Archive for May, 2005

Chillin’ in the Freeza

Tuesday, May 24th, 2005

Aww yeah. Stiens in the freezer, ready to hold an ice-cold brew.

ringzero is hb’s company; hb originally informed me about cafepress, which can do custom logo trinkets on onesy-twosy items. I wish this place existed while I was in my frat back at MIT; would have been useful for parties and rush.

Arrr, a southpaw’s beerstien with me company logo on it. Yeah! and in perfect time for the summer BBQ season!

Dvorak on the Tandy 102

Friday, May 20th, 2005

So, this month’s “Name That Ware” was probably a bit too easy :-) Looks like a lot of people got it pretty quickly. I’ll choose a winner when I post next month’s contest.

I chose the Tandy 102 for May’s installment because I happened to be working on it just now. The Tandy 102, as you may recall, is one of the original notebook form-factor “laptops”. I think it’s a great machine.

However, the biggest impediment to useability was the fact that I use a dvorak keyboard layout, so typing on this was very painful for me since I have lost my ability to touch-type on a standard qwerty keyboard. I thought it would be fun to rip out the ROM on my Tandy 102 and fix the keymapping to make the system more useable for me.

Here are the notes on my exploit. They are basically my personal journal that I kept while doing it, augmented with photos. I talk about the whole process, from removing the ROM to disassembling the system, to how I find the right subroutines.

Nekked EEPROM

Friday, May 20th, 2005

As part of the Tandy 102 hack, I couldn’t resist taking a couple of zoomed-in shots of the EEPROM silicon. You can see them here and here. You can clearly see the AMD logo in one of them, and in the other one you can see the indivdiual transistors and gates that perform some of the logic functions on the EEPROM.

PS: Star Wars III was great.

HackDAC Implementation

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

I’ve converted part II of my HackDAC post to HTML. Don’t forget to read part I as well.

Name That Ware – May 2005

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

The Ware for May, 2005 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger view.

This particular specimen runs a real risk of being guessed outright through simple familiarity. As usual, just getting the answer right won’t necessarily get you a prize. The most correct entry with the most interesting/insightful commentary or story relevant to the subject will win the prize!

I guarantee that next month’s ware will be much more difficult than this one, but this guy happens to be under my soldering iron tip this week. ;-)