A couple of months ago I purchased several relay boards and switching power supplies off eBay with the plan to re-use one of my original (256 megs of RAM and no mounting holes) Raspberry Pi model B computers as a sprinkler controller. The parts arrived and I set them aside expecting to have time to work on the project after the 4th of July. About two weeks before the 4th though I realized if I got the project assembled in time I could use the sprinkler controller as a fireworks controller. ...

It'll never work like that! I bought a National Instruments AT-GPIB IEEE-488 ISA card last year intending to use it with HPDrive so that I could make an old PC pretend to be an HP-IB hard disk. I installed the HP-IB card in the old KT7A-RAID computer I’ve been using for doing lots of other retro things. Unfortunately the card had to go all the way at the end and the HP-IB connector was too large to fit on there which meant swapping the motherboard into a different case that...

Have you ever needed to pull an old web page out of the Chrome cache, and wondered how to do it? I had to do this recently myself. I was editing a comment on reddit, and for some reason it wasn't taking. After hitting reload I discovered to my horror that instead of editing the comment, reddit had replaced the entire text of my post with my edited comment! This was terrible because the post was very long and had been edited a few times. Trying to recreate it from memory would be...

As I’m continuing to build a collection of cartoons, TV shows, and movies on my plex server, I’ve put together several scripts to make converting and splitting video easier . For the most part though I’ve been working with digital copies of things. While I have been working on digitizing old home movies shot on 8mm video tape, I’ve been using a digital 8 camcorder which has a FireWire interface and handles the digitization, so on the computer I’m working with...

I recently picked up a CoCoSDC board and after assembling it, the first thing I did was load it up with games. I quickly discovered though I wasn’t going to be doing any gaming without a joystick. I don’t own a Tandy CoCo compatible joystick, so I did what any normal person would, I figured out how to convert something I already had: an Atari 2600 joystick. Atari 2600 joysticks are absolutely horrible though, so it didn’t take very long for me to want to go back to my ninepin...