Collaborate Disseminate
Debugging an application crash can oftentimes feel like you’re an intrepid detective in a grimy noir detective story, tasked with figuring out the sordid details behind an ugly crime. Slogging …read more Continue reading Turning a GDB Coredump Debug Session Into a Murder Mystery
There have been many questions about what direction Arduino would take after being bought by Qualcomm. Now it would seem that we’re getting a clearer picture. Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer …read more Continue reading Arduino’s New AI-Centric Board is the VENTUNO Q
Recently [TheRetroChannel] came across an interesting failure mode on a Commodore 1541 5.25″ floppy disk drive, in the form of the activity LED blinking just once after power-up with the …read more Continue reading Diagnosing a Mysterious Fault with a Commodore 1541 Disk Drive
Most people see that garden shed as little more than a place to store some gardening tools in, but if you’re like [Dr. Semiconductor], then what you see is a …read more Continue reading Building a Class 100 Semiconductor Cleanroom Inside a Shed
It’s hard to deny that label printers have become more accessible than ever, but an annoying aspect of many of these cheap units is that their only user interface is …read more Continue reading Reverse-Engineering the Bluetooth Fichero Thermal Label Printer Protocol
With the RAM and storage crisis hitting personal computing very hard – along with new software increasingly suffering the effects of metastasizing ‘AI’ – more people than ever are pining …read more Continue reading How Usable is Windows 98 in 2026?
The Commodore CBM 3032 is a successor to the original Commodore PET 2001, yet due a conflicting trademark issue with Philips these first European PETs were called ‘CBM’ instead. Hence …read more Continue reading Restoring a Commodore PET 3032 in Rough Condition
Around the thirteenth century CE, European society was in the midst between transitioning from Roman numerals to the Arabic numerals that we use today. Less remembered are the Cistercian numerals, …read more Continue reading Building a Super-Compact Cistercian Numerals Clock
During the 1990s the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant – formerly the Chernobyl NPP – continued operating with its remaining three RBMK reactors, but of course the 1970s-era automation with its …read more Continue reading How the Chornobyl NPP Got Modernized in the 1990s
Although to the average person a camera lens is just that bit of glass you stick on the front of the camera to make stuff appear in focus, there’s a …read more Continue reading The Tragic Demise of the Technirama Prism-Based Anamorphic Lens