Category: Doing
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Pickering vs Grado: Chapter two — Penny Lane
This time we're looking at a Beatles classic for our cartridge comparison. Penny Lane from the Canadian pressing of 1967 - 1970. Which will sound better?
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Pickering vs Grado: Chapter one — introduction, review, and listening to an old favourite
Two cartridges. One vintage, the other new. Which sounds 'better'? What is better? I get to play with charts and audio stuff, and play cool tunes to YouTube! What's not to like. And maybe we find out a bit more about these two cartridges.
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Making progress
Updating my slowly-evolving analog audio project wherein I undertake to rebuild/recover my enjoyment of observing the phenomonon created when a tiny diamond rides merrily through a vinyl groove, delightedly vibrating, producing a minuscule electrical current that eventually (through amplification magic) becomes the sweet sound that we call analog music. The project makes progress and it's…
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This pile of gear is starting to come to life… and a list of vinyl test albums
An old turntable, a new cartridge, and a list of awesome albums to pick up. What's not to like!
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Don’t want to install employer’s Multi-Function Authentication app on your phone? Five reasons to support your position.
In case you are looking for a few reasons beyond 'I just don't want to', which is fine, and a valid reason on its own. Here's more.
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I’m don’t have the knowledge, but ChatGPT does…
I’m working on a website, building pages that have random pull-quotes on them. And I’m making mockup / placeholder pages. Many mockups. This gets old pretty quickly so I’m thinking to myself, “Self? Let’s see if we can have some fun with these quotes”. But, rather than just do a search for quotes, I thought I’d…
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Using ChatGPT to generate Dungeons & Dragons adventure scenarios: Abandoned mineshaft near Oakdale
I was playing around with the ChatGPT artificial intelligence recently, and decided to prompt it to see how well it could create a Dungeons & Dragons adventure. Surprisingly well, it turns out. I’m tempted to run this sometime… Abandoned mineshaft near Oakdale Prompt: Using the 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons rules, create a small dungeon…
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A Virtual Parallel Printer for a Vintage Computer
One of the neat things about using vintage computing equipment is figuring out modern ways to work with the older technology. Why virtual printing? Recently, I wanted to explore printed output from my NEC PC-8201a. For one thing, working ‘on the hardware’ in this case has a display limit of eight lines of forty characters…
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I Made some RAM for my NEC PC-8201a — and it’ll work on a Tandy Model 100 too!
Original expansion RAM for the NEC PC-8201a and Tandy Model 100 is pretty hard to find these days -- so I made some.
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How long will a NiMH battery pack last in a NEC PC-8201 or PC-8201a?
As I was converting NEC battery packs to be recharegable, I wondered just what the run-time of a battery pack would be. So I came up with is a simple BASIC program to run the computer battery down, and record the time that it dies and calculate the run-time. This is the story...
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Vintage Computing: Saving data to an audio device
Back when the early days of personal computing, you did your work on your computer and either printed out the finished work, or stored it to work on later. Early on, cassette tapes were the storage medium of choice as they cassette tape recorders were commonly available, and reasonably affordable. Some computer system did have…
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Aloha to a Hawaiian TRS-80 Model 100
Well, finally got a chunk of free time to get back to my ‘Model 100 school’. My goal is to learn about these m100s through hands-on learning. A new friend (Hi Larry) sent me his ailing m100 to further my education. Who knows? Maybe I can get it running again — it’s a nice looking…