Thursday & Friday I did my monthly backup in Napa, and I also picked up an entire truckload of old Macs. Almost all are 6100/7100 class Performas, there are also a couple of old 68k Macs too. All were working when stored a couple of years ago, although I may have to go back and look for the cables, I don't think I got them all. My mom also gave me her old HP Omnibook 600C. It's a 75mhz 486DX4 with a small dual-scan color screen. She also tossed in a cue-cat she got at radio...

This is sort of an expansion & howto on my previous post of scroll a message on my cable box . I finally got around to building a new 8 digit display and mounting the whole thing in place of my floppy drive. The total cost for this project was less than $20. The most expensive parts were the 7 segment displays and the ICM7218 chip. I used 0.56" tall digits. It took 4 of the LED packages to get 8 characters. The width of all of them together was exactly the same as a floppy! First...

I've decided to release Fixx'm and IRCKit under the GPL. Why? Well, when I first created Fixx'm in 1998 I had never intended it to be a shareware program, always freeware. Since I haven't done much more than bug fixes lately, I might as well go ahead and make the source code available. Fixx'm was originally intended as a standards based "AIM replacement." Back in 1998 when I was working on building Full System, I was communicating with everyone involved over the...

Well the company almost managed to get their test working. I still had to go around and around with them to even get it as far as they did. I wasn't able to complete it, but I was able to get through 39 of their 44 questions. It was as I expected, just a lot of useless trivia questions. Most of the questions looked like they came right out of a textbook's end-of-chapter review. None of the questions would test a person's critical thinking or problem solving ability. I suggested to...

After my recent post about programming skill tests, it makes me wonder if there's any correlation between someone's preference of video game type and their programming skills. Probably not, but I'm still curious. My preference for video games tends to lean more towards the puzzle and exploration type games. I love the entire Zelda and Metroid series (although some of the more recent Zeldas have deviated from the non-linear exploration). I've also enjoyed Lemmings and Lost...