With newspapers dying out, it seems the only hope for independent journalism is the internet, but good luck getting anybody to take the internet seriously.
Maybe we won't but maybe our kids will. Already the shift to online news media is happening this day and more and more people are getting fed up with the crap spoon fed to us.
I am noticing it myself that I barely watch/read any "normal" news. I find technology news much more interesting, maybe that is good or bad depending on your viewpoint. Not that my anecdotal evidence is any indication of the future, but how we are consuming media is changing. Most unidirectional media like radio, tv, newspapers are feeling the pressure of the internet. They are scrambling to improve their readership and thus going to appeal to the biggest common denominator, this is going to drive even more readers away.
Jikes, what was i smoking! It is not an ARM device but some kind of 32bit epson processing core (i was confused with another chip from samsung). I hope there is an GCC port for this core.
This project is based on Epson's S1C33E07 processor with SDRAM, a serial EEPROM and a SD card slot attached. Along with UI input/output devices, of course.
The project's goal is to provide a bunch of software:
* a set of bootloaders which load a small kernel image from SD card and execute it.
* wiki-lib, a library which contains all the application's logic
* gui-lib, a very thin layer to provide glyph rendering and font file parsing
* some simulators (Qt/Cocoa/ncurses) which emulate the hardware to make development easy
* the 'kernel' code which is only a small wrapper around the hardware and uses wiki-lib and gui-lib
* host based tools to generate the content from Wikipedia sources (indexing, font file generation,...)
Toppers/JSP is included as source tree in a configuration that boots on the hardware. However, it is not currently used as base of our software stack.
---
So this is an ARM device with some SDRAM, pretty curious on how much RAM there is. Hope that some additions will be made like formula rendering for the scientific articles. This seems like a device with a lot of hacking potential. It reminds me of the Texas instruments calculators hardware wise with it B&W LCD. Too bad it has so little buttons for additional functions. The price seems okay if a real community springs up around it with some nice development tools.
Any music of Merzbow or Hypnoskull would suffice too. But your suggestions are much more creative.
Any idea of where to get the sounds you describe besides making your own?
JGE looks a lot like Vendetta online, but way more expanded. I shifted from EVE-online to another space based MMORPG and played vendetta for a while. The combat system with licenses was fun to do and it removed lot of the grind.
Quite curious how they will do in the market place. A real skill based MMORPG instead of grind X amount of spiders/gurista cruisers for XP/monies. Looking forward to that.
Well where i worked, one of our engineers used a pretty interesting scheme with a super capacitor and a switching converter to get better battery indurance.
The problem was that the switching converter running of batteries had a high quiscent current consumption ( a few ma, this was a few years ago around 1998 or something). We had a small micro that runs from 5V to 3V or something. We first activated the DC DC converter until 4.9V was reached, and then we shut it down. Then the Supercap discharged ( it was a 0.47F 5.5V device) slowly while the DCDC shut down and used very little current. Then when the voltage reached around 3.3V we turned the DC DC back on for a while until the 4.9V was reached and we shut it down again. We got way better usage from the batterys like that.
At home i got a few 3.3F 2.5V caps for general experimentation. Especially useful in BEAM robotics for storing energy for long term activity.
I also got a few samples from cooper bussman, 50F 2.5V Cans, I was thinking about a quickly rechargable RC car.
I was looking at a few of the higher capacity super caps, those 2600F 2.5V devices. They are mostly used as a temporary store for regenerative breaking. I saw a interesting application note with balancing series chains of those kind of capacitors, without exceeding voltage rating.
What i know from experience, the higher the capacitance of the super capacitor the smaller the ESR. Once i accidentaly shorted the leads of the 50F cap that was fully charged, they got hot pretty quickly! A 2600F capacitor being shorted, I assume this device will violently fail.
Can you please bust or confirm the myth if its possible to breathe and survive in a diving suit just like in the abyss? The one filled with that pinkish liquid? That would be cool.
Well some of my more complex electronics projects require BGA packaged style FPGA's. These are almost impossible to solder at home so i usually do that at work.
First baking them for 48 hours at 40 degrees in a large oven of about 20.000 euro's. Thats to prevent from moisture to violently evacuate the package, cracking the packaging.
Then it goes in their new brandspanking reflow oven that costs about 150.000 euro's. Not to mention the liquid nitrogen the oven uses (special atmosphere needed when reflowing with lead free alloys).
But usually i just take a lift of a currently running production run. It would be madness (and get me a lot of problems) just to run the machines for one little PCB with a BGA432 on it.
The older SIMM modules make excellent modules to add a big chunk of memory to your controller/processor/DSP/FPGA for all kinds of things.
Or you can just use a paintstripper and get the chips off, and incorporate them in your project. The left over boards you can use as guides in your tech books.
> All in all, a device like this would cost about $100 (even in mass production) as tuners and FPGA's are generally not cheap.
Fpga's expensive? Well i guess for this function you can use a pretty small FPGA. The smallest spartan 3 from xilinx is $2.50 in multi 1000 quantities and for that you get 1,728 cells. I dont know either about the complexities of the stream, but the new MAX2 CPLD's from Altera are the same price but you wont need an external config ROM. (altough less capable but maybe capable enough for this application)
About the signal translation devices, well i have no idea how much they would cost. But as soon these components are mass produced prices would be little, at least sub 10 dollar prices.
Maybe it would be easyer to just implant some kind of mod chip or card, or just reflash the hardware in the device itself. Problem is that there is a huge amount of appliances that need to be figured out how to hack. Just a simple "magic box would be the easyest".
But when demand rises for these boxes, 100 dollars is a lot. It would not take long and big sales that a smart company makes some kind of ASIC and sells it.
Aphex Twin? If you really want to scare them away, play ventolin. You will probably get complaints via email about that your phone is out of order (no its the on hold music).
Its not that difficult to build your own solution, i have found out that many of the boards are quite pricey. As an student myself i really dont want to buy premade solutions, becouse it detracts a bit from the learning experience and its much cheaper to build your own.
Many micro's can be had as samples from a lot of vendors, like microchip, maxim-ic, atmel, Texas instruments (the only ones i have dealt with). The 8051 solution of maxim is quite good for digital experiments (lots of I/O's and very fast). The AVR is more suited in my opinion for applications that can take full advantage of their integrated prepherials. Such as robotics or control applications. I have no experience with PIC's as they are quite limited and difficult to program in my opinion. Lots of online information on these chips, like programmers and tools.
There are a lot of programmers for many controllers floating on the net. The best i have found is the pony prog software (free), the schematics are there and support a lot of devices. http://www.lancos.com/prog.html I have used the parallel AVR programmer, its just an simple 74HC244 latch with some components.
The dallas 8051 micro's have an very simple programmer with some simple tools to load programming files into them (.HEX files). See the user guide at the final pages. http://pdfserv.maxim-ic.com/en/ds/DS89C420 .pdf These devices can be programmed with SDCC (free opensource) or Keil microvision (evaluation copy has 4k code limit).
There are many choices for building your own board, just browse on google. You will appreciate the price difference. If you are not sure if an solution works right away. You can build it first on an breadboard and when that works, build it on an experiment board.
You can check my homepage under "projects" to see what kind of things i have built. Many experimentation boards included for all kinds of devices (8051, AVR, CPLD). All have their schematics included, or links to those schematics.
Math co processor boards would be great, buy still quite fixed function.
It would be much more efficient if you would implement an co processor with an FPGA. First programming the FPGA what functions to execute. And then feeding the data to it, when the calculation is completed you just reprogram it to become whatever you want.
This way you would not have an math only board, but a board that could perform many many functions. You just need to write algorithms to exploit them.
The diablo game series have indeed a quite workable plot.
Only they should not reflect the gameplay too much in the movie. Killing thousands of identical shaped monsters with different colours doenst make for good action:-). But i heard rumors of blizzard planning to make an movie or series or something on the diablo universe. A while ago they sued newline studios for trademark infringement on one of their movies. But alas they are probably just rumors. When you look at the in-game cinematics of blizzard games they do have the talent to make an good movie.
Starcraft has a better, more believable story then warcraft 3 for instance.
I would like to see jim raynor first facing the evacuation of the planet he was stationed on, in hot pursuit by the attacking zerg. Followed by teaming up with mengsk, then losing kerrigan. Meeting with the protoss to fight the zerg overmind together. It would be difficult to get every aspect of the game in the movie (would make a long movie) but most happenings are essential for development of the story.
The starcraft expansion pack has enough story line for an sequel of that movie.
Well i am quite interested in what you made. Could you just give an overvieuw? or a little page describing your project?
I am now currently developing an microcontroller with an CPLD type logic analyser, still in its breadboard stage and it contains:
- DS89C420, Fast 8051 derivative from maxim-ic, its available for free as part of their excellent sample program. (free) - 32K 10ns SRAM's out of an 80486 mainboard. (free from a mainboard) - Several 74F244 bus drivers. (F logic for high speed) But maybe would be an better idea to replace with AC logic. (free from an mainboard or 60 eurocents a piece) - An XilinX 9536XL-PC44 CPLD, quite cheap from my distributor (around 6 euro's at farnell). - MAX 233 rs232 interface chip (free samples) - an 74LS125 to make the controller ISP (In System Programmable). (free from an mainboard) - 64 Mhz oscillator module (free from an IBM token ring card) - Experiment board with an integrated ground plane (around 13 euros at various shops)
Such projects can be built cheaply for around 20 euros and some time to write controller and PC side software. If you select the parts well, like faster clocks/logic/components. You might quite an nice analyser for the price. Most important for such high frequency projects is that you make your own PCB with solid ground plane. (or use an experiment board with such a plane).
true true.
Well a smartmedia socket is not that expensive. If you put some time in it, total cost maybe 30 dollars? Still too bad that these things are not sold in europe. If you can update the firmware in these it could make for all kinds of very cool projects. In this case it would be much cheaper to experiment with it then to buy the parts.
When i experimented with some TL741 opamp IC's, i once mixed up the + and - supplies, it took me a minute or so to notice it.
The circuit didnt work offcourse and while troubleshooting i noticed the chips was too hot to touch.
After putting the supplies in the correct order it worked fine.
Well i used that same opamp as an RFI detector for my tesla coil and other HV apparatus. Well one time i made an plasma globe with an lightbulb and checked it out. Well checking the circuit out, i suddenly saw arcs flying from an exposed transformer lead to the probe. It killed the led, but the opamp still worked.
Well it is possible to put in the powercable in 2 pins to the left. Bringing 12V to the ground and ground to the 5V.
A friend of mine had to assemble a computer for its dad. And when turned on a constant stream of smoke came out of the case. He totally freaked out, and turned the computer of. After he let me check the computer, i put the powercable in correctly, the floppy drive worked okay.
I own an tektronix 544 scope. Heavy big mostly tubed, giving a 50Mhz. I still use it as my main working scope for several months. I bought it of the dutch version of ebay as i needed a simple scope. When i checked the date codes on some parts where like 1968 or something.
I also gotten an Tektronix 545B but it has a problem with its HV transformer, it goes dimmer after an hour or 2. Has more functions (delayed sweep) but has 30Mhz.
I had to clear out an old warehouse of an IT company there where the usual storage racks with no parts etc. But in the corner i found an heap of debris that consisted of bits of concrete, dust and few 287 and a 386-33.
I put the 287 in an suitable computer. After doing an FPU testing program from some disk, it worked okay. But run verry hot.
The first one was my first computer, a old 286-16. Well i had installed a SB pro 2.0, but the internal setup of the whole thing was kinda wonky. So i had to disconnect the mobo power cables to put something in the slot. Well after putting the whole setup back together. The mobo power cables where attached wrong, well After i switched it on the computer would just flick on and off. Then i saw what happened, and i was like "NOOO!" it was my first computer that i bought for about 350NFL (175 dollar) at the day, thats a fortune for a 11 yearold. After correcting the problem it worked, but i did notice that in windows 3.1 the computer just randomly gave a GPF. Just out of the blue, even when just sitting there, or my dad playing patience.
The company where i worked my first internship i had to do the first job every intern there has to do. that is to clean the attick, well it was filled with busted UPS's but i also found some brown bricks. Well i asked the lead programmer what they where. "oh those are harddisks from an old Tandon computer" he then proceeded to show pictures of the computer coming in, it was totally black, fryed etc etc. The harddisks in those tandon computer where packed in so called "rampacks" (the plastic had bubbled making the brown brick appearance). Well the programmer told that they backupped all the data on those things, they just had to sand some of the brown bubbly stuff off.
The best stuff is unknown stuff from old computers. Like a friend of mine and me, gotten 2 arcnet cards. But when inserted they did not work, probably wrong settings, so we examined the cards. on the side was a block of more then 20 jumper positions, with 12 filled. So we started to randomly replace the jumpers. We found out where the I/O block was as we saw that shifting. But we wanted to change the IRQ as the card was going to be put in an XT and IRQ was set to 11 or something, so we thought we changed the irq. And we booted it up, well the computer did nothing and a puff of magic smoke was emitted from the card. After looking what we did wrong (shorting one of the IO pins with the IRQ pins) we put the jumper in the correct position. It worked.
Later on we checked how well those cards worked, well they worked still but saw like 40 percent packetloss, not that we noticed back then, we could play doom via IPX!
Let me say, high school and comparable schools, where a hell for me. Maybe you now all look at it with a glimmer of a smile.
I still look at it with a tear in my eye....
The advice for my past self:
Learn to keep yourself busy, prevent boredom.
Ignore those that pick on you, better to ignore than to be hurt.
Trust only that you can really trust, there are no such things as friends until proven.
Buy a PC, best thing to keep boredom away, and to make friends.
Slashdot Mirror
With newspapers dying out, it seems the only hope for independent journalism is the internet, but good luck getting anybody to take the internet seriously.
Maybe we won't but maybe our kids will. Already the shift to online news media is happening this day and more and more people are getting fed up with the crap spoon fed to us.
I am noticing it myself that I barely watch/read any "normal" news. I find technology news much more interesting, maybe that is good or bad depending on your viewpoint. Not that my anecdotal evidence is any indication of the future, but how we are consuming media is changing. Most unidirectional media like radio, tv, newspapers are feeling the pressure of the internet. They are scrambling to improve their readership and thus going to appeal to the biggest common denominator, this is going to drive even more readers away.
Jikes, what was i smoking! It is not an ARM device but some kind of 32bit epson processing core (i was confused with another chip from samsung). I hope there is an GCC port for this core.
Seems that the hardware specs are online:
http://code.google.com/p/wikipediardware/
---
This project is based on Epson's S1C33E07 processor with SDRAM, a serial EEPROM and a SD card slot attached. Along with UI input/output devices, of course.
The project's goal is to provide a bunch of software:
* a set of bootloaders which load a small kernel image from SD card and execute it. ...)
* wiki-lib, a library which contains all the application's logic
* gui-lib, a very thin layer to provide glyph rendering and font file parsing
* some simulators (Qt/Cocoa/ncurses) which emulate the hardware to make development easy
* the 'kernel' code which is only a small wrapper around the hardware and uses wiki-lib and gui-lib
* host based tools to generate the content from Wikipedia sources (indexing, font file generation,
Toppers/JSP is included as source tree in a configuration that boots on the hardware. However, it is not currently used as base of our software stack.
---
So this is an ARM device with some SDRAM, pretty curious on how much RAM there is. Hope that some additions will be made like formula rendering for the scientific articles. This seems like a device with a lot of hacking potential. It reminds me of the Texas instruments calculators hardware wise with it B&W LCD. Too bad it has so little buttons for additional functions. The price seems okay if a real community springs up around it with some nice development tools.
You use the screens for micro's? Do you have a website on that? You have piqued my interest ;-)
Any music of Merzbow or Hypnoskull would suffice too. But your suggestions are much more creative. Any idea of where to get the sounds you describe besides making your own?
JGE looks a lot like Vendetta online, but way more expanded. I shifted from EVE-online to another space based MMORPG and played vendetta for a while. The combat system with licenses was fun to do and it removed lot of the grind.
Quite curious how they will do in the market place. A real skill based MMORPG instead of grind X amount of spiders/gurista cruisers for XP/monies. Looking forward to that.
Well where i worked, one of our engineers used a pretty interesting scheme with a super capacitor and a switching converter to get better battery indurance.
The problem was that the switching converter running of batteries had a high quiscent current consumption ( a few ma, this was a few years ago around 1998 or something). We had a small micro that runs from 5V to 3V or something. We first activated the DC DC converter until 4.9V was reached, and then we shut it down. Then the Supercap discharged ( it was a 0.47F 5.5V device) slowly while the DCDC shut down and used very little current. Then when the voltage reached around 3.3V we turned the DC DC back on for a while until the 4.9V was reached and we shut it down again. We got way better usage from the batterys like that.
At home i got a few 3.3F 2.5V caps for general experimentation. Especially useful in BEAM robotics for storing energy for long term activity.
I also got a few samples from cooper bussman, 50F 2.5V Cans, I was thinking about a quickly rechargable RC car.
I was looking at a few of the higher capacity super caps, those 2600F 2.5V devices. They are mostly used as a temporary store for regenerative breaking. I saw a interesting application note with balancing series chains of those kind of capacitors, without exceeding voltage rating.
What i know from experience, the higher the capacitance of the super capacitor the smaller the ESR. Once i accidentaly shorted the leads of the 50F cap that was fully charged, they got hot pretty quickly! A 2600F capacitor being shorted, I assume this device will violently fail.
Can you please bust or confirm the myth if its possible to breathe and survive in a diving suit just like in the abyss? The one filled with that pinkish liquid? That would be cool.
Well some of my more complex electronics projects require BGA packaged style FPGA's. These are almost impossible to solder at home so i usually do that at work.
First baking them for 48 hours at 40 degrees in a large oven of about 20.000 euro's. Thats to prevent from moisture to violently evacuate the package, cracking the packaging.
Then it goes in their new brandspanking reflow oven that costs about 150.000 euro's. Not to mention the liquid nitrogen the oven uses (special atmosphere needed when reflowing with lead free alloys).
But usually i just take a lift of a currently running production run. It would be madness (and get me a lot of problems) just to run the machines for one little PCB with a BGA432 on it.
The older SIMM modules make excellent modules to add a big chunk of memory to your controller/processor/DSP/FPGA for all kinds of things.
Or you can just use a paintstripper and get the chips off, and incorporate them in your project.
The left over boards you can use as guides in your tech books.
Interfacing can be tough sometime, here an AVR example:
http://www.myplace.nu/avr/dram/index.htm
Just google for your favorite controller type with the word DRAM.
> All in all, a device like this would cost about $100 (even in mass production) as tuners and FPGA's are generally not cheap.
Fpga's expensive?
Well i guess for this function you can use a pretty small FPGA. The smallest spartan 3 from xilinx is $2.50 in multi 1000 quantities and for that you get 1,728 cells. I dont know either about the complexities of the stream, but the new MAX2 CPLD's from Altera are the same price but you wont need an external config ROM. (altough less capable but maybe capable enough for this application)
About the signal translation devices, well i have no idea how much they would cost. But as soon these components are mass produced prices would be little, at least sub 10 dollar prices.
Maybe it would be easyer to just implant some kind of mod chip or card, or just reflash the hardware in the device itself. Problem is that there is a huge amount of appliances that need to be figured out how to hack. Just a simple "magic box would be the easyest".
But when demand rises for these boxes, 100 dollars is a lot. It would not take long and big sales that a smart company makes some kind of ASIC and sells it.
That would cut cost considerably.
Aphex Twin? If you really want to scare them away, play ventolin. You will probably get complaints via email about that your phone is out of order (no its the on hold music).
Its not that difficult to build your own solution, i have found out that many of the boards are quite pricey. As an student myself i really dont want to buy premade solutions, becouse it detracts a bit from the learning experience and its much cheaper to build your own.
0 .pdf
Many micro's can be had as samples from a lot of vendors, like microchip, maxim-ic, atmel, Texas instruments (the only ones i have dealt with).
The 8051 solution of maxim is quite good for digital experiments (lots of I/O's and very fast).
The AVR is more suited in my opinion for applications that can take full advantage of their integrated prepherials. Such as robotics or control applications.
I have no experience with PIC's as they are quite limited and difficult to program in my opinion. Lots of online information on these chips, like programmers and tools.
There are a lot of programmers for many controllers floating on the net. The best i have found is the pony prog software (free), the schematics are there and support a lot of devices.
http://www.lancos.com/prog.html
I have used the parallel AVR programmer, its just an simple 74HC244 latch with some components.
The dallas 8051 micro's have an very simple programmer with some simple tools to load programming files into them (.HEX files). See the user guide at the final pages.
http://pdfserv.maxim-ic.com/en/ds/DS89C42
These devices can be programmed with SDCC (free opensource) or Keil microvision (evaluation copy has 4k code limit).
There are many choices for building your own board, just browse on google. You will appreciate the price difference. If you are not sure if an solution works right away. You can build it first on an breadboard and when that works, build it on an experiment board.
You can check my homepage under "projects" to see what kind of things i have built. Many experimentation boards included for all kinds of devices (8051, AVR, CPLD). All have their schematics included, or links to those schematics.
Math co processor boards would be great, buy still quite fixed function.
It would be much more efficient if you would implement an co processor with an FPGA. First programming the FPGA what functions to execute. And then feeding the data to it, when the calculation is completed you just reprogram it to become whatever you want.
This way you would not have an math only board, but a board that could perform many many functions. You just need to write algorithms to exploit them.
The diablo game series have indeed a quite workable plot.
:-).
Only they should not reflect the gameplay too much in the movie. Killing thousands of identical shaped monsters with different colours doenst make for good action
But i heard rumors of blizzard planning to make an movie or series or something on the diablo universe. A while ago they sued newline studios for trademark infringement on one of their movies. But alas they are probably just rumors. When you look at the in-game cinematics of blizzard games they do have the talent to make an good movie.
Starcraft has a better, more believable story then warcraft 3 for instance.
I would like to see jim raynor first facing the evacuation of the planet he was stationed on, in hot pursuit by the attacking zerg.
Followed by teaming up with mengsk, then losing kerrigan. Meeting with the protoss to fight the zerg overmind together. It would be difficult to get every aspect of the game in the movie (would make a long movie) but most happenings are essential for development of the story.
The starcraft expansion pack has enough story line for an sequel of that movie.
Well i am quite interested in what you made. Could you just give an overvieuw? or a little page describing your project?
I am now currently developing an microcontroller with an CPLD type logic analyser, still in its breadboard stage and it contains:
- DS89C420, Fast 8051 derivative from maxim-ic, its available for free as part of their excellent sample program. (free)
- 32K 10ns SRAM's out of an 80486 mainboard. (free from a mainboard)
- Several 74F244 bus drivers. (F logic for high speed) But maybe would be an better idea to replace with AC logic. (free from an mainboard or 60 eurocents a piece)
- An XilinX 9536XL-PC44 CPLD, quite cheap from my distributor (around 6 euro's at farnell).
- MAX 233 rs232 interface chip (free samples)
- an 74LS125 to make the controller ISP (In System Programmable). (free from an mainboard)
- 64 Mhz oscillator module (free from an IBM token ring card)
- Experiment board with an integrated ground plane (around 13 euros at various shops)
Such projects can be built cheaply for around 20 euros and some time to write controller and PC side software.
If you select the parts well, like faster clocks/logic/components. You might quite an nice analyser for the price. Most important for such high frequency projects is that you make your own PCB with solid ground plane. (or use an experiment board with such a plane).
true true. Well a smartmedia socket is not that expensive. If you put some time in it, total cost maybe 30 dollars? Still too bad that these things are not sold in europe. If you can update the firmware in these it could make for all kinds of very cool projects. In this case it would be much cheaper to experiment with it then to buy the parts.
Not if you dont have the money to spend for an camera you are going to use rarely.
When i experimented with some TL741 opamp IC's, i once mixed up the + and - supplies, it took me a minute or so to notice it. The circuit didnt work offcourse and while troubleshooting i noticed the chips was too hot to touch. After putting the supplies in the correct order it worked fine. Well i used that same opamp as an RFI detector for my tesla coil and other HV apparatus. Well one time i made an plasma globe with an lightbulb and checked it out. Well checking the circuit out, i suddenly saw arcs flying from an exposed transformer lead to the probe. It killed the led, but the opamp still worked.
Well it is possible to put in the powercable in 2 pins to the left. Bringing 12V to the ground and ground to the 5V. A friend of mine had to assemble a computer for its dad. And when turned on a constant stream of smoke came out of the case. He totally freaked out, and turned the computer of. After he let me check the computer, i put the powercable in correctly, the floppy drive worked okay.
I own an tektronix 544 scope. Heavy big mostly tubed, giving a 50Mhz. I still use it as my main working scope for several months. I bought it of the dutch version of ebay as i needed a simple scope. When i checked the date codes on some parts where like 1968 or something. I also gotten an Tektronix 545B but it has a problem with its HV transformer, it goes dimmer after an hour or 2. Has more functions (delayed sweep) but has 30Mhz.
I had to clear out an old warehouse of an IT company there where the usual storage racks with no parts etc. But in the corner i found an heap of debris that consisted of bits of concrete, dust and few 287 and a 386-33. I put the 287 in an suitable computer. After doing an FPU testing program from some disk, it worked okay. But run verry hot.
Well i had my fare share, almost killed hardware.
The first one was my first computer, a old 286-16. Well i had installed a SB pro 2.0, but the internal setup of the whole thing was kinda wonky. So i had to disconnect the mobo power cables to put something in the slot. Well after putting the whole setup back together. The mobo power cables where attached wrong, well After i switched it on the computer would just flick on and off. Then i saw what happened, and i was like "NOOO!" it was my first computer that i bought for about 350NFL (175 dollar) at the day, thats a fortune for a 11 yearold. After correcting the problem it worked, but i did notice that in windows 3.1 the computer just randomly gave a GPF. Just out of the blue, even when just sitting there, or my dad playing patience.
The company where i worked my first internship i had to do the first job every intern there has to do. that is to clean the attick, well it was filled with busted UPS's but i also found some brown bricks. Well i asked the lead programmer what they where. "oh those are harddisks from an old Tandon computer" he then proceeded to show pictures of the computer coming in, it was totally black, fryed etc etc. The harddisks in those tandon computer where packed in so called "rampacks" (the plastic had bubbled making the brown brick appearance). Well the programmer told that they backupped all the data on those things, they just had to sand some of the brown bubbly stuff off.
The best stuff is unknown stuff from old computers. Like a friend of mine and me, gotten 2 arcnet cards. But when inserted they did not work, probably wrong settings, so we examined the cards. on the side was a block of more then 20 jumper positions, with 12 filled. So we started to randomly replace the jumpers. We found out where the I/O block was as we saw that shifting. But we wanted to change the IRQ as the card was going to be put in an XT and IRQ was set to 11 or something, so we thought we changed the irq. And we booted it up, well the computer did nothing and a puff of magic smoke was emitted from the card. After looking what we did wrong (shorting one of the IO pins with the IRQ pins) we put the jumper in the correct position. It worked. Later on we checked how well those cards worked, well they worked still but saw like 40 percent packetloss, not that we noticed back then, we could play doom via IPX!
Let me say, high school and comparable schools, where a hell for me. Maybe you now all look at it with a glimmer of a smile. I still look at it with a tear in my eye.... The advice for my past self: Learn to keep yourself busy, prevent boredom. Ignore those that pick on you, better to ignore than to be hurt. Trust only that you can really trust, there are no such things as friends until proven. Buy a PC, best thing to keep boredom away, and to make friends.