My wife uses a Radio Shack alarm clock that looks nearly identical to the one in this post. It broke recently and I fixed it by removing about 3 inches of the power cord where it attaches to the transformer.
I'm hoping to do something similar, but only use HW that I own or can find at yard/estates sales. I bought a 4Tb WD My Cloud this weekend for $5. Found a 2Tb for $1 several years ago and WD replaced it for free.
I was given a Macintosh SE model M5010 and a M5011 in 2020. Both have bad hard drives, but the batteries are not leaking. I'm not sure when I'll get around to working on them.
Frostburg State University, Deep Creek Lake and Wisp Resort are close. Summer temperature was 10 degrees F cooler than my house near DC the last time I spent a week at Deep Creek.
'Here are some questions I’ve found fun to ask people I’ve just met to get to know them. I’ve found that good conversations start from questions that get your (future) friend to'
Next questions usually involve trying to sell me something, donate or sign a petition
I had a bleeding ulcer in high school in the 70s, so assuming it was stress, the staff at my all male Catholic HS started to treat me like a human being. It wasn't stress, but I enjoyed the change.
I believe that my ulcer was caused by daily doses of the antibiotic Tetracycline which the family Dermatologist prescribed for acne. Once I stopped taking it, my symptoms were gone.
Payphone Project
'These are some notes from my project to install a working payphone in my home and configure it to make and receive calls through an Asterisk PBX.
Tinkering with payphones is a lot of fun! Some of the later designs were quite advanced - the ones I have can dial into the exchange with a modem to report detected faults, submit their earnings and even download the latest tariffs every night. This was all done on just the power from the phone line and with late 80s tech. The server software, that we're now trying to revive, has some kind of bespoke distributed database to sync between regional exchanges but also work independently of one another. []
And there are some many fun and stupid things you can do with them! We set up one at uni can tell you what's for lunch at the cafeteria, connect to a voice chat on Discord, print an LLM summary of your phone call on a receipt...
[] For anyone for whom the above sounds familiar, no, it's not a Nortel Millenium, although we do also have two of those. They were made by Iskra Terminals from Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) and had this functionality at least 10 years before Nortel and the rest. If anyone is particularly interested in payphone shenanigans, shoot me an email (in bio)
