The difference between the NT555RIIs and the Motivos with regard to traction is astounding… I should have done this last year.
Traffic was pretty horrible on the way back from the tire shop (What is with Texans going 20 under the speed limit at all times?), but I did get a chance to get on it at an onramp – still have to feather the gas on launch, but with warm tires at anything above 40mph you can just mash the loud pedal now.
It’s a long weekend coming up with the 4th being a Friday and all – if the weather holds out I might go goof around in the car a bit.
Having recently replaced the fuel pumps on the Hellcat, I’m pretty sure the reduced fuel flow has been dramatically impacting the car since I bought it.
With the new fuel pumps installed, leaving any traffic light, even casually, spins the tires and creates a spectacle. And this morning I went for a short drive and twice, just going around a corner – in a rather sedate fashion even – the rear end walked out on me.
As it stands right now, the Nitto Motivo all-seasons I have on it are dangerous. They are simply too high-milage, nice ride, and low noise for 700+ ft/lbs of torque.
So when I went out for lunch this afternoon I wandered over to the local “Big Brand” tire shop and placed an order for two new Nitto NT555 RII drag radials to be put on the back end of the car tomorrow.
These new NT555 RII tires are D.O.T. compliant drag racing tires made of some rubber sorcery that makes them super sticky while also not instantly killing you if the road gets slightly damp.
They also apparently aren’t terribly noisy or harsh riding either…
Living in the future is pretty cool.
See, back in my day, we had Mickey Thompson if you wanted a race-ready tire – and everyone who hit Bandimere on the weekends drove 50-series M/T Sportsmans or Indys.
1984
But back in those days tires that were great for racing weren’t very good tires to live with; lots of road noise – but you couldn’t really hear the tires over the rattles and exhaust, and they handled like crap – but that was barely noticeable with leaf springs, drum brakes, and bench seats.
I did opt for sticking to the 275 width tires that the hellcat came with just to stay on the 9.5″ rims I currently have. That and the NT555 RIIs in 275 width were a mere $531.99 a piece…
With a little modification to the fender liners in back I can stuff 11″ rims in there (with a +22 offset) and go to 315s while staying under the fenders – but that will require new rims at about $500 each and the NT555 RIIs in 315 width are about $600 a piece.
I’ll probably do that next year when I have to replace the tires I just bought… Which is really the biggest down-side to the drag radials – they’re good for 5-6000 miles, tops. So they turn into an every spring purchase.
Gotta pay if you want to play I suppose.
The only other real down-side I can find on these tires is the warning label stuck to them that states if you move the car at anything under 20 degrees the tires might crack… Not a big deal as I don’t drive it in the winter, but still an interesting warning.
During the week I normally eat breakfast at home before I head into the office, but today I decided to splurge and get something on the way in.
I drive right past a CFA, so it’s on the way, and they make a pretty good egg, sausage, cheese bowl-thing – so that’s where I stopped.
It was a quarter to seven in the morning, so the place wasn’t busy and at the drive through window the manager meets me to talk cars for a few minutes.
He looks over the Hellcat, nods, and asks the usual questions:
Hellcat?
Yep.
Supercharged?
Yep.
How much horsepower?
About 800.
How fast is it?
I’ve done a quarter mile in 11.7 at 127mph, and 0-60 is about three and a half seconds…
After the usual questions he shows me a photo of his 2020 Shelby GT500 mustang. It looks pretty nice and he says it runs about the same in the quarter on a modded upper pulley and an E85 tune.
Anyway, this goes on until the next car pulls up behind me and he hands me my food and drink – and tells me it’s on the house and to have a nice day.
So, there ya go – if you’re looking for an excuse to buy a $70,000 race car, you can occasionally get free breakfast with it.
One of the things Colorado is infamous for is its terrible highway interchanges. The most infamous of these would be the I-25 / I-70 interchange – lovingly called “The Mousetrap”.
They rebuilt the Mousetrap in the early 90’s, and it is better now – but it still punishes tourists who haven’t planned ahead.
Back in the 80’s I drove through the ‘old’ Mousetrap fairly often – it was one of those things where you had to be in the correct lane for where you wanted to go about two miles ahead of time… Unfortunately not everyone was a local and the whole interchange was basically someone playing marbles with cars for most of the day.
It was so bad that in the 70’s Denver installed an airport-style control tower at the interchange to coordinate police and tow trucks.
It’s “Orange Season” here in Colorado, which means the surface streets all tend to be one-lane traffic jams currently. So this week I’ve been trying my luck by driving up Parker Rd. to the Parker / I-225 interchange…
And it’s a bit of a shit-show every day…
See, thanks to Cherry Creek State Park, everyone in the above area needs to get to that one spot to get on I-225. And there are only two roads to do this; Parker Rd. and Hampden Ave.
So every morning it looks a bit like this:
The people coming in from the 2-lane Hampden entrance on the right have to cross four lanes to the left in about a half-mile to go south on I-225. Meanwhile the people coming in from Parker Road at the bottom need to merge right across the 2 lanes of Hampden people trying to go left to go north on I-225.
To complicate this, if you look closely between the Hampden ramp and I-225, there are a couple of exits for the commercial park to the north…
This is where, every day, someone with out of state plates will madly charge across several lanes of 50+ mph traffic to take that Vaughn Road exit…
Something like this:
This morning I was the lucky recipient of one of these out of state people cutting right a few inches in front of my bumper.
No turn signal and no hesitation – just yanked it right.
Apparently there’s a reason the hellcat has 15.7″ 6-pot Brembo brakes on it – and it’s to stop the 4400 pound monster before it kills some idiot Californian in a beat up econobox.
I screeched to a halt, the cars behind me went three different directions, and I laid on the horn – to get flipped off for being in her way.
I probably need to just stick to the surface streets despite the cone-zones everywhere… There are fewer out-of-state people away from the highways.
Friday afternoon, here at the office, my CFO came in and asked for a ride to pick up his Camaro from the shop – he had the front suspension redone, a motor mount replaced, and other small mechanical stuff done over at ProTech.
I looked over the work and they seem to have done a good job and the cost was pretty fair.
He hopped in his Camaro and I followed him back to his place to give him a ride back to the office, and the trip resulted in a lot of turned heads and thumbs up – so that was fun.
Saturday morning I ran down to the King Soopers in Parker for groceries, and then in the afternoon I drove back down to Parker to have dinner at Hickory House – which is still the best BBQ in the area.
Parker is a great place to drive around because it’s the last bastion of Colorado’s front-range car culture. So of an evening you’ll see everything from current-year Italian supercars to 1930’s street rods running around.
Sunday I spent in my home office, sitting in the air conditioning, doing 3D model and texture work in Second Life.
A friend wanted me to theme the ground level of their two sims, which I wrapped up Sunday evening. And I think I might shift my avatar from an anthropomorphic dragon to a feral dragon just for fun – so I picked up a few parts for this and will work on it over the week as I have time.
And that’s the update from the weekend. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was fun / relaxing and that makes it worth it.
I’m in the office today and staging a few Windows laptops for employee use. It takes me about an hour to set up a Windows laptop these days, mostly because of Microsoft and shovelware bloat…
The image above is what you’re faced with when setting up an HP laptop currently… Whee! And I have to manually delete all of it to ensure the system is clean for testing…
Microsoft on the other hand is really, really interested in your personal information, and getting a machine set up for testing with a local account gets harder with each update.
Most of the time you can shift-f10 into a command prompt at the setup networking screen, type in oobe\bypassnro, and wait for the reboot to get a tiny little “I don’t have Internet” link that will let you set up a local account. But Microsoft is getting rid of that too… The only recourse at that point will be to roll my own OS installers and then go dig around in the manufacturer’s website for drivers.
When I bring this up most people will point out that Apple does the same sort of thing… But not really.
See, Microsoft is a software company and therefore has to do a lot of incremental sales and tap as many small revenue streams as possible… For example, Windows 11 Home costs $139 and Microsoft still injects ads into it and data-mines you as a revenue stream… And some people think the insistence on a “free” Microsoft account is innocent…
With a Microsoft account what you get is another vector for Microsoft to sell software and services to you, and acquire data from you to sell… If Microsoft gives you an email address, it’s purely to sell you Office 365 and tell you about how great Edge is because Edge is another sales / data-mining vector. If Microsoft gives you cloud storage, it’s just to rifle through your data for anything they can resell – when OneDrive feels like working at any rate. And the device settings sharing with a Microsoft account simply tells Microsoft what hardware you have and lets them unify your advertising IDs across platforms…
Apple on the other hand is a hardware company, so their interest is in selling you more hardware for large sums of money. And the Apple Account exists to get people locked into the ecosystem… There isn’t really a need for an incremental advertising / data-mining revenue stream if Apple can just sell people a new $1000 phone every year because all of their photos are in iCloud and their apps are tied to their Apple Account.
And annoying users with ads and data-mining is counter productive to that “sell more hardware” goal – Apple wants you happy with the ecosystem, so injecting a McAfee installer into the start menu at random is just not something Apple will do.
As mentioned previously, I generally lean towards Apple computers for my personal computing needs… But I work with Windows professionally and I’m also a bit of a gamer – so I’ve kind of oscillated between the two platforms for decades now.
For example, three years ago I built myself a no-holds-barred bleeding-edge Windows rig based on the systems I build for work…
The above is a Supermicro X12SPL-F mainboard, Intel Xeon Gold 6312U processor, 128G of DDR4-3200, and a Zotac RTX 3090. And in 2022 this thing was the 1200 watt ultimate beast of a computer.
The problem with the machine was three-fold: it consumed about 400 watts at idle and welding current at full tilt, was essentially a space-heater and would raise the temp in my office to unbearable levels which prompted running the central air more often – so even more electrical cost, and Windows 10 was nearing end-of-life and Windows 11 is a total travesty…
I mean, I dislike Win11 so much that in 2023 I spent about a month turning Server 2022 into a workstation OS just to get around the Win10 expiry issue… And while I got it to work – mostly – the effort required to hack drivers and whatnot prompted me to sell the Xeon-based machine above and just go buy an M2 Ultra Mac Studio.
Before the fedora crowd chimes in – I use a lot of Linux professionally as well, and I rather like Linux – in the same way someone who has to haul 80,000 pounds of bananas likes a semi truck… Linux is a great workhorse, but I’d rather not use it as my daily driver.
Anyway, the M2 Ultra was an exceptional machine that outperformed the Xeon computer above in pretty much every way, while using a max of 270 watts… So, when the M3 Ultra was announced I upgraded on the spot.
That there is my current rig. An M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 96GB of ram and 1TB of storage.
It’s sitting on a K&N V-Rod motorcycle air filter with an adapter I had 3D printed. This does a great job of keeping dust out of the machine without impeding airflow.
The monitor is the 27″ Apple Studio display which is amazing as well. And behind the air filter is a Thunderbolt 4 M.2 adapter holding my 4TB storage drive.
The Liebert UPS supplies backup power to the computer and monitor, and currently shows 71 minutes of runtime because the computer and monitor use so little power…
And yes, my desktop audio comes from a pair of floor-standing B&W DM640i speakers powered by an Onkyo TX-SR353. So the Mac sounds pretty good too.
Something I do to keep track of miles and maintenance over time is snap a photo of the odometer every thousand miles to timestamp it.
I bought the car with 24,800 miles on 31 MAY 2024 – 383 days ago. So I’m averaging 10.96 miles a day – and anything over 10 miles a day on average is officially a ‘daily driver’.
Overall miles average since new though (delivered to the dealership on 22 NOV 2016) is 9.2 miles per day – which is part of why I bought it.
See, buying a car literally built to be abused is typically a very bad idea because, well, it’s been abused…
But my Hellcat had tons of detailed maintenance records and the first owner leased it – and only put 12,000 miles on it in the four years he had it before trading it in. The second owner was the shop manager at the AutoNation where I bought it, and he too only put about 12,000 miles on it over four years.
Meanwhile I’ve put about 4000 miles on it in a single year – and it sat in the garage all winter. But I also tend to drive my cars instead of look at them.
Since I bought it I’ve installed the best automotive alarm system money can buy, put in a new battery, had the radio / head unit replaced, flushed and filled the diff, put in new plugs, replaced the drive belts, rotated the tires and put two new Nitto Motivos on the back, replaced the front rotors, pads, and brake fluid, had an alignment done, did an oil/filter change, and replaced the fuel pumps…
Mostly maintenance stuff and some upgrades… I think I’ve got about $5000 in the car at this point not counting gas and insurance.
The reward for this expense and effort happens almost daily…
See, when you drive a murdered out Challenger Hellcat, you’re a bit like the old gunfighter in a western and every punk kid with a pistol wants to take a shot.
Last year most of the challenges came in the form of ricers – tuned nitrous sucking imports with ‘bees in a can’ exhaust, too much camber, and not enough torque to be taken seriously.
They are plenty fast, but they aren’t purpose-built drag cars, and the Hellcat is still undefeated against the turbo cars I’ve come across in both digs and roll races.
This year it’s mostly been EVs wanting a shot at the dinosaur, and while a performance EV (especially high end Teslas) are stupidly quick, I can still hold my own because I tend to have the better driver mod.
I mean, I’ve been building and racing cars since the mid 80’s – and old age and treachery will always win out over youth and enthusiasm…
This morning on the way into the office saw another speed contest – this one came in the form of a new BMW M4 Competition…
I was minding my own business, just tooling along the divided three-lane road on the way to the office. I’d just left the light in the right lane and made a bit of noise to get to my usual 50 in the 45 – as you do – and put a dozen car lengths between the pack and myself. And in the mirror I spotted the battleship gray M4 with that comically oversized grill desperately weaving around cars to catch up and prove something…
As he was being a danger to himself and others I analyzed the situation; no traffic in front of me for about a half mile on a straight, dry, divided road with good visibility. The Hellcat was showing 170 degrees in the transmission and my intake air and oil temps were satisfactory – so I down-shifted into my 50mph power band and waited for him to start his mad charge as he got around the final car in front of him.
He came flying up to do a high speed pass to show me up, and as he got to my door I nailed it… The Hellcat exploded forward, pulling the front wheels up and the supercharger screaming its warning to the half mile around us – and the M4 instantly appeared in the rear view mirror.
I went from 50 to three digits in about three seconds, and let off at three times the posted limit at about 5 seconds – which put probably 3 car lengths between us…
The M4 then flew past me and high-tailed it into the traffic up ahead, and started being a danger to himself and others again.
This is the ‘driver mod’ that lets the old gunslinger keep pace with the punk kids… And was a pretty typical drive to work all things considered.
I really should get a ‘gap cam’ to record the beatdowns, but then again I probably shouldn’t be recording myself doing this sort of stuff… I’m too old for jail time.
My CFO came into the office today and asked if I could drive him over to the dealership to pick up his Lotus Emira – and being as my Hellcat is still in the shop the only option was to ride with him in his Boxster, and then drive his Boxster back to his place.
Not exactly a hardship.
Now, granted, his Boxster is dramatically underpowered for what I’m used to – it’s about 200hp compared to my Hellcat’s roughly 800 – but it’s a different kind of car. It’s more about cruising around with the top down and enjoying the moment than ripping a launchpad out of the nearest available tarmac…
In the long list of cars I’ve owned, one was a white 1972 Porsche 914 2.0 – which had about 100hp but only weighed a smidge over 2000 pounds. It was a very similar beast to the Boxster, and I had a nice wayback moment when driving the Boxster back to his place.
Anyway, back to the Emira…
Taking delivery of his Emira with my Hellcat in the background
He took delivery of his Emira back in August, after waiting like two years for the thing, and last week the first service interval came due. So it’s been in the shop for a week now – not that this phases my CFO much as he has like seven cars.
The Emira had a slew of firmware updates that needed done, and there’s the typical Lotus issues with sticky reverse gear, electrical foibles, and excessive wind noise… The dealership apparently fixed all of the little things under warranty and did the oil/filter change which was only $250.
I know readers might be justifiably alarmed at that cost, but it really isn’t that bad considering what it takes to get the car apart to do it… The Emira isn’t your granddad’s F-150, and it takes a solid 30 minutes just to get the underbody panels off and back on again.
The Hellcat has a similar oil change cost, but for other reasons – such as needing to drain the oil coolers as well as the pan, and the thing holds 7 quarts of oil…
As for the Hellcat – it’s still in the shop.
They did determine the issue was one of the fuel pumps and my extended warranty is covering the cost. Right now they’re waiting for a new Hellcat spec fuel pump to show up, and then they need to do the work – so hopefully I’ll have the car back by the end of the week.
To say the world has changed a bit since I was younger is a dramatic understatement. And I like to ponder the tides of change on slow, quiet weekends like this one…
One example of the past versus present is airports.
Prior to 9-11 you could hang out at the gate with whomever was on the flight, or meet them there when picking them up. So it was normal to arrive, walk up the boarding ramp from the plane, and have someone waiting right there at the gate for you. And tearful goodbyes at the gate were just as common.
And all of those eateries and whatnot on the other side of security used to have families sharing a meal before jetting off to parts unknown.
I spent a lot of summers with my grandparents growing up, so I had a lot of solo flight time between Colorado and Ohio when I was little. Being a solo 8-12 year old had some perks – like always getting invited up to the flight deck where the pilot and co-pilot would show off the controls and answer my million-and-one questions. Every flight I also got a pair of gold-plated plastic wings pinned to my lapel from some very nice stewardess, as well as a bag of airline swag.
Airports were also a lot less stressful back then and I fondly remember the old “Stapleton” airport in Denver, which seemed like a mall with airplanes to me. And plane flight was more of an event back in the day; people were generally all dressed up for the trip and everywhere parents whispered to children to be on their best behavior.
Notable flights out of Stapleton for me include:
1986 – departure to boot camp in Great Lakes Illinois
1987 – departure to groton sub-base from Christmas leave
1991 – departure to Galveston for work in the gulf
1992 – departure to Istanbul for work off the coast of Mersin
Stapleton was closed in 1995 where everything moved to DIA.
I’ve flown out of DIA a handful of times – the most notable being when I left Colorado in 1997 to restart my life in D.C. – but since 2004 I’ve basically sworn off airlines and just drive everywhere… It’s cheaper and less stressful.
I need to take the Hellcat into the shop this morning to have them look at one of the fuel pumps. The car keeps tossing a P062A error, which is fuel circuit A out of spec, and the pumps Dodge used in 15-18 are notoriously crap – so it’s probably that.
Fortunately I bought the ultra top-end extended warranty when I bought the car, so I should only be $200 out of pocket… $200 because the work will be out of network.
See, I bought the car at AutoNation – from their repair shop manager as it was his personal car and he was just selling it through the dealership because it was easy. When I bought it he was very specific about not bringing it to AutoNation for work as the car was beyond their ability… So, I take it to a shop I’ve been using for the last few decades, who also happen to have SRT techs.
And that’s why it’s $200 instead of free.
In other car related news – why are BMW drivers like this?
It’s not even an M-Series or something special – it’s just your bog-standard X3 SUV which simply means you paid too much for the same SUV everyone else drives… New York plates though – that might have something to do with it…
And we’ve been having some construction going on in the building where my office is – construction must pay well these days…
Owning something like a Hellcat is kinda spendy – just because you can afford to spend $80,000 on a car doesn’t mean you can afford it…
For example, I’m over 55, no accidents or anything in the last few decades, have had a long string of performance oriented cars, take yearly offensive/defensive driving courses to keep my skills up to snuff, and have been with my insurance company since Reagan was in office – and I still pay about $300 a month for insurance on the Hellcat.
Mostly because it’s literally a guided missile…
Other costs include things like the $300 a piece for the 305 width tires, and you get to replace the rears yearly. It uses expensive fluids – the thing has two full cooling systems filled with $50 / bottle coolant, has about a half mile of oil cooler piping so it holds 7 quarts of high-end Pennzoil synthetic, and the drivetrain lubricants are made with unicorn tears or something… The lube in the LSD is almost $200 for a fill. And the gas milage is pretty bad most of the time; I think I’m averaging about 16MPG, and it’ll only really run right on Shell V-Power Nitro+ which is always about a buck a gallon more expensive than everything else.
Hell, it uses sixteen $50 spark plugs…
I’ve been dealing with this sort of thing for so long it doesn’t phase me much, but I wonder how the 20-something drywall guy is making ends meet with that Trackhawk.
I’ve been into Apple Computers since Apple Computers was invented, and accordingly I have quite a collection of hardware from bygone days.
Back in 6th grade (1980) there were four Apple IIs in the ‘computing lab’ located in a repurposed storeroom off of the library, and I spent a ton of time on them… This was where I started using a hex-editor to crack copies of friend’s games so that I could play the game when they weren’t around.
I personally never owned an Apple II of any flavor though, as they were inordinately expensive even back then. My father had an OSI C1P and then a TRS-80 Model 1 that I messed with in the late 70’s, and my first personal computer – as in it was mine – was a Sinclair ZX-81 that I built from a $99 kit in 1981. I then moved to a Commodore VIC-20 in ’82 and an Atari 800XL in ’84 – but at school it was all Apple IIs and I used the crap out of them…
My first exposure to the Macintosh line was in late 1986 – one of the guys in the barracks at General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) had a brand new Macintosh Plus his parents had bought for him right before he enlisted, and he wasn’t into it. So I picked it up off of him for a couple hundred bucks even though it was a $2600 computer at the time – which is $7500 in today’s money.
That Mac Plus is there on the left in the above photo, along with the “Mac Saver” fan on the top and the HD20 external drive I added later… 20 megabytes – it can hold almost three of the above JPGs – and it was amazing at the time.
That Mac Plus still runs, almost 40 years later. I need to re-cap the analog board as the monitor image is getting a little wobbly, but other than that it still runs MacPaint and Zork flawlessly.
In 1988 I moved to an Amiga 500 to get access to better color graphics, and the Mac Plus was relegated to the closet.
I was still using the Amiga 500 in late 1993 when I picked up the PowerBook 165C – the grey laptop just to the right of the Mac Plus. The 165C came out in early ’93 and I really wanted one to run this new “PhotoShop” application on, but they were around $4300 (about $9500 in 2025). By Christmas ’93 though I was able to score a used one for a grand – and it too still runs, though the battery has long since given up the ghost and is unobtanium these days.
The next Mac chronologically is the Power Mac 8100 sitting under the 165C. I picked this up in late 1995 for a song… I was working at a local used computer store called Action Computers as one half of the repair department, and the 8100 came in for repair. It was a $9,000 machine that needed about $700 in parts as I recall, and they never came back for it – so I got it for parts cost.
1996 – from some mid-90’s digital camera
The above image, taken in March of 1996, shows the 8100 sitting between the machines for my BBS ‘Silicon Psychosis’ and under the ISDN modem and router that was my connection to the raw, unfiltered Internet. The 8100 was my workstation, where I cruised the nascent Internet, hung out in IRC and a few MUCKs, and did digital image stuff in PhotoShop. It also ran my website using HTTP server software called WebSTAR.
By the time the 8100 was retired it was maxed out in ram (264MB), HPV video with 4MB ram, 2GB HD, and a CD Burner. I recently replaced the HD with a SCSI to SD card adapter, but the rest of the machine is as it was back then – and it still works…
The next Mac is the PowerBook G3 (black laptop in the center). I picked up a PowerBook G3 “Wallstreet” in 1998, after I moved to Virginia in 1997, for use in my work in D.C. I eventually traded the “Wallstreet” for a “Pismo” in 2000. The Pismo is a 500Mhz G3 with a gig of ram and the “Airport” card – it was a hotrod back in the early aughts… Also still functions apart from the unobtanium battery, and I use it to dial into a few local BBSs on occasion.
Next is the 17″ 1.33Ghz PowerBook G4 (silver laptop in the center). This was a laptop I was given when I returned to Virginia in 2003 for an ill-fated teaching job. The tech school fell through but I got to keep the laptop. I did a full restoration of this machine with new old stock parts five or so years ago, so it’s pretty much as-new – even has a working battery! I pull this out and get it onto the Internet on occasion just for giggles.
From here I had an assortment of “Intel Macs” that weren’t really worth hanging on to and they generally got horse-traded for newer more powerful models… Things like iMacs and MacBooks and Mac minis…
Eventually, in 2010, I traded my way into that MacPro 5,1 (the big silver machine on the right). This was originally the bottom-spec single-CPU Xeon W3530 machine, but is now a fully maxed out dual-CPU 12-core 3.46Ghz Xeon machine with 128GB of ram, a Radeon RX580 video card, a 1TB M.2 PCIe adapter, 4TB of SATA storage, USB3, etc., etc. I used this machine for work as recently as last year as with some effort it’ll still run current MacOS versions. It’s a beast, and it’s a shame Apple went away from this sort of machine.
Lastly is the 2013 Mac Pro “Trashcan” that I picked up in 2015. This one is the dual D700 video card version that I upgraded the CPU, ram, and storage on. I used this as my daily driver until last year when it was replaced with an M2 Ultra Mac Studio – which was recently replaced with a 2025 M3 Ultra Mac Studio that I am using to write this post.
Also in that first picture, for the eagle-eyed viewer, are three of my original iPhones – iPhone 2G, iPhone 4, and iPhone 5. My iPhone 3, being made of plastic, didn’t fare so well and I no longer have it. The 4th device is my old iPod. I had a first-gen iPod when those came out, but it got lost in a move…
On top of the Mac Plus is the last modem I ever bought – a USRobotics Courier V.Everything from the mid 90’s. That runs through a Grandstream HT802 to the Internet and allows me to simulate the days of analog when dialing up BBSs.
In the upper right is a very special Commodore 64 – that one has a mini-ITX board with an Intel i9-9880H, 4GB GTX1650, 16GB ram, and a 1TB M.2 stuffed into it. It’s a perfectly reasonable modern computer that is also a perfect recreation of the original Commodore 64.
To the right of the cheese grater Mac Pro is a small silver box – this is a modern recreation of an Amiga 500 – a Fauxmiga if you will… It has all of the Amiga’s custom logic (Paula, Denise, Agnes) in FPGA, but all of the actual CPU functions and processing happen on a new old-stock DIP-style Motorola 68000… So it’s an actual Amiga 500, just with modern VGA, PS2 keyboard and mouse, and SD card storage.
Next to the Fauxmiga is an Atari 400 “mini” and joystick that I use to play 80’s video games on occasion.
And lastly you can just see my old MiniDisc player from the late 90’s under the Fauxmiga and 400 mini. I still take this on my walks and listen to minidiscs that I recorded back in the day.
