Category Archives: Computers

E7250

Posted on 2017-12-02 by pappp

I picked up a refurbished Dell Latitude E7250 (Dell’s “Premium” 12.5″ laptop, just over a generation out of date) because the little loaner Inspiron 11-3000 I’d been using as my carryin’ around laptop had become unacceptably shitty at essentially all … Continue reading →

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SC17 Notes

Posted on 2017-11-19 by pappp

I’m back from SC’17, and to complete annual tradition, some thoughts: Chinese manufacturing is winning the day: The Nov’17 Top500 shows three of the top 5 and roughly 60% of the total compute power on the list are Chinese machines. … Continue reading →

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MicroChorder

Posted on 2017-05-27 by pappp

I hacked together an Arduino Micro firmware that is a drop-in replacement for a Spiffchorder, long version and code below the fold.

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New Backup Scheme

Posted on 2017-05-23 by pappp

I’m finally not living so dangerously with the data outside my Seafile-synced live set and doing proper backups of all my machines, including laptops. I’m also now storing my various media files on a RAID instead of a single large … Continue reading →

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Ebay DB25 Arduino Nano grbl Adapters

Posted on 2017-05-09 by pappp

A second consecutive CNC post, because I haven’t had time to write up long-form posts for months, and something requiring documentation came up today. While I’m still quite happy with LinuxCNC (especially since I discovered NativeCAM), my adviser bought himself … Continue reading →

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3040Z CNC Router

Posted on 2016-11-23 by pappp

I’ve been fascinated with machine tools and mechatronics for well over a decade, and have been indulging that fascination with a series of little benchtop CNC machines since about 2008, especially since my collection of related degrees lend legitimacy to … Continue reading →

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SC16 Notes

Posted on 2016-11-19 by pappp

Posting pictures and thoughts from SC16, because someone else might learn from them. I pushed my crappy cellphone pictures from the show into a google photos album, some of them even have comments about why they’re interesting attached. I’ll probably … Continue reading →

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Install Viavdo 2016.2 on ArchLinux (x86_64)

Posted on 2016-09-08 by pappp

As of the date of this post, Xilinx Vivado 2016.2 works fine on Arch with minimal coaxing. Said coaxing is documented here in case it will be useful for others. 1. Install ncurses5-compat-libs from AUR, or the installer will hang … Continue reading →

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Macintosh LC Recap

Posted on 2016-03-17 by pappp

I’ve done some invasive repairs on the Macintosh LC from my small fleet of vintage computers. I figure it’s worth writing up because there is a lack of detailed information about this kind of work on the ‘net.

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Apparently a WordPress update caused some subtle breakage here a while back. The site has been spewing, among other things, a bunch of “&raquo” escapes in places that end up encoded as XML (thus breaking, among other things, RSS feeds). … Continue reading →

Posted on 2016-02-28 by pappp | 1 Comment