Tech Tangents

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! Here is the Github repo with the code: https://github.com/AkBKukU/USBPETKeyb... I'll go back and clean it up later. This is just an early-and-often type release to get the basic working code out there. This was actually helpful because it let me test all of the keys on the keyboard to see what pads are dirty.

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. This was filmed using the same setup right after I did the RAM video. So I had the loose fitting lens on the camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_z1f... Here are the diodes I used to repair it: http://a.co/iSWT4Rj Just a simple 1N4148 switching diode.

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. PCMCIA, I know... I got this new and didn't know much about it other that it could connect a computer to "any TV". After getting it setup I found it was actually really cool. It's not much more than an active VGA to composite or S-Video adapter, but it's still cool.

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! This is the assembly of a custom module PCB for a Tiva C Series TM4C123 MCU. It is a fairly powerful MCU when compared to an Arduino. I needed a go to solution for quickly prototyping PCBs that were milled (hence a MCU layout being difficult)and designed this board. There were a couple of problems that have all been resolved in a new layout already.

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! Here is a github repo with all the files for this video! https://github.com/AkBKukU/BlenderVSE... It includes the editing windows I use and the upload script. It's not much more than you would have to figure out on your own but it will at least give you a full example if you are really wanting to do video editing with Blender. The multithreaded Blender script: https://github.com/sciactive/pulverize The youtube CLI upload script: https://github.com/TheMengzor/youtube...

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! The CD player behaved way better in the video than it ever had for me before. It was unusable when I first got it. I had a couple issues entirely caused by my moving too fast. The probes were set to 10x, TP=Touch Point(Test Post?), and I had some misguided notions about the root cause. In the end it all clicked for me though and it worked out. The way the CRT scope works doesn't work well with a 60fps video. In the future I'll use a digital scope. I prefer the analog one for stuff like this but it's really not needed. Album Credits: Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails Music for the Jilted Generation by The Prodigy

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. I got this a while ago and was very impressed by how it feels. The battery is in shockingly good condition. The OS is fun to use, though I suspect if I was using it on a day to day basis I would get over it and find it tedious.

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. Here I am introducing this project and going over everything for the first time. I built this over a year ago using several modules to get it running as quickly as possible. The software isn't my best effort and really needs to be redesigned from scratch. It's works quite well though and I've got a lot of use out of it. Gihub repo: https://github.com/AkBKukU/gpstesting

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. Short Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeHOT... This is why I stopped videos kinda short. I was so tired of trying to solve this problem that couldn't be found. I was originally also going to do a short play through of that french copy of phantasmagoria until it needed a CD change to see if it would move to the next disc automatically. Why two videos? Anyone who just wants to see the IDE CD changer will only want to see the first one I put up. They won't be interested in the 10m of troubleshooting that went into getting the computer to work again after installing the drive. I wanted the short one up first so it would get more views and be better ranked over this video. But this video explains why the other one was short for people who want to know. This one also includes an intro that I decided I didn't like at the last moment and cut it from the short video. That i

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... What happened: This is the first video of the style I've adopted that I recorded and I was still trying to figure out how I would do it. I thought it would be cool to record the process at three different camera angles. So I put my DSLR above, my phone 6P to the left, and an s5 to the right. I didn't want to have to worry about local storage on the devices so I thought it would be a good idea to stream the video back to my computer from the phones to record. I also didn't want to have to deal with my camera's 10m record limit so I captured HDMI from it on my computer. So I was simultaneously recording 3 60fps 1080p video sources. Oh yeah, my computer was actually a core 2 quad with 8GB of RAM with a 5400RPM HDD. This was not well thought out. So it throttled like crazy in the CPU and disc access. The phone video was lost, and this was choppy. I was not h

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. If you want the thumbnail for personal use such as a wallpaper, I put it up here: Google Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/2koaS1d98Mz... Deviantart: https://akbkuku.deviantart.com/art/0x...