A closeup of a pastel pink mechanical keyboard. The Enter key has what looks like a little cream pastry on it, with berries on top. The image has been edited to have a pink tint to match the style of the website, and it has a slight rgb split glitch applied.

Now #003 - Ham Radio Course : Standard Chinese (Again) : Mages & Modems

robyn :: 22 Feb 2026 #small web #indie web #now #ham radio #language learning #chinese

Learning

I wrote a whole entire blog post on those two (which started out as a Now post and then became waaaaay more than that.)

Reading

vga256’s "Mages & Modems"

This book has been my “palate cleanser before bed” reading for a couple days now, and so far, I am really enjoying it. I would recommend it to folks who either were actively participating in the age of early home computing (the 80s, roughly speaking) for a shot of nostalgia; OR those who were not quite sentient yet in those years, and would like to know how it all started. There’s another very enjoyable layer of life in the Canadian North / life on the Canadian prairies as well, so if you have some familiarity with either of those, you’ll probably get even more out of it.

As someone who first started using home computers right at the tail end of the diskette era, just when CD-ROMs had started to become commonplace and computers were sold with slots for a CD-ROM drive, or a built-in drive outright, it was absolutely wild to me to read that a CD-ROM often had more storage capacity than the PC’s hard drive in those early days. To say nothing of type-in programs written in BASIC, which completely blew my mind.

Plus, any book that devotes pages to a discussion of The Incredible Machine and Stunts is a win in my book.