I'm currently sitting in KCI enjoying the complimentary WiFi while I wait to board my first flight for the trip back home after attending Kansasfest 2007.

I have really enjoyed my time here with friends, old and new. Talking with people in person about our favourite machine is something that I have not done very much of in the last few years and I have missed it. I certainly tried to make up for it over the previous five days, however I'm feeling sad about leaving because I don't know when I'll be coming back.

This year there were a lot of people who had knowledge of and a strong interest in hardware. Michael Mahon's R&D to develop nadanet is inspiring. James Littlejohn's upcoming projects are very interesting. Ed Eastman's ability to desolder cache ram chips, spread a .3 package into a .6 package and install them was also impressive.

I went to Kfest this year with a few goals. I've met almost all of them.

The main one was to release Marinetti 3.0, however, I haven't spent enough time on it and I felt that to release it now would be 'half baked'. I plan to get onto this in the short term. We'll see what happens.

I wanted to get my TWGS boards upgraded to 32k Caches & faster crystals. Thanks largely to Ed Eastman and also to Henry Courbis, we upgraded two stock TWGS' to run at 12.5Mhz. They failed at 14Mhz but we weren't able to test any speed in between, so they may run slightly faster yet.

Key to the cache upgrade was the cannibalisation of a 486 motherboard to retrieve the cache rams. I'm glad I kept it - ewaste recycling at its finest.

Paul Zaleski also told me about Henry's high speed GALs - they may help with getting a further speed boost too.

Ed also reworked the oscillator socket from dip to machine pin on a ZipGS for me. The dip socket had been installed on an angle that made inserting oscillators difficult. Now I won't have that issue.

After attending the soldering session I don't feel as bad about not bringing my IIgs motherboard with me to have machine pins installed in the cpu socket - I may be able to do this myself.... now I need to find some tools. I certainly learned that my fat tipped 30w iron is not the right tool for the job.

I'm bringing a //e motherboard back with me courtesy of James Littlejohn. I'm planning to hack it to hold a IIgs motherboard so that Charlie can use it - ala Mike Stephen's work (url is not available). The //e motherboard will be offered to someone else who's requested one to work on.

The plane is about to start boarding so I'll head out.