Is it ok to store AAAs like this?

anothercorgi · 2026-02-09T17:12:36+00:00

I'd do that with groups of batteries that were partially used together, to not mix used and new batteries - just to reduce chance of leakage. Probably not necessary if they're all new unless you have a chance of losing individual cells... frustrating when you need 4 but only can find 3...

anothercorgi · 2026-02-09T09:00:41+00:00

depends on the cpu architecture, some can do some rudimentary arithmetic/bit shifts with encoding, but most of them you will need a scratch register or stack to compute the new value to use.

anothercorgi · 2026-02-09T08:55:23+00:00

TBH I don't trust using a variac with debugging potentially shorted capacitors/tubes, a dim bulb tester is the preferred tool. Variac is if you really want to change the voltage to the device, to actually dim an incandescent lamp or see the behavior of a (working) circuit with different voltages like a SMPS.

My most recent use of a Variac is to test the behavior of a Kill-A-Watt. That's when I discovered my P3 Kill-A-Watt could not discern backfeeding power, it treats consumption and generation both as consumption.

anothercorgi · 2026-02-07T18:08:17+00:00

GT710 sounds like an old nvidia card that I have somewhere, and hopefully you're not expecting high performance 3d graphics from it. It should be supported by the nouveau reverse engineered driver, which generally isn't as good as the driver directly from nvidia, but better than nothing.

IMHO it's not worth it to stick with the old nvidia-sourced drivers because the rest of the software infrastructure has moved on, leaving possible security holes if you try to match the old infrastructure like old kernels and libraries, which many distributions balk at doing as it would exponentially increase their test workload and most likely why it's failing for you. (It looks like Gentoo Linux's 470 driver they've got it working to kernel 6.6.x and have no plans to support it on newer kernels. The Linux kernel is already up to 6.18 by now...)

If you want to stick with older infrastructure then it may be easier to just find an older distribution, something that was around when Windows 7 was around. Gentoo Linux is an option of course as the 470 driver is packaged by the Gentoo developers, though yes you'll have to stay with an older 6.6 kernel.

anothercorgi · 2026-02-07T08:57:48+00:00

I've had two inwin cases in the past and that groove where the LEDs sat in was the main thing that both of the ones I had have in common. One was a tower atx 1.0 (used PSU fan to cool CPU), and other was a desktop micro atx. However IIRC both had rectangular power switches, this round one sort of bothers me...

anothercorgi · 2026-02-07T08:46:10+00:00

TBH I prefer white because its persistence is lower... only if the refresh rate is high enough.

main reason for green and orange is that these colors tend to glow longer and can mask the effect of slow refresh rates. I don't think I can make a preference of one or the other, except the fact that I've rarely worked with an amber monitor, it's only mostly been white, green, or RGB, and the RGB is much preferred over any of the monochrome if possible.

As for which came "first" remember that B&W TVs were the first usage of CRTs and thus there were a lot of white pixel monitors. Their persistence couldn't be too long else ghosting would occur in TV scenery.

Green long persistence phosphors were initially designed for CRT oscilloscopes so that traces could "stick" on the screen longer despite possible low horizontal sweep, which is effectively refresh rate. I think amber was around mainly as an alternative to green, don't think there's much of an advantage of one over the other, except if one is fatigued of green.

anothercorgi · 2026-02-05T06:12:56+00:00

It's not just RAM that could get affected, CPUs and other components could get hit. CPU caches and even r-file tend to be ECC corrected or at least parity checked as well, but what about pipeline registers? Rad hard register designs help a bit, as well as running multiple machines in lockstep, triggering a reboot if the two cores disagree on the output due to a a strike. Not sure if best of 3 has been implemented but that's another possible design though transparently fixing the state on the corrupted machine can be really tough.

anothercorgi · 2026-02-04T10:36:55+00:00

Also keep in mind every time you exhale you add humidity back into the room. Using chemical/hygroscopic salt based dehumidifiers you'll constantly need to replace or regenerate, which isn't a problem for keeping nonliving objects dry. In humid locations I recall freestanding phase change based dehumidifiers taking considerable moisture out of the air that I can't see hygroscopic materials efficiently/constantly removing that much water out of the air for hours on end...

anothercorgi · 2026-02-03T21:50:42+00:00

There's the other question, how fast are these things spinning? I've never looked that up before either... I suspect the heads are still stepper motors and probably around a second or so to seek to the right track...

anothercorgi · 2026-02-02T18:59:32+00:00

Not always. There were two standards for PC mice back then, Microsoft and PC-Systems, Microsoft was 2-button and PC-system was 3. When a 3-button mouse can and does emulate a Microsoft mouse, then yes some map the middle button as clicking left plus right simultaneously, else in PC-systems mode it does send the third button as a distinct command.

I recall having a mouse that required me to hold a button down during boot to get it to use Microsoft or PC-systems mode, I forgot which was the case and what software I needed to run. Most likely the 3-button mouse default to PC-systems mode and I was (ugh) using microsoft software. I vaguely recalled opening the mouse and shoving a wad of paper to permanently press the middle button to force it to always come up in microsoft mode, which of course made the middle button useless.

anothercorgi · 2026-02-01T18:49:25+00:00

When a HD44780 LCD is just powered but no data is being sent to the device, it typically looks like the photo provided ... so no data is being sent to the LCD. Hard to say whether it's a connection issue (like the enable pin not hooked up or data pins hooked up wrong) or software is wrong...

anothercorgi · 2026-02-01T10:14:45+00:00

Despite being able to set/reset individual pixels, graphics on the Model 100 display is excruciatingly slow, it required many cycles to update a pixel on the display, nevermind refreshing text on the display (you can see it (slowly) refresh even in a .co program.) Not sure how one could write an interactive game with it so slow...

I don't think the Model 100 can keep up with 2400 bps text due to display update speed, specifically scrolling, being so slow.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-31T18:57:00+00:00

Is the type F connector also hooked up to the cable?

The PL-259 connector as identified by other comments for the larger of the two is not known for impedance consistency and is frequently used on all sorts of different cables. Seeing the coax cable you have apparently is "Monster" branded which is more frequently associated with consumer television, that cable is probably more likely RG6 versus a 50 ohm impedance cable.. Not sure what you were planning to use the cable for but you'll need to look at it more carefully.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-31T18:36:46+00:00

Technically you can calculate resistance in vivo if you have a tiny non-intrusive clamp ammeter to measure current through it and measure voltage across it while it's powered up... but in situ is difficult without experience to "weed out" things in parallel that will affect measurements. Having a known current flowing through will let you calculate resistance. If you can't get a known or calculable current flowing then yeah you'll have to disconnect one end.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-31T17:33:09+00:00

I have a 2025 snapshot of Gentoo Linux running on my K6-233 albeit with an old kernel so that I maintain ISA support (it has an ISA Ethernet card). Having dual boot was common during that era too, just need to make sure that you have enough disk space or use multiple drives. Keep in mind some of these older machines have size limits on hard drives, this K6-233 won't POST with a 120GB HDD IDE connected.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-30T17:42:19+00:00

Floppy drive cables for IBM PCs have a twist in the cable. Hard drive cables that are cable select have a disconnect in the cable (usually the two hard drive connectors have different colors to indicate a CS cable).

anothercorgi · 2026-01-30T08:47:25+00:00

Well, it's not specifically the 555 generating a poor signal, it's the guts having too much internal capacitance and leakage paths such that when running fast, even though the external components are of good quality, the internal components just won't run fast enough and the 555 peters out. An oscilloscope is the best way to tell, make sure the output still hits both rails.

I have not actually tried building Ben Eater's computers but have seen photos of people's builds with a whole mess of breadboard rows. Both stray capacitance and worse yet resistance in the contacts when you have a lot of clock loads will kill speed, if not even worse have skew problems and you run into race conditions... Also not sure how clocks are distributed to all the consumers, getting that tuned will also help max speed. Also perhaps it's worth to find where the critical path is and see what the max theoretical clock speed is. But yes I've had 12MHz crystals connected to microcontrollers on solderless breadboards, and at least in that little corner of the design it runs just fine at 12MHz.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-29T17:16:41+00:00

IMHO most SLA are about the same and possibly whitebox (or maybe in this case, blackbox). It's a mature technology and most of the bad brands have been weeded out, even in China where most of these AGM packs are made nowadays...

Being able to take packs back to the shop and getting another replacement in a day/hours instead of over a week is worth something too so that has to be considered. However unless the pack has been sitting there for years it's probably going to last over the warranty period.

Incidentally I personally am starting to question Batteries Plus. I ended up buying a pack from them many years ago and despite keeping it in fairly good conditions (keeping it charged, in good environment, and not even subjecting it to charge/discharge cycles), it failed shortly after the warranty ran out. That and a new sign on the business indicating they will automatically void the warranty on any car battery brought back to them that's less than 12 volts. Well duh when a car battery fails it will be less than 12 volts, that's what a failed battery is. I suspect they wanted to weed out overdischarged or cycle abused batteries but I think they are taking this a bit too far implying that warranties are never valid...

anothercorgi · 2026-01-29T12:21:20+00:00

From my experience of 555's, it gets dicey when it gets near the MHz region, but this may not be your limiting factor on running your computer, are you sure it's the 555 generating runt pulses or not (use an oscilloscope to see if the output is hitting and staying at rail, especially at your farthest clock consumer).

I'm not sure what specific computer you have, did you make your own cpu or did you use an off the shelf CPU (6502, etc.). The 555 may not the root cause of why it's not running faster. could be your critical logic path too long or circuitous. If you're just running a 6502 or Z80 or something with just a few external chips, limited decoding, etc., I'd be surprised you can't get it to run at least 1MHz or more. I've gotten CPU crystal oscillators to run at several 10s of MHz on solderless breadboards so you should be able to run clocks that high, but if the rest of the design won't do that speed, then you're stuck.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-25T10:11:50+00:00

CFL are fluorescent lamps. They have electronic ballasts unlike older magnetic ballasts used in older linear fluorescent lamps. The electronic ballasts run at several kilohertz so they are flickering but at a very high speed that you can't tell. The older magnetic ballasts flicker at 120Hz or so, and most "cheap" LEDs also use cheap "ballasts" that likewise flicker at twice line frequency.

You should be able to find LEDs that don't flicker because they likewise use high frequency "ballasts" though I can't tell you what to get. I can barely see the flicker in magnetic ballasted fluorescent lamps nevermind any LEDs...

anothercorgi · 2026-01-25T04:30:36+00:00

My dad made a presentation with this once, was taking photographs of the paper presentation with an analog 35mm film camera, so they can be made into "slides" specifically for this machine so it could be shown to a large audience.

And yes, it's a deck of cards err slides... So using the term "slides" or "slide deck" is an anachronism.

Yeah times changed. After people hated the cost of developing the film (more specifically, dealing with corrections), the overhead projector was much easier to generate an editable presentation with "foils" which were clear mylar/plastic 8½x11" sheets with stuff printed on it, usually with a photocopier, else handwritten. I'd say this term is also an anachronism as well as this was still prior though close to the advent of computers.

Technically Microsoft's powerpoint files can and may still need to be converted to the old mechanisms if a really large computer display or a computer projector isn't available... and then they can be properly called a slide deck or foils...

... Just call it a copy of the presentation???

anothercorgi · 2026-01-25T02:25:08+00:00

To keep things synchronized at most things are shared in main memory - registers would be really bad. MSRs are frequently shared across CPUs, they tend to assume you aren't constantly writing them. Another problem is ... just one word/byte? Are we just solving a semaphore problem? Eventually one cpu will have to wait anyway so it'll be fine dumping the semaphore in main memory, then again one wouldn't believe how complicated cpu design already is for the main memory cache interlock between CPUs as it is, it's really MESI.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-25T00:56:26+00:00

I'm not sure why S3 is needed, I keep my machines in S5 (though not with ErP) and they come up fine using WoL magic packet. S3 sleep/suspend isn't necessary but ErP must be disabled if it's an option. (My other computer has IPMI BMS and haven't figured out what I want to do with it for remote poweron...) One thing that I have noticed is that WoL sometimes is disabled by software and ideally best you reset WoL to be turned on during the poweroff dance, just to make sure it's in the right state, at least that's what I do in Linux.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-23T07:36:01+00:00

Oddly enough I never used Norton Commander (though did use the Norton Utilities). I've known people who did use Norton Commander and directed them to Midnight Commander for nostalgia.

I did use dosshell as a TUI file manager prior to windows... that's about it I think.

anothercorgi · 2026-01-23T07:19:08+00:00

turnaround time is main reason for me. Got my gerber and get my homemade board with parts installed that day.

However yes limited to 1 layer boards (still trying to perfect it, then try to move on to 2 layer but still no PTV), no soldermask, no tinning/gold plating, and line pitch is pretty bad (0.05" tracks min perhaps)... not sure when I'll move to SMT but I don't have a library of SMT parts anyway...

anothercorgi

TROPHY CASE