Update: 2/4/2026: This project has been featured on Hackaday.com ! Old radios and TVs have fascinated me for years. As a passionate DIY restorer of vintage technology, nothing excites me more than switching on an old gadget and experiencing what it was like to use many decades ago. To me, something about seeing modern content on a vintage machine just feels off . When I revive a piece of old…
Update 1/7/2026: This article has been featured on Hackaday.com! About a year ago, I switched graphing calculators from my trusty TI-84+ to a shiny new HP Prime G2. After an initial learning curve, (the TI-84’s button layout was deeply ingrained in my muscle memory) I quickly grew to appreciate the HP’s far superior capabilities. The high-resolution color LCD screen fits more equations with better…
A few years ago, I bought a tiny flashlight on AliExpress for about $10. I carry this super handy flashlight everywhere I go; it’s smaller than a AA battery and it is significantly brighter and more useful than my phone’s flashlight. Unfortunately, like many super-cheap USB-C devices, the USB-C port is not compliant with the USB-C standard. Consequently, the USB-C cables I use to charge my phone,…
My 15-year-old Kindle 3 wouldn’t turn on even after replacing its battery pack with a new one. I got it working again after discovering cracked solder balls underneath the CPU.
When I’m visiting somewhere scenic, I often think to myself, “If only I had some binoculars right now!” The trouble is that my binoculars are bulky and aren’t something I enjoy lugging around. Monoculars aim to solve this issue by sacrificing stereo vision for increased portability. After doing some research, I concluded that most inexpensive monoculars are cheap junk (and still bulky too). One…
I have a Fujitsu Halcyon Split Unit AC that is about ten years old. Last week, it stopped turning on or responding to the remote control. Mysterious error lights were blinking on the front panel. Here’s how I fixed it: First, I noticed that there were some blinking LEDs on the front panel, and sure enough, referring to the installation manual, these were diagnostic LEDs. I counted three pulses on…
Background: I really enjoy tinkering with older-style CRT televisions and monitors. I appreciate the unique character that each CRT display seems to have (especially scan-lines!) I have long wanted a system to view older video content (predating LCD technology) on CRT monitors. For this reason, I began a quest several years ago to feed video signals from my modern computers into older CRTs. While…
Introduction I’ve long been a fan of the movie “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ”, especially the futuristic design of the evil supercomputer HAL 9000 . DIY HAL 9000 Replica Inspired by several other replicas of this prop already documented online, I decided to build my own 3D-printed HAL 9000 with a unique twist. Almost all of the HAL 9000 replicas I came across in my research could only play back…
Update 2/4/2026: This article has been featured on Hackaday.com! Unsurprisingly, at almost a decade old, my 2014 5K iMac is no longer as fast as it used to be. Replacing its fusion drive with an SSD helped squeeze a few extra years out of it, but the slow computer is no match for any of the new Apple Silicon computers. I purchased a MacBook Air in 2020, and despite its numerous advantages, I…
I wanted an easier way to reference my iBook G3 Clamshell’s logic board without taking it apart, so I made these high-resolution scans. These photos are composites of several images —the oversized logic board would not fit on my scanner’s bed. The bottom scans of the logic board are much sharper than the top; this is due to my scanner’s limited depth of field. (There are many protruding components…
Update 3/1/2026: This article has been featured on Hackaday.com! Introduction: A few years ago, I attended the VCF East vintage computer festival. While I was there, I had the chance to interact with dozens of rare and interesting computers including several mainframes, minicomputers, a NeXT Cube, an Apple Lisa, and an Apple I replica. One of the most interesting machines I used was not a…
I have an Orion XT-6 telescope, which I greatly enjoy using to observe the night sky. One of the challenges with the XT-6 is that it is a completely manual telescope. This means that as the Earth rotates, the stars and planets appear to change position in the eyepiece even when the telescope itself is completely stationary. As a result, I can only observe a given target in the night sky for a few…
I enjoy tinkering with HiFi equipment and have often considered building my own speakers from scratch. While I’d eventually like to make my own high-quality wooden speakers, such a project costs more than I’d like to spend at the moment. When I learned about distributed mode loudspeakers, which many websites claim sound great without costing very much to build, I decided to give this project a…
I built this igloo in the winter of 2021 over the course of several days. The inner diameter of the igloo was nine feet, and the total height was over six feet tall. The walls were about one foot thick and made of highly compacted snow. Where I live, the climate does not provide enough snow to build a traditional igloo (out of snow blocks pulled from several deep feet of prior snowfall). I was…
I’ve owned some fantastic-sounding Harman/Kardon SoundSticks II for many years, but they have long suffered from a problem where the volume balance between the left and right speaker channels was inconsistent. Upon a visual inspection of the control PCB inside the “iSub” subwoofer unit, I saw evidence of leaking electrolytic capacitors (these go bad with age, and can interfere with the function of…
The goal I have an Apple iBook G3 (1999) with a battery that no longer functions. As I want to continue using this computer without being tethered to an electrical outlet, I decided to try repairing the existing battery. Taking apart the laptop battery was not an easy job. Not only was the battery held together with plastic clips, but these clips were also glued. I used a variety of plastic pry…
Binaural audio recordings have fascinated me for years. In case you haven’t heard of binaural audio before, it is a specialized recording technique designed to capture “three-dimensional audio” that allows a listener to detect where in space different sounds originate. By recording in stereo through rubber molds of human ears with two separate microphones, sound waves from any given source reach…
I am in the process of creating a video series detailing the restoration process of my Macintosh SE/30. The editing of next videos is on a temporary hiatus while I wait to get a computer that can handle the computational demands of my editing software. The first part of the series is already complete, and it is embedded below. Enjoy!
After several years of tinkering with a very uncooperative Macintosh SE/30, I finally came to the conclusion that I needed a fresh machine to work on. With a fresh machine, I would finally get the chance to restore a Macintosh to flawless condition. In September 2019, I was incredibly excited to acquire this particular Macintosh SE for the bargain price of only $16! The computer itself was fairly…