Welcome
On my site you'll find technical things such as how to configure and modify various items of hardware or software.
Inside a Motorola 8500X brick phone
Everyone likes looking at the innards of electronic devices. Modern ones are a bit boring now unless you’ve got a microscope, but there’s plenty of interest in old tech… especially…
Make Netatalk work on Ubuntu 11.10 and OSX
I recently upgraded my server to a new machine running Ubuntu 11.10. With the Macs in our house I’ve always used Samba for file sharing – it works, it’s stable…
The insides of an iPod 1.8″ HDD and a 2.5GB Seagate Microdrive
Hard drives are pretty fascinating things, full of complex and precisely machined pieces of metal that spin at high speeds. And they’re strangely reliable too, considering what’s in them. Well,…
Fake Hello Kitty iPod Shuffle from eBay for £0.01
Amy just received this amusing piece of Chinese electronic tat from eBay. It’s a Hello Kitty branded MP3 player that bears a striking resemblance to a popular brand of portable…
A BBC Micro with an MMC Card… and some bad components
After the success of repairing my BBC Micro’s PSU I decided the act of shoving 30 year old floppies into an equally old drive, while amusing and all was a…
Repairing filtering capacitors on faulty BBC Micro PSU
30 year old computers often have a few drawbacks, especially when the equally old components inside them start to malfunction. There is a known fault with the BBC Micro’s power…
Building a Fignition computer
From the main Fignition website FIGnition is a £20 educational DIY computer which works like an 8-bit home Micro: outputting to composite video and ready to be interactively programmed from…
Replacing Mac Mini HDD with 64GB Kingston SSD
Notes to remind myself how to configure my Mac so that its swap file is not stored on the SSD.
Restoring missing Microsoft Excel workbook windows
I just had a rather strange problem with Microsoft Excel 2010. When opening the workbook nothing appeared on the screen: Evidently something had loaded since the formula bar contained data…
Installing an SSD in a Late 2009 A1283 Mac Mini
I recently bought an SSD for my Mac Mini. Being a late 2009 model with a 2.26GHz Core2Duo, 4Gb of RAM and a 500GB HDD there wasn’t much else I…
Amazon Kindle 3 ‘WiFi’ problems and pfSense
A few weeks ago I replaced my malfunctioning Netgear ADSL modem/router/firewall with separate pieces of hardware, the main one being an old PC running the BSD-based firewall ‘OS’ pfSense. After…
Using ‘dd’ on OSX
Poking a USB device into a Mac causes it to be automounted, with suitable entries appearing in /dev. Ejecting or unmounting the USB device makes all the /dev entries disappear,…
NAT Loopback on a Speedtouch 780 BeBox
If you still have a Thompson Speedtouch 780 ADSL2+ router (for example you might be a Be Internet customer who signed up when they first opened, and received one of…
Gardening Notes
Just some notes to remind me next year… Stuff that worked Hanging baskets with strawberries in The greenhouse Peas Beans Chillies Tomatoes Brambles Grow bags from the 99p shop Stuff…
Printing comments in Excel 2010
Short version: Review tab – Show comments Arrange comments on page Page setup – Sheet tab – Comments at end of sheet Long version on the Office Online Help.
Hardware
Inside a Motorola 8500X brick phone
Everyone likes looking at the innards of electronic devices. Modern ones are a bit boring now unless you’ve got a microscope, but there’s plenty of interest in old tech… especially…
The insides of an iPod 1.8″ HDD and a 2.5GB Seagate Microdrive
Hard drives are pretty fascinating things, full of complex and precisely machined pieces of metal that spin at high speeds. And they’re strangely reliable too, considering what’s in them. Well,…
Fake Hello Kitty iPod Shuffle from eBay for £0.01
Amy just received this amusing piece of Chinese electronic tat from eBay. It’s a Hello Kitty branded MP3 player that bears a striking resemblance to a popular brand of portable…
A BBC Micro with an MMC Card… and some bad components
After the success of repairing my BBC Micro’s PSU I decided the act of shoving 30 year old floppies into an equally old drive, while amusing and all was a…
Repairing filtering capacitors on faulty BBC Micro PSU
30 year old computers often have a few drawbacks, especially when the equally old components inside them start to malfunction. There is a known fault with the BBC Micro’s power…
Building a Fignition computer
From the main Fignition website FIGnition is a £20 educational DIY computer which works like an 8-bit home Micro: outputting to composite video and ready to be interactively programmed from…
Howto
Make Netatalk work on Ubuntu 11.10 and OSX
I recently upgraded my server to a new machine running Ubuntu 11.10. With the Macs in our house I’ve always used Samba for file sharing – it works, it’s stable…
Restoring missing Microsoft Excel workbook windows
I just had a rather strange problem with Microsoft Excel 2010. When opening the workbook nothing appeared on the screen: Evidently something had loaded since the formula bar contained data…
Amazon Kindle 3 ‘WiFi’ problems and pfSense
A few weeks ago I replaced my malfunctioning Netgear ADSL modem/router/firewall with separate pieces of hardware, the main one being an old PC running the BSD-based firewall ‘OS’ pfSense. After…
Using ‘dd’ on OSX
Poking a USB device into a Mac causes it to be automounted, with suitable entries appearing in /dev. Ejecting or unmounting the USB device makes all the /dev entries disappear,…
NAT Loopback on a Speedtouch 780 BeBox
If you still have a Thompson Speedtouch 780 ADSL2+ router (for example you might be a Be Internet customer who signed up when they first opened, and received one of…
Printing comments in Excel 2010
Short version: Review tab – Show comments Arrange comments on page Page setup – Sheet tab – Comments at end of sheet Long version on the Office Online Help.
Tech
The sharp and hard thing of steel
TweetI like gadgets and odd bits of Chinese tat which is why I received this stainless steel multi tool for my birthday last year. It’s stainless steel, so slightly magnetic…
