Sharing an IR receiver via an opto-isolator
I wanted to share an infrared remote receiver between the Pace DC550D cable box and Raspberry Pi 2 B running Kodi. This way there is no need to mount another visible IR receiver. It turned out to be a...
View ArticleSwitching from IDE to AHCI on an ICH7-M based laptop
Many older laptops have SATA controllers and SATA drives, but set up the chipset in IDE mode instead of AHCI mode. Compared to IDE mode, AHCI can provide faster transfer rates, NCQ and power savings....
View ArticleExiftran for Windows
The Windoze 10 Photos app doesn’t actually rotate JPEG files, and instead just sets the EXIF orientation. I want my photos to always be displayed in the correct orientation, so this is not acceptable,...
View ArticleHow to set the MAC address when connecting to wireless using...
If you try to set the mac address using hwaddress ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx in /etc/network/interfaces, that fails. It seems ifup tries to set the address after connecting to WiFi. The address needs to...
View ArticleNotes about unlocking a Vonage VDV23 VoIP box
I got a used Vonage VDV23 VoIP box to play with. Vonage seems expensive and limited compared to other VoIP providers like voip.ms, so I decided to unlock the box for use with other providers. A guide...
View ArticleFacebook friend request accepted even though I never sent one
A while ago someone I stayed in touch with over 10 years ago appeared in my suggested friends list. That was probably due to a mutual friend. I looked at the suggested friend's page and public posts...
View ArticleHow to find good yogurt in Canada
While living in Croatia in the 80s, I enjoyed plain yogurt every day. After moving to Canada, I was very disappointed with the yogurt here.Now I can find good yogurt in Canada. It's really quite...
View ArticleStreaming video from an MJPEG network camera to applications in Linux
I recently got a D-Link DCS-930L network camera. It outputs a motion JPEG (MJPEG) stream at http://address/video.cgi. Although there's no kernel driver for receiving that, it is possible to send it to...
View ArticleHow to log in to SoundCloud in Kodi
The SoundCloud add-on for Kodi accesses SoundCloud via its API and OAuth2 authentication. It is supposed to log in once using your username and password, and get a token. After this, there is no need...
View ArticleDealing with a partially installed Windows 7 update
On one computer the June 2017 monthly rollup (KB4022719) somehow installed improperly or got corrupted. It couldn't be uninstalled, and future rollups couldn't be installed. Apparently, the process of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Opening a "single use" armband plastic snap together button
As you can see the armband's button was secured by 4 plastic ribs which stick out from the post. The ribs on the post and the profile of the ring act like a wedge, temporarily deforming plastic to...
View ArticleUsing SpeedFan's driver to call Dell BIOS functions for fan control
SpeedFan uses a signed driver to talk to hardware for temperature measurement and fan control. The fact it's signed is important because Windows 10 makes running unsigned drivers difficult. I wasn't...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fixing Whirlpool part 3378207 to make dishwasher start washing reliably
A dishwasher doesn't simply recirculate water while washing. It tries to separate solids coming off the dishes from the water, and recirculate only the water. Some dishwashers have filters. This...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SPARCstation ELC repair
The SPARCstation ELC is a SPARC workstation built into a monochrome CRT monitor. It is fanless, and gets quite hot, which is bad for electrolytic capacitors. I suspect that also some particular...
View ArticleNetbooting SunOS on a SPARC workstation from Ubuntu 20.04
The general procedure for booting a Sun SPARC workstation over the network is well documented. I liked this guide.The post here exists to document ways in which things break in modern Ubuntu and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
DEC KA650 (MicroVAX III / 3500 / 3600) error 62 can mean a bad keyboard...
My MicroVAX produced no output via the QDSS. I saw the monitor flash as if the QDSS was initialized, but video output appeared. Instead text went to the serial console of the KA650 CPU board. There, at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Telequipment D54 oscilloscope bad MPS6518 transistor in sweep-gating bistable
My Telequipment D54 oscilloscope didn't show a trace. Instead, if I turned up brightness all the way there were some very faint blobs which changed a bit with the horizontal position adjustment. If I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fix for Tseng ET3000AX SVGA card displaying monochrome
This is a Micro-Labs VGA Solution, an ISA super VGA card based on the Tseng Labs ET3000AX. It seems to be a reference design because other brands of cards also exist with the same board layout. It...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An ugly fix for on ODIN OEC12C887A RTC
The Odin OEC12C887A chip contains a battery backed real time clock and a small amount of battery backed RAM. The battery and the crystal needed for this are part of the chip. Many old motherboards use...
View ArticleClik here to view.
ATI Mach 64 GX character generator failure
This is an PCI video card from ATI, based on the 210888GX00 Mach64 chip. I think it's a Graphics Pro Turbo. It is only designed to accelerate the Windows desktop, and was released well before 3D cards...
View ArticleAT motherboard serial connector pinouts can differ between motherboards
Older AT format motherboards don't have a back panel with many connectors, like an ATX motherboard. The only direct external connection is for a keyboard. Many motherboards have onboard serial and...
View ArticleInstalling MIT Project Athena 4.3BSD onto a VAX
Athena 4.3BSD is an MIT modification of 4.3BSD for their Project Athena distributed computing environment. Although it is designed to work in such an environment, it can be installed and used on a...
View ArticleULTRIX 4.00 problems writing to devices hosted on a Linux NFS server
When the VAX ULTRIX 4.00 Rev. 158 /usr/diskless/genvmunix kernel does a non-appending write to a device, like "echo foo > /dev/console", that fails if the device is located on a x86_64 Ubuntu 20.10...
View ArticleI give up on running recent NetBSD on old hardware
NetBSD is an amazingly cross platform operating system. It also supports some very old hardware, such as most of the first small VAX systems. However, software in general gets bigger and slower over...
View ArticleCascade Complete Gel may not be good enough
Recently the dishwasher started washing later than it should. Instead of spraying sounds starting early while it was filling, the sounds often started when filling was almost completed, and about a...
View Article