The Western Digital VelociRaptor has ruled the roost when it comes to high performance hard drives, being the only relatively modern consumer option for 10,000 rpm drives. Descendants of the earlier Western Digital Raptor drives which I covered earlier, I...

If you’ve been around the site since the early days, one of my earlier articles covered why digital photo frames never really took off. Because of a number of glaring deficiencies, I’ve basically never really had any interest in them....

A while back when I was reviewing the B&K Precision DAS240-BAT Multi-Channel Recorder, I made some graphs looking at the individual discharge characteristics of a 6-cell Ni-MH battery pack. As it turns out, this battery pack actually came from my...

A while back, the fine folks at the element14 Community Forums sent me a set of prizes which included a nifty little power bank. Everyone knows that I don’t just blindly trust any-old power bank to my devices, nor do...

Earlier in the year, I visited the CCARC Wyong Field Day and one of my hauls was a Maestro ZXR 2400 External Modem. Made by an iconic Australian brand of dial-up modem equipment, I couldn’t let it sit on the...

A little more than a week ago, I posted about the Yamaha DiscT@2 and Fujifilm Labelflash system of creating visible images on recordable discs using the laser of a CD/DVD recorder, and made a comparison with the HP LightScribe system...

A fair amount of random old junk passes through my hands, as I can rarely justify leaving a good salvage behind. This sometimes means bringing home an “unloved” box that is sitting on the side of the road for an...

Last week, I wrote about DiscT@2 and Labelflash, labelling methods which utilised the laser inside a CD/DVD writer to create readable labels on the top and underside of discs. That particular system, pioneered by Yamaha and further improved by Fujifilm,...

Following on my recent posting about who makes your toilet and facial tissue, I had the same question about copy paper. After all, this is one very popular office consumable that I often buy on price rather than anything else....

Recently, it’s been impossible to browse the internet without encountering an advertisement for a VPN service. Services include those which rhyme with FjordVPN, TurfSnark and DepressVPN, which feature prominently all over YouTube videos. Many of these services make claims such...

A few years ago, on a visit to a long-time friend and colleague, I found several tubes of ceramic-packaged chips destined for the trash. I asked whether I would be allowed to “salvage” them and was approved – so I...

Labelling optical discs in an attractive and durable way has always been a bit of a challenge. While retail top discs with branding are often relatively ordinary and unattractive, deserving just “Sharpie” treatment, people often aspire for more aesthetically pleasing...

It was over a month ago when I decided to embark on a project testing MOSFET Rds using the Rohde & Schwarz NGM202 power supply when I got a comment from a reader about the possibility of testing some “cheap”...

During my recent review of the Multicomp Pro MP730026 3.75-digit BLE DMM, I discovered that the beloved Uni-T UT210E DC Clamp Meter that I own uses a common DM1106EN chip for its functions. Thanks to the efforts of a number...

Working from home over the past few months has really reminded me about how much we take the internet for granted. Some readers may have wondered why I decided to work on the Techway Endeavour II computer – well, I...

It wasn’t many months ago when panic buying was a thing and people decided to stock up on toilet paper and tissue products. Somehow, someone decided that the COVID-19 outbreak would result in some apocalyptic circumstances where having an excess...

Last year, I salvaged a Pentium I 100MHz computer with the Techway Endeavour II branding, covering the salvage in two blog posts. Since then, the box has been resident in my room, awaiting some more TLC, so I decided to...

Around two years ago, a friend bought over a broken Soyoung S-C18 Soymilk Maker for a repair. Ultimately, that repair was successful, bring the unit back to life, but I said there would be no warranties since the unit itself...

The late 90s and early 2000s was an odd time for desktop computers. Before then, most computers were chunky beige boxes that either sat on the desk or were towers standing vertically. These would almost always accept a stack of...

Since I embarked on my adventure to look for AVS+/AVS2 and free 4K/UHD transmissions on the air, I’ve hit a brick wall regarding decoding AVS2 video and there’s still mysteries regarding AVS+. These have occupied my spare time for the...

On the whole, my impression is that direct to home broadcasting especially in the C-band is on the way out in most suburban and city areas. With smaller, narrower blocks and apartments being the norm, “big ugly dishes” are not...

It has been quite a while since I last looked around the C-band neighbourhood, owing to the hail-storm damage to my Chinese-made mesh dish and having to take down all of my RG6 Quad-Shield coax wiring for a retaining wall...

Double adapters are a convenient item to have if you’re in a pinch and need an extra mains socket. Cheap and simple in their design, they belong to a class of products we rarely ever pay a second thought to...

Following on from my last post about some of the more conventional rail transport in the Kyoto region, this post looks at some of the other transportation options in the region, railway or not, along with some random amusing observations...

Continuing on my public-transport tour of Japan, the next major city on my 2017 trip was was Kyoto. This particular city is not all that big and its subway is relatively limited, so I didn’t take that much effort to...