So anyhow, I've had a pretty busy couple of days. Monday, I finally fixed the EGR valve in my truck so that I could get a vehicle inspection. And yesterday I managed to lose my keys. I thought I had left them in the door lock when I was getting stuff out while parked at work. But I had a spare key, so I went home. I finally installed the new door locks on the house doors that I've been putting off for five years, since that keychain had the only key to those locks. Then after all that I no
I've been moving back to San Antonio so that I can be closer to my mom; now that she's getting older, I need to NOT be on the opposite side of the worst traffic in central Texas, namely Austin. Last week I got static IP set up on the house here in SA, and this past weekend I brought down the MythTV computer. It took me an hour or two to get it set up, but the guide data for channel 29 wasn't coming in. I suspected it was because I wanted to keep the old Austin data around (as reference for the
A few weeks ago I found one of these. It's a network cable tester, and I found it with two short lengths of shielded RJ-45 cable. This particular model is no longer sold, but was probably worth about $120-$200 when new a few years ago. While it is designed to test wires in the wall, it's not really convenient for that. But it's fine when you're just testing a bunch of wires. The thing is, I didn't really need to test RJ-45 wires (I have a few in the wall, but not many) or BNC (yeah, lol), I want
A couple of weeks ago was the Classic Game Fest in Austin. There was one corner block that had a bunch of assorted homebrewers, particularly Atari 800 and Sega Genesis. Then I realized I had my laptop and tried to see if I could get my old stuff running, as I knew my make files were smart enough to start an emulator.
The first thing that surprised me was getting a bunch of signed vs unsigned char warnings. It seems I had a newer gcc installed than when I had worked on that old code.
I finally dug up the Eagle 6.5 installer that I had been saving for a LONG time. Version 5.x (what I used back in the day) still used the proprietary binary data files, useless for any other program. Version 6 added an XML-based data file format. Version 6.5 was the last one which still used the old license system, where you could still select the freeware license without first signing your soul away to AutoCAD.
Well, I finally set it up on the Mac Pro. First I tried to get my old ve
I've been working on a full-screen text-based disassembler the past few months, check it out.
It's got support for a lot of different 8-bit CPUs and 68000, it has auto-tracing, and it's light years ahead of what I've used before. What I had been using before was so frustrating that I didn't even tell anyone else about it, so I finally sat down and wrote it. Now I can crank out a good rough disassembly in a couple of hours. I've been kicking it around for a few months and even used it
The other day I got an idea how I could add being able to type in comments. (With limitations, like each comment has to be on a line with code.) So I did the important part first (how to store them in memory), and ended up finding a dozen bugs along the way.
Now I can theoretically disassemble a big ROM, put comments in, and just pass around the .ctl file (info for the disassembly) and .cmt file (the separate file with human-editable comments), then someone can combine them with anot
I have an interesting... thing... with a bunch of 2708 chips in it, and I want to read them. But I'm very wary, because I don't want to fry them.
The problem is that the 2708 needs extra supply voltages of -5 and +12 volts just to read a chip, but it also needs +26V for programming. The extra cost of all the extra voltages means almost zero programmers support it without extra hardware.
A few months ago, I tried to do the simple idea, add a socket board with some pins cha
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