Tech Tangents (2016 - 2025)

Why would anyone want to use a Commodore PET keyboard on a modern computer? The very idea is ridiculous! So ridiculous that I couldn't resist!

I decided it was time to upgrade the memory in my Gateway 2000 Liberty to it's maximum potential. After some research I decided on an... unusual method. It didn't go quite as well as I had hoped. But at least I got it done in the end. I decided I'd come back to the software reinstall later. I think RCR486 needs more voices for the PC speaker music.

I was so excited to get this ESR meter and broke it immediately in the dumbest way possible! Well, here is how you repair a DE-5000 if you put the battery in backwards.

I would take my laptop with me everywhere when I was young. Playing games on the go was always great. But it would have been better to hook up to a TV. Well here is how that could have gone.

I'm out of town this week so today we take a look back to a video I had made over a year ago. This was one of a handful of videos that I had made while trying to get the feel of how I would setup my filming and editing workflow. So be prepared for some clunky edits and rambling because this was never meant to be released!

I didn't have a lot of time this week to make a video so I thought I would cover how I make videos on an open source Linux based stack. Blender as a VSE is more than capable for the types of videos I create so I have come to enjoy working with it. The ability to render and upload from my server really helps as well!

I took a look at repairing/calibrating my Sony CDP-47 CD Player with the original service manual. So I broke out an oscilloscope and cracked it open!

This is a look at a General Magic DataRover 840F I have. The MagicCap OS on these devices is an interesting take on how to design a GUI.

This is a project introduction to my GPS speedometer. As I work on it I'll be doing check-in videos that show it's progress.

I wanted to do a simple video today so here I'm just demonstrating what happens if you put a phone with a USB C port in the Nintendo Switch dock. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. The dock probably negotiates with the phone(a Nexus 6P in this case) to see if it is a Switch. When it isn't it just goes into an error state. It may be possible to spoof the Switch ID in the phone, but you don't want the phone to get the 15V power shunted to it if it can't handle it. TL;DR: You should probably not try this at home.

I know what you are thinking, "Seriously? A printer?" But yes! A printer! It's actually pretty cool. I got this printer a while ago and never got it to work. But now that I have another I felt more confident to take some risks. So I begin to get one of them working but I have to wait for the cartridge to be ready. So there will be a follow up. But I decided to showcase it's cool scanner option in this video.

I got a hold of a really cool IDE CD changer. Here is me trying it out for the first time. This video was a massive pain though. The 98 machine has stopped working for me during this video. I'm not sure what happened. My guess is the PSU is going bad. Tomorrow I'm going to put up a different cut of this that shows the full trouble shooting process.

This video is the full experience of what happened with the 98 machine when I installed the IDE CD changer.

Just an update about some of my ongoing projects. GPS: I have all the major parts in for the next revision and am starting to familiarize myself with them. Some worked out better than others. Printer: The carrier should be ready to test now. I'm still waiting for the battery to come in to continue it though.

I needed to take a look at my Zenwatch 2 because it stopped making sound. It was a fairly simple repair. It was what I thought it would be. The speaker was clogged full of debris. Nothing a quick teardown and mild cleaning couldn't fix though. It was nice to get a look at the inside of this thing. It's pretty serviceable. I like to rate my devices by how long I think I will be able to keep them going. With the only connector, battery, and all moving parts being easily removable/replaceable I'd say this this should last quite a long time.

I needed some more storage in my Early 2009 Xserve and decided to put a 5TB drive in it. Things didn't go as planned. Of course as soon as I make a video on this someone has put up a bunch of drive trays on ebay. So I have two more coming now. The external USB HDD on the server is both annoying to keep going on the server and something I would like to have back from it's permanent use here. Too bad I couldn't make that happen. I think I may have been wrong in the video and you could buy a 2TB ADM but that doesn't help me out.

I've never been able to get anywhere near the advertised speed of my gigabit powerline adapters. So I decided to try an absolute best case test of their real speed. Needless to say, they let me down. There are people on the Amazon listing who have recorded much higher speeds. Maybe mine are defective? 802.11ac is going to be my answer to this problem. The server has a pretty decent LOS to the Wifi router. with tweaking the antennas it should be very quick.

I decided it was finally time to familiarize myself with my Knight Electronics ML-200 Mini-Lab. I didn't get this thing for super cheap, but I could tell I would be able to get some real use out of it. It's not the best, you could easily do better but I'm holding out to get a specific model of function generator for a bit more.

One of the drivers in my MDR-7506 headphones decided to stop working one day. So I set out to repair them. While not quite the results I was hoping for due to the parts I used. After a couple weeks of using the headphones after this I am still not happy with them. If I can find another real Sony speaker I'll repair these. But it's not that likely. This is the second of two videos that I initially thought were lost for good. But I was able to recover the video files off the corrupt SD cards.

I wanted to be able to control my Fiio X5 with an inline remote but still be able to use my headphones of choice. So I made my own controls. The standard for inline controls is so simple that I seriously cannot believe that this isn't a thing already. Please, feel free to look and prove me wrong!

Here is another throwback video. This was recorded in June of 2016. As soon as you start watching you'll see why it was shelved...

Druaga1 sent me an "invite.doc" and I needed to open it. Office 97 install time I guess.... If you've seen any of my later videos on this laptop you'll know that I do actually have a parallel port CD drive for it. I just couldn't resist trying out the full experience of installing Office off of floppy disks. One of the audio channels was cutting in and out this time so I had to change it to mono after the fact and manually rebalance everything.