• Unlocking a Cisco SPA122 for use with any provider

    06 May | 18
    • in Computers • 
    • by FozzTexx

    I thought it would be nice to make a portable PBX that could travel with me when I take some of my retro computers places to demo them. The PBX would let me demonstrate how dial-up works without needing to find an actual working land-line, and if a land line was even available, without having to make an expensive long distance call. I can't remember what keywords I was looking for but the first model I came across was a Cisco SPA122 and when I looked on eBay there was one with a...

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  • Chapters and Subtitles

    04 Feb | 18
    • in Computers • 
    • in Saturday Morning Cartoons • 
    • by FozzTexx

    My Plex server continues to fill up, mostly with various TV series and cartoons. I generally prefer to get my content from DVD or Blu-Ray disks because most of the time they include chapter markers. Chapter markers are fairly important to me, at least for TV series. Why? Because when you're watching a TV series it gets old having to watch the opening titles every single time, and trying to skip over them can be tricky when they aren't a nice even multiple of 30 or 60 seconds. Another...

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  • Making Belts With a 3D Printer

    22 Oct | 17
    • in 3D Printing • 
    • in Commodore PET • 
    • by FozzTexx

    Just as the 40th birthday of the Commodore PET rolled around I managed to get a Commodore PET 2001 with the itty bitty calculator keyboard and a built-in cassette drive. The cassette drive on my model is some off-the-shelf cassette player that Commodore hacked up with a bandsaw and mounted under the lid of the PET. Old brittle belt Of course being 40 years old the belt on the tape drive had long since become stiff and brittle and broke into pieces when I removed the tape drive from the...

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  • Kermit on the JAIR 8080

    28 Aug | 17
    • in IMSAI • 
    • by FozzTexx

    After bringing home an IMSAI with a JAIR 8080 board from VCF West it didn't take long before I wanted to get it connected to something else. As always, my go-to communications program is Kermit. Since the JAIR 8080 board is a little bit different than other S100 or CP/M computers, I wasn't sure if there would be support for the serial ports in Kermit already. After trying out a generic Kermit build I discovered that it was going to require actually modifying Kermit to add support for...

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  • Adding Solid-State Storage to an Original IBM PC

    14 Aug | 17
    • in Electronics • 
    • in IBM PC • 
    • by FozzTexx

    After CGA Weekend it became pretty obvious I needed to do something about getting some kind of permanent mass storage installed in my IBM PC. I can't simply add an IDE hard drive controller since the slots are only 8-bit and in general IDE controllers are designed for 286 computers and up which have 16-bit ISA slots. 8-bit SCSI cards are uncommon and ones that can be used to boot from even more so. I've messed around with using the XT-IDE BIOS over serial , but it was very slow. The...

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