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Now here’s a useful post on 68kmla, which also solves one of my curious questions.

When I mostly dismantled my Duo 230, one of the things I found odd was the lack of capacitors. Admittingly, while most of the interesting stuff on motherboards this side of my birthdate are implemented by ICs, it is kind of hard to make such a logic board without some capacitors :P.

Looks like they’re mostly clustered near the DC power input socket and the serial port. Which is located underneath the northern end of the frame, where the hinge mounts. The square piece, looks like the serial port behind the flip down leg next to the power socket. Despite going far enough to remove the display panel, I didn’t take that much of the frame apart in my efforts to inspect the insides. Honestly, I was just surprised by the lack of plastic disintegrating the moment I unscrewed the damned thing 🤣.

Note to self on the eradication of ants

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Always go somewhere else and get the usual Amdro ant block or fire ant killer. Never buy the Amdro quick kill granules. The natives won’t fall for that shit.

On the flipside whatever reason fire ant killer seems more enticing to the natives, at least the small black apartment invading ants we typically see in this part of Georgia aren’t like the red fire ants I grew up with in Floridia. Those were the kind of fuckers you sit in the car, look down, go oh my fuck, and run screaming with legs full of ants wishing there were a canal nearby so you could make like a cartoon character.

By contrast the ones here tend to be highly persistent, but are only in it for the food. Not aggressive toward man and beast, so much as they will find clever ways to route themselves from across a yard to the other side of a building if they smell fooooood.

Fuck.

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When I was younger, I pretty much figured that if I ever had a nice cozy garage with a work bench. Odds are, I’d end up tinkering on electronics; probably with hair like Doc Brown by the time anything useful was learned.

As an adult who ended up a computer nerd, I’m now fairly certain I’d end up with a garage full of old computers. Probably a good thing that I don’t have that much closet space nor a garage 😂

Captain’s log, Star date 2021.163

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Thus far it has been a good day.

Between work and a leaking hot water heater: it feels like the first day off I’ve actually had in a while.

Which of course means that I had to drag my ass out of bed and go do erands, lol.

Long overdue grocery shopping got done, and on the way from other stuff: I opted to stop at the diner for an omelet and coffee-exactly what I needed. Managed to slurp coffee and catch up on video games and Netflix between dog walks.

Sometimes the whole sitting on the couch and drooling plan, as I call it, rather has a therapeutic effect upon my sanity.

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The subtle joys of a hot water heater that doesn’t leak: when not only is your hot water working great, but you don’t have to mop the floor so often 😂

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Two thoughts on trying to take apart one of my old Logitech speakers:

A/ It’d be worth buying a new set versus the effort to take this thing apart and see if I can (probably can) fix it.

B/ Someday I should just randomly go out and buy a drill, so I’ll have one when deemed helpful.

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You ever think about how Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC”

For me the era of the netbook is a mixed but mostly happy one. I remember the sales guy trying to convince me that they were such low end computers that they couldn’t do much of anything. Compared to my six year old laptop that was depending on how you count sold out models, either the second or cheapest one at Best Buy: the 1015PE was sufficiently capable for my programming needs.
Encountering Windows 7 Starter Edition made me accuse the operating system of cheating for how quick the suspend and resume worked compared to my old laptop. While adjusted for age the Atom wasn’t drastically different from my old Sempron: it did come with modern buses and standards like DDR2. So for all practical invents and purposes it worked really well as long as you weren’t multitasking several heavy tasks, at which point the Ubuntu setup I had installed would become quite lathargic from the lack of resources.
In fact one of the reasons I loved the Transformer Pad EeePC that replaced my netbook was how smoother Android on a Tegra 2 handled multitasking than the Atom N450. The other reason was insane battery life able to handle a cross continent journey by air, while my x86 netbook couldn’t make it past the first flight when being used as little more than a high tech typewriter.
While my opinion of Chrome OS is a bit harsher than my view of netbooks, I find it interesting how technology grew from there. Chromebooks proved of all you really wanted to do was run a browser then the netbook concept was a superb form factor for typing and surfing. Meanwhile Apple’s iPad and various far more affordable Android powered tablets came to prove that you could do plenty of you didn’t need to run a bunch of old Windows software.
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Have to admit that I would like to see more devices like this’s even if the refresh rates of e-ink displays tend to be atrocious. The kind of scrolling and flinging people tend to expect out of general purpose tablets make it more noticeable than paging through an ebook. More so than the lack of color most devices have had.

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 For a while now, I’ve been considering going to rechargeable batteries. Last time I can remember encountering these in my family was as a child, since (as I recall being told) me and the charger had some kind of encounter with water around age 3 or 4. So it’s been a while.

The past decade has seen my use of batteries go up rather than down. Mostly due to a greater embrace meant of Bluetooth peripherals that are preferring AA/AAA batteries to built in cells and USB charging. Plenty of batteries go to my Logitech K380 and Samsung S-Mouse at work. Fewer at home since my old K810 charges from USB, and my Fire TV remotes last quite a while.

For years I’ve used the Play & Charge kit for my controller, which is kind of nice for me since it charges from the controller’s USB port. The pack looks like it’s just a connection for the controller’s power management, and a pair of AA cells in a plastic casing. Worked out pretty well.

Based on my math overall costs would be up to $50 for enough to replace my battery needs and a charger. Considering my battery costs tend to be higher based on the which thing takes what vs which piece of my stockpile of batteries is at home and which is at work. It’s probably worth it to just use rechargeable batteries with some in use, some kept spare, and not taking a bath with the charger.

When you account for the cost of making sure both home/work are stocked with the right size, the cost is about the same as an 8 packs of rechargeable NiMH. So this seems like a good plan to me—or just say screw it and buy about several years worth of regular batteries off Amazon and stuff them in a bin >.<