Linux coding, retrocomputing, electronics, fun test equipment and my opinions.
Have you ever wondered this? I've built dozens of dipoles, a couple of loops and at least one Moxon antenna for ham radio work, but when I started out I had a hard time visualizing this whole impedance thing. I stumbled across this video on YouTube the other day that provides
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Integrated development environments (IDEs) have been around since the late 80's in one form or another. While they can be powerful tools, modern IDEs like Visual Studio require gigabytes of RAM to run, and have fancy graphics that make them difficult to use over a remote network connection. To add to
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I've been through a number of major software releases as a team member or project manager in my career. There have been many "cutover weekends", "cutover evenings" and even "cutover hours" as the team I was part of deployed new software into production. Many of you have been part of
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The vi editor (more accurately vim on Ubuntu) is the mysterious realm of the UNIX greybeards. A relic of the acoustic coupler modem era, it is one of the few 40 year old programs that is not only useful, but is still considered one of the best tools for the
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Bubble Memory was one of the most promising technologies in the late 70's and the hype at the time was that it would be the dominant form of computer memory in the late 80's and 90's, when all home computers would be equipped with literally MEGABYTES of the stuff. One
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As part of my long struggle to repair my beloved Radio Shack Color Computer 3, I decided to test the ROM chip out of circuit. My initial tests on the board seemed to point to the fact that the ROM chip would not respond to any queries for data. In
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I bought an instrument cluster module that I was going to hack and wire into my 1984 Mercedes Benz G-Wagen. I sold the truck before I finished this project, but I did do my best to understand how I might be able to drive the instrument cluster with an Arduino. Part
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The Radio Shack Coco 3 was highly anticipated by the Coco community in 1986 when it was released. Some of us Coco'ers were lucky enough to own one. Unfortunately, I've blown up two of these great computers recently and have to get to repairing at least one of them. In this
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Desoldering large DIP chips can be a pain. Using solder wick is a bit of an art, and removing a 40 pin chip with a "solder sucker" isn't any fun. But with a cheap hot air rework gun, you can pretty easily remove chips without damaging the chip or the
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Here's a video I made introducing the main features of the Tektronix 465 oscilloscope. I try to give an overall view of the scope that would be useful for beginners or anyone else looking to acquire one of these classic scopes. https://youtu.be/pGVXUsjTzIU
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