[vcf-midatlantic] What projects are you working on?

[William Dudley]

I'm retired, so 2020 has only caused a minor change in my "free" time.
The allocation has changed quite a bit, however.

But recently I've been working on:

Fixing a Kenwood KT-56 tuner (bad cap)

Fixing a "dead" HP laptop (replace the mosfet with a piece of wire.  This
is *always* the fix for dead laptops, it seems.)

Replacing the cells in a Lenovo laptop battery pack.  Got the Lenovo as a
trade for fixing the HP.

Scanning the service manual for the KT-56 that I bought on Ebay and
uploading it to hifiengine.com

Fixing a broken HP scanner.  (Fortunately, I have a back-up scanner for the
service manual project).  I think the opto-interrupter that tells the
computer that the scanner has travelled to the end of the bed is broken,
and I think I can hack something up to replace its function.

Writing code for the ESP32 based TTGO-Twatch-2020, which I'm using as my
"daily driver" watch lately.

Making a welding table out of a Harbor Freight wood-working table (mainly,
having a steel top made for it).

Making welding table clamps for the above welding table project.

"Restoring" a 21 foot steel pipe I found in the ground (!) to use as an
antenna mast.  I de-rusted the outside, welded up some holes, and got it
"more or less" straight.

I manage to keep busy.

Bill Dudley
This email is free of malware because I run Linux.


On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 10:33 AM Jameel Akari via vcf-midatlantic <
vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:

> The past few days I’ve been working on re-finishing a closet that I use
> for (vintage) computers & parts - insulation, Sheetrock and paint.  Just
> got that last part done yesterday and will be trying to put stuff away and
> organize.  Assuming I don’t get squirreled by the state of the lighting
> wiring in there.
>
> That’s getting done now because we’re also trying to rewire and repaint my
> home office / lab, so everything’s gotta be moved somewhere else.
>
> I have too much stuff, so I hope there’s a Spring VCF swap meet, or the
> VCF East consignment sale.
>
> Other people are doing cool stuff that made me finally sit-down and reply:
>
>
> > On Dec 29, 2020, at 9:19 AM, Alexander Jacocks via vcf-midatlantic <
> vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> >
> > Sounds like there are a ton of interesting projects going on!
> >
> > I’m working on a bunch of things, as usual:
> > - waiting for parts to try to install OS/2 on the museum’s PS/2 model 70
>
> As per my OS/2 exhibit a couple years ago, I have not had great luck with
> the hard disks in these machines.  I’ve read suggestions to try re-capping
> them (the floppy drives certainly need them) but haven’t got back to that.
>
>
> > - replacing failed Dallas chips on a variety of machines, including a
> > sparcstation 2 and 20
>
> I feel that’ll be a thing I’ll need to do soon as well.
>
> >
> > Non-vintage, but I also wrote an published an Ansible role to use
> EntryDNS
> > to answer ACME challenges. I really enjoy working with Ansible!
> >
> I’ve thought about playbooks for less-common vintage UNIXes.  It’d be nice
> to be able to just push config onto a fresh base OS without spending hours
> re-installing and re-configuring every time I want to replace disks or
> whatever.  And to have that playbook configuration be code-as-documentation.
>
>
> > On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 02:44 Ethan Dicks via vcf-midatlantic <
> > vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> >
> >> On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 1:00 PM Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic
> >> <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> >>> I'm curious what projects everyone is working on.
> >>
> >> I've been doing a lot of software projects in recent weeks -
> >> disassembling and commenting 6502 application code from the 70s and
> >> 80s.  On the bench, I just received (after 2+ months of waiting) some
> >> edge connectors to finish constructing the memory/expansion board for
> >> my SYM-1, and I'd like to turn back to Commodore-128 keyboard overhaul
>
> I was surprised on how expensive those card-edge connectors are.  OTOH, I
> haven’t managed to come up with anything to do on my SYM-1 that strains the
> 4kB on-board or needs more I/O than it already provides.
>
>
> Meanwhile I still have the Lego Saturn V from last xmas to build…
>
> —
> Jameel Akari
>
>