Slowly returning to the retrocomputing hobby after 12 14 many years, most of my collection has been in storage way longer than I anticipated in 2006.¹

That means I’ll have to treat every machine I take out of storage essentially as an unknown. That’s why I looked around on the internet for some best-practice checklist on how to proceed with “new” old computer, but couldn’t find anything.²

So here’s my attempt. I’ll extend and modify it as I take more and more machines out of storage. I welcome your feedback.

Another list I’m putting together for my own benefit (the first one is here).

Reverse Engineering Frameworks

Ghidra

Ghidra is a free, open-source software reverse engineering (SRE) suite developed by the U.S. National Security Agency. It’s primarily used to analyze compiled binaries, allowing users to disassemble, decompile, and inspect low-level code. One of its standout features is a powerful decompiler that attempts to reconstruct readable high-level code from machine instructions. Ghidra supports many processor architectures and file formats, making it useful for malware analysis, vulnerability research, and firmware inspection. It also includes scripting and collaboration features.

Nochmal auf Deutsch, damit das Thema auch von denen gefunden wird, die auf Deutsch danach suchen.

Ich schreibe gerne mit der Hand, am liebsten mit Füller auf liniertem Papier. Und weil mir Kleinigkeiten manchmal wichtig sind: am allerliebsten auf liniertem Papier mit 8mm Zeilenabstand, statt der in deutschen Schulheften üblichen 9mm.

Nun werden linierte Blöcke in Büromaterialschränken immer selterner; Laserdrucker dagegen stehen überall. Deshalb habe ich mir Druckvorlagen für liniertes, gepunktetes (statt: kariertes)¹, und vorne liniertes, hinten gepunktetes doppelseitiges A4-Papier erstellt, außerdem gepunktetes einseitiges A3 Papier für größere Zeichnungen.

I love writing by hand, preferably with a fountain pen, even though my handwriting is terrible. Unfortunately, decent notepads and notebooks seem to disappear from many office supply cupboards, so I decided to make my own notepaper templates to print wherever and whenever I need some.

Take your pick of ruled, dotted, or front-ruled-back-dotted hybrid double-sided A4 paper, or dotted single-sided A3 paper for those large drawings.

Share and Enjoy,¹ but don’t forget to attribute when you share!

While it’s quite easy to get a large number of images into an Evernote note, it’s hard work to get them all out again: you have to right-click them one by one, then “Save as…” each one.

However, Evernote does let you export the entire note ‒ and even several notes at once ‒ into one .enex file. .enex files are XML, with each image base64 encoded and neatly enclosed in a <resource> tag. So here is a perl script that will take a list of .enex files as command line arguments, and write all the images from each of them to the current folder.