keeping busy in Northern Ontario
Update: April 24, 1999.
The Amiga has been retired. For 11 years it was the home of my collected digital bits. By the end it had a 573MB 5.25” full-height hard disk and a QIC-150 tape drive, and stored a whole decade’s worth of email, letters and code. Quite a job for a 7MHz 68000 machine. You get attached to a machine when you’ve patched the operating system to boot your homemade device driver to access a scrounged disk through homemade hardware. When you’ve low-level formatted the disk by typing SCSI command bytes in hex into a homemade SCSI exerciser program with the official SCSI specification as your manual. When you still remember how cool it was that the homemade TAPE: device actually worked better than /dev/rst0 on the Unix boxes.
This fellow has a brother who likes to keep himself busy making all sorts of contraptions, including a homemade pipe organ a cd changing machine various lego machines and, of course, a homemade C64 joystick.
The Wandel Brothers Matthias and Markus are worth a good look but don’t forget to check out the rest of the family too.
postscript:
If you must know, I had been trying to repair a portable cd player for quite some time. After repairing one of the rail guides for the optical transport, I seem to have discovered that the original problem is most likely due to a malfunctioning limit switch. Because I have no idea where, how or what kind of limit switch is used in this Sony portable, I sought favor with the almighty Google, offering up numerous strings which eventually arrived at “find cd limit switch”. The benevolent and slightly obtuse Google then rewarded me, not with the answer I sought, but with a Home built CD changer contraption and the glory of the mighty Wandel clan. Sometimes you just need to buy a new cd player. That does not mean you should simply discard the defective carcass. You never know when you might decide to build your own automatic, personalized cd, engraving device out of balsa wood, rubberbands and ten penny nails.
14 August 2003, 01:31 ::
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— Tor Mescaline 2003-08-15 09:50 #