Vintage Computer Festival; $3 Magic Mouse

Magic Mouse

At the SoCal Vintage Computer Festival, stumbled acrosss an OG Magic Mouse (the one that uses AA batteries) in a box marked $5. They gave it to me for $3 since it was untested. Got it home and tried to fire it up and no green light. Dead. Figured my $3 gamble didn’t pay off... But, being me, I futzed with it and, after testing the AAs and confirming they were good, kinda shoved them into the positive terminals and ... a flicker, then a steady flashing green light. Huzzah! It works fine, I’m using it as I type this. Pro tip: For $12, BetterTouchTool allows tap-to-click on the mouse, instead of requiring a physical click every time. Between that, and the built-in scrolling gestures (horizontal scroll to go back and forth between pages), I’m wondering why I never tried one of these earlier! (Probably because they’re like $80 and I’m forever a cheapskate.)

Spent a few hours there, got to see everything on the floor and perused the consignment section. Learned how to properly solder at a workshop where we built a convention badge. Met Rick Wilkinson at the soldering lesson and followed him back to pick up an Austin Drive 2.0 DIY distortion pedal kit. (Oh, yeah, I started taking guitar lessons again.) Missed the exhibition of Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa, but it’s available online. (It’s also on YouTube, but if you rent it via Vimeo, apparently the filmmaker gets paid...) There are other presentations I want to watch that I wasn’t there for. FujiNet looks cool, but I didn’t have time to really get the demo. BlueSCSI had a presence (I think in connection with an Amiga group?), as did Rabbit Hole Computing, which had some interesting tech. I was intrigued by the PCI cards that support M.2 or SATA drives, and the CD-ROM emulator that actually supported audio out via the sound card pigtail. Neat stuff; if/when I get around to pulling my old PII/PIII systems out to see if anything still works, may set one up with solid state storage.