Day 23 - And a view of the 9825A motherboard. We have the CPU under the heat sink, expansion bus in the rear and memory bus to the lower left. The top left is unused in the "A" model, up front is the power connector.

...and I finally have my noscripts for managing backups and archives in a semi-proper version. I hope that this will help cut down time on trying to find stuff and making sure I have enough copies before I clean things off from my internal HDD and clean up memory cards...

Day 24 - Merry Christmas!

Hmmmm 🧐🔩

Live Stream on Twitch!

I'm getting stuff ready for a live stream later today. Stage Hands will be handling that, while I take a well deserved cat nap! What's it about?

Let me (Stage Hands) explain a bit:

During my childhood, I got lots of Lego sets from my parents; I'd say almost exclusively Lego Technics... but around my 10th birthday, I also got some electronics kits, since I always was very interested in all things electric! The kits I got were well loved and used, but over time their parts kinda got strewn around and lost. So when I re-kindled my Lego collection about 10 odd years ago, I only could find bits and pieces in the boxes my parents put into storage. Bummer. But now: I managed to find almost all of the kits I had online in various conditions, but at least: complete. In today's stream, I'd like to show off one of the basic kits and where I learned my first steps with electricity and electronics. Which is going to be a treat, since this one is in "near mint, sealed on the inside" condition. That means the outer wrapping is gone, but the inner foil is still intact! Unboxing a 46 year old kit and doing some of the prep work as well as a few experiments, just for the fun and nostalgia of it!

I am aiming for the stream to start around 19:30 give or take, then will talk a bit about the electronics kit and the manual, before opening the foil; just so people can gather... if they want to gather that is. In case you want to know what's coming up, Google for "Kosmos Elektronik-Junior" the box has a blue arrow design...

Anyhow, I hope to see some of you in the chat - I'll reply when I read stuff, but I probably can't type much during the stream:

https://www.twitch.tv/atkelar

Quick reminder: starting in about 2 hours

Streaming was fun! I hope to get that a bit more often through the year...

Part 3 of the HP 9825A series is coming up today, 19:00 European time as usual! It's a bit on the longer side, so bring popcorn! Again, slightly too short for two parts; in hindsight, I could have moved a few minutes into part 2, which is a bit shorter than part 1 even. But back then, I was a bit worried that part 3 might get too short. Oh well... What irks me a bit more, is that the audio quality of the narration is a bit "all over"; there are about 100 voiceover bits in this one, so re-recording them in one session is not really a viable option; I did re-record quite a few to get rid of the "tincan version" at least. But one can clearly tell different recording sessions. I'm still not 100% sure what's causing it; the "tincan" version was caused by an OS upgrade resetting my recording input, so I recorded it via the headset mic and not via the proper mixing desk mic; I'm sure that the sniffles season is addign to the complexity - i.e. I'm not hitting the voice all the time, but there is also clearly a recording difference in how the voice sounds. I fixed it with some EQ as good as I could, but it's still noticeable. Linux and audio devices... what can I say...

And coming up at the top of the hour: Part 3 of the HP 9825A restoration and repair project! Join in live, if you have time... almost 50 minutes that is! https://youtu.be/LVP6H7Sk_sI

Oh, and I just today made this here: https://youtube.com/shorts/Mkk3FGGAvr0 😁

Recapping my next larger project... Like usual. But this one looks sus indeed.

Yay! One part of the upcoming project works! Now let's see how the other dozen or so parts go that need to work for the whole thing to be useful again. x.x

Recapping!!! Gotta get them all! 😸

I have to update my smallest ever seen magbetic deflection CRT. The manual said this camera has an optical viewfinder, but it seems I got a later model...

One step short of sanding... But the before/after comparison speaks for itself!

Finished recording the narration for the upcoming video. The rough cut is almost done too, so if nothing goes wrong, the patreon and member preview should be possible by tomorrow...

Almost done with the preview... x.x I seem to have had a sleep-backlog to catch up on 💤

hmmm... something is off with this calculation... I mean... I am dealing with high voltage, but 12 TV seems a smidge high...

Coming up at the top of the hour: a small restoration project of a "Fluke Trendar 200 IC test clip" - Fluke's idea of a field tester for digital ICs. Join in live if you have time! https://youtu.be/7e5oEy9_Q24

While I'm finally getting my backups and archives in order, I just checked the "global file index" again. Yep. I am at 46600 cataloged files in the archive. That means: more than 40k times "record" on either video or audio... x.x I need a drink! 🍸