After being stranded with a flat car battery last week, I decided to buy this Autophix JSC 2100 super capacitor jump starter (as well as buying a new battery!) It’s the cheapest on the market by a long way, and only available on eBay or AliExpress, so it’s wise to be sceptical. But the Chinese […]
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Dancing Stage Party Edition: “Everyone is waiting for you” audio file: Download as an mp3 file In March 2020, faced with a prolonged period confined to my home, I realised I needed a home-based exercise regime. Back in the early 2000s I had played Dancing Stage Party Edition (the European version of DDR) extensively, and […]
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[Edit: I cannot recommend this device as an Access Point, although as a wireless repeater/extender it’s probably ok. Time to revise my opinion of this repeater slightly. Today the webcam went offline, and when I checked, the repeater wasn’t connected to the internet. I had to turn it off and on again to reconnect. Not […]
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I’ve been trying to make a decent home-made oat milk for months. I use oat milk to add to tea and coffee, not for cereal or to drink directly. I’ve tried so many recipes, and every time I get a really unpleasant “sludge” in the bottom of my drink. It varies how much I got, […]
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The Retro Challenge is a one-month long excuse to do cool stuff with old computers and blog about it (vaguely wrapped up as a competition). (This year the challenge is being hosted by Mark Sherman at http://mwsherman.com/RCR/2020/04/. I started my challenge on 1 April without knowing for sure if it would be running this month. […]
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I collect old computers, and so my friends often find interesting things for my collection. My friend Paul recently gave me an old iPad 2 for my museum. The thing is, it didn’t feel very old. I still use an iPad 3 every day as my main tablet (it still works fabulously well, apart from […]
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I recently wanted to record a message in the voice of a Dalek (for a silly little project I’m doing). I looked for tutorials, but they all involved ring modulator software that only worked on Windows PCs. I worked out how to do this on my Mac, and so decided to create a tutorial for […]
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In which I spend two days working out how to reinstall Windows XP on an old Asus EeePC 1001P. This post is so you don’t have to go through the same pain!
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I needed to wire up the two floppy ports in the case to the Gotek USB floppy emulator.
One would be a standard socket, but the other was for use with the Amstrad CPC 464. This had two issues…
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Throughout March I tinkered with some Video Genie computers as part of the Retro Challenge.
The idea was I would learn to use a couple of new diagnostic tools for digital hardware, and then use them to fix some of my old computers.
Here’s a summary of what I did.
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