I had great difficulty getting my Arduino Opta set up and working using the Arduino PLC IDE – whatever I tried I got the “Cannot download Sketch file (error code: 1)” error.
I finally had success using the plain Arduino IDE to do the initialization and then switching to the Arduino PLC IDE. The final step was changing the Modbus address to 247.
It probably shouldn’t be that tricky….
My Apple 27” Thunderbolt Display was flickering on and off intermittently (running on my M1 MacBook Air via a Apple USB C/Thunderbolt Adapter). Turns out it was the integrated Thunderbolt cable – I’ve connected it using a seperate cable and it now works perfectly (the display has a separate Thunderbolt port you can use).
Eventually I may try to replace the cable properly but it’s a fairly involved job… (thanks Apple!).
I have a pair of Apple IIc units (with matching power bricks), an Apple IIc monitor (complete with stand), an external Apple IIc floppy drive and an Apple IIc mouse (in original box no less).
In some brief testing, everything apart from one of the Apple IIc units worked perfectly (including both power bricks). This includes all of the 5 1/4 inch floppy disks I tried!
As you can see from the following photographs, the monitor is still crisp and bright. Not bad for around 38 years old!
With any luck, repairing the other Apple IIc unit shouldn’t be too hard. Everything is intact and present and there are no signs of damage.
So I’ve finally bought myself one of the new M1 Macs – my first new computer in nearly 10 years. I went with the 16GB unified memory model with 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU and 1TB SSD. Not very cheap but I’m hopeful I will get 5+ years of service out of it.
The first computer we had when I was growing up was a Commodore 64. We had it in the late 80s/early 90s – when it was old but not yet retro cool. It was my introduction to computing and I have fond memories. We had a tape drive, joysticks and the paddle/wheel controllers. Some of our favourite games were Wizard of Wor, Lemans (top down car racing game with the paddles), The Last Ninja and Impossible Mission. A few years later it was relegated to storage as a Window 95 486 PC and a Macintosh IIci took it’s place (we didn’t miss the tape drive and it’s propensity to find errors 30+ minutes into loading a game).
Fast forward a few decades and, thanks to John, I am now the proud owner of a Commodore 64C. John also hooked me up with a modernised power supply, joystick, S-video cable and a 1MB (!) cartridge full of programs. I’m using an S-video to VGA adapter to drive an old 17 inch LCD. Graphics isn’t perfect – I’ll be trying another old LCD soon.
Loading up the 1MB cartridge and there is Wizard of Wor!
There is currently a battle going on to see who can get the highest score…
In an effort to scale back my collection, I have been going through my Apple Newtons. I have 4 OMPs (Original MessagePads) – two are dead completely and two are exhibiting the glitches expected from bad capacitors.
After watching the following excellent YouTube video I decided to tackle the recapping myself.
Stay tuned for progress updates!
At the moment, the Mac Mini is unique in that it spans three processor architectures (although this is very likely to be matched by the iMac).
The new(ish) Raspberry Pi 4 makes a great little Minecraft Server, especially if you only have a handful of users. Daniel Lemire’s blog post is my go-to guide for getting it working.
After some trial and error (and leaning heavily on the tutorials and sample code available online) I have built a Pebble watchface (named gWatch for obvious and boring reasons). It’s fairly basic – see the screenshot below.
