119728022
submission
50000BTU_barbecue writes:
I like using computers from the 1980s and early 1990s "in the flesh" as it were. Real hardware with all the weirdness that goes with it. We still use the same electrical plugs and keyboards and joysticks are still similar-looking but display devices have become these enormous high-resolution devices with fewer and fewer analog inputs. Old CRTs are starting to lose sharpness and brightness and may get tossed or damaged when moving.
The solution is to use some sort of video upscaler. There are many devices offered from cheap Chinese units for about 10$ to old professional studio scalers from 10-20 years ago. The Chinese units have no controls and are quite variable in the results obtained. But they're cheap. The old scalers would deliver professional results but are not guaranteed to work with consumer monitors or lock onto the non-standard timings of the non-interlaced "240p" video common on 8-bit computers.
What device do you use?
53148253
submission
50000BTU_barbecue writes:
I made a comment a few days ago in a story basically saying the oscilloscope is dead. While that's a bit dramatic, I've found that over the last 20 years my oscilloscopes have been "on" less and less. Instead, I use a combination of judicious voltage measurements, a logic analyzer and a decent understanding of the documentation of the gadget I'm working on.
Stuff is just more and more digital and microcontroller based, or just so cheap yet incredibly integrated that there's no point in trying to work on it. (I'm thinking RC toys for example. Undocumented and very cheap. Doesn't work? Buy another.)
While I still do old-school electronics like circuit-level troubleshooting (on old test gear), that's not where the majority of hobbyists seem to be.
Yet one thing I keep hearing is how people want an oscilloscope to work on hardware. I think it's just not that necessary anymore.
What I use most are two regulated DC lab supplies, a frequency counter, a USB logic analyzer, a USB I2C/SPI master, and a USB-RS-232 dongle. That covers a lot of modern electronics.
I have two oscilloscopes, a 100MHz two-channel stand-alone USB unit and a 1960s analog plug-in based mainframe that is a '70s hacker dream scope. But I rarely use them anymore.
What equipment do hardware folks out there use the most? And would you tell someone trying to get into electronics that they need a scope?
36092591
submission
50000BTU_barbecue writes:
Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone. But what story have you read that resonates years later because of some insight about human nature or society that's basically cynical or pessimistic? For me it's Fred Pohl's "Jem" with its sharply divided resource-constrained future world driven by politics, and its conclusion that humans are just too destructive to handle contacting alien life, especially if humans have the technological upper hand.
I'm wondering what other stories have stuck in people's minds. It can be a short story, a novel or an entire series of books.
(Sorry, I have no idea what the tags are supposed to do or how they work. I click and it becomes "!politics" or there's a picture of a hat. No matter what I type in "tags" it stays as "politics" with a "x" I can click to make it "!politics". I've rarely seen something so useless be so counter-intuitive. sci-fi doesn't work, but when I type "science fiction" the space bar apparently acts as en enter key so all it sees is science. I think my next submission will be about depressing user interfaces.)
