@foone@digipres.club avatar

foone

@foone@digipres.club

Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird Stuff, maker of Death Generators. (she/they🏳️‍⚧️)

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foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Here's something cool I never realized existed:

PCBs distributed through magazines!

From Radio Electronics (June 1987):

https://archive.org/details/radio_electronics_1987-06/page/n68/

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

The way this works: You have a blank PCB coated in a thin copper layer, and it's coated in a photoresist material. This material breaks down when exposed to light.

You then shine a bright (usually UV) light at it for a while, and the spots which got hit by light break down, while the other parts (which were in shadow) remain on the board.
You then use a corrosive chemical to etch away the copper layer, but it only etches away the parts that aren't covered in photoresist.

hikari, to random EN
@hikari@noyu.me avatar

YOU KNOW IT'S A REAL FILE FORMAT WHEN IT'S GOT UTF-16 JSON IN IT

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@Ezhik @hikari but frankly many of them should have been

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Getting movies in Pan & Scan is annoyingly hard. I'm just gonna have to buy a bunch of VHS tapes and digitize them, I guess.

Maybe some occasional early "full-screen" DVDs on ebay. Those'd be easier to rip.

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@grumpy not really. But I will say that using an RCA->HDMI adapter and USB3 HDMI capture seems to be a lot easier to set up (compared to just getting a composite capture device) and has equivalent quality

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@nicholas that sounds like a lot of work for even one movie

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@ryanfb @grumpy I've been intimidated out of using this project given how many RF capture points you need to have to do it comprehensibly. VHS is annoyingly complex compared to laserdiscs

polpo, to demoscene
@polpo@bitbang.social avatar

For the latest issue of Make Magazine, I wrote a feature article about ! The online version of the article is now up. Come read about my beginnings as a teenage fan, how I was introduced to the GUS and how I decided to make an emulator for it so many years later. https://makezine.com/article/technology/computers-mobile/democratizing-the-demoscene-picogus-brings-the-90s-tracker-sound-to-the-masses/

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@polpo @h0ffman @ishotjr @inversephase thanks for that. I'm always happy to see something I suggested get picked up and turned into a real thing!

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

thanks to the lack of specificity on this form, I am now free from ALL EMAILS!

JacksonBates, to random
@JacksonBates@aus.social avatar

a computer keyboard where all the inputs are actual locks and each character is typed by using a key from a big ring of keys attached to your belt with a retractable tether like a high-school janitor

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@georgeharito @JacksonBates
I've already got that one half-built, no joke

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I've got a special level of hate for sites which make you select which location you mean before you can enter your username & password.

screw that! FIX YOUR ACCOUNT SYSTEM SO IT KNOWS WHERE I AM

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

This isn't even a case of my account being on foobar.com vs foobar.ca or foobar.co.uk

This fucking site made me pick which of these east-bay cities I'm in. These cities are like 25 miles apart at most.

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@JessicaTaylor I think union city is between Hayward and Fremont? But otherwise, yes.

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

to make it clear how close together these locations are, I live in San Leandro and the Hayward location is closer to me.

billgoats, to retrocomputing
@billgoats@bitbang.social avatar

Oh wowwwww! Here’s something from a very specific era: a blobby graphite external FireWire CDRW drive.

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@billgoats I keep seeing one of these at my local ewaste place and thinking it's an ls240 drive, but nope!

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Properly photographing a 3.5" floppy disk for archival is annoyingly complicated. The label has THREE sides!

I've already built an automated system to take a picture of the front of a disk, but really I need to take THREE photos if I want to get the whole thing.

That means either three cameras or I need to rotate the disk 90° and then 180°, which is going to really stress the limits of my mechanical engineering skills.

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@altareos that's on the todo!

but those are harder. I already have a floppy-handling machine for 3.5" disks, 5¼" and 8" is gonna be way harder

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

My proof of concept print is done.

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

So it gets photographed at this angle, rotates to this, then to this, and then to opening-down to drop the flop.
Rinse, lather, repeat.

image/jpeg
image/jpeg

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

@Thorsted Yeah, but by this point I've already imaged the disk, so I know what format it is

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