I still need to design and build the rest of the cabinet but here is what I have so far.
The main guts sit in the base and are secured. The display controller and audio amp will be affixed to the rear of the cabinet in upcoming builds. The draw holding the keyboard does pull out so the keyboard is stored when not in use and available when needed. The screen is rotatable and seen here in a vertical orientation for Bomb Jack.
It’s all working well so far and I’m very pleased with progress but I do need to get some more blue filament before I can build the rest of the bottom part. Due to nearby events and occasions this will have to wait a month or two!
Today I learned how to disassemble the AMS for my 3D printer. This is the “Automatic Material System” that allows up to 4 different filaments to be used in single print (more if you daisy chain them).
The red filament got wedged solid. Well solid enough that I was not prepared to put any more force into trying to pull it out so I went searching and found how to disassemble it to clear such jams.
It turns out it was really simple, once I’d located the correct tool! It’s just 2 screws and the main assembly lifts out. This also gave me a chance to clean out the spilled desiccant beads but I did have a problem afterwards in that I’d taken out one of the active support shaft assemblies and misplaced it. It turns out I’d put it with the phone tools I’d got out while looking for the correct tool to undo the screws! This is essential for cleanly rotating the spool as the filament is fed or unloaded.
I now have a new bezel printed for my desktop arcade project. Here are two photos showing front and back. Front shows my reflection taking the photo (unavoidable) and the back shows gaps that will hold the magnets that will keep the bezel in place in the case surround. It’s designed to be square so rotatable to match game orientation. The screen is an iPad 3 screen connected to an HDMI/VGA display controller, both obtained from Ali Express.
I don’t track anyone. I have no interest in tracking anyone. I have no interest in monetising this blog but the Health Check on this site insists on this notification. I don’t think I need a compliance notice but I’d rather not take any chances.
Now that nag had popped up again in my dashboard so I’ve changed it so it doesn’t show unless you’re logged in and as the only current person able to do that is me it should be hidden from everyone else.
If you do get an account it will be via mutual consent anyway so no problem there.
Let’s see how this goes. If it still nags I might just say bollocks to it, remove the compliance plug-in and take my chances. As I said, I don’t collect any information (apart from normal server logs which I don’t skim for data) so I’m unlikely to need compliance anyway.
I heard about this via Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast on TWiT. It’s a new CMS/blogging platform based around WordPress (though not using any WordPress code) and they’re making a big noise about the way it’s more secure by design and how plugins are all sandboxed but…
…it’s written using and designed to use AI agents, so they can basically fuck off. I’ll stick with WordPress and use a minimal number of plugins.
If you want to take a look at their blog post out of curiosity or interest (I’m not going to use code written by AI but I’m not going to tell anyone else what to do) you’ll find that here.
I’ve had a clean up for security reasons, deciding to start from scratch with users registered on this blog. I’ve deleted all users except my main one as nobody has logged in for years and you don’t need an account here to post anyway.
If anyone really thinks they need an account (view/comment only) then let me know and I’ll manually add you. This is for trusted friends only though. As I said, you don’t need an account to comment.
Since this site will be more active and the cookie consent notices that the “health check” in the admin panel practically insists is installed even though I’m not accepting new accounts are a pain in the arse, I think I’ve found a way to hide these on the vast majority of this site. If you do see any then please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to hide those too.
Comments are open but I’ll probably have to approve each one. You can use a fake name (preferably a recognisable alias) and email address as they won’t be verified. I’m not expecting it to be busy with genuine comments so I’ll just use a human filter (me) to check each one before approval.
Just posting this here as I have posted nothing for a while. First I’ll say nothing to see if anyone notices but after a few days I’ll promote it so people can see I’m back.
I’ve been working late shifts over the last week and now I go into night shift territory, which I absolutely hate because I don’t sleep well at all leaving me extremely fatigued and grumpy.
I’m turning this grumpiness into something positive: I’m going to post here more often! I’m pretty much sick of major social media platforms, have long since deleted my Twitter / ? account and Faecebook (not a typo) is pissing me off more than ever. MeWe is just too quiet and while I’m not expecting this to be busy, it’s mine, all mine! Nobody else can censor me here, there’s no algorithm so I can say and post what I like… provided it’s ethical and legal of course.
So let’s see how this goes. As I said in the first paragraph I’ll leave it for a few days (probably until these nights are finished) and then start to bring attention to this blog.
I have now also added a link to an RSS feed so you can add the feed to any RSS aggregator to be informed when I make a new post.
I’ve decided to add 2-Factor Authentication to this site to strengthen security. While I don’t use this site much any more (this may change) I haven’t been letting it go stale and have been keeping everything on here up to date. I know full well how dangerous it is to not update; leaving a massive hole in site security with unpatched vulnerabilities!
This follows on from discovering Debian 10, which I was running, has reached End-Of-Life so I quickly updated to Debian 12, which inevitably broke my mail server (also quickly fixed) but otherwise went really smoothly.
Now with everything up to date and running smoothly I feel much more comfortable for the next few years 😉
I hope by now you can see I’m not complacent over security and I’m fully aware nothing is perfectly secure. I do keep an eye on everything I use, even things I don’t use often, to ensure it’s as secure as it can be.
This is my first post here for a while but it’s quite long so deserves it!
A short while ago I acquired a VIC 20 for the price of postage (thanks Johnny Blanchard – Re:Enthused) but it didn’t work so I bought one from eBay.
I used this to start some diagnosis. After a few chip swaps I discovered the 6502 wasn’t working so I bought a replacement and it was up and running, but it didn’t recognise when a disk drive was attached.
Using a borrowed oscilloscope I did some diagnosis and concluded that one of the outputs of the 7406 inverter chip wasn’t giving any signal, so I ordered a replacement and some sockets.
This arrived today so I piggy backed it over the suspect ship and the disk drive was recognised!
As I knew it was bad I wasn’t worried too much about damaging the failed 7406 but I did want to try to remove it cleanly… I failed. 3 pins just wouldn’t clear.
A mangled (but failed) 7406 IC
I then soldered a socket onto the board and popped the replacement 7406 in and all is good! I did manage to break off the electrolytic surface mounted capacitor from the SD2IEC (floppy drive emulator) so had to do some more research and diagnosis to figure out which way around it fits then did my first ever surface mount soldering, and it all still works!
My SD2IEC – the capacitor is to the lower left of the SD slot
The small 14 pin 7406 in a fresh socket and the screen showing a directory successfully loaded proving the repair is successful is shown below. This is my first deep diagnosis and repair of an old computer and I’m quite happy with the process and especially the results.
