82MHz - All Posts

Linkdump No 115

Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This past week I've been writing a lot, first the Walkman post</a> and then my IR sensor project</a>. I've gotten some really nice feedback on both; the Walkman post in particular seems to have resonated with a lot of people, which is interesting. I wasn't even sure if writing a post about it was worth it because it was such a basic fix. But now I'm glad I did.

I'm sure if you have a blog, you know the doubts that sometimes creep into your mind. The feeling of "should I even write about this", "who even cares about what I have to say", "this is silly" etc. I have these thoughts too; a lot actually. But the answer is always "yes, I should write about it, even if I think it's silly" because you never know, your silly post about an old Walkman might brighten up someone's day, and if even one person enjoys it, it was worth it.

The lesson I keep learning is to not listen to the doubts and the negative voice in my head and just do it anyway. The voice lies. So thank you to everyone who's getting in touch with me, I truly appreciate it! On to the links.

Articles

Copy That Floppy! - Imaging floppy disks for long-term preservation</a>
This is an in-depth guide into how floppy disks work and how to archive them, because they don't last forever. If you still have some old floppies, it might be a good idea to buy a drive and archive them now before it's too late.</li>
Bosses Horrified as "AI Native" College Graduates Hit the Workplace</a>
"Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate."
It's sad to see that thanks to the overuse of AI we're currently creating a generation of essentially braindead drones who aren't capable of thinking for themselves, because they never learned how. (via Doug Merritt</a>)</li>
Google's New reCAPTCHA Wants Your Camera Access and 21 Points of Your Hand</a>
Apparently Google is planning a new captcha process where you have to turn on your camera and wave your hand around so they can biometrically scan it. And who wouldn't trust a company like Google with their biometric data! Every time you think that things can't possibly get any worse, big tech finds a way to make things worse. (via Emilis</a>)</li> </ul>
Software/Services
GitHub - nadrad/h-m-m: h-m-m, or Hackers Mind Map, is a simple, fast, keyboard-centric terminal-based tool for working with mind maps. · GitHub</a>
I never got into mind maps, they just don't work for me. But maybe they do for you, and if you like working in the terminal, this might be a good tool for you. (thanks, Matto!)</li> </ul>
Hardware Projects
Building A Wireless Fingerprint Authorization Device | Hackaday</a>
Very neat project, a DIY device to authorise yourself on your computer via your fingerprint. I'm always weary of such devices because who knows what data goes where if it comes from some random company, but if you build it yourself, you know the data stays securely under your own control.</li>
Valve open source the Steam Machine e-ink screen so you can make your own | GamingOnLinux</a>
The Steam Machine is so expensive that I don't think many people are going to buy it... but if you end up buying one, you can build an e-ink display to attach to the front of it, and I have to say, the Steam Machine with this type of display looks pretty sweet! Almost like a computer from the 80s. (via thumb</a>)</li> </ul>
Videos
I Taught Myself C By Rejecting Modern Tech - YouTube</a>
This is the antidote to that AI article from above... here's a young guy who taught himself coding the oldschool way. By buying a computer, buying a bunch of books and then working through them. It's great to see that there are people like this, too. (via coffe</a>)</li>
Chernobyl’s Forgotten Internet | Chornobyl Uncharted Ep 33 - YouTube</a>
Fascinating video about servers and websites hosted in Prypjat, the town near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I love the narrator's Ukrainian accent; it adds a lot to the atmosphere of the video. (via Raffaele</a>)</li> </ul>
Around the Small Web
Half-Baked Product | Weli's blog</a>
I don't remember what this literary genre is called, but this is a story that talks about how dysfunctional start-ups operate by using a ridiculous but easy to understand example. It's funny, and if you've ever worked in the corporate world you'll surely recognise some of the excesses described here. (via Steve Lord</a>)</li>
DesertFOX: "LucasFilm's "Passport to Adventure" from 1990 is still one of the coolest demo diskettes ever made!" - Mastodon</a>
DesertFOX over on Mastodon collects and archives retro games, mostly on floppy disks. This is something that I'd never heard of before and it sounds fascinating. If you're into old DOS games, have a look at his profile, he often posts about buying and archiving old games.</li> </ul>
Misc
snr.dance</a>
I was browsing old OCC posts and found this mentioned in Andrei's post from last year</a>. It's an internet radio station that broadcasts old Eurodance tracks. Check out the design of the site! Looks straight out of the 90s/00s, in a good way.</li> </ul>

Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 4 - Making a Case in FreeCAD

Andreas (82MHz) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since the coding part is now done, I decided to solder the Arduino and IR sensor on a bit of perfboard, and then put it in a case. I don't have a case though; but what I do have is a 3D printer, so I'm going to try my hands at designing one. 
This was interesting because I've never really designed anything before. I've always printed out models from Thingiverse</a> or Printables</a>, or if I needed something custom I kind of crudely put something together out of basic shapes in the slicer.
Today I thought now is the time to do it right and get into actual CAD design, so I downloaded FreeCAD</a>. And boy does this thing have a learning cure, let me tell you! This is definitely not going to be a tutorial, because I really have no idea what I was doing there. I just watched a few tutorials and then started clicking around, and in the end I think I ended up with something halfway decent, even though I'm not fully happy with it. But hey, first try.
Anyway, here's the Arduino and the IR sensor, soldered on a piece of perfboard. I decided to put the filter cap in after all as per the datasheet, because why not.
</a>
</figcaption> </figure>
For the case design I took inspiration from this iPod dock, which I really like with the rounded off corners. It also has an IR sensor at the front.
</a>
</figcaption> </figure>
The board the Arduino sits on has a certain size, so that determined the size of the case, which I made 5.5cm square and about 2cm tall.
After watching some tutorials and a lot of false starts and swearing and banging my head on the desk in frustration, I finally came up with this:
</a>
</figcaption> </figure>
It's not perfect, but I think for a first try it isn't bad. Here's my ~~dusty</del> trusty 3D printer building it:~~
</a>
</figcaption> </figure>
Have I mentioned that I find 3D printers absolutely fascinating? You start out with nothing and then half an hour later you have an object in your hands that simply didn't exist before. Mind-blowing.
So here's the case with the Arduino board inside. It's definitely not perfect, I especially don't like how the USB port is just kind of sticking out of a round hole, but making this opening the right shape for the USB port and getting the position right is beyond my CAD design abilities at this point. Next time.
</a> </a> </a>
</figcaption> </figure>
Overall though I think it turned out quite nice and from the front it looks decent. I made it in black so you can't see the inside through the hole in the front, which you would have been able to had the case been white (the first prototype I made was white, and that was the thing that was bugging me the most). Having some IR-transparent black plastic covering the hole like it is on the iPod dock would be ideal of course, but I don't have this kind of material, so a hole will have to do.
And so with this, I'm done! I know that wasn't a very difficult project, but it still went surprisingly well. I think what took the most time was writing this all down, otherwise that would have been a one afternoon project. But it's also fun to document everything, and I enjoy the writing just as much as the actual work. Maybe I should do this more often.
So now it's only Thursday, and the OCC still runs until Sunday. What am I going to do the rest of the time?
I think I'll play some games on Windows 98 to unwind and relax.

Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 3 - Coding Part 2

Andreas (82MHz) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Now that the IR receiver is working and I can receive key presses from the remote on the Arduino, it's time to think about sending them to the PC somehow.
The remote I'm planning to use is the small Apple remote that came with old Macbooks. It has five buttons for Play/Pause, Vol +, Vol -, Next Track, Previous Track and Menu. 
</a>
</figcaption> </figure>
The keyboard library</h2>
For sending key presses from the Arduino to the PC via USB I found two libraries. One is actually already built into the IDE, and an example for how to have the Arduino act as a keyboard and send keycodes to the PC can be found in the IDE under File -> Examples -> USB -> Keyboard -> KeyboardReprogram.
This library allows sending pretty much all keys that can be found on a regular keyboard, but it can't send multimedia keys like volume up/down, play/pause and so on. For that there's an extended library called HID-Project</a> which includes the multimedia keys and a ton of others, too.
I'm attempting to control the Kodi media centre software with my remote, and there the keyboard navigation is done via the arrow keys, Enter to select and Backspace to return to previous screen. Since I only have one set of keys on the remote, I think that's how I'm going to assign them for now. The keys on the outer ring will be Up/Down/Left/Right, the centre button will be Enter and Menu will be Backspace, so I can use the remote to navigate the interface. It would be nice to have the multimedia functions too, so maybe in the future I'll implement a mode switch by long pressing the menu key or something.
Putting it together</h2> I decided to start from a slightly smaller example for the IR library called SimpleReceiver</a>, and then add the correct codes for my particular remote and the keyboard commands it should send to that.
To get the keyboard functionality working, all I had to do was to include the header keyboard.h at the beginning of the file with
#include <keyboard.h> </code></pre> and then add Keyboard.begin(); </code></pre> to the setup function. The loop() function contains this snippet of code if (IrReceiver.decodedIRData.flags & IRDATA_FLAGS_IS_REPEAT) { Serial.println(F("Repeat received. Here you can repeat the same action as before.")); } else { if (IrReceiver.decodedIRData.command == 0x10) { Serial.println(F("Received command 0x10.")); // do something } else if (IrReceiver.decodedIRData.command == 0x11) { Serial.println(F("Received command 0x11.")); // do something else } } </code></pre> where i could add the logic to send the correct keyboard commands to the PC once I received a key press from the IR sensor. Sending keyboard codes is done with Keyboard.write(KEY_UP_ARROW); </code></pre> and the defines for alle the keys can be found in the header file keyboard.h. (Btw, in the IDE you can hold the control key and then click on function names, header files, variables etc. and it will take you to the relevant file or definition.) After a bit of fiddling and refactoring I got it to work and I ended up with this sketch; most of the functionality I implemented is near the bottom: Full Arduino sketch</summary> /* * SimpleReceiver.cpp * * Demonstrates receiving ONLY NEC protocol IR codes with IRremote * If no protocol is defined, all protocols (except Bang&Olufsen) are active. * * This file is part of Arduino-IRremote https://github.com/Arduino-IRremote/Arduino-IRremote. * ************************************************************************************ * MIT License * * Copyright (c) 2020-2025 Armin Joachimsmeyer * * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy * of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal * in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights * to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell * copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished * to do so, subject to the following conditions: * * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all * copies or substantial portions of the Software. * * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, * INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A * PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT * HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF * CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE * OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. * ************************************************************************************ */ #include <Arduino.h> #include <Keyboard.h> /* * Specify which protocol(s) should be used for decoding. * If no protocol is defined, all protocols (except BEO / Bang&Olufsen) are active. * This must be done before the #include <IRremote.hpp> * In alphabetic order */ //#define DECODE_DENON // Includes Sharp - requires around 250 bytes of program memory on ATmega328 //#define DECODE_JVC // ~ 200 bytes //#define DECODE_KASEIKYO // Includes Panasonic ~ 300 bytes //#define DECODE_LG // ~ 400 bytes #define DECODE_NEC // Includes Apple and Onkyo ~ 250 bytes //#define DECODE_SAMSUNG // ~ 300 bytes //#define DECODE_SONY // ~ 175 bytes //#define DECODE_RC5 // RC5 + MARANTZ: ~ 425 bytes //#define DECODE_RC6 // ~ 375 bytes // Universal protocol decoder //#define DECODE_DISTANCE_WIDTH // Universal decoder for pulse distance width protocols ~ 2275 bytes //#define DECODE_HASH // special decoder for all protocols ~ 250 bytes // Exotic protocol decoder //#define DECODE_BOSEWAVE // ~ 140 bytes //#define DECODE_FAST // ~ 135 bytes //#define DECODE_LEGO_PF // ~ 300 bytes //#define DECODE_MAGIQUEST // ~ 270 bytes //#define DECODE_MARANTZ // RC5 + MARANTZ: ~ 425 bytes //#define DECODE_OPENLASIR // Modified NEC with 8-bit validated address + 16-bit command. ~ 175 bytes //#define DECODE_WHYNTER // ~ 90 bytes //#define DECODE_BEO // This protocol must always be enabled manually, i.e. it is NOT enabled if no protocol is defined. It prevents decoding of SONY! ~ 430 bytes //#define DEBUG // Activate this for lots of lovely debug output from the decoders. //#define RAW_BUFFER_LENGTH 750 // For air condition remotes it may require up to 750. Default is 200. #include "PinDefinitionsAndMore.h" // Define macros for input and output pin etc. Sets FLASHEND and RAMSIZE and evaluates value of SEND_PWM_BY_TIMER. #include <IRremote.hpp> // include the library // Function prototype void receiveIrAndSendKey(uint16_t command); /* * Using the function printActiveIRProtocols() requires additional 318 bytes program memory * Using the function printIRResultShort() requires additional 1436 bytes program memory * Using the function printIRSendUsage() requires additional 2568 bytes program memory * Because these 3 functions all share common code, using all 3 functions requires only additional 2884 bytes program memory */ void setup() { Serial.begin(115200); // Just to know which program is running on my Arduino Serial.println(F("START " __FILE__ " from " __DATE__ "\r\nUsing library version " VERSION_IRREMOTE)); // Start the receiver and if not 3. parameter specified, take LED_BUILTIN pin from the internal boards definition as default feedback LED IrReceiver.begin(IR_RECEIVE_PIN, ENABLE_LED_FEEDBACK); Serial.print(F("Ready to receive IR signals of protocols: ")); printActiveIRProtocols(&Serial); // Requires additional 318 bytes program memory Serial.println(F("at pin " STR(IR_RECEIVE_PIN))); Keyboard.begin(); } void loop() { /* * Check if received data is available and if yes, try to decode it. * Decoded result is in the IrReceiver.decodedIRData structure. * * E.g. command is in IrReceiver.decodedIRData.command * address is in command is in IrReceiver.decodedIRData.address * and up to 32 bit raw data in IrReceiver.decodedIRData.decodedRawData */ if (IrReceiver.decode()) { /* * Print a summary of received data */ if (IrReceiver.decodedIRData.protocol == UNKNOWN) { Serial.println(F("Received noise or an unknown (or not yet enabled) protocol")); // We have an unknown protocol here, print extended info IrReceiver.printIRResultRawFormatted(&Serial, true); IrReceiver.resume(); // Do it here, to preserve raw data for printing with printIRResultRawFormatted() } else { IrReceiver.resume(); // Early enable receiving of the next IR frame IrReceiver.printIRResultShort(&Serial); // Requires additional 1436 bytes program memory IrReceiver.printIRSendUsage(&Serial); // Calls printIRResultShort() and other functions, if protocol is UNKNOWN } Serial.println(); /* * Finally, check the received data and perform actions according to the received command */ if (IrReceiver.decodedIRData.flags & IRDATA_FLAGS_IS_REPEAT) { Serial.println(F("Repeat received. Here you can repeat the same action as before.")); if (IrReceiver.decodedIRData.address == 0x34) { // Apple remote address receiveIrAndSendKey(IrReceiver.decodedIRData.command); } } else { if (IrReceiver.decodedIRData.address == 0x34) { // Apple remote address receiveIrAndSendKey(IrReceiver.decodedIRData.command); } } } } /* Keycodes for Apple remote: * Address: 0x34 * * Commands: * Up: 0xA * Down: 0xC * Left: 0x9 * Right: 0x6 * Play: 0x5 * Menu: 0x3 */ void receiveIrAndSendKey(uint16_t command) { switch (command) { case 0xA: // VOL+ / UP Serial.println(F("Received command UP")); Keyboard.write(KEY_UP_ARROW); break; case 0xC: // VOL- / DOWN Serial.println(F("Received command DOWN")); Keyboard.write(KEY_DOWN_ARROW); break; case 0x9: // PREV / LEFT Serial.println(F("Received command LEFT")); Keyboard.write(KEY_LEFT_ARROW); break; case 0x6: // NEXT / RIGHT Serial.println(F("Received command RIGHT")); Keyboard.write(KEY_RIGHT_ARROW); break; case 0x5: // PLAY/PAUSE / ENTER Serial.println(F("Received command PLAY")); Keyboard.write(KEY_RETURN); break; case 0x3: // MENU / BACKSPACE Serial.println(F("Received command MENU")); Keyboard.write(KEY_BACKSPACE); break; default: break; } } </code></pre> </details> And with that, it works! </video> I'm sure I will keep working on this and change or refine some things in the future, but for now the basic functionality is there, and I'm happy with that. Next step: Build a case. That's going to be interesting, because I have very little experience with 3D design. Wish me luck.
Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 2 - Coding Part 1 Andreas (82MHz) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Okay, enough theory. Time to actually start implementing. First step is to download the latest version of the Arduino IDE</a>, which is currently 2.3.10. I've worked with version 1 before so I think I'll get by, but there are also a number of tutorials available</a> to get you up to speed. The Arduino IDE</h2> </a> The Arduino IDE</figcaption> </figure> That's what it looks like at first boot. Very simple. The Arduino programming language</a> is really just C with a number of useful functions and defines added to make life easier. Starting from scratch, I get an empty sketch (that's what Arduino calls the source code of a program) with two predefined functions, setup() and loop(). setup() will contain all the setup functionality that only runs once, and loop() is the endless loop that will never terminate which I've mentioned in the previous post. In my case I want to read the output from the infrared sensor and then evaluate it and pass it on to the computer via USB in the form of keyboard inputs. This means that the setup() function will contain all the functionality that configures the Arduino to receive input from the infrared sensor and to act as a HID (human interface device) to the computer, and the loop() function will sit idle and wait for a signal from the IR sensor to arrive, and then convert this to some kind of keyboard signal and send it on to the PC. There is of course a lot more code that's needed to make the microcontroller work properly, but that's all preconfigured already in the IDE and hidden from the user. Which is both a blessing and a curse, because on the one hand it makes working with Arduinos really easy since all the "hard stuff" is already done and hidden, the user doesn't have to worry about it and can concentrate on their implementation right away. On the other hand it keeps the user from understanding what's really going on and what makes the microcontroller tick in the first place. I'm always in favour of understanding how things work and what's really going on, so I feel a bit uneasy with this approach. Maybe we'll look at the "real" code later to see what's actually happening, but for now, let's move on. Taking a quick tour around the IDE, the select Board dropdown menu allows me to choose the board I'm working with. The Sketch menu contains options to compile the code and upload it to the board, as well as the library manager, which I'll use later. </a> </figcaption> </figure> And the File menu holds the Examples category which contain lots of code examples to use as a starting point or see how certain things are done in the code. </a> </figcaption> </figure> When I connect my Arduino via USB, it is automatically recognised and shown under the Select Board menu, which is nice. So I can select it and the IDE will automatically load everything that's necessary to work with this particular board. If it wasn't recognised, I'd have to go to Select other board and port and find it in the board manager. </a> </figcaption> </figure> Working with libraries</h2> I essentially have two options when it comes to implementing something: Write everything from scratch</li> Start from an example or find a library that contains the desired functionality</li> Vibe code everything</del></li> </ol> Like I said, I have two options. Doing everything from scratch and writing all the code myself has the advantage that I'd really deeply and in detail understand what's going on, but it would require to read the datasheet of the controller, read the datasheet of the IR sensor and work out how to get them to talk to each other, which will take some time. I'm lazy, so I'm choosing to go down the second path. Under Tools -> Manage Libraries... I can get to the library manager. I am looking for some library to read out an infrared sensor, so I search for "infrared" and look through the list of which libraries are available. IRremote by shirriff, z3t0, ArminJo sounds like it might be good candidate, and after reading through it's Github documentation</a> I think that's the one I'm going to use, so I install it. It comes with a bunch of examples that I can look through in order to understand how to use it. </a> </figcaption> </figure> Receive Demo sounds good, so let's click this and see what happens. A new window opens up with a bunch of code in it. This is the demo program that receives signals from the infrared sensor. Note that there are two tabs; we'll get back to this. </a> </figcaption> </figure> Scrolling through this, there's a lot of stuff, but I can find the setup() and loop() functions in there. Looking at the loop() function, I can see these lines: * Check if received data is available and if yes, try to decode it. * Decoded result is in the IrReceiver.decodedIRData structure. * * E.g. command is in IrReceiver.decodedIRData.command * address is in command is in IrReceiver.decodedIRData.address * and up to 32 bit raw data in IrReceiver.decodedIRData.decodedRawData */ if (IrReceiver.decode()) { Serial.println(); </code></pre> This tells me that it will wait for some data from the IR receiver and then send it out via serial. If a serial port is configured on the Arduino, which it seems to be here, then it will report to the computer as a USB-connected serial device. On Linux this typically appears under /dev/ttyUSB0</code>or /dev/ttyACM0</code>. Under Windows, it's some COM port. The Arduino IDE has a built in serial monitor (under Tools -> Serial Monitor), so let's open this. </a> </figcaption> </figure> We need to set the correct baud rate for the serial port to work. What's the baud rate of the Arduino's serial port? Scrolling through the setup() function of the code I can find the line Serial.begin(115200); </code></pre> So that's the baud rate to set in the serial monitor, 115200 baud. This is the baud rate that's pretty much universally used these days, so whenever a serial connection asks for a baud rate, setting it to 115200 is a good bet. Running the example</h2> Okay, let's just upload this to the Arduino and see what happens, shall we? I can select Verify/Compile from the Sketch menu, which runs through without a problem, and then I select Upload from the same menu to upload the sketch to the board (upload also does the compile step, but I wanted to do it separately first in case there were any problems). This also works flawlessly, so now this program should be compiled and running on the Arduino. Now I open the serial monitor, set the baud rate to 115200, reset the Arduino (by unplugging and replugging the USB cable, because there's no reset button), and I get this: </a> </figcaption> </figure> Everything in this window is coming from the Arduino via the serial port, so this means the program works, the serial connection works and the Arduino does what it's supposed to. Connecting the IR sensor to the Arduino</h2> Next, let's hook up the infrared sensor to the Arduino. The IR sensor has three pins (taken from the datasheet</a>): </a> </figcaption> </figure> The Arduino has a lot of pins (also from the datasheet</a>): </a> </figcaption> </figure> How to connect them? GND and Vs is easy, I can just hook them up to the GND and VCC pins of the Arduino, respectively. But where does the OUT pin of the sensor connect to? Going back to the Arduino IDE, there is a second file open that's called PinDefinitionsAndMore.h. This contains the following table: /* * Pin mapping table for different platforms * * Platform IR input IR output Tone Core/Pin schema * -------------------------------------------------------------- * DEFAULT/AVR 2 3 4 Arduino * ATtinyX5 0|PB0 4|PB4 3|PB3 ATTinyCore * ATtiny167 3|PA3 2|PA2 7|PA7 ATTinyCore * ATtiny167 9|PA3 8|PA2 5|PA7 Digispark original core * ATtiny84 |PB2 |PA4 |PA3 ATTinyCore * ATtiny88 3|PD3 4|PD4 9|PB1 ATTinyCore * ATtiny3216 14|PA1 15|PA2 16|PA3 MegaTinyCore * ATtiny1604 2 3|PA5 % * ATtiny816 14|PA1 16|PA3 1|PA5 MegaTinyCore * ATtiny1614 8|PA1 10|PA3 1|PA5 MegaTinyCore * MKR* 1 3 4 * SAMD 2 3 4 * ESP8266 14|D5 12|D6 % * ESP32 15 4 27 * ESP32-C3 2 3 4 * ESP32-S3 2 3 4 * BluePill PA6 PA7 PA3 * APOLLO3 11 12 5 * RP2040 3|GPIO15 4|GPIO16 5|GPIO17 */ </code></pre> These are the pin mappings for different boards. I have an Arduino (clone), so the first line applies, which means data from the IR receiver is expected on Pin 2 of the Arduino. So I'll connect them like this (the IR sensors datasheet</a> suggests a capacitor and a resistor in the power lines, acting as a low pass filter to smooth out any high frequency ripples in the supply voltage, but I think I can get away without them for now): </a> </figcaption> </figure> And here's what it looks like in the real world: </a> </figcaption> </figure> That's a nice and janky setup. I like it. But does it work? </a> </figcaption> </figure> It does! Every time I push a button on the remote, the Arduino sends back these two lines: Protocol=Apple Address=0x34, Command=0xC, Raw-Data=0x340C87EE, 32 bits, LSB first, Gap=536700us, Duration=68300us Send with: IrSender.sendApple(0x34, 0xC, <numberOfRepeats>); </code></pre> It recognises that it's an Apple remote sending an address and the command ID. The address is always the same, but the command ID is different for each key, which is how I can differentiate them. Success! I can receive commands from the IR remote on the Arduino. That's the first step done. The next step is to figure out how to configure the Arduino as an USB input device, and then to put it all together. Stay tuned. Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 1 - Some Theory Andreas (82MHz) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Yesterday I announced that I'm planning to build a USB-IR receiver for my media centre. Let's look in a bit more detail at what I'm trying to do here. I have three components: An infrared receiver</li> An Arduino</li> A remote</li> </ul> </a> Infrared receiver, Arduino clone, Apple remote</figcaption> </figure> I want to connect the infrared receiver to the Arduino so that the Arduino can receive commands I send from the remote, convert it to something the computer can easily understand (maybe by acting as a keyboard and sending keycodes) and pass it on to the computer (media centre) via USB. The remote</h2> This is just a basic Apple remote I had lying around. I think it came with the white Unibody Macbooks around 20 years ago, and some other devices as well. Mine I think came with a docking station for an iPod, with which it also works. Once a key is pressed on an infrared remote, it rapidly pulses an infrared LED at a frequency of usually 38kHz (other frequencies in the range of 30kHz to 56kHz can be used, too) and sends out a few bytes of information which contain the ID of the key that's being pressed and maybe some other data. The simplest way to send digital data via light is to just code it as "light on means 1" and "light off means 0". That's not a very robust method of transmission though, so some other methods are usually used, like having a short pulse of light for a "0" and a long pulse for a "1". We cannot see infrared light, but digital cameras can. You can point the camera of your phone at the front of an infrared remote and see the LED light up when you press a button: </a> The infrared LED of a remote as seen by a digital camera</figcaption> </figure> The infrared receiver</h2> This is a standard component, and there are many variants available. There's a good overview in the Arduino forum of the pinouts of the most common ones</a>. </a> TSOP31238 IR receiver</figcaption> </figure> The one I have is a TSOP31238</a>. It has three pins for GND, Vs (supply voltage) and OUT. How it works is you hook it up to power (3.3V or 5V) and when it receives a signal from an infrared remote, it will just send out the information it received as digital pulses on the OUT pin. The frequency of the remote control and the IR receiver must match for them to work together. This is a 38kHz receiver, so I hope the remote works on 38kHz as well, but most do. The Arduino</h2> I have no idea when or where or why I got this, but I've had it in my parts bin for years. This is an Arduino clone called a Pro Micro</a>. Arduino</a> is a project started around 20 years ago by a few guys in Italy who wanted to make microcontroller programming easy, so they developed easy to use boards and greatly simplified the programming aspect. Since then, countless clones and derivatives of the original Arduino boards have appeared on the market. This one is equipped with an Atmel ATmega32U4 microcontroller (MCU, Micro Controller Unit) which runs at 16MHz, has 32KB of flash memory to store the program code, 2,5KB RAM and a 1KB EEPROM for data storage. </a> Arduino Pro Micro</figcaption> </figure> This board is really bare bones, it just contains the MCU itself, a crystal oscillator for the clock signal, a USB connector and it breaks out the MCUs pins into a more accessible form. It's just enough to make the microcontroller work. What even is a microcontroller? Essentially it's a small computer on a single chip. It contains a CPU, program memory, RAM, some memory for persistent data storage and a number of interfaces to the outside world in the form of GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins and more specialised interfaces like a UART (essentially RS232 serial port), analog to digital converter, and pins that speak various bus protocols like SPI, I2C, CAN, USB and so on. All in one chip which is small and runs at low power so it's perfect for embedding in devices where some kind of computing is needed. If you're not familiar with microcontrollers, the specs above will sound crazy low compared to the phone or computer you're reading this on, but it's more than enough power for what I'm planning to do here. The most important part is that is has an integrated USB controller, so I can just hook it up to any PC without any fuzz. It also has a UART (serial port), so I could connect it to virtually any computer from the last 45 years or so, which is pretty amazing. This tiny thing can talk to your modern MacBook Ultra Turbo Pro Max Tim Cook Special Edition, but also to a Commodore 64. Developing for a Microcontroller</h2> Microcontroller development used to be pretty complicated, but thanks in no small part to the Arduino project it has gotten much easier. What's needed is some kind of code editor, a compiler for the target architecture of the microcontroller (called a cross compiler) and some software to flash the compiled binary to the microcontroller. In the past you had to cobble all these components together separately and try to get them to work (and for controllers that aren't mainstream you still have to), but for popular microcontroller boards like the Arduinos and their clones there's the Arduino IDE which brings everything in one package, ready to go. There's one thing that is very different in a program on a microcontroller compared to a program that runs on an operating system: The program can never be allowed to terminate. As soon as it finishes, the controller enters an undefined state, because it isn't running any code anymore. And the only way to bring it back is a reset, either through a power toggle, an external reset circuit or an internal timer which resets the controller. So every microcontroller program will at some point enter an infinite loop which it never leaves. I think that's enough theory for today; tomorrow we'll look at the Arduino IDE and start coding. Old Computer Challenge 2026 - Make Something Andreas (82MHz) — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 It's that time of the year again. For the past three years I participated in the old computer challenge</a> every year, and I always had a lot of fun, so I wanted to do something this year, too. The topic for this year isn't strictly about old computers, but rather about making something yourself, to combat the onslaught of AI slop that we're all being subjected to on a daily basis. I like this topic, and so I've been racking my brain without much success on what I could (and want to) make. I currently have a lot of time (thanks to some health issues</a>), but not a lot of energy or ability to focus and work on something for a prolonged period of time (thanks to the same health issues...), so many things I would want to do are probably beyond my current abilities. So I thought rather than torture myself trying to come up with something elaborate and then failing at it, I'll try my hands on something simple and fun. I'm going to use an Arduino to build a USB infrared receiver, so I can control my media centre (which is a Raspberry Pi running Kodi) with an infrared remote control. (I know I can attach the IR receiver to the Pi's GPIO pins directly, but using USB makes it more universal.) That might sound complicated, and in the past it would have been, but thanks to Arduino and tons of available software libraries it should actually be pretty straight forward. I'm also a firmware developer by trade, so this falls way within my comfort zone. I don't even have to buy anything, because all that's needed is an infrared receiver, a remote control and a random microcontroller board, of which I have way too many anyway. So I dug out a few parts I had lying around, and that's my project for this year. Make something usable out of the parts in the picture, and maybe 3D print an enclosure to make it look nice. </a> Infrared sensor, Arduino clone, Apple remote</figcaption> </figure> The goal here is to build something (semi)useful, but also to create a tutorial on how to get started building something with an Arduino, so that anyone who is interested in working with microcontrollers but is maybe a bit intimidated by it can follow along and see that it's actually fairly easy to get something going. Should be fun. I'm going to get started now, I'll post updates throughout the week. Continue here: Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 1 - Some Theory</a></li> Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 2 - Coding Part 1</a></li> Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 3 - Coding Part 2</a></li> Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 4 - Making a Case in FreeCAD</a></li> </ul> I bought a Sony Walkman Andreas (82MHz) — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 It keeps happening. I can't control it. Sometimes, I feel nostalgic for some old piece of tech, and before I know what's happening, I'm already browsing eBay looking for one. That's how I ended up with an old Thinkpad from 2004</a> recently. And now it happened again, and so I'm now the proud owner of a Sony Cassette Walkman. Despite not having any tapes anymore.... Ok, so I got nostalgic for Walkmans (Walkmen?) and tapes recently, and as I was browsing eBay I found this one, sold as not working, and it cost only 17,50€ including shipping. It looks a little beat up, but I'm fine with that. In fact, I prefer it because I noticed that if I buy some retro hardware that still looks pristine, I'm hesitant to use it because I'm scared I will scratch it up. So when a device comes with some cosmetic damage already, that's perfect for me. </a> Sony WM-EX521</figcaption> </figure> I also bought a tape, because what would I do with a Walkman without a tape? It's one of my favourite albums by Rush, Signals from 1982. </a> Rush, Signals, 1982</figcaption> </figure> The Walkman is the Sony WM-EX521</a> from 2002, which is a pretty late model. It's not one of the classics from the 80s, but I really like the design, the case is made out of metal so it looks and feels really solid and with it being relatively young, I don't expect too many problems. In fact, I had a suspicion that the only thing that was wrong with it might be the belt. Tape drives have rubber belts in them which link the motor with the tape mechanism, and these wear out over time. They can become loose or lose their elasticity, some break and some also try to turn themselves back into crude oil, which leaves a giant mess behind. So when the Walkman arrived, I opened the back to see how it looked on the inside, which required putting it on a heat plate for a few minutes to soften the adhesive, and then I could carefully insert a plastic tool between the frame and the back cover and start prying... nah, I'm kidding. This was made before all of that nonsense. You take out five screws and you're in. Which is how it should be. Anyway, I took the back off, stuck a battery in, pressed play and I could see that the motor was spinning, but the belt was loose and wasn't moving. Suspicion confirmed, the belt was bad. Thankfully it was just worn out and hadn't disintegrated yet, so that's an easy fix. I ordered a new belt here</a>, which arrived a few days later from Portugal, and replaced the old one. I also sprayed some contact cleaner into the volume potentiometer while I was at it, because it sounded very noisy and scratchy. Here are some pictures, and you can see the old, worn out belt next to the new one. It's literally twice as long! No wonder it wasn't working anymore. </a> The inside of the Walkman</figcaption> </figure> </a> New belt vs worn out old belt</figcaption> </figure> After that was done I put in the Rush tape, pushed play, and success! The tape played. Walkman fixed! There was one more problem though: the tape ran slow. I'm very familiar with these songs and I noticed pretty quickly that they sounded kind of slow and tired here. There is a trimmer on the circuit board which adjusts the playback speed, and there are special calibration tapes which have a tone of a precise frequency recorded on them, so you can connect the tape player to some measuring equipment and dial in the speed until the tape plays the tone at the right frequency. I don't have such a tape however, so I did this: The first song on the album, Subdivisions, starts with a single note, played repeatedly on a synthesizer. I checked the version of the song on Youtube with a guitar tuning app and figured out that this note is an F#. So I played this part of the tape on the Walkman over and over again through a speaker and slowly adjusted the speed upwards until that note also showed as an F# on the tuner (it started out being close to E, so almost a semitone lower and slower than it should have been). This might not be the most precise way to calibrate the Walkman, but it is good enough for my taste. </a> Adjusting the playback speed</figcaption> </figure> Then I put the Walkman back together and I was done. Except, it turned out I wasn't quite done yet. I played the tape for a bit, and at first it sounded fine, but after a few minutes it began to slow down and playback eventually stopped. And it wouldn't fast forward or rewind, either. I suspected that the tape might have been lying around unused for years, if not decades and as such might be a bit hard to turn. And maybe all it needed was to be wound back and forth a few times to loosen up. Now, I could have done that with a pencil like we used to do, but I was too lazy, so I came up with a different solution: I 3D-printed a cog that fit into the tape, attached that to my battery powered drill and wound the tape back and forth a couple of times this way. And I'm happy to report that with this completely sensible and not at all stupidly overengineered solution, the tape plays perfectly now! </a> I'm an engineer!</figcaption> </figure> And with that, I now have a perfectly working Walkman again, something that I haven't had in more than 25 years. And I don't think I ever had a Sony. So I guess now I have to go and buy some more tapes. Linkdump No 114 Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I recently had a "phone support" call with my parents, where they needed help with their computers and smartphones and the internet router. They regularly ask me for help, because they're completely overwhelmed and out of their depth when it comes to modern technology, and it makes me sad to see how much they struggle with their devices. We have incredible technology these days; things that 40 or 50 years ago were pure science fiction, like a supercomputer that you carry around in your pocket and that is connected at all times to the rest of the world, can play music, can play movies, can run games, can record video... it can do virtually anything you can think of. And yet it's terrible, especially for elderly and non tech-savvy people. Technology is supposed to make our life easier. That's why we have it. But somewhere in the last 20 years or so we completely abandoned this idea and created devices that are downright hostile to the user. They bombard us with notifications, demand our constant attention and insist that we make an account here, enter our personal data there, create a password (whoops, this one's not strong enough - try again!), solve a captcha, verify our identity and on and on and on. And my parents, who grew up at a time where the most complicated piece of tech they had at home was a black and white TV set that had ONE KNOB to select the channel are predictably completely overwhelmed by all this bullshit. It makes me so sad and angry to see this. We really messed up here. The technology that we have today, as amazing as it is on paper, isn't making our life easier anymore. It's just creating headache after headache. It wasn't like this 20 years ago, and I hope it won't be like this 20 years from now. But today, unfortunately, we have to deal with it and I'm going to have many more support calls with my parents trying to help them whip their tech into doing what it's supposed to. At least that gives us something to bond over as a family. Thanks, Silicon Valley. Articles Sony erases digital content from libraries; we’re reminded we don’t own what we buy</a> Friendly reminder... if you "buy" something that isn't offered to you as a DRM-free download, you don't really own it and the vendor has probably given themselves permission somewhere in the 200 pages of terms and services that you didn't read that they are allowed to take it away whenever they feel like it.</li> Adversarial Communication</a> "'AI' turns every conversation into a fight, because fighting is what they are good at." A list of things where AI is more or less openly acting as an adversary, be it in customer support, education or job automation. (via Tim Chase</a>)</li> </ul> Software/Services GitHub - clangen/musikcube: a cross-platform, terminal-based music player, audio engine, metadata indexer, and server in c++ · GitHub</a> A terminal based music player, for the people who don't like cmus</a>. Found it via Anita Lewis</a>, who gives a great overview on her blog.</li> GitHub - reekta92/clin-rs: Feature-packed TUI note management app inspired by Obsidian · GitHub</a> If you like Obsidian but you wish there was a terminal version of it, this might be the right app for you. (via Alec Sargent</a>)</li> nick/flatpak-converter: Find all packages on Archlinux that you can replace with flatpak native versions - Geeky Schmidt: Nick's private CVS</a> If you're using Arch Linux btw., you know that the AUR (arch user repository) has recently been more and more under attack from people who use it to spread malware. So this script might come in handy as it replaces AUR software packages with their flatpak equivalent. (created by Nick Schmidt</a>)</li> </ul> Videos World’s Biggest RC A380 — Lufthansa 100th Anniversary Reveal - YouTube</a> These guys built a 1/8 scale model of an Airbus A380. It weighs 360kg, has a wingspan of almost 10 metres, four fully functioning jet engines, and it actually flies. It's absolutely insane and gorgeous to look at and see flying.</li> Memory is too expensive so I made my own - YouTube</a> Polymatt built a magnetic core memory from scratch. This is a type of computer memory that they used in the 50s and 60s where a bit was stored as a magnetic field in an iron ring. As usual, his attention to detail is incredible.</li> The "Cable Melt" mystery // What is it and can it be stopped? - YouTube</a> Sometimes old devices that have been stored with their cables wrapped around them develop defects in the plastic that look like someone held a soldering iron to it. This is due to a chemical reaction of the softener in the cable with the plastic of the case. This video explains why and how it happens. (via Everything C64</a>)</li> </ul> Around the Small Web The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier</a> Another great essay by Terry Godier about how all of our devices demand our constant attention these days. (via Matto</a>)</li> Junited 2026 - rldane.space</a> Junited 2026 - Forkingmad</a> Junited 2026 - Kedara.eu</a> Junited 2026 | thomasrigby.com</a> Robert Birming created a challenge called "Junited</a>", a month to share links to other people's blogs on your own. These are the Junited pages of a few bloggers I follow. Go and have a look, there's a lot of great stuff in there!</li> How to turn a Smart TV into an "almost" full-fledged Linux workstation - DEV Community</a> This is about smart TVs, but it really can be used as a tutorial to turn almost any Android device into a Linux machine.</li> </ul> Linkdump No 113 Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 It's July again! Soon, anyway. And this means two things: Heat waves (hate it) and computer shenanigans thanks to the Old Computer Challenge (love it). This is what I started this blog with three years ago, and I've participated every year since. Last year the community was a bit meh, and for a while it looked like nobody was interested this time, but Tekk came up with a nice concept</a> and updated the website accordingly. This year's challenge is again not strictly defined, but I like the topic: Make something yourself, to combat the onslaught of AI slop we're being subjected to. I think that's a great idea, and I'm sure I'll come up with something and I hope some of you will, too. Articles What Have We Dumped On The Moon? | Hackaday</a> Wherever humans go, they leave their trash behind. Not just on Earth, but also on the moon. Did you know the Apollo astronauts dumped their poop bags</del> defecation collection devices on the moon? (Btw: the bags were transparent</a>...)</li> In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words - The Old New Thing</a> Raymond Chen remembers the man who invented the squiggly lines under misspelled words. Once upon a time, Microsoft actually invented useful things...</li> I Left Port 22 Open for 54 Days: An SSH Honeypot Study</a> What happens when you connect a seemingly unsecured machine to the internet and just wait? (via Lazy Reading</a>)</li> </ul> Software/Services GitHub - chubin/wttr.in: :partly_sunny: The right way to check the weather · GitHub</a> Check the weather forecast in the terminal with a simple curl command. It works in the browser</a> too. (found in an old Gopher post from Matto</a>)</li> </ul> Videos I Revived MSN Messenger and Its Forgotten Companion Gadget! - YouTube</a> Here's something I've never seen before... a plastic toy shaped like the MSN messenger icon, and when a message arrives it blinks and wiggles it's wings. It's cheap and plasticky and pointless, but it looks like fun. Remember when tech was fun?</li> 5 Monitors on a Commodore 128! - YouTube</a> Connecting 5 monitors to a Commodore 128 and driving them all independently. Sounds impossible, but by splitting up the individual colour channels to different screens it can be done.</li> Dear AI Companies: Stop the “Doom Trolling” - YouTube</a> Cal Newport makes the argument that either the AI company CEOs are truthful in saying that their invention will destroy the world, in which case they're awful humans for continuing to develop it, or they know that that's not true and they're lying through their teeth to keep the interest in their product high, in which case they're awful humans for lying out of nothing but sheer greed. Either way... awful.</li> </ul> Around the Small Web Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick - The Wallflower Digest</a> Alice wrote a very thorough and interesting review of the Philip K. Dick novel which served as the inspration for the movie Blade Runner. I haven't read it in ages, and I wonder where my copy of it is...</li> Lazy Reading for 2026/06/21 – DragonFly BSD Digest</a> Like me, Justin publishes a weekly link roundup he calls Lazy Reading, and I regularly steal links from him for my own posts. So if you like what's happening here, there's more of it over there.</li> The Great Commodore Brand Heist - Nostalgia Nerd</a> Nostalgia Nerd takes a look at the history of the Commodore brand name since the company went bankrupt. The article is a bit older and doesn't include the latest shenanigans surrounding the brand, but it's a fascinating read nevertheless.</li> Internet works best in small dosages</a> You know what, I think Michał might be onto something here...</li> </ul> Misc MAGAZINE, HEFTE</a> German again, sorry... but sometimes these links are also for me to remember. This is an archive of old computer magazines from the 80s and early 90s, focusing on the home computers of the era.</li> </ul> Linkdump No 112 Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I recently discovered that Bubbles</a> offers the option to embed a widget on your website</a>, to show how often your post has been upvoted and also to nudge people to go upvote in the first place. I'm not sure if I really want this on my blog and if it really has any kind of benefit... The idea behind it of course is to get your post in front of more eyes and increase your reach and visibility, and this leads back to the question why I write a blog in the first place. Is it just to get my thoughts out, or is it to have an "audience" and have people read what I write? A little bit of both of course, but I'm never really sure where on this spectrum I really stand. But I thought I'd give it a try and see if I like it. It's all the way at the bottom and not particularly well integrated (yet) because I'm not good at web design, but it's there for now. What do you think, keep it or leave it? And do I have to do this influencer thing now where I tell you to like, comment, subscribe, upvote and share my post? Don't forget to turn on notifications and ring the bell so you don't miss anything! Articles Why do these Castro gay bars have TSA-style face scanners?</a> Gay bars in San Francisco apparently now have facial recognition devices at the entrance, and it's mandatory to scan your face before you're allowed to enter. The patrons are fine with that, because why would there be anything wrong with creating a comprehensive database of minorities in the current political climate... (via Computeum Vilshofen</a>)</li> Digital Sovereignty Becomes An Imperative As the US Reads Dutch Emails</a> "Microsoft allegedly shared the names and internal communications of Dutch officials working on EU platform regulation with the U.S. House of Representatives". Remember this the next time they talk about the supposedly "European Cloud". It's all a bunch of lies. (via Metin Seven</a>)</li> A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones</a> Researchers are looking into using old phones as computing clusters, which is a great idea. There are hundreds of millions of these devices available, and if they can be put to good use, I'm all for it.</li> Millennial computers: how generation Y grew up with C64, Amiga, Atari, Apple and Windows – GenerationAmiga.com</a> A nice article which explores the relationship that the millennial generation (of which I'm a part of) has with computers. (via Valuable News</a>)</li> The FBI built its own replica small town to simulate real-world cyberattacks | TechCrunch</a> That's fascinating, and it makes sense. If you want to learn how to deal with a cyberattack, what better way than to build an actual town with infrastructure and study the effects first hand. (via Dustin Dikes</a>)</li> </ul> Software/Services moments - A small home for your photos</a> A new photo journal blog thing. According to the developer</a>, it's modelled after Bear Blog, but for photos. It's very new, but it looks great! (via Indra's Micro Blog</a>)</li> GitHub - danifunker/usbode-circle · GitHub</a> I thought I had this already in here at some point, but apparently not... This turns a Raspberry Pi Zero (and a few other models) into a USB CD-ROM drive. Just flash this to an SD card, dump your ISO images on there, put it into a Raspi and hook it up to a PC via USB. Now you have a USB CD-drive without having to burn discs.</li> </ul> Videos Roger Wilco Dies a Lot in Space Quest 1 - YouTube</a> I've never played Space Quest, but after watching this I'm thinking maybe I should... some of these scenes are hilarious. (via</a>)</li> </ul> Around the Small Web AmigaOS 2: The Greatest Upgrade</a> Datagubbe (still the best name ever) is back with another Amiga post. This time he takes a look at Workbench 2.0 and why it is vastly superior to it's predecessor.</li> "These Days I'd Rather Read a Book" | Brandon's Journal</a> Despite being a movie enthusiast, modern movies are driving Brandon away from the cinema and towards reading books instead, and I can see why. There's very little in the cinema that interests me these days, either.</li> </ul> Misc Pac-Hunt — You're the Ghost</a> This is really fun - it's classic PacMan, but you play as the ghost and have to catch him. (via Metin Seven</a>)</li> GitHub - cyberpapiii/chipotlai-max: The AI coding agent that runs on stolen Chipotle compute 🌯 Fork of OpenCode with Pepper AI as default model. Community project to add providers from Home Depot, Lowes, Target, Starbucks & more. · GitHub</a> So apparently Chipotle (US fast food chain) runs an AI chatbot, and someone found a way to use this as a general AI assistant. "Not affiliated with Chipotle. They will probably sue us. Worth it." That's my kind of humour! (via Chris Heilmann</a>)</li> </ul> Thoughts on the new Commodore phone Andreas (82MHz) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 This week, the new Commodore</a> under CEO Peri Fractic (actor turned Youtuber Christian Simpson) announced the release of their latest product, a flip phone they called the Callback</a>. And people online went nuts. Some love it, but most seem to hate it and the feedback has been overwhelmingly (very) negative. I have some thoughts too, so I thought I'd write them out here. The device itself</h2> </a> I actually like it. I used to own a Samsung Z230</a> flip phone in the late 2000s and I absolutely loved it. The new Commodore phone is basically the same form factor, so I like it just for this, but it also has a few other things going for it. It has modern connectivity (LTE, Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS), a decent enough SOC (it doesn't have flagship specs, but this is not a flagship phone - the SOC just needs to be "good enough", which I think it is), and it's running the Linux-based Sailfish OS, which is a bit less open than I'd like in an operating system, but it can apparently run (most) Android apps, so there's a huge software library available. And it comes with a user-replaceable battery! It's sad that this is even worth mentioning as a feature, but that's the world we live in right now. But a Linux flip phone in a flip phone with a keyboard and decent modern connectivity and specs? Sounds perfect for me. I never like the touchscreen-only approach, and if I could have a phone that does all the things modern phones do in a small but usable form factor with a physical keyboard, I'd be happy. I'd also be fine with T9, it takes some getting used to but I was pretty fast at typing messages back then. Just in terms of what this device is and what it's supposed to be able to do, I really like it and I would actually be tempted to get it, because it ticks a lot more boxes of what I want from a phone for me than whatever Samsung, Google or Apple have to offer. However... Everything else</h2> Let's start with the price. 499€/$ on preorder (excluding tax) is way too high for what this device is. 199 would be ideal, 299 would be acceptable, but 499 is a non starter. I get that they're manufacturing small quantities and so they can't profit from the economy of scale, but that's still way more than I'm willing to pay. Then there's the fact that it's marketed as a "digital detox" device, which means that the installation of social media apps, email apps and even browsers is blocked at the OS level, according to their FAQ. And that's completely inacceptable for me. It would be fine if they weren't preinstalled because of the whole digital detox angle, but outright blocking them from ever being installed? With that, they already lost me. If I want some random guy in California to decide what I can and cannot do with the thing that I bought, I'll buy an iPhone. And I don't have an iPhone precisely because of this. I'd also like to know how exactly this fits into the "Commodore" branding. Did the C64 prevent certain software that the company didn't like from running? Did the Amiga block email? Did these machines set up rules for what you were and were not allowed to do with them? I don't think so. And then the marketing itself. I get that they're going for a 2000s Frutiger Aero aesthetic, because it's a flip phone, but... why? What does that have to do with Commodore? The first product from this company was a replica of a 1982 computer, and now all of a sudden they're jumping forward by 25 years to a time period when Commodore didn't even exist anymore. That's just confusing. And it doesn't help that all the pictures of the phone and everything surrounding it feel just so cheap. A lot of people called them AI generated slop, and I don't know if they are AI generated or not, but they're certainly mostly CG and feel pretty cold and lifeless as a result. I get the same vibes here that I get from Apple's high-gloss keynote events. And I don't like it. I could go on, but these are my main thoughts. I actually like the device itself, but the price is too steep and there are too many questionable decisions surrounding it that put me off. I'm not as attached to the Commodore brand as some other people are, but even I am wondering why this has the Commodore name on it. This sounds more like a Christian Simpson device. It's something he wants and because he now runs a tech company he just decides to make it, no matter if it makes sense for the brand or not. I'm still curious enough about the device itself that I'm looking forward to the reviews, For all we know, this could be a very capable phone. And I would guess that they are going to soften their stance on the whole "browsers and emails are blocked" nonsense if there's enough backlash. After all, my 2006 Samsung flip phone could receive emails and had a (rudimentary) browser, and there is no reason for this phone not to have that. I just hope that if this fails, it doesn't tank the whole company. That would be a shame. There's one point I'd like to make in their defence. Some people seem to have pretty unrealistic expectations of what this company can and cannot produce at this point in their existence. I read some comments online that they should bring out a new floppy disk drive, or even make all new CRTs. And yes, these are products that people in the retro community would want, but... there are no more factories in the world that can manufacture floppy drive heads or picture tubes. They all disappeared, and with them the tools and the know-how of how to manufacture these things. You can't just call Sony and ask them to make new Trinitron tubes for you, because they decommissioned all the factories and tooling long ago. It wouldn't be impossible to spin up a new CRT factory of course, but it would be a massive undertaking requiring an upfront investment in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which this company doesn't have. And for what? For a product that's going to sell a few thousand items? Would you be willing to pay thousands of Dollars/Euros for a CRT so they can recoup the cost of building a new factory? Developing a product from scratch is expensive, and manufacturing it is even more expensive, especially if it contains components that aren't readily available anymore and that need to be custom made. So putting something together that's already mostly available or can be made from standard components is likely the only thing they can realistically do at this point, until they build up the funds and the expertise to start developing products of their own. If they survive for this long, that is. Re: If I could be transported back Andreas (82MHz) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 In Hyde's recent Over/Under series of interview posts, David left the question</a> "If you could be transported back in history to a period of time, when would it be and why?" for the next participant, who happened to be Elena Rossi</a>. She gave a great answer</a>, and then David</a> and Hyde</a> answered the same question too on their blogs, so I thought I'd chime in with my two cents as well. If I could be transported back in history to a period of time, when would it be and why?</h2> If I had a time machine, this thing would get a lot of use, because there are so many historic periods I'd want to visit; I'd go see Elvis live on stage, and the Beatles. I'd visit Germany before it was bombed to pieces during the second world war. I'd go back 2000 years and visit ancient Rome, and the region I grew up in, when it was under Roman rule</a>. Then go back another 2000 years and see the Egyptian pyramids when they were still shiny and new. Woolly Mammoths were also still alive 4000 years ago, so I'd go and see them, too. And why not travel back a full 100 million years to see some dinosaurs? But here's what I would really love to do. I'd love to go back maybe 5 million years, to a time when humans were still pretty much apes living in trees. And then jump forward in time in increments of two or three hundred thousand years, and watch the evolution of humans take shape. We know a lot about our evolution from the fossil record, but a lot of it is still unknown. When did we shed our fur? When did we start walking upright? When did we first start to use language? What did the different human species that once existed look like, and how do they compare to us? When did humans first arrive in Europe? When did different skin, hair and eye colours evolve? All these are questions that we have a somewhat decent understanding of, but I think it would be really interesting to witness all this in person and not just see reconstructions of what humans might have looked like 2 million years ago in a museum. There was also a brief period, around 40.000 years ago, when modern humans and Neanderthals lived in Europe at the same time. I find that endlessly fascinating. Could you tell them apart? If you saw a group of humans then, would you have been able to definitively say which species you were looking at? I once read that while Neanderthals looked different than humans, they probably didn't look any more different than modern human ethnicities look different from each other anyway. So chances are, both groups would look both strange and familiar at the same time. That's what I would love to do. Take a tour through the evolution of humanity, to see where we came from, how we got to where (and what) we are today and to see our closest relatives who aren't around anymore. I think that would keep me busy for a long time to come. It's probably for the best though that I don't have a time machine, because in every time period other than the modern age, meaning the last two or three hundred years, I would very likely be dead within days, if not hours after arriving, because I have absolutely zero survival skills. I would either be taken out by wildlife (stomped on by a Mammoth, eaten by a T-Rex) or be identified as a stranger by the local population and processed accordingly (thrown to the lions in the Coliseum, clubbed to death by a gang of Neanderthals) or I would simply catch some weird disease or parasite (if I made the mistake of eating or drinking something there) that my immune system had no idea what to do with and wither away. But one can dream. Linkdump No 111 Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A few weeks ago I gave myself permission to skip the intro of these posts if I can't think of anything interesting or clever to say, and I skipped it twice since then. Well, I've been informed that people miss the intro, so I'm going to do my best to bring it back ;) There's just not a lot happening in my life currently, and I'm in a bit of a writing slump, so I struggle to come up with interesting or funny things to talk about. That's also why I haven't been blogging a lot recently. I guess that's part of a natural ebb and flow, sometimes you're very creative, sometimes you're not. But I know from experience that even when I'm in a slump, staying with it and not just giving up entirely can help me get out of it. So thank you to the people who told me that they enjoyed and miss the intros, I'll do my best to keep writing them. Software/Services GitHub - ppaluchowski64/LibreConnect: An application for seamless communication and integration between computers and mobile devices, developed with a strong focus on user privacy. · GitHub</a> This app is still in it's early stages, but the feature list sounds really impressive and if all of that works the way it's intended, it might end up being even better than KDE connect, which is already pretty great. Here is the dev's announcement post</a>.</li> GitHub - digital-grease/fauxx: Data poisoning for your everyday tracking · GitHub</a> This app seems to poison the advertising data that your phone collects about you to make it useless for the advertisers, and to protect your privacy. (via tootbrute</a>)</li> Chip Player JS</a> An online chiptune player with tens of thousands of tracks readily available. Sounds great, and looks great, too! Here's a tune</a> I remember from my childhood. (via Metin Seven</a>)</li> </ul> Videos Something is jamming GPS over Europe. Here's what we found - YouTube</a> I guess after reading this headline you already suspect who might be behind it, and you're probably right. This video is a deep dive into how GPS signals across Europe are jammed and how they figured it out. It's like watching a spy thriller that's rooted in science.</li> MotoNoob707 - YouTube</a> Fratm</a>, who I'm Fediverse friends with, has created a motorcycle channel where he films his rides around northern California. I watch these videos sometimes when I can't sleep at night, as they're very relaxing and the scenery is beautiful.</li> </ul> Around the Small Web Week Notes - w23</a> Clayton has a few nice links in his recent weeknotes, so I thought instead of stealing them here I'd just point you to his post instead.</li> The back cover of C++: The Programming Language also raises questions not answered by the front cover - The Old New Thing</a> Raymond Chen talks about a book publisher which uses the same nondescript blurb on the cover or every other book they released.</li> The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book | Brain Baking</a> Wouter Groeneveld compiled ten years worth of blog posts into a book. I like the idea!</li> List of blog aggregators - bstn.info</a> Looking for new blogs to follow? Look no further! (Thanks, Matto</a>!)</li> The decline of Google and rise of alternative searches as the source of traffic</a> STFN looks at his website analytics to figure out where the traffic on his blog is coming from.</li> How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight</a> "This is a story of how building HTML-first doubled a company’s users literally overnight." A great post, but with a disappointing ending... (via Tim Chase</a>)</li> </ul> Misc Das Schulbuch zum Commodore 64 [PDF] – pagetable.com</a> My apologies, because this is in German, but it's really nice... a book from 1984 about using the Commodore 64 for solving maths and physics problems that you encounter in school. I went to school a decade later when computers were much more powerful, but we still weren't taught any of this.</li> </ul> Linkdump No 110 Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Articles No Juniors Today, No Seniors in 2031 — Blog | Filipe Brito Ferreira — Front-End Engineer</a> A depressing article about where the tech industry is headed thanks to short-sighted CEOs replacing junior positions with incompetent AI. (via Les Orchard</a>)</li> </ul> Software/Services GitHub - mplsllc/macsurf: A modern web browser for Classic Mac OS 9 PowerPC</a> Someone ported the lightweight Netsurf</a> web browser to classic Mac OS, so if you're still rocking your Clamshell iBook like it's 1999, then first of all you're awesome, and you can now visit modern websites on it again.</li> Releases · reinauer/WinUAE · GitHub</a> And someone else ported the Amiga emulator WinUAE to MacOS and Linux, which is interesting because the emulator started it's life as UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator), with WinUAE being the most popular fork of it, and now it's coming full circle and back to *nix systems again.</li> GitHub - itsjunetime/tdf: A tui-based PDF viewer · GitHub</a> A PDF viewer for the terminal, for those who prefer living without a GUI. Written in Rust. (via Raffaele</a>)</li> </ul> Videos The Close | Adult Animation Comedy Short Film - BBC - YouTube</a> I already shared this on Mastodon, but it's just too funny not to share it here as well. (via Armin</a>)</li> </ul> Around the Small Web Now that your newsletter is AI-generated, I've Unsubscribed</a> "If you're just going to present me with prompt-generated content, I hate to break it to you but I have access to ChatGPT, and I can do that myself." This is the clearest explanation I have read so far for why AI-generating your content is just completely stupid.</li> Little Bits: Issue #37 For May 2026</a> Adam has a new issue of his Little Bits link post out, and as usual it's packed full of interesting stuff. He releases one every month while I release one every week, but in terms of sheer number of links he still has me beat :)</li> Gmail Thinks I'm Stupid, So I Left | moddedbear.com</a> JP does the sensible thing and leaves Gmail behind because the (AI)-enshittification is getting out of hand.</li> Worse on Purpose</a> This blog dives into how everyday products got worse over the years thanks to corporate mergers, acquisitions, cost cutting measures and everything else the corporate world has to offer. Very America-centered, but still a fascinating read and thanks to globalisation also relevant in other parts of the world. (via Lazy Reading</a>)</li> Gemini Quickstart!</a> Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS · brennan.day</a> Recently, Jon</a> has been getting more into Gemini and he shared these two posts about this alternative version of the web, which I highly recommend checking out if you're into this kind of thing.</li> </ul> Misc Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer source code - AlphaPixel Software Development</a> The Juggler is one of the earliest and most famous demos of the Amiga's graphics capabilities, and here's a story about recovering it's source code. It's a bit weird that the author directed an AI to write an extractor for Amiga disk images for him when there are plenty of tools available already, but it's still a fascinating read and he even got the blessing from the demo's original author to publish the sources online.</li> </ul> Listening to every Album: AC/DC Andreas (82MHz) — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 When I was young, I was a huge AC/DC fan. I started listening to them probably around the time I got my driver's license, maybe a year or so earlier, and I remember driving around in my Dad's tiny blue Ford Fiesta</a> blaring AC/DC at full volume. I loved it, while everybody else probably thought I was a complete dork. Good times. Fast forward 25 years, and I recently realised that apart from hearing the occasional song here and there on the radio, I haven't really put on an AC/DC record in years. Shockingly, I never even listened to the two latest albums, apart from checking out the singles when they first came out. AC/DC always stayed true to who they are, and the joke goes that everything sounds the same and they just recorded the exact same album 17 times. Is this true? There's only one way to find out. Here are all 17 AC/DC studio albums in chronological order, from oldest to newest. Let's travel back to Australia in 1975 and get started. Contents</h2> High Voltage (1975)</a></li> T.N.T. (1975)</a></li> Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1976)</a></li> Let there be Rock (1977)</a></li> Powerage (1978)</a></li> Highway to Hell (1979)</a></li> Back in Black (1980)</a></li> For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) (1981)</a></li> Flick of the Switch (1983)</a></li> Fly on the Wall (1985)</a></li> Who Made Who (1986)</a></li> Blow up your Video (1988)</a></li> The Razors Edge (1990)</a></li> Ballbreaker (1995)</a></li> Stiff Upper Lip (2000)</a></li> Black Ice (2008)</a></li> Rock or Bust (2014)</a></li> Power Up (2020)</a></li> </ul> High Voltage (1975)</h2> ★★☆☆☆ Oh dear. I know I heard this album before, a long time ago. But now I also know why I haven't listened to it since, and why I only ever listened to it maybe a handful of times to begin with. They were very young when they recorded this and they were clearly still figuring out their sound and what kind of band they wanted to be. It feels very "proto-AC/DC" in that you can already hear glimpses of what was to come, but it wasn't fully realised yet. Case in point: There's a ballad on the album, called Love Song. How many ballads by AC/DC do you know? Exactly. It's not that good. Many songs are just a bit too long for what they have to offer, the lyrics are pretty juvenile at times (though this is AC/DC, so they aren't going to get much better) and it's just not a very strong album overall. But hey, everybody has to start somewhere, and it put them on the map and kick-started their career, so I can't complain too much. Just don't record any more ballads, please. Favourite song You Ain't Got a Hold on Me</a>. T.N.T. (1975)</h2> ★★★★★ Now that's more like it. As far as I'm concerned, AC/DC starts here. Phil Rudd has arrived on the drums and with him the signature AC/DC groove. Almost every song is a classic and many of them they've kept playing live throughout the years and still play in every show. The Jack is on here (and I had completely forgotten that the lyrics on the album are way different and much tamer than the ones Bon sang live), as is High Voltage, T.N.T. and It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll). With School Days there's also a Chuck Berry cover on the album which makes perfect sense because Chuck Berry is Angus Young's big idol. Which you can not only hear in his playing, but also see on stage. You know the duck walk that Angus does, where he hops around on stage on one foot? That's Chuck's move</a>. This album is an absolute classic, and they were just getting started. Favourite Song It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll)</a>. It rocks, it grooves, and it has bagpipes. What more do you want? Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1976)</h2> ★★★★☆ Another classic album, but I was surprised to find that I actually liked the previous one a little better. There's still a lot of great songs on here like the title track Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Problem Child and of course Jailbreak, and they're also trying some different things here, like the song Squealer which starts slow and calm and then builds up more and more momentum as it progresses which fits the lyrical theme (it's about Sex, what else?). There's also a surprisingly quiet and slow blues song called Ride On. I think this was in my 'midnight' playlist in my teenage years - as the night became quieter, the music I listened to became calmer and with more interesting emotional themes. There are a few tracks on here however which don't quite resonate with me, like Ain't no Fun (Waiting 'round to be a Millionaire) and Big Balls, which is about, you guessed it, big balls. The ones in ballrooms, supposedly... that song also doesn't have an ending, it just suddenly falls apart and then the next song starts, as if they had reached the end of what they'd written and didn't know how to continue. Not a bad album, but also not their best in my opinion. Favourite Song Jailbreak</a>. Let there be Rock (1977)</h2> ★★★★★ In the beginning, Back in 1955... This album is killer. So many great songs on there, among them of course the title track Let there be Rock. It's one of their best songs ever, period. The verse are just bass, drums and vocals, and they are a mini-masterclass of how a rhythm section should work. These guys are locked in with an unbelievable drive. And of course the big Angus solo towards the end... it doesn't get better than that. And then there's Dog eat Dog, Bad Boy Boogie, Hell ain't a bad Place to be and the all time classic Whole Lotta Rosie, all on this one album. It's damn near perfect, the only song that's a bit more meh is Crabsody in Blue, which is a slow blues and is kind of boring to be honest. But one dud on an album full of otherwise absolute killer songs is fine. Yeah. Enough said. Go listen to it, you won't regret it. Favourite Song It has to be Let there be Rock</a>, no doubt. And check out the video where Bon Scott appears as a preacher! Powerage (1978)</h2> ★★★★★ I haven't listened to this album in years, probably over a decade. Maybe even two decades? I really don't remember... but I put it on and found that I could sing pretty much every lyric and every riff, and when a song ended I knew which one was going to come next. I must have listened to this album a lot, and for good reason. It's amazing. It's got a bunch of absolute headbangers like Rock'n'Roll Damnation, Riff Raff, Sin City and Up to my Neck in you which I never get tired of hearing, and the remaining songs aren't any less catchy either. Maybe with the exception of Kicked in the Teeth which feels like a less good version of Let there be Rock from the previous album. But what did I just say about one dud on an otherwise great album? On this album, Cliff Williams joins the band as the new bass player, replacing Mark Evans who played on the previous albums. Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams are a match made in heaven and they form one of the tightest and grooviest rhythm sections in rock history. He will stay in the band until his retirement in 2023, making him the longest-serving band member after Angus Young. His addition to the band also means that even though AC/DC are the quintessential Australian rock band, from this point on they will never again have more than one Australian-born band member, Phil Rudd. Angus and Malcolm Young and Bon Scott were all born in Scotland, and Cliff Williams is English. Favourite Song Up to my Neck in you</a>. Highway to Hell (1979)</h2> ★★★★★ Oh boy! This is the album that got me into AC/DC, and into heavier music in general. The gateway drug. I remember the first time I heard Highway to Hell (the song) I was very confused because I was used to the 'polished' sound of bands like Queen, ELO, Elton John and so on. And here were these guys with their ugly scratchy guitars, no keyboards, and some dude with an awful voice shrieking at the top of his lungs... who the hell likes that? Well as it turns out, I do. Who knew. Because of this history, this album will always have a special place in my heart. But it's also just a really fucking good album! They made a huge leap on this album in terms of songwriting, no doubt due to the input of producer Mutt Lange who they worked with for the first time here. The previous albums were all great and fun and hard rocking, and this album is all of that too, but it's also interesting because the songs are more diverse than ever. Highway to Hell, Girls got Rhythm, Shot down in Flames, If you want Blood (you've got it) are all great songs, and they are all very distinct from one another. No song just blends into the next, they all have their own unique character. Which is nowhere more evident than on the final song Night Prowler which is just dripping with atmosphere. It's hard to decide whether or not this is their best album, but to me it's their most interesting and well-rounded one for sure. Unfortunately it will be the last album with Bon Scott, who after a night of heavy drinking in London passed out in a friend's car and never woke up again on February 19th, 1980 at the age of only 33 years old. He burned bright, but he also burned out fast, and it's a shame. Interlude Since we're at a turning point in the band's career now, I want take a quick break and address something that's been bothering me for literally decades, and that's when people brush off AC/DC as 'simple music'. Even musicians do that sometimes, which I find baffling. "The drummer plays the same simple beat on every song". "The bass player plays the same note throughout the entire song". "They use the same three chords for all songs", and so on. Granted, they're no Rush or Dream Theater, but if you take some time to really engage with their music, you'll find plenty of songs which are far more complex than what some people might want to make you believe. Just listen to the previous album as a prime example. In addition to this, music is not just about the notes that are being played. It's just as much about the feeling, the groove, the swing, the drive or whatever else you might want to call it. It's about how the notes are played as much as which notes are played. Even on the simplest of songs where the drummer play just a simple 4/4 backbeat, the guitars play the proverbial three chords and the bass player plays nothing but the root of the chord in an 1/8th notes pattern, listen to how they're playing it. Listen to the groove of the drums, to the swing of the 1/8th notes on the hi-hat. Listen to how the bass player locks in perfectly with the drums and plays with the same feeling and swing, forming one of the tightest rhythm sections you will find anywhere in rock music. Put on some headphones and listen to how precise Malcolm plays his parts on rhythm guitar. Malcolm Young in particular is in my opinion one of the most underrated guitar players of all time, because while he might often 'just' play a simple pattern on an A chord for two minutes straight, he does so with absolute precision and perfect timing. Just listen to this</a>, and then try playing it the same way. And keep in mind that he played this live in front of 70.000 people. AC/DC's music might seem simple on the surface, yes. And anyone who knows three chords on guitar might be able to play AC/DC - badly. But playing it well? I tell ya folks - it's harder than it looks. Back in Black (1980)</h2> ★★★★★ After Bon Scott's untimely death, the band was incredibly quick to regroup and within a few months found a new singer in Brian Johnson from the Newcastle-based band Geordie and wrote, recorded and released a new album. And what an album it is. This thing is a masterpiece! There is not a bad note on it. If you ask me which one my favourite AC/DC album is, it's this one. Every song is a banger, and Brian delivers a near superhuman vocal performance here. Unpopular opinion: I prefer Brian over Bon. There's just something about his voice that I like more than Bon's voice. What else can I say about the album? Hells Bells, You shook me all Night long, Back in Black... I could just put the entire track list here. All of them are great. Excuse me while I go listen to it again before I continue with the next one. Btw, have you ever heard Brian's old band Geordie</a>? I don't think anyone in early 1980 would have guessed that this guy was going to be AC/DC's new singer. Favourite Song Hells Bells</a>. The bell, the riff, the vocals... I could listen to this 50 times in a row and never grow tired of it. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) (1981)</h2> ★★★☆☆ This album always fell flat for me. Back in Black was perfect, the songwriting was top notch and it sounded amazing. This one is a step back in every regard. The songs feel kind of flat and uninspired and it also doesn't sound nearly as good; particularly Brian is mixed so low that he sounds as if he's ten metres behind the band and then an additional five metres away from the microphone. It's weird, especially considering that it was produced by the same guy (Mutt Lange) as the last two albums, which sounded great. And the songs... For Those About to Rock is a classic of course and the one that they end every show with, with the cannons firing and everything. But the rest? I just finished listening to the album five minutes ago and I've already forgotten most of it. Nothing is really memorable. No wild riffs, no big choruses. Everything sounds a bit bland and uninspired here. I think that's all I can say about this one. Unfortunately, this is a theme which will now continue throughout the rest of the decade... Favourite Song For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)</a>. I'm linking a live recording here because that's where the song really shines. Flick of the Switch (1983)</h2> ★★★★☆ First reaction: It's better than I remember! I haven't heard this one in decades and I don't remember it being good, but it's... well, not great, but I enjoyed it more than the previous one. The band was fed up with Mutt Lange and so they decided to produce the album themselves. This album is widely criticised for its dry sound, but I still think it's a bit better than For Those About to Rock, even though I have to admit, the guitars and drums sound bone dry and a bit unexciting as a result. It definitely doesn't sound as good as the albums from the 70s, which is weird because it's still two guitars, bass, drums and a guy who screams. If they could make it sound great in 77, there's no excuse for making it sound worse in 83. Anyway. The songs. Most of them feel like a continuation of the ones from the last album - a bit too slow and uninspired for what we've gotten used to from AC/DC. They seem to have forgotten that they are great at writing riffs and instead deliver mostly sustained chords without much variation. There are a few exceptions, thankfully. Flick of the Switch has some nice riffs, but feels a little too slow overall. Landslide is good though, uptempo and with some good riffing, and the last song Brain Shake finally has that old familiar drive and feels like a proper AC/DC song. Overall I'd say the album is okay. Not fantastic, but fun to listen to. Favourite Song Brain Shake</a>. It grooves. Fly on the Wall (1985)</h2> ★★★☆☆ Tensions were high during the recording of Flick of the Switch and escalated to drummer Phil Rudd being fired after laying down his drum tracks, being replaced by English drummer Simon Wright who was only in his early 20s when he joined the band. With him, AC/DC is now essentially a 100% British band which happened to be founded in Australia. This is one of AC/DC's worst reviewed albums, and I can see why. It sounds bad, the guitars sound kind of scratchy and unpleasant, the drums on the other hand sound dull and lifeless and Brian sounds as if he got his balls stuck in his zipper and was screaming in the other room while the band was recording, and they just left it like that. The songs are about the same quality as those on the last album. Some are good, some not so much. Fly on the Wall is not bad, as is Shake your Foundations. Playing with Girls is pretty good, while Danger might be the most boring song they've ever recorded. The rest is kind of meh, pretty forgettable. The lyrics are terrible (guess what Sink the Pink is about), but thanks to the horrible mix you can't understand them anyway, so that works out okay. For this album they recorded kind of a short film</a>, which is really just a bunch of music videos loosely connected with a nonsensical story. It's not particularly good, but if you're into "so bad it's good" movies with terrible acting, you might get a kick out of this. Favourite Song Playing with Girls</a>. Despite the lyrics :) Who Made Who (1986)</h2> ★★★☆☆ Speaking of "so bad it's good", this is the soundtrack to Stephen King's movie Maximum Overdrive in which machines become sentient and start killing people. This movie is legendary for being completely insane in every imaginable way. Reportedly Stephen King was coked out of his mind the whole time he made the movie (and during most of the 80s in general). But he wanted AC/DC on the soundtrack, and so they penned three new songs for the movie and contributed several old ones as well. This album is the soundtrack to Maximum Overdrive with the three new songs Who Made Who, D.T. and Chase the Ace and a number of previously released songs. The good news is that they fixed the scratchy sound form the previous album. The bad news is that now everything sounds dull. I really don't know what they were doing in the 80s. They had their sound figured out in the 70s and now they kept messing with it and never got it right. Anyway, the three new songs? Who Made Who is nice, a bit slow maybe but I like it. D.T. is boring as hell, but Chase the Ace (both instrumentals, a first for AC/DC) has a nice drive to it. The old songs are great, but we already knew this. Overall not an essential album. Favourite Song Only considering the three new songs, Who Made Who</a>. It's the best of them. Blow up your Video (1988)</h2> ★★★☆☆ 80s AC/DC isn't making things easy. I never noticed this before, but now listening to all those albums back to back I realise that my verdict is pretty much the same for all albums of the decade (with the exception of Back in Black): There's a few good songs on there, but also a lot of filler and the sound is subpar, worse than the albums from the 70s (but at least better than Fly on the Wall). So there's not much new that I can really say about this album. It's more of the same. Heatseeker and That's the Way I Wanna Rock 'n' Roll are awesome, and I enjoyed Nick of Time and This Means War, I was still whistling the verse riff two hours later. The rest is not really worth mentioning. All in all you could probably compress the last five albums into one, squeeze out all the filler and end up with one really good album. So, am I going to listen to these albums again at some point? Probably yes. They're not terrible, and there's good stuff on each one. But they're definitely a step down in quality compared to the Bon Scott era and Back in Black. I criticised them a lot here, but I still like all of them. I just don't recommend listening to all of them in one go, maybe that's a bit much. Moving on, let's see what the 90s had to offer. Favourite Song Heatseeker</a>. I remember listening to this at full volume in the car when I was like 18, 19 years old and having a blast. The Razors Edge (1990)</h2> ★★★★☆ Finally, fucking finally after 10 years we get an album that just sounds good! I can't believe I have to say this, but going through the albums from the 80s was quite a slog at times. But now it's the 90s, and this is the best sounding album since Back in Black. It sounds so good in fact that they could release it today and nobody would complain about it sounding dated. Everything is clear and direct and punchy and in your face, the way AC/DC is meant to sound. And it starts with an absolute bang. Thunderstruck and Fire your Guns are hands down the best songs they've written in a decade. If they don't make you jump out of your seat, nothing will. Things calm down a bit with Moneytalks. The Razors Edge starts slow and then builds up, which I really like, and Rock your Heart out is a great uptempo song, even though the chorus is kind of lackluster. The rest of the songs are okay, though the album loses steam towards the end; Let's make it and If you dare seem kind of forgettable to me. Still, I think this is the best one since Back in Black. Another lineup change happened here and behind the drums is now Welsh drummer Chris Slade. He's a more versatile drummer than Simon Wright and he must have swallowed a metronome as a child because he plays like a machine with impeccable timing. The result is a rhythm section that's tight as hell, but it's missing a bit of Phil Rudd's laid back swing. I like him a lot in AC/DC though, especially on the 1991 live recording</a> from Castle Donington, where he kicks ass. Favourite Song Thunderstruck</a>. Of course. What else? Ballbreaker (1995)</h2> ★★★☆☆ I haven't heard this album in decades. I remember it sounding awful, but it actually sounds fine, no complaints there. But the songs don't do very much for me. Hard as a Rock is fine and became a staple of their live shows. I like The Furor (which I misheard as "Der Führer" in the past - oops), Boogie Man is a bluesy number that's reminiscent of some of the work with Bon Scott, and Ballbreaker is nice and groovy. The rest though seems kind of forgettable to me. Brian also sounds not that great here, kind of hoarse and weak. There's a live recording from the tour after this album called No Bull</a> and he sounds the same there. Out of breath and hoarse. Maybe he was smoking too much during this time, I don't know. But he sounds worse than he did on the previous album and live recording from five years prior. Phil Rudd is back on the drums here for the first time since the Flick of the Switch album, and he brings the old AC/DC groove back, which is nice. I wonder though how the album would have sounded with Chris Slade still on the drums... maybe he would have given some of the slower songs a bit more of a push. Comparing this album with the last makes me really value his contribution, he gave the band some forward momentum which is missing here. Favourite Song Hard as a Rock</a>. Stiff Upper Lip (2000)</h2> ★★★★☆ I think I started listening to AC/DC some time in the late 90s, don't know when exactly. So in my world, everything they released so far has always existed, and this is the first "new" release for me. It came out right around the time I turned 18, when I was into AC/DC big time. It starts with Stiff Upper Lip, which is an absolute banger of a song. I played it like 50 times in a row when I first heard it. It's right up there with Thunderstruck, Hells Bells and Highway to Hell for me. The rest of the album has more of a bluesy feel, much more than any AC/DC album that came before, and back then I didn't really like that, I wanted every song to be like the title track. Listening back to the album now, I appreciate it a lot more. Songs like Can't Stand Still, Safe in New York City or Satellite Blues might not be the hard rock bangers AC/DC is known for, but they're still great songs in their own right. The only small issue I have with the album are Brian's vocals. He sounds better here than he did on Ballbreaker, but he sings at the top of his range throughout and that makes him sound squeezed and hard to listen to at times. The bluesy feel of the album could have done with a slightly more relaxed approach to the vocals. On the tour for this album they played a show in Munich, where they recorded a DVD</a>. Munich is about 1,5hrs from where I grew up, but I was still in school at the time and had no money to buy a ticket and see them; my uncle, who is a massive AC/DC fan, did go. I immediately bought the DVD when it came out, and man did I wish I had been there, because it's a fantastic show! Favourite Song Stiff Upper Lip</a>. Black Ice (2008)</h2> ★★★★☆ Eight years since the last album marks the longest gap between AC/DC albums to date, and I remember that throughout the 2000s there was a lot of speculation that the band was going to retire and wouldn't record or tour any longer. Thankfully none of this turned out to be true, and they came out with a banger of an album. This album feels relaxed to me. The songs are great, and it sounds like the band is having fun playing them. Brian sounds amazing here; he sings in a slightly lower register than he did on previous albums and as a result his voice sound much stronger and freer than it did on Stiff Upper Lip. There are a number of great headbangers on here, especially Rock 'n' Roll Train, Big Jack, War Machine and Wheels, and a couple of bluesy ones in the vein of the last album, too. With 55 minutes it's the longest AC/DC album, and they could have maybe trimmed a song or two off the end, but overall it's a great comeback album and it proved that they weren't done yet. I finally saw them live on this tour in 2010 in Stuttgart. It was a great show, and there were I think 65.000 people in the audience, which is the biggest crowd I've ever been in. I'm glad I saw them, but I also decided that once is enough. These big stadium shows with tens of thousands of people are just not for me. Unfortunately this would be the last album with Malcolm Young on guitar, who had to leave the band a few years later due to suffering from dementia. I remember when I saw them live thinking that he seemed to look confused at times. He was already suffering from memory loss at that time, and later on I read that he would often sit down before a show to rehearse the riffs that he wrote and played a million times before, so he would remember them on stage. He died in 2017. Favourite Song Big Jack</a>. The chorus is just so catchy! Rock or Bust (2014)</h2> ★★★★☆ Now I'm entering uncharted territory, because I never heard these last two albums in full. By this time my interest in AC/DC had kind of waned; I was and am still following their career, but I no longer run out to the record store to buy their latest album on the day it comes out, which I did with Black Ice. This is the first album without Malcolm, who was replaced by his nephew Stevie Young on rhythm guitar, though apparently all the riffs were still written by Angus and Malcolm, the way it's always been. How is the album? Well, it's ok. I'm not overly enthusiastic about it, but it's a solid AC/DC record which feels very similar to the previous one. The one song that stood out to me is Rock the Blues Away, which has a great southern rock feel to it. It's unusual for AC/DC, but it's catchy and I like it. The rest of the album flows nicely, but a day after having listened to it, I've already forgotten most of the songs. It's standard AC/DC stuff without any particular ups and downs. Nice album, but it didn't make me jump out of my seat. Up until this point, AC/DC was always rock solid with its line ups; in fact since 1980 apart from two changes on the drums (followed by Phil Rudd's return) nothing changed at all. Now things are becoming more unstable though. Malcolm had to leave the band to be replaced by Stevie, and shortly before the album's release Phil Rudd was arrested for drug posession and trying to hire an assassin to kill two people. What the hell! So he was out of the band for a while (he briefly returned, then dropped out again for unknown reasons) and was replaced by Chris Slade, who already played on the Razor's Edge album and tour. Cliff Williams announced his retirement at the conclusion of the tour for this album, and Brian had to leave the tour due to trouble with his hearing. He was replaced live by Axl Rose, who did a surprisingly good job</a> singing AC/DC, I have to say. I expected the worst, but he nailed it. Favourite Song Rock the Blues Away</a>. Power Up (2020)</h2> ★★★★★ After the recent shakeups in the lineup, it seemed like AC/DC might have been done. But against all odds the stars aligned; Brian got his hearing issues under control, Cliff Williams came out of retirement and even Phil Rudd got his legal troubles cleared up somehow, so the band got together again to record another album. Angus dug through his collection of ideas that he and Malcolm had come up with in the past, so even though Malcolm isn't around anymore, his spirit can still be felt on the album. And what an album it is. I shouldn't have skipped this one when it came out, because it's great! It pulled me in right from the first song Realize with it's signature AC/DC groove that only they can pull off. Shot in the Dark, which was released as the first single is great, Through the Mists of Time has a nice, slightly melancholic feel to it, Wild Reputation is a typical mid-tempo blues rocker... Everything that makes AC/DC great is there on this album, and I enjoyed every minute of it. If this ends up being their last album, which it probably is, then it's a great conclusion to their career. Favourite Song Through the Mists of Time</a>. I especially love the video which takes a look back at their career and pays tribute to the band members who are no longer with us. Epilogue</h2> So this is it, 17 AC/DC albums. And now I can confidently answer the question I posed at the beginning: Do they all sound the same? Absolutely not! They all sound like AC/DC, sure, but each album has it's own character, and you can clearly tell how the band has evolved and changed throughout the more than five decades of their career. It seems though that the death of Bon Scott had a lasting impact on Malcolm and Angus, because with the exception of Hells Bells, they never again reached that level of raw power that they displayed on their earlier albums. Of course this is pure speculation, maybe the band's trajectory in the 80s would have looked the same with Bon still in the band, who knows. The band is still touring to this day, but things have changed, starting with the exit of Malcolm due to his health in 2014. By now Cliff Williams has retired, Phil Rudd seems to be out for good (even though nothing was ever announced publicly) and so AC/DC it mostly Angus and Brian now, with Stevie on guitar and two guest musicians (Matt Laug and Chris Chaney) on drums and bass. Angus is 71 and Brian is 78, so who knows how long they'll still be around. But as long as they're healthy and enjoy what they're doing, I say more power to them, and I'm glad they're still playing and are bringing joy to the people who come out to see them. It will be a sad day when they decide to retire for good, but their albums and live recordings will live on forever, and I'm immensely grateful to them for the countless hours of joy their music has brought me. Linkdump No 109 Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I think I say this every year, but I'm really not a fan of summer. At least not when it's over 30°C, that's just too hot for me. Well we just had a week of 30°C and more, and it's not even June yet! If that's the temperature in May, I'm really not looking forward to what we get in July and August... maybe it won't be so bad, but I think it's time to dust off my portable AC and make sure it's ready for what might be coming. Articles Linux Fu: Fake Webcams Have Many Uses | Hackaday</a> Linux makes it very easy to work with video streams, both from a file and from a live source like a webcam. This is a great introduction into what can be done with a few simple shell commands.</li> </ul> Software/Services Yahoo! Messenger Archive Reader – Priyank Sharma</a> If you've used the Yahoo messenger in the past and still have the files containing your chats, with this tool you can extract a chat from the database. I've never used Yahoo messenger, so I can't test it, but it might be useful to some. (Thanks, André!)</li> DietPi - Lightweight justice for your SBC!</a> This is a Debian-based Linux distro primarily aimed at SBCs like the Raspberry Pi and many others, but it's also available for regular x86 PCs. It's easy to set up and runs great on older PC hardware, too.</li> GitHub - carlosbaraza/old-ipad-photo-frame: Turn an old iPad into a digital photo frame. Zero-dependency Node.js slideshow server for legacy iOS devices. · GitHub</a> Here's a lightweight web server (requires node) that reads a folder with images and serves them as a slideshow. The idea is to turn an old iPad (or any other tablet with a good screen) into a digital picture frame without having to try and find software for the outdated tablet. Just point the browser at this server and that's it. (via</a>)</li> Run Unix v4 from your browser</a> Last year a version of Unix that was thought to be lost was discovered on an old tape and restored. I took a look at it here</a>. Here it is ready to run in the browser, no installation of any emulators necessary.</li> </ul> Hardware Projects DIY Gameport to USB Adapter | LittleBigTech</a> Before USB, Joysticks and Gamepads for PC used the game port. This is an easy to build adapter to connect old Joysticks to modern PCs via an inexpensive Arduino.</li> Pinecone Computer Daisy</a> This person built their own retro 8-Bit computer from a few Arduinos, complete with Basic and even networking, and put it in a case of an actual 80s mini computer to make it look period correct.</li> </ul> Videos My complete Linux Setup: KDE tweaks, theme + all apps & utilities I use - YouTube</a> Nick from The Linux Experiment, which is an excellent channel btw, goes over all the Linux apps he uses on a day to day basis. Lots of interesting tools in there!</li> </ul> Around the Small Web The Weaver web browser</a> Kaimac</a> started developing his own web browser. It doesn't do much yet, but it's a great project.</li> </ul> Misc Hail Mary - Star Map</a> This is a map of our solar system and neighbouring stars in our galaxy, ready to zoom in and explore. It looks fantastic!</li> </ul> Windows 98 on a Thinkpad T41 Andreas (82MHz) — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I love the Windows 98 era of computing and gaming, but until now I didn't really have a good Windows 98 computer. Old Pentium systems are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, especially if you also want to have a period correct GPU like a 3dfx Voodoo card. Not to mention that a desktop PC takes up a lot of space. But there are still lots of systems on the market that can be found for very little money, and thanks to modern patches and drivers Windows 98 can be made to run on hardware much newer than the system itself. With that in mind, I recently got a Thinkpad T41 from Ebay specifically for running Windows 98, and it runs great. </a> T41 booting Windows 98</figcaption> </figure> So this is the Thinkpad. It's in decent condition, the top cover is kind of ugly because it is coated in a type of soft rubber that has a lot of scratches and feels a bit sticky, but otherwise it's in good shape. The battery even still holds a charge, if only for 20 minutes or so. But after more than 20 years, that's still impressive. It's a 2003 model with a 1,7GHz Pentium M, 1,5GB RAM, a Radeon 7500 GPU and it shipped originally with Windows XP, so on paper it's too new to run Windows 98, but interestingly there were still drivers available from IBM for Windows 98, so it was still officially supported. Setting up Windows 98</h2> I set it up with Windows 98 Quickinstall</a>, which is hands down the easiest and fastest way to get Windows 98 installed today. It comes with a lot of patches and drivers already installed and can be installed in a few minutes</a>. The Thinkpad has a still working optical drive and can even boot from USB, so I could have burned the ISO image on a CD or written it to a USB drive and installed it this way, but I decided to take a different route, just to see if it's possible. I pulled the hard drive out of the laptop and connected it to my desktop computer via a SATA - USB adapter. Next I created a Virtualbox VM without a virtual hard drive just for this purpose, booted the Windows 98 Quickinstall ISO in this VM and mounted the Thinkpad's hard drive in it (Virtualbox allows connecting USB devices to a virtual machine). Then I ran through the 98 Quickinstall setup where I selected the USB-connected physical hard disk as the installation target. This works because 98 Quickinstall boots a minimal Linux distro, which comes with USB drivers, and writes a preconfigured Windows 98 image to the hard drive. After that was done, which only took a few seconds, the machine should be rebooted from the hard drive. I didn't do this however; instead I just powered off the VM, disconnected the hard drive and put it back in the Thinkpad so that the very first boot of Windows 98 was already on the correct hardware. This is important because Windows 98 configures itself for the hardware it runs on on the first boot after installation, and I wanted it to see the correct hardware and not the virtual machine. As expected, it booted up without any issues on the Thinkpad. 1,5GB is normally too much memory for Windows 98, but this installation is already patched to work with more than 512MB of memory, so that's not an issue. It detected some hardware out of the box, for other components I had to get the drivers from here</a> and installed them by hand, which worked flawlessly. I couldn't get the Wifi drivers to work, but that's fine because I can get the computer online via my phone</a>. </a> T41 running POD by Ubisoft</figcaption> </figure> And there it is, my new Windows 98 machine. Both CPU and GPU are way overpowered for this era of computing, so I expect pretty much everything I throw at it to run without any issues, unless there are some weird driver incompatibilities, but so far I haven't encountered any. One thing I have encountered is a stupid limitation of the keyboard; when I press too many keys at once, the machine freezes for a split second and beeps at me. This is a well known limitation of Thinkpads</a> of this era and a design flaw of the keyboard matrix. For gaming that's of course not ideal, but I've gotten used to working around it and I can still use an external keyboard if it gets too annoying. One thing that's missing is a game port, so no 90s joysticks/gamepads for now, but there are solutions for this problem</a>, too. And curiously the keyboard doesn't have a Windows key. I don't think I've ever encountered a keyboard made after 1995 that doesn't have a Windows key, but for whatever reason IBM seems to have decided that their computers don't need one. I disagree, because I use it frequently, but hey. You get used to it. Overall, I really like this computer. It runs well, doesn't take up a lot of space, and being a Thinkpad it's built with repairability and serviceability in mind, so if anything breaks it can be swapped out easily. There are even still aftermarket batteries available, so I might get one of those and have a fully portable 90s laptop, which I think is awesome. Linkdump No 108 Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Articles Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch</a> Google is turning up the enshittification to 11. Here's a very accurate summary</a> of Google's latest I/O conference.</li> Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract - Jeff Geerling</a> And another product that's getting worse for the end user... it's always the same story.</li> </ul> Software/Services The Virtual OS Museum</a> I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds amazing - a pack of hundreds of operating systems, all pre-installed and ready to run and explore. Next time I'm stuck at home, I know what I'm going to do. (via Jack Baty</a>)</li> </ul> Hardware Projects GitHub - simoneluconi/SKAFTSARV-to-WLED: Modding the IKEA SKAFTSÄRV with an ESP32 and WLED · GitHub</a> Ikea sells this really nice looking RGB-LED lamp, and here's a guide on how to hack an ESP32 microcontroller into it to build your own custom smart lamp.</li> Open Printer | Crowd Supply</a> Now that I see this, I wonder why nobody has tried making an open source printer before. Probably because making hardware is difficult and expensive, but in a world where all products get enshittified to hell something like this is desparately needed. (via Chris</a>)</li> </ul> Videos I should not have liked the world’s first smart home. - YouTube</a> Tom Scott goes on a road trip through England and visits one interesting place in every county. The whole series is great, but this is my favourite episode so far - he visits the castle of a Victorian era inventor which is filled with all kinds of cutting edge technology of the time. And there's some very poignant social commentary at the end.</li> </ul> Around the Small Web Playing ATARI music on Amiga for free!</a> This is probably only interesting to you if you're into synthesizer music, which I am so I found it fascinating. It's a deep dive into how the Atari produces sound and how this can be reproduced on the Amiga, which has completely different sound hardware.</li> Make your website or blog fediverse-ready | Stefan Bohacek's Personal Website and Blog</a> How to link your website with your fediverse profile. That's really neat, and I'm going to implement this after I finish writing this post :)</li> Fits on a Floppy - A Manifesto for Small Software</a> This is something we really need, and we're unlikely to get anymore - lean software that doesn't use more resources than is absolutely necessary. (via Michal</a>)</li> wake up! 16b</a> Speaking of lean software, here is a DOS demo that has audio and video, and it fits in 16 bytes. Sixteen bytes! You could transfer the file by writing the binary by hand on a post-it. (via Nina</a>)</li> </ul> Misc Wikipedia File Explorer — Browse Wikipedia on a Windows XP desktop</a> Wikipedia, but as a file system in Windows XP. Individual articles open in WordPad. It's not the most useful thing in the world, but the idea is really cool. (via Raffaele</a>)</li> TAWS - The Amiga Workbench Simulation is loading...</a> Here you can run every Amiga Workbench in the browser to play around with and get a feel for how the OS developed. (via</a>)</li> ~ rip.so :: the digital graveyard ~</a> A virtual graveyard for dead online services and related tech products.</li> </ul> Getting an old Computer online with Android Ethernet tethering Andreas (82MHz) — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I enjoy playing around with old computers and software from the 90s and early 2000s. My childhood computer was the Amiga 500 which I still have and which I love dearly, but the Windows 9x/XP era of computing is the most nostalgic for me because this coincides with my teenage years and my early 20s, and there are just so many great things about it; 3dfx games, the early internet, Napster, ICQ, Winamp... it was a fascinating time in tech. One problem with computers from this time period is how to get them online. They either have no wifi or severely outdated wifi modules which at best do WEP encryption, but they can't connect to a modern WPA encrypted wifi network. So in order to get them online you would either have to downgrade the security of your wifi network (terrible idea), set up a dedicated wifi network for these machines with only WEP security enabled (also terrible) or connect them via ethernet, which is easy enough as long as you have an Ethernet connection available. But what if you want to get an old Windows 9x/XP-era computer online somewhere where there is no ethernet connection? Here's a deceptively simple way to do it: Get a cheap USB-C to Ethernet adapter</a> from Ebay/Amazon</li> Connect this to your (Android) 1</a> phone and via a short Ethernet cable to the Ethernet port of the computer in question</li> Enable "Ethernet Tethering" in the phone's settings</li> </ul> </a> And that's it. As long as you have automatic network configuration via DHCP enabled on the PC, the phone should automatically assign an IP address to the PC and bridge its wifi connection to the wired network through the Ethernet adapter. And this should work with every old (and new) computer, as long it has an Ethernet port. I admit, it's not the prettiest of solutions (I need to get a shorter Ethernet cable), but it works and it's really simple to set up. So why did it take me so long to figure this out? I have no idea. I tested this with a USB-C docking station which has an Ethernet port too, and it worked just as well, but required external power to the docking station, meaning an extra power cable is required. ^{1 I don't have an iPhone, so I have no idea if it would work with iOS, too. </div>} Linkdump No 107 Andreas (82MHz) — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Last week I shared a post by David</a> about backing up his blog. Except, due to a brain fart on my part, I called him Glyn</a>, who is someone else entirely. Why? I have no idea... maybe I started writing the post before I had coffee. Thankfully people are paying more attention to what I write here than I am, because not long after I posted, I got a message from David asking why I called him Glyn. And almost at the same time I got a message from Glyn, asking why I called David by his name. So we went back and forth a bit on Mastodon, which led to quite an amusing morning last week. Moral of the story? If you want people to get in touch with you, mess up their names! Articles Celebrating Thirty Years of the Internet Archive with the ‘Class of 1996’ | Internet Archive Blogs</a> The Internet Archive is turning 30 years old, and they're taking a cheeky look back at popular websites and services from 1996.</li> The View From RSS</a> This is an interesting post from someone who subscribes to an insane number of RSS feeds and how this shapes her experiences of the web. I have no idea how she manages to stay sane; I would live in a state of perpetual crippling anxiety if I had this many feeds in my feed reader, but I guess for some people it works. (via Matto</a>)</li> </ul> Software/Services Welcome – An Otter Wiki</a> I was looking into setting up a personal wiki lately, and I landed on this one which looks very good. It's easy to set up, has a clean and simple interface and all entries are stored as plain markdown files and in a git repo, so you have the full history of changes, too.</li> GitHub - davmlaw/they_live_adblocker: Replace Ads with They Live style slogans · GitHub</a> They Live</a> is a classic 80s SciFi movie in which aliens have infiltrated humanity and control them via subliminal messages on billboards. This adblocker replaces online ads with the messages from the movie, making the internet feel even more dystopian than it already is. (via Metin Seven</a>)</li> </ul> Hardware Projects Proving Earth’s Rotation With a DIY Foucault Pendulum, Victorian Science in Action : 16 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables</a> You can actually set up a Focault Pendulum in your home to measure the earth's rotation.</li> Teen builds 'Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle' to detect ecological threats | Popular Science</a> Here's something great: This kid build an underwater drone that moves like a sea turtle. I couldn't have done something like this when I was 15!</li> </ul> Videos A Curiously Minty Cyberdeck - YouTube</a> This guy built a cyberdeck out of an Altoids tin. In order to make it fit the tiny tin, he had to develop a custom keyboard.</li> </ul> Around the Small Web Serving a Website on a Raspberry Pi Zero Running Entirely in RAM</a> Not much more to say, this is really cool!</li> Soundtracker origins, part 1: Where in the World is Karsten Obarski? – I Know You…</a> The first post (actually the second, but the first is in French</a> which I don't speak) about the history of Sound trackers, which were (and still are) music production tools that were first popularised on the Amiga in the 80s.</li> #LiegendDemo - protesting for ME/CFS treatment & visibility</a> This week was ME/CFS awareness day</a>, and because of this there were a lot of protests all over Germany to raise awareness for the illness and ask for better medical and political support for people suffering from the illness (I'm one of them</a>). Ava wrote down her experience joining the protest.</li> </ul>

82MHz - All Posts

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Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 4 - Making a Case in FreeCAD

Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 3 - Coding Part 2

Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 2 - Coding Part 1

Working with libraries</h2> I essentially have two options when it comes to implementing something:</p>

Connecting the IR sensor to the Arduino</h2> Next, let's hook up the infrared sensor to the Arduino.</p>

Old Computer Challenge 2026 Day 1 - Some Theory

Old Computer Challenge 2026 - Make Something

I bought a Sony Walkman

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Thoughts on the new Commodore phone

Re: If I could be transported back

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Listening to every Album: AC/DC

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Windows 98 on a Thinkpad T41

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Getting an old Computer online with Android Ethernet tethering

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