I keep a little blog called Insane in the Membrane which links to various YouTube videos that show conspiracy nuts and crazy religious people frothing at the mouth. It’s not updated that frequently so you won’t get spammed with information, it’s just videos that’ll amuse you. All videos, no long rambling texts. Kind of like late night TV. Brain off, watch the pretty images and giggle.
Here’s one I just found, all about rainbow’s[sic]
This may or may not turn out to be nasty, but I decided it was worth a go. I’ve started production of a batch of Ginger Tea Beer, which is a mix of root ginger, lemons and some strongly brewed tea. I took inspiration from this ginger beer recipe.
There’s a few pictures, so hit the more link to continue reading… Continue reading
A month or so ago I ordered a DivIDE board from Papaya Labs. The DivIDE board is an ATA interface for the ZX Spectrum, allowing IDE devices such as hard disks, CDROM drives and Compact Flash cards to be plugged into the Spectrum, which, through a special loader built into the board, allows .Z80, .TAP and .SNA images to be loaded into the Spectrum and run. The .Z80 and .SNA images are simply pushed into the Spectrum and it runs them with no need to reboot. The .TAP files are presented to the Spectrum as real tapes, and after typing ‘LOAD “”‘ they load in exactly as a tape would – only in a few seconds, rather than a few minutes.
This is a long post, with lots of information in, more after the break… Press it, you can watch a YouTube video at the end. More photos of the setup available on my photos website.
Crystal Radio set using razor blade and pencil
These things are somewhat amazing. With nothing more than a coil of wire, a pencil, razor blade and some random wire it’s possible to construct a crystal radio set. These things are so simple the fact they work at all is like magic.
All it takes is a long piece of wire for an antenna, a ground connection and then some sort of semi-conducting material for a cat’s whisker and you’ve got a radio. ‘Semiconductor’ sounds a bit high tech, so replace that with ‘something that mostly conducts electricity, but not that well’. The signals are incredibly weak and tuning is an artform and watch where your hands go or you’ll end up becoming part of the radio!
I built the set from random junk in my house. The purple wire I have on a spool for just such occasions, the razorblade came from my bathroom (no, I’m not Emo 
) as did the toilet roll tube. The cork block is actually a sanding block out my toolbox.
The ‘set’ is connected to my PC’s soundcard to amplify the signals but even with that I had to turn the volume of my PC right up to the point the speakers were humming with all the stray EM noise my house generates (the washing machine is on at the moment which can’t help things).
Crystal Radio set connected to my PC
I worked out the construction of the radio by looking at a few pictures on the web and then fiddling until things worked. I had problems with the lacquer coating on the thin wire I took from an old hard drive’s read arm assembly. Eventually after some faffing and prodding I had the pencil causing giant bursts of static when it touched the razor blade. The razor blade needs to be “blue”, to do that it needs heating in a flame until it glows red.
And then the coolest thing ever happened… I picked up a football match. I hate football, it bores me to death, but the fact it came from a bunch of crap on my desk was pure magic 
If you try to build one of these but it doesn’t work, test all the contacts by prodding them with your fingers. There should be little bursts of static or other noise if you touch stuff. The set is highly sensitive to everything, so if it works sit still and try not to wave your hands about. Seriously, for reasons beyond my understanding I had an excellent signal if I touched my finger to the blue thumbtack, and put a dirty spoon across the wires going to the soundcard plug. Blowing onto the pencil helped too since the contact needs to be “just right” and is utterly random.
Intel Celeron CPU with not enough CPU paste
So, my MAME cabinet was having stability problems all day. Either it was locking up, the network kept dropping or bits of it stopped working (like the sound). By a process of elimination I managed to make it consistently crash running Memtest86 after about ten seconds. No errors were printed about the RAM, and it did it with both sticks of RAM in the machine.
The BIOS reported the CPU at a toasty 70c which is kind of high, but then my P4 based server upstairs runs at 60, and seems quite fine with that. All the same I went to Maplin, bought some heat transfer goop and gave the CPU and heatsink a good clean. Not that the CPU needed much cleaning, since there was barely any heat paste on it. There was a large chunk of crusty, dry paste on the back of the heatsink too. Lm-sensors now reports the machine running at 40c while under heavy load.
Don’t buy cheap hole saws and expect them to last for more than one use. Also watch out, MDF is really easy to start smouldering. Make sure all the clumps of burning MDF dust are removed and the holes aren’t smoking either.
Today has been a slow, frustrating day. I “lost” four hours earlier just faffing with the machine trying to make it work. I still don’t know why the PC says the BIOS checksum is incorrect every time the power is removed, the motherboard battery is good so all I can think is the flash in the BIOS chip is starting to fail. It wouldn’t surprise me, I did get this motherboard free inside a junk PC case on Freecycle.