Had to dive into the storage space in the attic the other day to retrieve some comics pages that need to be rescanned (color masters had apparently never been copied off the machine they were made on, which was finally junked a decade ago). Digging through those moving boxes that were just as we left them after our move in 2010 is an experience I will normally go to great lengths to avoid but while I considered just redrawing these pages, there simply isn't time for that.
I did retrieve a few extra items from a box full of electronics though:
2 Firewire male-male cables
1 set of computer speakers from way back when. Not hi-fi but better than built-in laptop speakers
2 spindles of assorted CD/DVD-ROMS, many still empty
1 Wacom Intuos tablet from the late 1990s, presumed still functional.
The Wacom tablet will help me test pen support on PPC linux and if it works well I'll be one step closer to having a retro production system in the office.
I was able to do All The Things with the iBook back in 2005 when it was still an OS X Tiger system. After I put the new SSD in, I will probably dual-boot Tiger and Ubuntu Mate 16.04, but for now I want to see How Many Of The Things I can do with Lubuntu 16.04 alone.
If the answer turns out to be 'All The Things Except Web Browsing'... that may not be all bad actually. #productivity
(which means that this Christmas, I'm going to lean heavily on 'no, we're doing Christmas dinner outside the house or not at all'. I need to protect my art time and the working conditions that help me be productive much more vigilantly.)
There were other factors that caused my art productivity to nosedive: the February slump at my day job didn't happen at all this year, my wife's health and mobility issues also didn't help, plus I got very ill during my vacation in the early spring. But having my tools in the right place is one thing I can actually influence, so my tools will stay in the right place from now on.
However, lest I give the wrong impression I should add right away that most of the time 'the office' at home is not where the work happens. It turns out I use my time a lot more effectlivey when I move my (actual, not quite as retro) production system, a 2012 iMac, into the dining room.
The day I moved that system back upstairs so that we could seat everyone for Christmas dinner marked the start of my productivity going to shit again after doing quite all right for several months.