April 2013

Here’s an Australian daddy long legs spider (Pholcidae) wrapping up its lunch. Nothing particularly exciting, just a spider going about its business! These little fellows are also known as cellar spiders elsewhere in the world. They’re not to be confused with harvestmen, which are also called daddy long legs in... Continue reading

Meet Pepper, the miniature sausage dog from Pepper the Dog Blog! Pepper is still just a little puppy here, but already knows their name. It’s quite remarkable how quickly a young dog can learn something like that. Just listen when I call! We’ve also got a couple of brief appearances... Continue reading

Hop aboard for a very quick look inside an old Apple IIc. Sure does look antique! Better off in a museum than on a shelf. My camera battery was about to go flat, so I thought I’d record the machine quickly while it was in pieces. I’ve never taken one... Continue reading

A quick and easy repair to my Nixie clock. I hate NiCad batteries with a passion, so today I’m replacing the original 3.6 V battery with a nice peaceful NiMH replacement from element14. Enjoy the back of my hand for half the video while I block what I’m doing due... Continue reading

After the A-Bus capacitor replacement failed to improve Sophia’s condition, I moved on to the mainboard. I’ve now replaced most of the electrolytic capacitors there, and the results are considerably more promising. The Hakko 808 works wonders on these old boards, although I’d been operating on very little sleep when... Continue reading

Some progress with DreamShell 4.0.0 RC1, but this setup is still behaving unpredictably. I’ve been trying to get the Dreamcast booting from an SD card using one of those serial-port adapters, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it just sits there complaining about... Continue reading

The lovely Sophia is getting a fresh set of capacitors on the A-Bus board today. That’s board 171-6834C, revision 0.7, and I’ve got the Hakko 808 ready for another evening of desoldering. There are six main electrolytic capacitors to remove, all rated at 220 uF and 10 V. Fortunately, the... Continue reading

Here’s a visual comparison between a brand-new electrolytic capacitor and one that has failed badly enough to bulge. I’ve got two 680 uF, 4 V capacitors here, one in rather better condition than the other. It’s quite interesting seeing them side by side because the damage becomes obvious once you... Continue reading

Introducing the incredible Hakko 808 desoldering gun! I’ve only used it once before this video, but I can already see why people like these things. After spending so much time fighting through-hole components with a soldering iron and braid, a tool that heats the joint and sucks the solder away... Continue reading

Just a quick video on the pinout of my XRGB-mini adapter cable. Taste the colours! Aqua, Pink and Blue! I’ve removed the connector from the supplied Framemeister adapter so I can rewire it for EuroSCART. The problem is that the supplied adapter uses the Japanese RGB21 pinout. It looks remarkably... Continue reading

Here is a rip of the VHS tape supplied with issue 1 of Official Sega Saturn Magazine, cover-dated November 1995. Includes: Virtua Fighter 2, Sega Rally Championship 1995, Virtua Cop, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Clockwork Knight 2, Mortal Kombat 2, Alien Trilogy, Defcon 5, Virtua Racing, Hang on GP,... Continue reading

Here is a rip of a VHS tape given away with issue 3 (December 1992) of Mean Machines Sega. Apologies for the stuttering sound at times. I guess VHS tapes just weren’t meant to last this long in perfect condition. The VHS tape box had this on it: Sega Mega-CD... Continue reading

I don’t own this ASUS EeeBox B202 anymore, but this video is still useful if you need to get inside one. The B202 is one of ASUS’s little Atom-era nettops, built around an Intel Atom N270 and the 945GSE (ICH7M) chipset. It is very compact, which naturally means getting to... Continue reading

Sure, there isn’t much to the actual setup. Only three options, and none of them that exciting… I suppose it’s better than a kick in the teeth! Anyway, the trick is to choose DOS from the TeraDrive menu and press F1 during the PC-side startup. I discovered this while investigating... Continue reading