Software Defined Radio

A short while back, I picked up an RTL-SDR [affiliate link] from Adafruit to get into software defined radio. It can tune frequencies from 24MHz to 1850MHz, but you may want to pick up some MCX male to various connectors [affiliate link] in order to attach a different antenna, as the included antenna is a bit limited.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, everyone! Hope you have a wonderful 2019!

OS/2 Warp on old Thinkpad

A short while back, a friend gave me an old IBM Thinkpad T23, so my first thought was "IBM Laptop should get an IBM OS" so I set to work getting OS/2 Warp installed on it. First issue is that the Warp CDs are not bootable, and the IBM does not have a built-in floppy. No problem, I thought, as he also gave me a USB 3.5" floppy drive. But I also discovered that the optical drive is broken on the laptop, so I went looking for an alternate method of installing the OS. I found this thread about installing from a folder on the hard drive. So, I install MS-DOS 6.22 and copy the os2image folder from the CD to c:\temp and modify the config.sys on disk1 as instructed. I boot from the Install disk, swap in disk1 when requested, then disk2, then... Error... Kinda non-descript, as it says something about a problem with either the hard drive or the floppy drive. My best guess is that the BIOS support for the USB floppy only goes so far, then fails when OS/2 gets to a certain point of the install. I recall seeing something, somewhere, about adding USB drivers to the OS/2 floppies, so I will try to track that down and see if that works. Barring that, my only other option is probably to place the HDD into another old laptop that has a working floppy and optical drive, do an install using generic drivers, then swap the drive into the Thinkpad and update the drivers to match the actual hardware. Stay tuned for progress...

The Orville

I recently watched the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, and, while enjoyable, it seems like the producers changed things just for the sake of pissing off long time Trek fans. I am currently watching The Orville, and, while it is a hilariously cheesy spoof of Star Trek, it still manages to be more like Star Trek than Discovery is.

BBS

I have been tinkering with WWIV under Linux again. Still a work in progress, but the BBS is available at bbs.nitemarecafe.com again. Telnet is port 2002. Lots of things need done yet, as I haven't spent more than a few minutes at a time on it, but more will be coming soon.

Sabre Computers

Back in the day, I worked at a local Computer Renaissance, and one of the first things I did was to refurbish a Sabre computer, which, I gathered, was some sort of re-branded, or foreign distributed, AST Advantage. I'm not sure where my boss sourced these machines, but they were fairly bare by the time we received them. I added a hard drive and multimedia kit, possibly upgraded the RAM and/or CPU, installed an OS, and we sold a ton of them. The first one I refurbished, I wound up buying, as it was a rock-solid machine. We sourced two different models, a 486SX-25, and a 486DX-33, and they had different RAM and CPU sockets in them, if I recall correctly. The 486DX is the one I wound up with, and it was easier to upgrade the CPU (I eventually installed an Intel Overdrive 83 in it, and it kicked ass) and had 4 72-pin SIMM slots. I think the 486SX model may have had 2 72-pin and 4 30-pin slots, but my memory is a bit fuzzy there. The DX had a 1-meg (upgradable to 2 megs) ATI Mach 32 on board, and I *think* the SX had the same. It had IDE, floppy, 2 serial ports, and one parallel port on board as well, and had 4 ISA slots via a riser card.

I recently went looking for information on Sabre Computers but I come up blank. I obviously found a pic of an AST Advantage, which looked identical aside from the name plate. Anyone out there have any links about Sabre, or pics of one?

Hacking "My own Leaptop"

My daughter has had a "My Own Leaptop" (affiliate link) for some time, and the sound recently quit working on it, so I think it might be time to do a little hardware hacking ;) First, I'll check to see if I can fix the sound, but, if not, I'm looking at dropping in a Raspberry Pi. I'm not sure if the LCD will be usable at all, but it's pretty a pretty low-res black and white LCD without any backlight anyhow. This has been my plan all along, but I was going to wait for her to outgrow it first. One of the challenges will likely be the keyboard. It's not a standard keyboard, and there's not enough room to stuff a standard (even a mini) in the Leaptop unless I take a dremmel to it. I'm hoping to be able to wire the existing keyboard into a Teensy and make it appear as a standard hid device to the Pi. A bigger challenge is going to be finding a kid-friendly, keyboard-driven interface that will run with a limited keyboard. I'd also like to use the four-position switch that's underneath the screen, but I suspect it will be easy enough to wire this to some gpio pins and occasionally check the position of the switch. At any rate, if I'm unable to repair the sound, I'll be doing this sooner rather than later, and I'll post the progress as I go.