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While trying to clean up some office wiring I grabbed a new spare 4-port Gigabit hub and discovered that it was missing its dongle power brick. That’s not the first time I’ve received an electronic device missing its power supply and figured I might be able to find one as it needs 5v and 0.6A. […]

As discussed in the prior post around switching to LaunchBox for retro gaming, I decided to convert my early 2013 Macbook Pro 15″ Retina to Windows. It had the latest version of MacOS on it and I could (and probably should) have simply followed the steps to convert it to a dual boot configuration using […]

Over the last week or so, my attempts to create a really straight forward retro gaming systems took a number of unanticipated twists and turns. As documented in my previous post, it started out with installing the latest version of Linux Mint on an older Intel Core i5-based laptop and then overlaying that with RetroPie. […]

If you are reading this, you probably know that I’ve slowly but surly been adding more and more IoT smart devices to my home. Over the course of the weekend I added three Shelly 1 Plus devices to control our porch lights and the light in our sun room. The objective is to create an […]

An essential accessory for every laptop!

I am super stoked about my retro gaming system project. I discovered that RetroPie includes support for retro PC games via integrated DosBox. To take it for a trial run, I loaded an old (1993) game from Apogee Software called Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure. After some fiddling around to get the install right and the screen […]

Over the years I’ve collected a number of aged laptops that are of limited use as daily Windows 10/11 daily drivers due to inadequate hardware specs, worn out batteries, and/or mechanical issues like unreliable displays and keys. I’ve struggled with finding a real use for them as I have plenty of server horsepower already between […]

Since I would be taking a trip to visit relatives, I put the printer to work cranking out a few fun toys to play with and as painting projects for my 9-year old grand niece. One toy we had a ton of fun with at the park was this whirlybird gizmo. It was fully 3D […]

I have been running an Unraid as my network attached storage for about 5 years now. Recently I was able to test out its recoverability when a 6g WD Blue went completely belly up. Long story short, the parity protection worked like a charm and I lost no data. Crisis averted! I took the opportunity […]

The other day I was obliged to step in and give a couple of different presentations in front of technical audiences using Power Point decks assembled by other team members. The material was reasonably familiar (n-tier web architecture); but, nearly every slide was an impossible tangled eye chart. As engineers and architects we love to […]