Some Tape Only Has One Clean Play Left In It

Empire of One: The Solopreneur’s Blueprint to Building Online — Four bucks, twenty-seven pages, ten chapters, and not one of them is find-your-passion. Twelve years in the Air Force, then a decade fixing broken systems at Google, GoDaddy and CBRE until they cut the job out from under me. Hell of a way to get handed your own calendar. What I kept was the operations thinking, scaled down to a business of one, which is the part every creator guide skips, because how many of those people ever worked the damn job?

The Decades-Old AMOS Missing Mouse Cursor Bug He Found, and How the Community Helped Him Fix It — A guy testing a new Amiga game found the mouse pointer gone under Kickstart 2.0 and nowhere else. He posted it to a Facebook group of people who still write AMOS in 2026, and a stranger named Fredrik reproduced it and named the cause: boot straight from the startup-sequence, no CLI screen ever opens, so there’s no system pointer for AMOS to copy. The fix that shipped is one line. A copyright notice printed at boot, which opens the CLI screen, which hands AMOS back its pointer. Thirty years nobody had that bug written down anywhere, and it got closed in a comment thread by people who got paid nothing for it, which is about the only reason I still believe in the internet some days.

THE TIP. If you’ve got reels from about 1978 to the early nineties sitting in a closet, some of them are rotting from the inside whether you ever touch them or not. That gunk that squeals against the heads and leaves brown residue on your fingers is the tape itself coming apart in your hands, because the binder gluing the oxide to the plastic spent decades pulling moisture out of the air until it went soft and sticky. Ampex is the famous one. Some Agfa and 3M runs too. You’ll know it the second you press play, because the transport groans like it’s dragging a chain through mud, then stops dead, or worse, shreds right there in the heads.

The fix the archive world uses and doesn’t advertise: bake it. A food dehydrator, the kind built for jerky, set to around a hundred and thirty Fahrenheit, and check the scale, because a hundred and thirty Celsius turns a master into a frisbee. Tape flat on the trays, four to eight hours, and a ten and a half inch reel wants the long end. The heat drives the moisture out long enough for exactly one clean pass. One. Not one a year, one ever. It starts drinking the air the second it leaves the oven, so have the deck running and the drive recording before that reel goes near it. After that, the original never touches a head again. The file’s the master now.

Some dehydrator on a kitchen counter right now, twenty bucks, bought for jerky, is the same damn machine an archive reaches for when there’s no second copy of a thing left anywhere. That’s why the trick lives in forum posts instead of a catalog, and it’s why you check the cabinet over your fridge before you buy anything.

What’s on the tape in your closet? Tell me. Somebody reading this is sitting on the only copy of something on earth and I’d bet they don’t know it. ~ J.D.