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An industrial 386 Frankenstein rebuild Or: Doing stupid things for dubious fun and no profit. Or: moral of this story: Don't spend an entire holidays at home. Or you will start to poke FPU with logic probe :). Last week I was reviewing electronic trash in the market when I noticed an unusual PC...

A recent flea market finding: Philips N2204 cassette tape recorder. Bought it very cheap... honestly, to waste some time fixing it. A Philips EL mechanism from late 1960s shows that this tape recorder has been made probably shortly after my EL3302, one of the first cassette tape recorders...

More advanced browser: Mostly messing with JS so much that it starts to be indistinguishable from late-90s ActiveX. Mostly WebAssembly, sharing of desktop/devices, GPU. The VM is configured the way which is almost like a weird search bot (no, not this Google or Bing one, this one which looks...

Palemoon user here, however... In fact, I have a few browsing modes. I use PM as my daily driver because I need certain features, like accessing common functions without these 10+ key RPG gaming mice, so my toolbar is just full of things I can use with touchpad, like dropping down the...

A really interesting thing, I found it in a box of e-waste on a flea market and bought because I was curious what is it. The black box, with 6 LEDs and 2 DIN sockets on front, and 2 DIN sockets on rear. The ribbon cable goes from between shells of the metal casing and ends with C64 cartridge...

Finally a nice workbench power supply. I have a "small" one, made by myself, with a maximum of 20V at 4 amps with more or less good regulation, and the 10A monster which is too big for my workbench. Unfortunately the thing I bought is a bit old, but I got it for the scrap metal price. It is...

Two interesting things from the flea market: 1. The unusually flimsy tape recorder If they are cheap, I buy these small tape recorders as they look nice with retro computers. Many of them are from 1970s, and some are even earlier - a few months ago I got a Philips EL, this with the "three sides"...

And another proof that Perl is not obsolete yet! I use it constantly, as it gives me lots of freedom in programming. It is a handy "algorithmic notepad" - all programming techniques accessible at any moment. UNFORTUNATELY all techniques... A small part of the project I was doing a few years...

You remember that I restored the audio player and speakers some time ago? So, well, I decided that I will buy some CDs if they will be cheap in a flea market. The good thing is that I have a complete information what I like, so I know what to look for, so I bought a dozen of CDs. And here is...

Yes, it was about IR remote. And I had no remote to copy at all. The protocol used by chip was Denon/Sharp. Generally there are two things sent with each keypress: ID of device I want to command and the command itself. However, if you look for example in these codes, this is a similar remote...

Interesting fact: Today I tried to find this remote or replacement. And... I can't find it! There are similar version clones, but for an earlier version of the stereo, without volume control motor, and none in my country. And the fun was when I repaired the power amp. Some "genius" decided to...

An interesting observation: The laziness has a critical mass above which it decays to a few projects. Some time ago I repaired an old audio set I got and I had no remote controller for it. I wanted to have a remote as after an operation with a jigsaw on speakers it started to have a nice sound...

That's interesting, about this "active prevention". I am not a lawyer too, but it looks like it can be more or less comparable to the somewhat cute situation that every software is open source as there's a disassembler. If only ReactOS team could know it they would not bother with removing parts...

from Audacity Privacy Notice. Wait, isn't this directly violating the GPL? Because it looks like it certainly violates DFSG point 5.

This is the thing I had when trying to implement drag and drop between different programs. Decades ago there were some draft standards, rather poor to be honest. Currently there are almost no standards, so the best thing they came with was sending mimetype and data. It works when sending some...

OK, after my experiments with X's Primary, there is the advise: Verify EVERYTHING. If it works in GTK applications, check Qt. And Wx too. Maybe even FLTK. There's also an X text editor named CoolEdit. Its GUI seems to be not made with any typical library (although looks MOTIF-ish), the authors...

I fight with another problem preventing the release of my project as open source. The thingy for Linux which allows to insert non-keyboard characters. I could not find any good character selector, i.e. better than Windows 98 "Character table". To enter foreign characters, you can use overly...

I had an interesting situation. I have some AT mainboards and 3 ATX mainboards, as I have space I decided to get some casings and make computers, especially that I have all other components. I found 3 cheap ATX casings from early 2000s to put Athlon and Pentium II into, and decided to buy them...

I meant made in e.g. C or C++ and Qt/GTK, and available to any program through clipboard or text file. I made this thing because inconsistent or non-existing spell checking under Linux was troublesome so with this script I can write the text everywhere, then copy it to clipboard, lanuch the...

Ah, it's 4-diode, full-wave rectifier, in such units it's usually packaged in SMD form. And of course I messed the spelling again, it's Graetz bridge. In my language such type of rectifier is still called "Graetz bridge" for historical reasons.