The personal blog of 82MHz
This week, something happened in the world of rock music that nobody thought was ever going to happen again - Ritchie Blackmore rejoined Deep Purple live on stage for the first time in decades. Blackmore is one of my favourite guitar players and easily one of the greates guitarists of all time. Along with late keyboard player Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice he is one of the founding members of Deep…
This week Ruben wrote about Feeling blue after the end of Heartstopper , his favourite series. I've never heard of this series before and I'm also not the target audience for it, but he said something in his review that got to me: " It’s the series I wish young me would have been able to watch, at a time when gay people like myself were only portrayed as stereotypes in mainstream media:…
A few days ago I wrote a post titled " Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change ". I don't write posts with the intention of getting lots of clicks, but this one seems to have struck a nerve (or the headline was clickbaity enough) because it went kind of viral (at least in small web terms). It bubbled to the top at Bubbles and someone also posted it on Hacker…
Recently, someone on Mastodon shared this video titled " Apple Changed... " by a guy named Theo who I'd never heard of, but according to his website he's a guy who "builds things". Apps, presumably. I had nothing better to do (sleepless night...) and I enjoy a good Apple bashing, so I watched the video. In it, Theo spends an hour ranting about how terrible the experience of developing…
It's currently Blaugust , and so I'm counting all my blog posts this month as Blaugust posts, including the Linkdumps. I told a friend about it and she laughed, because "blau" in German means "blue", like the colour, but it can also mean being drunk. And I had this thought too... Blaugust sounds a bit like I'm planning to spend the month getting hammered. Sometimes a totally…
I recently repaired the Micro USB socket of an old Raspberry Pi; the one through which the Pi receives it's power. It was a bit of a fiddly soldering job because the connections for the USB port are tiny. Because of this, I briefly considered just sending the power straight into the 5V and GND pins on the Pi's pin header. I've seen projects where a Raspberry Pi was powered through…
Recently a person I'm following on Mastodon posted a picture of two cats. It was cute and kind of funny. I saw it, chuckled and forgot about it. But then someone replied that they ran the picture through an AI checker and according to this the picture was very likely AI generated. So the original poster apologised for not checking whether or not the picture was AI generated slop and to make…
A list of all Blaugust participants was posted yesterday on Nerd Girl Thoughts. I thought it would be nice to have a list of all RSS feeds of these blogs, so I cobbled together a quick and dirty solution. Here's the OPML file . I probably missed a few feeds, so if your blog isn't in there, I didn't leave you out on purpose, my script just failed to pick up your feed. Feel free to…
Sam from TheTangentSpace published a post a few days ago about his participation in the Blaugust Festival Of Blogging . I remember this from seeing the #blaugust hashtag in previous years, but I never participated, so I thought this year is a good time to change that! Sadly the founder of the challenge, Belghast, passed away just a few weeks ago, but the challenge lives on in his memory, which is…
Only the good die young All the Evil seem to live forever That's taken from the Iron Maiden song Only the Good Die Young from the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album. I've been thinking of this lyric a lot recently as I keep seeing good musicians and actors , people who spent their lives bringing joy to others, die relatively young, while all the horrible people in the world seem to…
The Amiga turns 40 this week. I had an Amiga 500 as a kid, some time in the early 90s. And I remember being made fun of for having an Amiga, because PCs were supposedly so much cooler and better and whatnot. But the first time I visited a friend who had one of those amazing PCs and he proudly showed me his games with their EGA graphics colour palette and the PC speaker sounds I thought, are you…
You know what, I was kind of busy last week with my OCC project, and I was also building a website for a friend who is opening her own doctor's office, and so I completely forgot that my blog turned three years old last Thursday! Well I actually didn't completely forget, but I was convinced that the date of my first post was July 19th, while it was actually July 9th. Whoops. The human…
This past week I've been writing a lot, first the Walkman post and then my IR sensor project . I've gotten some really nice feedback on both; the Walkman post in particular seems to have resonated with a lot of people, which is interesting. I wasn't even sure if writing a post about it was worth it because it was such a basic fix. But now I'm glad I did. I'm sure if you…
Since the coding part is now done, I decided to solder the Arduino and IR sensor on a bit of perfboard, and then put it in a case. I don't have a case though; but what I do have is a 3D printer, so I'm going to try my hands at designing one. This was interesting because I've never really designed anything before. I've always printed out models from Thingiverse or Printables ,…
Now that the IR receiver is working and I can receive key presses from the remote on the Arduino, it's time to think about sending them to the PC somehow. The remote I'm planning to use is the small Apple remote that came with old Macbooks. It has five buttons for Play/Pause , Vol + , Vol - , Next Track , Previous Track and Menu . The keyboard library For sending key presses from…
Okay, enough theory. Time to actually start implementing. First step is to download the latest version of the Arduino IDE , which is currently 2.3.10. I've worked with version 1 before so I think I'll get by, but there are also a number of tutorials available to get you up to speed. The Arduino IDE The Arduino IDE That's what it looks like at first boot. Very simple. The Arduino…
Yesterday I announced that I'm planning to build a USB-IR receiver for my media centre. Let's look in a bit more detail at what I'm trying to do here. I have three components: An infrared receiver An Arduino A remote Infrared receiver, Arduino clone, Apple remote I want to connect the infrared receiver to the Arduino so that the Arduino can receive commands I send from the remote,…
It's that time of the year again. For the past three years I participated in the old computer challenge every year, and I always had a lot of fun, so I wanted to do something this year, too. The topic for this year isn't strictly about old computers, but rather about making something yourself, to combat the onslaught of AI slop that we're all being subjected to on a daily basis. I…
It keeps happening. I can't control it. Sometimes, I feel nostalgic for some old piece of tech, and before I know what's happening, I'm already browsing eBay looking for one. That's how I ended up with an old Thinkpad from 2004 recently. And now it happened again, and so I'm now the proud owner of a Sony Cassette Walkman. Despite not having any tapes anymore.... Ok, so I…
I recently had a "phone support" call with my parents, where they needed help with their computers and smartphones and the internet router. They regularly ask me for help, because they're completely overwhelmed and out of their depth when it comes to modern technology, and it makes me sad to see how much they struggle with their devices. We have incredible technology these days; things that…