"If something is worth doing, it's worth overdoing."
We made our own nerdy clock.
We took a big clock and covered the backplane with modeling grass.
It took about 5 containers to fill the backplane enough to get it nicely filled.
The lettering near the pictures are the RGB representation of the color used in our office.
Lets see if you can decode them all. (use password clock to view solutions!)
I got bored and attacked my work laptop with a belt sander!
After getting rid of the embedded logo, i took a can of black chalkpaint.
I ordered a powerbank a while ago, which had to be shipped from china.
I got this, and tought “I’ve been scammed”
So i send a mail to the place i’ve ordered from, this was their answer.
You need to unscrew the adapter, in which you will find your ordered product.
Your product has been shipped in this way since they can still be difficult at customs.
And then the shipping will take longer again.
Opening the adaptor:
My order
I worked for a highly secure position in a financial place.
We had to use so-called RSA keys.
These keys we needed to get access to the servers.
That morning i came in office and had the following conversation with the manager:
ME: It’s far too easy to lose my RSA key, so I left it at home.
Manager: So how are you getting any work done?
ME: Well … i can get the login codes from here, while opening a browser to a popular social site. Here is my webcam, pointing to my RSA key.
(For everyone to see)
Manager: …. blank stare
ME: Now i can access it from anywhere!
Manager: … buttt
I recorded the key, so it displayed only a few old codes.
(It was a looping animated GIF, which looked like a webcam picture)
When explaining he laughed. A two minute joke, two hours making it ..
Qoutes from people i knew at that time. Also teachers and students from the MTS.
Somewhere in 1992 i got hold of a Oscilloscope, probably borrowed from someone. I don’t know what happend to it. I got the idea to generate drawings on the scope, because it had two inputs with you could switch to x and y inputs.
My friend Sepp got into it also, we both wrote some software to do funky stuff with this. I found some software today (20220516), and having bought a old skool scope 2 years ago …
So i found source machine code, no executables. Now i needed to get a assembler running again.
Sidenote: I recently fixed a Amiga 500 and got a disk switch installed on the even cia.
Booting some old seka disks and starting MasterSeka again in a looong time.
ESC - open editor
r (read file)
v (directory)
a + enter + enter (no options assemble)
g (go running the program)
Some programs on the disk: (some are made by Sepp, who is a far better coder than i am)
Lissajous figures are simple sine and cosine functions to get:
So how does this work, well a amiga has stereo outputs. These are controlled by two DAC outputs on the 8364 (Paula) chip. (DAC – Digital Analog Convertor) ( Paula has 4 DMA controlled DACs !! )
Looking at the schematics of the audio part, we see a lot going on concering audio filters. The tests i’ve done today (2022) are on a amiga with unmodified audio filters. (Low on my prio list)
So frequencies are not direct what you get directly converted from digital values. Besides that, syncronisation between left and right channel, even using DMA can be an issue.
(DMA – Direct Memory Access, this means that it can be controlled without using the CPU)
Running the house draw code:
Note: Due to different hardware not a good working example .. yet
I tried a few years after we did this, to modify a generic monitor to display things using two inputs, not using scanlines. But to no avail. Only flipping the screen and colors using relais (more on this later)
Bonus part: Above did remind me of a Vectrex, a game console which utilises same display technic. So no raster lines and pixels, but line drawing by controlling the beam.
I was reading Bert Visscher book (2022) : Dat wordt nooit wat.
Then i saw this :
