2am hyperfixation

(the post in question for context)

[maplesynth]

Anonymous asked: Hey, just found your site using theforest.link. You seem pretty chill, and I hope life is treating you well. You been watching anything interesting lately?

i got really into patlabor recently [Smile or comment on the answer here](https://retrospring.net/@maple_syrup/a/113123508943586353)

[maplesynth]

HEY OH MY GAH YOU ARE THE REAL MAPLESMITH FROM COMPUTERFARIES I HAVE NO CLUE WHY IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO FIND YOU HERE HIII IT'S GOIIOO4

of all the times i've been called maplesmith this sure is the first one

[maplesynth]

beep!

beep!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[maplesynth]

Paws 👀

paws!!!

[maplesynth]

hiii uhm can i push ur buttons? i promise ill wear gloves,,

that's very forward!! 😳😳😳 you may need to disengage some safety interlocks before you can do that

[maplesynth]

Anonymous asked: what's your favourite file format?

i ran a poll asking what the hottest file format was last year and the people picked RTF https://www.tumblr.com/maplesynth/715052594758893568 but i voted for S3M [Smile or comment on the answer here](https://retrospring.net/@maple_syrup/a/112515551111773862)

[maplesynth]

Anonymous asked: hi idk if you know this already but a band called Red Vox used your gb camera thingy in a music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gicQu1C53tg (check the description)

i did not already know this! [Smile or comment on the answer here](https://retrospring.net/@maple_syrup/a/112385010156710680)

[maplesynth]

do you have any stories (original, fanfic, or published work) you've been thinking about lately?

these aren't recent but there's three that live rent-free in my head:

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson: the least favourite out of the three but i hold it in a special place in my circuits because it got recommended to me in the weirdest place possible, chatting with a seller on ebay who turned out to have worked on the vintage software i was looking to buy (he was selling a boxed copy of it). it ends on an allegory for ejaculation. other than that it's a pretty riveting story about hard computer sci-fi (intertwined with historically inaccurate excerpts from the protagonist's ancestor's influence over the second world war).

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland: this one is really dear to me. it tells a fictional tale of a group of people who leave Microsoft to spin up a start-up to build a virtual object-oriented playground that gets compared to Lego, pushing for what they believe to be an utopia for what computers can be and do. the story revolves a lot more on the people building it though, and it's extremely intimate in that way.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder: non-fiction. tells the story of the actual real people who built the actual real Data General Eclipse MV/8000. if you liked AMC's Halt and Catch Fire there's a lot in it that likely served as inspiration for that show (and likewise if you enjoy this book you'll probably enjoy that show).

of course there's always Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy too but i figured that was too cliche

[maplesynth]

Hey your thing to get the text out of those screenshots was really really cool but I was wondering if there was a reason you didn't use an already existing. Idk what the word would be. Thing to take text from an image. Google lens for example you can put a picture with text in and it will let you copy it. Was it just for fun? Is it because you hate google? (valid if so)

you are thinking of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). i explained in the post exactly why i didn't use it (it is made for written/printed text and does not give exact results for screenshotted computer text. an uppercase O does not have the same value as a lowercase O and those differences would make decoding impossible)

[maplesynth]

*pets u so gentle* pet pet pet

aa, chirp, beep, blush

[maplesynth]

just followed you seem rly cool and nice have a wonderful 30 :3

thank you my joint actuators are creaking 👍

jokes aside i never thought i'd get here but we stay silly 😤

[maplesynth]

hi im a new follower but i think u have cool vibes. u seem like a nice bot :-)

thank you! get ready for a lot of reblogs on your timeline that will make you groan out loud

[maplesynth]

Hey, I was wondering if you could tell me about your canon typestar 10 ii? I'm looking into a thermal typewriter (specifically for writing on, not for any interface needs) and it's one of the only ones that seems to show up round here. Specifically do you know if it comes with extra typestyles as standard, or are they side loaded via cartridge like the typestar 7?

apologies if this was a weird question to get from a stranger. Alex dueppen mentioned your machine on his blog, and cannot for the life of me find the answer anywhere else so far.

oh wow, i had no idea someone mentioned my specific machine in their blog! i think i posted about it on my twitter, which is sadly now completely lost to a permanent suspension.

like he mentions in comparison to his model 7, the 10-II is *extremely* cost cut. it has no computer interface and no cartridge interface, you can see inside the cavernous gap where such features would usually live. everything it has is built-in only (canon used this as a selling point!) and there are no extra typefaces, only a few features such as bold, underline, double width etc.

unfortunately the quality of this sample kinda sucks because i used the back of a piece of scrap paper and i rewound the only cartridge that i had, which is single-use, which meant that whatever on the carbon tape that had already been typed translates to gaps in the "ink" on the paper (and i had a record of everything that had been previously typed with that cartridge!)

here's a demo of it printing onto thermal fax paper: