Festive Meets Nerdy

I like vacuum tubes. Have I mentioned this before?

I have a mental registry of small projects that involve vacuum tubes and one long-standing idea is a Christmas tree ornament. Here's how it goes.

(This involves fire, broken glass, and probably all of the chemical horrors of the 1950s. Say your prayers, wear eye protection, and Don't Be Stupid.)

Ghetto Tablet

This came into FG a number of weeks ago and, like many curios, wandered its way around the mezzanine getting prodded by volunteers. Nobody quite knew what to do with it but nobody was willing to scrap it.

This is probably the closest thing available to a modern tablet computer -- made about a decade ago. I've spent altogether too much time in the last week or two getting it working.

Audiophile silliness, now on a motherboard!

A couple of weeks ago I got hollered over to the dismantle bench -- "you have to see this" or something of the sort. Here's what they had inside the case:

It's the usual mess of wires and junk -- but way at the back, there's something that you will probably never again see on a motherboard.

Happy Binary Day!

It's 11/11/11 (and shortly 11:11:11) -- so happy binary day! This celebration just goes to show that we learned nothing from Y2K and still use two-digit years when it's convenient, but then again, 2011/11/11 just doesn't look quite as pretty.

I'd propose that we keep the powder dry for a real celebration in 2048 -- that's 100000000000 in binary. We won't roll over another digit like that until the year 4096.

Firmware and Bad Ideas

Geoff and Brian came across a strange situation last Thursday and called me over for a look. They were working on building a machine, and were experiencing a very Hallowe'enish phenomenon: a ghost disc.

They had installed an apparently working LG DVD drive into the machine, but every time they closed it without a disc inserted, a phantom disc called "Bluebirds" would show up on the desktop.

At first I thought it might be a PEBKAC -- a friend one listened in embarrassed confusion to most of a Frank Zappa album not realizing that she'd accidentally stuck two discs into the player at once. But to give Geoff and Brian some credit, it was nothing of the sort.

Macintosh Autopsy

This is what science fiction used to look like:

...but then again, so was this.

Proxima Desktop Projector 2400

I like old video projectors. They've been around in some form since the dawn of television -- the old CRT-based ones were technically the same as televisions with the brightness cranked so that they'd throw an image onto a screen. These evolved into huge three-tube monstrosities that you can now get for the price of a hernia.

But when the LCD display came along things got more interesting. In the late 80s someone started manufacturing little units that sat on top of a classroom-standard overhead projector. IBM's Thinkpad 755CDV laptop from 1995 could have the back of its display stripped off so that it could be similarly used to project an image.

By the end of the 1990s digital projectors had taken a familiar shape and dropped massively in both weight and price... but in the meantime there were some weird species in circulation. I already wrote about one (see the end of the article). Here's another. Excluse the blurry photography.