Publishing slowly...

Back in 2004, my main synthesizer, a wonderful Yamaha SY99, suffered from floppy drive failure. I got a replacement drive from the UK Yamaha Service Department, and because installing it was an interesting challenge, I wrote it up and made it available via my web-site. You can find it here, if you are interested.

Since then, others who have had similar floppy drive failures have come to me, and I've been meaning to update the pages with all the information that I've learned since 2004. It turns out that the floppy drives seem to fail after just over ten years because they use a belt drive system instead of the direct drive that you would find in more recent floppy drives. Of course, floppy drives have been largely replaced by those tiny sticks that have many names: Flash drives, USB drives...

So I've just spent a day writing up my latest discoveries about the SY99s floppy drive... And it seemed like it was happening very slowly. My major problem was the tables that I had made in a spreadsheet, showing the pins on the connectors and their function. Converting this to HTML so that I could put it onto a web-page didn't seem to be possible, so I did it by hand - slowly and painstakingly. If you look at the site referenced above, then you will find my hand-crafted tables there, in all their glory.

It then struck me that whilst there may be a clever way of converting from a spreadsheet table to HTML, if I don't know how to do it, then my ONLY recourse is to do it by hand. Perhaps I'm finding it difficult because I know how to code HTML by hand, and have never used any of the higher-level, more-abstracted ways of producing web-sites. The world is increasingly filled with people who know how to do things, and other people who do not know how to do those things, and I'm not sure that the polarisation, or the figures, are moving in the right direction. I think that increasingly fewer people know how, and that increasingly fewer people would even know how to find out.

I find this very worrying.

Even worse, I started out trying to reduce the entropy of the universe by documenting something useful to shar with others, and ended up at this gloomy place!