Commodore C286LT Laptop Teardown

Hi all,

I'm about to disappear to Europe for a couple of weeks (whee!) and will try to visit something interestingly nerdy while I'm there -- the Berlin Computer Game Museum? A small computer museum at Humboldt? But in the meantime, here's a teardown in the oddly fertile vein of 286 laptops.

Webster Chicago Wire Recorder

Hi all,

I was going to save this for a rainy day but I'm too excited to get it posted because it's pretty awesome.

Donation of the Day

I complain too often about people donating perfectly good gear just because it lost its glitter when the plastic wrapping came off. Sometimes a donation comes in that redeems my faith in human nature.

This note came in with a couple of laptops. It reads:

Cassettepunk MP3 Player: How to do it

Hi all,

Here's a few words on how this hack (the second one, that is) was done. This is a reconstitution of some old notes I made during the process.

This focuses primarily on the software side -- the hardware side can be pieced together from the photographs, aside from the one hardware modification to add a second USB port to the WL-HDD device.

This post contains no pictures and a lot of grisly detail. You have been warned.

Cassettepunk MP3 Player

Hi all,

Time for another hack. I've been doing these for a few years and though they're pretty diverse there are some common threads: one, they often involve music; two, they involve a particular niche of time after something has ceased to be useful but before it's gotten interesting as an antique. Call it "Cassettepunk".

Free Geek 2011 AGM

Hi all,

Free Geek held its 4th formal Annual General Meeting yesterday evening at the Maritime Labour Centre just down the street. In Free Geek fashion we dismantled the orderly rows of chairs, ignored the raised podium and microphones, and sat in a circle. The AGM is the yearly changing of the guard where the old board of directors steps down and a new board is chosen. Here's one quick report on how it went.

Know Your Volunteers: Harley and Isaiah

This week I was zipping around the warehouse with fistfuls of parts, looking for the right power supply for any of the half-dozen ancient palmtops that I was trying to work my way through, when I saw this pair working at the Printer Test station:

Harley and Isaiah

I love seeing kids at Free Geek Vancouver. We're contributing to the Nerd Army of the Future.