Back in early 2010 I posted about my home espresso setup at the time. I recently (finally) replaced it, and I have thoughts. Obnoxious, obsessive, thoughts.
The TL;DR is that I bought a Breville Bambino espresso machine and a Turin SK40 grinder, the former is good, the latter is really good, but there is plenty of rambling and pictures and such below the fold.
I’ve had an Anbernic RG351P for roughly 2 years now, and it’s an absolutely delightful object.
For those unfamiliar: the RG351 is an example of a class of little gaming emulation handhelds that started back in the mid-to-late 2000s with things like the Dingoo A330. They are, essentially, a tiny ARM (+ usually Linux) machine the size and shape of a handheld gaming device, set up with a built-in controller specifically to run games in emulation. The stock firmware on the RG351 is an ancient EmulationStation/RetroArch/Linux stack, but there are better alternatives – IMO, throwing in a decent SD card loaded with AmberElec is the first thing to do when you get one. It will play essentially everything from the dawn of gaming through the PlayStation and some (but not all) of the Nintendo 64 library, and has limited/marginal support for PSP and DS. It is …straightforward but not the sort of thing I’ll link… to obtain the full ROMsets for these platforms, they are frankly not that large. I paid about $90 for mine, I think they’ve gone up a bit, but there are a whole range of similar options at different price points, build qualities, and platform support.
The build quality, however, isn’t perfect. It’s small-brand China-export hardware. You know you have to be a little careful with it just from handling (I keep mine in a fitted case when throwing it in a bag). I’ve been through a screen (I got red lines in my original after about a year), re-gluing the back rubber pads (original glue melted), and now after two years I wore through the membrane behind the “A” button, and that’s actually what this post is about.
I opened it up, found the worn though button, looked around online, couldn’t any in stock, contacted Anbernic through their AliExpress store front (none available), asked the subreddit (no leads), and couldn’t come up with any exact replacement membranes.
HOWEVER on inspection, the membranes from the similar Powkiddy RBG10 appeared extremely similar, and those are readily available (as a $12ish pack of all the membranes and button caps to refit an RGB10, which includes two of the 4x membranes). I ordered this set via Aliexpress, and ~16 days later when it showed up, can confirm the membranes are slightly different, but drop-in compatible.
As you can see from the photos, the Powkiddy membranes have a bit more flat area, and the bottoms of the mounting holes are filled in rather than fully punched through, but the dimensions are exactly right. The height and force of the domes is even almost identical to the originals, and at effectively $6/membrane it’s a very reasonable repair.
Since I recently got my HP Apollo 9000 Series 735 up and running, and it’s March, I decided to have a little Marchintosh fun and load MAE (the Macintosh Application Environment, a real officially-licensed Apple product) on to it this evening. As you can see from the photo (because I don’t have a device that can capture the video this thing outputs, and haven’t figured out screenshots under HP-UX 10.20), it works.
Over a year ago I started working on an inert HP Apollo 9000/735 a friend gave me from their collection to avoid moving it cross-country. I’ve recently got it working, and am posting notes about the fun.
At the end of my first post about it, I had recapped the power supply, but had not found a monitor that would talk to the enormousCRX-24z video board with its 1280×1024@72Hz Sync-on-Green via 3x BNC output, or verified the condition of the discs.
As you can see from the splash image, all of those things have been remedied.
Last summer I posted about some tiny stepper motors from the internet, thinking about them as an alternative to mechatronic standbys like those terrible SG90 type servos or larger and differently terrible 28BYJ-48 geared steppers driven through a ULN2003.
At the time, I tried one with an A4988 stepstick from the top of my parts bin, and it didn’t work, so I figured there was some limitation and stuck to directly driving with H-bridges.
…it turns out the “limitation” was that the cheap current-setting potentiometer on that particular stepstick was broken so it was driving no output current.
Discoveries:
I’ve been biking a fair amount lately after a 20-odd year hiatus; I decided last year that I wanted to start biking, bought a Giant Escape 3 Disc near the end of summer, but didn’t get confident enough riding to use it around campus last year among the students texting their way to their first (next?) vehicular manslaughter charge before they flocked back.
This summer, I’ve been dong my commute into campus on it, plus a significant amount of fun/exercise riding, and the top fixable annoyance has become getting sprayed at the slightest hint of wet. I did some hackin’ that I haven’t seen on the interwebs to fit the fenders I picked to the frame, which is the point of this post.
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The Latitude E7250 I’ve been carrying around since 2017 is one of my favorite machines I’ve ever had; it’s small, robust, has perfect hardware support under Linux… and is starting to get a little too feeble for some tasks I’d like to use it for, experienced a few spurious shutdowns, and has a screen crack causing delamination.
I continue to be a fan of having a small, relatively inexpensive machine for carrying around, and a believer in “The only Dell laptops with acceptable build quality start with a 7”, so in the tradition of the $400 for a refurb and RAM upgrade I spent on the E7250, I ordered one of its more-or-less direct successors, a refurbished Latitude 7390 on a half-off sale a few weeks ago for about $470.
After a few weeks, it looks to be an excellent successor. Nitpicky details and comparisons below the fold.
I have an Onn Surf 8 (One of the surprisingly-not-that-shitty ultra-cheap Walmart tablets) that my research group bought a couple of to use as Android dev testbeds. I’ve been occasionally using it as a normal tablet since I have it around, and have been consistently irritated by the collection of bloatware it comes with…. so I decided to hack it. To tl;dr this whole thing, ignore the collection of typically scammy Android dev forum and blogspam crud, and use the open-source mtkclient for your MediaTek Android device hackin’ needs.
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I’ve wanted a hard-copy terminal for a while – both to play with and to use for explaining why serial works the way it does, but they tend to be expensive. Most of the common hard-copy terminals also aren’t really convenient objects to own: loud desk-sized machines (Teletype 33 family, most DECWriters), additionally clockwork nightmares (IBM 2741, earlier Teletype devices), which speak ridiculous protocols (…ditto).
This only leaves a handful of reasonable options, the most common of which are portables like TI Silent 700s and DEC LA12s, or one of the dasiywheel-printer based terminals (which are often non-period-correct things like a WheelWriter with a modern serial interface card in it).
So, of course, I’ve been idly keeping an eye out for a deal on one on the auction sites, and mid-October last year I got lucky: I scored a TI Silent 700 Mod. 745 for $34.00+S&H (about $47 all in) from a Shopgoodwill auction, and got it working.
I’ve had an Anycubic Linear Kossel for several years now, and have generally been quite pleased with it – if Anycubic were still selling them I’d still be suggesting them as ideal first printers.
It has produced quite a number of useful pieces, a decent assortment of household conveniences, and the usual selection of toys and meme trash for myself and others.
I’ve made a couple recent upgrades that seemed worth documenting.
