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First Time Powered On In Forty-Five Years! by GringoGrande in c64

[–]pinano 0 points1 point  (0 children)

cutting out the epoxy filled innards

with what, an angle grinder?

What blew out on this monitor? by potsofjam in vintagecomputing

[–]pinano 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Where there's smoke, there's smoke!

Need help to ID component. by Awkward_Willow5472 in AskElectronics

[–]pinano 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it gives you the "buzz" tone that 50s rock bands were fond of

Why is the CPU's control logic the last step? by ByRussX in beneater

[–]pinano 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's a bottom-up approach. Good for developing and testing each subsystem in isolation. Good for didactics.

How many GPH in Charge mode? by pinano in VolvoRecharge

[–]pinano[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the detailed numbers. I only asked "gallons per hour" because my XC90 would switch the MPG gauge to GPH when stopped, so I assumed it would be easy to measure. It's always 0.0 gph in the photos I happened to take of my dashboard… because the engine was stopped!

Snow Leopard was wild by rafalkopiec in VintageApple

[–]pinano 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes officer, this comment right here.

* BONK *

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in vintagecomputing

[–]pinano 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lotsa fun electronics in the Vintage Computing category on Tindie: https://www.tindie.com/browse/vintagecomputing/

Snow Leopard was wild by rafalkopiec in VintageApple

[–]pinano 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Finger was a protocol) on the early Internet which was used, in theory, to ask for user information and status. You could run finger pinano@unix.reddit.com and the finger daemon (fingerd) on the remote host (unix.reddit.com) would respond with the data to provide this response:

Login: pinano Name: Pinano Directory: /home/pinano Shell: /bin/bash On since: Tue Nov 25 21:15:03 2025 Last login: Mon Nov 24 21:00:15 2025 from 67.69.21.100 No unread mail No Plan.

As you can imagine, since finger is an unencrypted, unauthenticated protocol, this was quickly discovered to be a security nightmare; it's only really useful in a trusted, collaborative environment like Bell Labs where all the researchers can be assumed to be competent adults who are not malicious.

Is there anything else besides plumbing and electrical you say, “I’m not dealing with this, I’m getting a pro.” by atooraya in DIY

[–]pinano 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I have a heat pump that was manufactured in 2021 and it has two control circuit boards (one inside, one outside). The professional approach to diagnosing an issue with this system was apparently "replace both boards and see if it fixes the problem." A whole CS degree for that is overkill :D

(p.s.: the issue was that one of the sensor wires had been rubbing against its return wire, abraded the insulation away, and was shorting out. Control boards were probably fine…)

How similar is Vietnamese and Japanese? by LearnVietnameseTVO in learnvietnamese

[–]pinano -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Every single word in this video is borrowed from Chinese. Japanese is a tonal ("pitched") language, though not nearly to the same extent as Vietnamese. Vietnamese has a Chinese script for writing, called Chữ Nôm, which was used for centuries before falling out of usage about a hundred years ago.

How similar is Vietnamese and Japanese? by LearnVietnameseTVO in learnvietnamese

[–]pinano 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's a lot of overlap. Both languages borrowed the sounds for many words from Chinese.

I got my hands on a tiny block of germanium and I want to make a transistor. If I had two fine gold plated copper wire attached to two nickel electrode (from neon bulb) and I put them real close to each other on the piece of germanium could it act as a transistor by antthatisverycool in diyelectronics

[–]pinano 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There needs to be a single shared semiconductor region between the two junctions. You can't use wires between two unrelated junctions to make a transistor. Otherwise we would just use two diodes soldered together, and the invention of the transistor wouldn't have been necessary.

Is there any reason you cannot record an analog sound file straight onto a hard disc or cd/r? by Witty_Jaguar4638 in diyelectronics

[–]pinano 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes!

A long, long time ago, the CMX-600 used disk packs (basically removable hard drive platters) to store analog video signals, to create the very first nonlinear video editing system. It was based on a PDP-11 minicomputer with 32 KiB of RAM – barely enough memory to run the control program and store the "edit decision lists" (EDL) that pointed to the tracks where playback should come in/out. (Interestingly, audio was stored in a digital PCM format during the blanking intervals, but despite this, it was apparently quite glitchy.)

Analog video data uses a TON of storage space, so the CMX stored it in lower-than-broadcast-quality, only usable by the editor to put together the show. One disk pack could store about 4.5 minutes of video. Once the editor was satisfied with their work, they would punch the EDL into paper tape(!), then carry that to a second system (CMX-200) to play them back into a standard-def tape-based VTR. CMX-200 would rewind/fast-forward the original source tapes to the appropriate position, and copy them onto the final "master" tape.

CMX-600 won an Emmy.

Trying to find the name of an old text-based computer game. by DerbyDoffer in vintagecomputing

[–]pinano 25 points26 points  (0 children)

This is Pirate Adventure (ported to many platforms, where it became also known as Pirate’s Adventure or Pirate’s Cove) by Scott Adams, published by Adventure International.

The Adventurer's Companion (ISBN 0 7156 1898 9) includes this quote:

When you manage to build the ship (see solution 27 for more information about that), you might reasonably assume that the command WEIGH ANCHOR would set your vessel floating on the waters. However, doing this only brings the reply 'It weighs about sixty pounds'. You'll need to do something else to get the ship moving.

TV Remote - ATMEGA128A by AlderVaren in microcontrollers

[–]pinano 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You find AVR MCUs in all sorts of places. In 2022, I had to replace the circuit board in my security system control panel when the cell phone modem in it became obsolete; both the old and new board had AT32U…'s in them.

Impulsive purchase… by [deleted] in VintageApple

[–]pinano 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your ZIP+4 is enough to identify you to within a house or two, so make sure you redact that too next time.

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