Diy Hands On Projects

[Sonoran Sam]

Today, I just had a little "mini" project. After 27 years of getting in and out of my work truck, my butt wore a hole in the seat.
In my youth, I (briefly) worked at a (low end) Used Car Dealership. Not that it was a trick, but we used iron on patches to patch the holes in the seats. It wasn't try to hide anything, we just wanted to (kind of) make the seats (on these old worn out cars) look a little better.
So I did the same... I couldn't find a gray iron on patch (locally), so I had to order one off of ebay. Time will tell if it lasts or not. The truck isn't worth putting seat covers on and its just a work truck.

 

[Sonoran Sam]

Today's project was to resurrect an old 2004-2005 (32 bit) desktop computer (that was in the back of my closet). I found an old IDE hard drive at Goodwill for a few bucks and started thinking -- maybe just maybe its possible to bring this dead old beast -- back to life. I also thought this might be a good opportunity to learn Linux on a machine, that I don't really care about and has no value.
After trying two other Linux distros (that didn't work on this machine) I stumbled across "AntiX Linux" -- this one worked!! YEA!! Now I need to start playing with it and teaching myself how it and the "terminal" aspect work.

 

[RSchneider]

Today's project was to resurrect an old 2004-2005 (32 bit) desktop computer (that was in the back of my closet). I found an old IDE hard drive at Goodwill for a few bucks and started thinking -- maybe just maybe its possible to bring this dead old beast -- back to life. I also thought this might be a good opportunity to learn Linux on a machine, that I don't really care about and has no value.
After trying two other Linux distros (that didn't work on this machine) I stumbled across "AntiX Linux" -- this one worked!! YEA!! Now I need to start playing with it and teaching myself how it and the "terminal" aspect work.
View attachment 27030

I took an old laptop that honestly was a piece of junk when new. It had windows Vista on it and was returned to Dell twice. About a year ago, I fiddled with it and installed Linux. Now it works fine.

I also took one of my other laptops that the hard drive took a dump after it fell off a workbench at a job I was at. I installed an SSD in it and then figured out the convoluted scheme to get the exact version of windows on it that it had new. Once that was done, I did all of the updates back to Windows 11. It works really well.

My current laptop has a SSD in it and it can be removed easily. I got a warning that it was getting to the end of life. I bought a bigger SSD and a unit that will copy the old one. It literally copied the hard drive to the new one in like 10 minutes. Plugged in the drive and it worked perfect. Almost too easy.

 

[RSchneider]

Today, I just had a little "mini" project. After 27 years of getting in and out of my work truck, my butt wore a hole in the seat.
In my youth, I (briefly) worked at a (low end) Used Car Dealership. Not that it was a trick, but we used iron on patches to patch the holes in the seats. It wasn't try to hide anything, we just wanted to (kind of) make the seats (on these old worn out cars) look a little better.
So I did the same... I couldn't find a gray iron on patch (locally), so I had to order one off of ebay. Time will tell if it lasts or not. The truck isn't worth putting seat covers on and its just a work truck.
View attachment 27028

View attachment 27029

Now you need a marker and put some squiggles on it. That way it'll blend right in.

 

[Sonoran Sam]

I fiddled with it and installed Linux. Now it works fine

Yes... isn't it great to revive an old computer and put it back in service. My girlfriend needs a PC just to email, write the occasional letter, look up stuff on the internet and play a game of solitaire (now and then). So once I learn everything I need to know, she can have this machine and if she messes it up... I'll fdisk the hard drive and re-install AntiX.

 

[Hog]

Cleaning out my moms house and in the garage attic I am finding boxes of our old Tandy Model 1 computer system we used for surveying. No programs at the time, but you had basic installed so I programmed it myself to do boundary surveys and engineering calculations. It had the 16k expansion interface, two floppy drives (single sided), and a "Line Printer 6" which weighed a literal ton. Programming was through a portable cassette recorder, and it had a black and white video display. (This was better than what I learned on in school, which was a Educomp PDP-8 which only had a teletype terminal). I have not found all the pieces just yet, but there are many boxes to still go through. Hopefully if I can find all the pieces, I can donate it to someone/organization that would be interested in it.

 

[RSchneider]

Cleaning out my moms house and in the garage attic I am finding boxes of our old Tandy Model 1 computer system we used for surveying. No programs at the time, but you had basic installed so I programmed it myself to do boundary surveys and engineering calculations. It had the 16k expansion interface, two floppy drives (single sided), and a "Line Printer 6" which weighed a literal ton. Programming was through a portable cassette recorder, and it had a black and white video display. (This was better than what I learned on in school, which was a Educomp PDP-8 which only had a teletype terminal). I have not found all the pieces just yet, but there are many boxes to still go through. Hopefully if I can find all the pieces, I can donate it to someone/organization that would be interested in it.

Sounds like this. I was just up at RPI and seen this computer. They bought a closed down church and installed it in there.

 

[Hog]

I taught myself Z80 assembly language on the TRS-80, but our school Educomp was programmed with either a paper punch tape or by manually flipping "bit levers" up or down in a byte by byte procedure. I still have the manuals on those things. But computers evolved so fast I gave up on trying to keep up.

 

[Interested]

I taught myself Z80 assembly language on the TRS-80, but our school Educomp was programmed with either a paper punch tape or by manually flipping "bit levers" up or down in a byte by byte procedure. I still have the manuals on those things. But computers evolved so fast I gave up on trying to keep up.

I have my dads Altair 8800B and a Compupro. 8" floppies. Have an original IBM PC that has the cassette tape connection. A Columbia luggable with 5 1/4 floppies. Radio Shack color and Texas Instruments too. Someday I will sell when the market is better. I remember being on the bleeding edge of computers for a long time. Took me years to learn to be content with what I have.

 

[Hog]

Sounds like this. I was just up at RPI and seen this computer. They bought a closed down church and installed it in there.

I did alot of research on qubits when they were introduced. Also read a fascinating paper on how a true quantum computer could be used in conjunction with a "sphere of many radii" (essentially a large gravity well) to construct a workable time machine. It also alluded to the current craze at the LHC facility to create a "mini black hole" which would have the required gravitic density as a replacement for the "sphere of many radii" which currently can only be constructed in space. The technology was a little over my head at times, but made sense physically and mathematically. Of course whether it worked or not was up to the uncertainty and where the values fell on the probability curve, but statistically it would work at some point given enough "tries". So in effect, what I got out of it was that these colliders being built by many nations are a technology race to be the first to make a workable time machine, and thus gain control of the world through manipulation of the past.

Mind blowing stuff.