I think she’d like these flowers.
A sad anniversary
Resurrected power supply
A couple years ago, the power supply in my computer went belly up because the power switch had corroded and stopped being a switch.
No idea what caused it to become so badly corroded, but I finally got around to finding a new switch for it. The new switch fit perfectly into the opening, and getting it reconnected was a pretty simple job.
Now I’ve got a couple of power supplies to work with. Plenty of projects out on the web describing how to turn computer power supplies into useful bench power supplies, and I could definitely use a couple of those on the workbench.
Covering the garage attic opening
With the space over the garage insulated, that just left the opening in the ceiling that gets you into the attic space uninsulated.
I happened to have a section of peg board about the right size, so I attached some drawer pulls I found at the local Habitat for Humanity store ($0.50 each) and glued a couple of the extra insulation batts to the board.
It lays nicely on top of the attic entry opening.
Moving it out of the way is a little bit cumbersome, but easy to do. Lift it up, turn 90 degrees and set it down on the rafters behind you.
Not sure how long it will last with repeated handling. At some point I might decide to replace the batts with some pieces of foam insulation. I think this will work well for now though.
Cooked wifi card
The wifi on one of the older laptops in my collection failed quite a while ago. At the time, I figured the wifi card in the laptop had died, and got a USB wifi dongle to get it back online. Didn’t think much else about the problem after that.
This morning while I was looking inside to see what could be upgraded, I decided to pop the wifi card out to have a look. The top didn’t look too unusual, but when I flipped it over, there was a big toasted area on the label. Looks like the wifi chip got a bit hot and burned itself out.
The wifi card bay also showed some evidence of the heat. The area was a bit tacky, so I think it might be adhesive residue from the sticker on the back of the wifi card.
I popped the RF shield off the card and saw a bit of browning on the board from the overheating chip.
Retro gaming: Ultima IV
Ultima IV! On Linux!
One of my favourite games to play on my Apple IIe back in the day was Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. It’s been a long time since I played it, but thanks to xu4 (on Sourceforge), I can play it again. I’ve known about xu4 for a long time, but never bothered much with it until recently.
Getting it running on Fedora is as simple as installing the package with sudo dnf install xu4.
Plays just like it did on my Apple IIe. Ahh, memories.