Digital Distractions

Inside a Motorola 8500X brick phone

James — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:53:18 +0000

TweetEveryone likes looking at the innards of electronic devices. Modern ones are a bit boring now unless you’ve got a microscope, but there’s plenty of interest in old tech… especially...

Make Netatalk work on Ubuntu 11.10 and OSX

James — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:15:34 +0000

TweetI recently upgraded my server to a new machine running Ubuntu 11.10. With the Macs in our house I’ve always used Samba for file sharing – it works, it’s stable...

The insides of an iPod 1.8″ HDD and a 2.5GB Seagate Microdrive

James — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:39:29 +0000

TweetHard drives are pretty fascinating things, full of complex and precisely machined pieces of metal that spin at high speeds. And they’re strangely reliable too, considering what’s in them. Well,...

Fake Hello Kitty iPod Shuffle from eBay for £0.01

James — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:05:45 +0000

TweetAmy just received this amusing piece of Chinese electronic tat from eBay. It’s a Hello Kitty branded MP3 player that bears a striking resemblance to a popular brand of portable...

A BBC Micro with an MMC Card… and some bad components

James — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:23:44 +0000

TweetAfter the success of repairing my BBC Micro’s PSU I decided the act of shoving 30 year old floppies into an equally old drive, while amusing and all was a...

Repairing filtering capacitors on faulty BBC Micro PSU

James — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:38:23 +0000

Tweet30 year old computers often have a few drawbacks, especially when the equally old components inside them start to malfunction. There is a known fault with the BBC Micro’s power...

Building a Fignition computer

James — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 23:20:02 +0000

TweetFrom the main Fignition website FIGnition is a £20 educational DIY computer which works like an 8-bit home Micro: outputting to composite video and ready to be interactively programmed from...

Replacing Mac Mini HDD with 64GB Kingston SSD

James — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:24:24 +0000

Notes to remind myself how to configure my Mac so that its swap file is not stored on the SSD.

Restoring missing Microsoft Excel workbook windows

James — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:25:49 +0000

TweetI just had a rather strange problem with Microsoft Excel 2010. When opening the workbook nothing appeared on the screen: Evidently something had loaded since the formula bar contained data...

Installing an SSD in a Late 2009 A1283 Mac Mini

James — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:47:22 +0000

TweetI recently bought an SSD for my Mac Mini. Being a late 2009 model with a 2.26GHz Core2Duo, 4Gb of RAM and a 500GB HDD there wasn’t much else I...