When I got onto my cartoon collecting kick one of the first things I ordered was the Rocky & Bullwinkle complete boxed set. As soon as it arrived the first thing I did was load the entire series onto my Plex server so that I could watch it at my leisure without having to mess with inserting the disks. I watched a couple of episodes and it was very nostalgic but didn’t get much further than that. Since I’m not tied to watching TV on a schedule and don’t need to fill a...

I’ve had my dad’s first calculator sitting in a drawer in my desk for a little while. It’s a Hewlett-Packard 25 calculator with a red LED screen. My dad got it in February of 1976 at Macy’s and paid $207.68 for it. The calculator itself has a manufacture date of March of 1975. Not long after he got the calculator HP introduced the 25C which would save your program even after switching the calculator off which he said he would have preferred, but back then returning...

I’ve really enjoyed my 3D printer, so much so that I wanted to see how many gifts I could make using it. Making things for kids is pretty easy, there’s tons of little toys all over Thingiverse. Ideas for everyone else though are much harder to come up with. Sure there’s lots of silly little trinkets, but those are things for handing out at a trade show, not for giving as presents. The beer lock & puzzle box I made Looking all over for ideas I found these beer locks...

I’ve been watching 3D printer progress since I saw the first RepRaps a decade ago. They seemed interesting but very crude at the time. The few times I encountered an inexpensive 3D printer in person the creations seemed like they were very brittle. When I saw a video that was using NinjaFlex my interest in 3D printers increased quite a bit. The idea of being able to make flexible things and not just hard blocks of plastic was something I had been wanting to do. Several months ago I was...

One of the retro computer mailing lists I’m on recently had a side project go by about building a single board computer using a Hitachi HD63C09P 8-bit processor which is a descendant of the Motorola 6809. I followed along with interest and there were some small PCBs designed and when it got to the testing phase the project stalled because they couldn’t get the 63C09 to start up. For some reason the crystal wouldn’t start oscillating, or when using a full can oscillator the E...