What s going on in the workshop?
History has been kind to the Chinon FZ506 floppy disc drive. A lot of them seem to have survived. Though they don t have the aspirational cachet of the Teac FD55, they seem reliable, and I ve found that of the working or repairable floppy drives that have passed through my hands, a lot of them have [ ]
Monday morning. Arrive at the office with lots to do. Switch on the computer, and That s not what I wanted to see. There s lots of advice out there on the web about fixing this problem, but it turned out not to be so straightforward. The first step was to get hold of a bootable Windows [ ]
This story starts with the long drive from Cambridge, UK to Warsaw, Poland. I like to be able to listen to music to while away the hours in the car, and I decided to use cassettes. Why? Our car radio is faulty, so much of the time there s hardly anything to listen to. It has [ ]
It s admission time. I still run the financial side of my business on Quicken 2002 and yes, it really is 16 years old. It does what I need and is reliable. Over the years I ve developed various handy Python scripts for manipulating its QIF file format (more about those another time) so I m quite invested [ ]
A little embedded Linux magic comes in unexpectedly handy. Years ago, I started using Acronis True Image to back up my office PC. Other backup packages are available, as they say, but it s worked well enough for me. This week I had reason to use it in earnest. The PC is set up with two [ ]
One product I work on has a built-in data logger. This helps us a lot if a problem occurs: we can see the history of any faults. Every log entry is time stamped, which is important. We need to know when it s been used and how often. However, good timekeeping is a challenge. The product has [ ]
This post contains no electronics or software, just woodwork. Our house is full of traps for the inquisitive toddler. There s cat food and litter, an office full of sharp tools, a fireplace, and most tricky of all, a staircase descending from the corner of the living room guarded only by a coffee-table-height shelf. Fortunately, there [ ]
In the workshop I have a couple of these Tascam M-1B line mixers. They re a very useful box: they have eight inputs, each with a level control and pan pot, which are mixed together and fed into a master volume control. There s also a pair of headphone outputs with their own volume control driven by [ ]
Having relocated from the UK to Poland, the change in mains plugs has never quite been resolved. All the equipment that came from the UK has 13A plugs on it, and all the local sockets are the CEE 7/5 type. Then there are locally-acquired bits and pieces which generally have two-pin Europlugs. No matter how [ ]
This is my Canon S100 digital camera. After long, somewhat arduous service, the shutter button started playing up: it would focus but not take the photo. Eventually I got a mobile phone with a better camera and quietly forgot about the Canon. The S100 has been extensively frozen, boiled, soaked, rattled and trodden on, so [ ]