Tony is a Geek

A little while back - okay, nearly a year ago: https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2024/01/meconsole-weconsole-uconsole.html I decided to purchase a uConsole device.  I selected to have a 4G internal adapter inside, but for the love of god, I tried everything to get the b*s*d thing to work, I even changed the internal firmware - maybe it was the fact I was using giffgaff? I don't know.  Anyway, I then got some "bluepoints" (some people will know what that means!) and well, I then cashed them in for a £50 Amazon card. Next thing you know, I have 2 x 4G USB dongles coming my way :-D Why two, Tony?  Well, y'know, I either break one, I take one apart, I destroy one or one never does what it says, yadeyadaya... After having such fun getting the UGV Rover working the past few days , I finally got around to having a go with setting up the 4G USB dongles. Both devices came with 02 sim cards from sims4home.co.uk with a discount code - I actually use this in my campervan, works a...

I'm about to have ( yet another ) week off... I'm allowed, I literally was recorded as being utilised 100.1% last year, that's AFTER deductions of holiday days, etc...etc... ( most people struggle to get 50-60% ) and well, then being treated like sh!t by my employer by not recognising my efforts, but happy to take their rewards ( [no surprise] I pi$$ed off a higher up a few years back & they just won't let their d!ck swinging ego, move on... ho! hum! ), so, I've now got to take off one week per month, until April otherwise I lose the holiday days.  Fine by me.  But, oh, what to do? Well.....you may recall that a while back, maybe mid-last year, I wrote an ARTICLE HERE about using an SDR (Software Defined Radio) USB dongle for listening to the radio waves around us... and then I purchased a Flightaware USB stick and antenna.  I had a little play around with it.  I proved it could capture commercial flight data in a 100-or so mile radius from the antenna, save tha...

I was trawling the internet, as you do.... I found a few Atari 800XL related web-pages and YouTube videos, thought I would share them here: That then led me onto this cable video: The interesting thing about this video is - that is NOT just a bog-standard ordinary USB cable.... no no no.  That has a USB to Serial converter built into it, that's why the USB part is a bit larger / longer than normal.  Well, funny enough, when I was looking for the ESP8266-01 programming device I found such a cable and it has been sitting on my desk waiting for a purpose... I now have one! I also mentioned HERE about having a cut/worn SIO cable, well that makes for a perfect cable to cut up and join to the USB.  What's not to like? Okay, I confess, I did actually "finish for the day" and went to bed... alas, I did not sleep after a couple of hours, I gave in...and went back into the "office", fired up the soldering iron and made the cable (in 1 go), then went back to bed, slept...

A short while back I was surfing good old eBay, when I stumbled over a Minitel machine. After doing a bit of checking on wikipedia , I found out that it was an old 1980s machine that was the Internet before the Internet....but they only switched off the service in July 2012! It involved you dialing up a phone number, connecting your phone to the device and then using the keyboard and special orange function keys to navigate around. It looks to be like a Prestel / Teletext / Ceefax / CompuServe type of "internet".  Remember those days :-)  If you're from the US, then think early days AOL (before the free CDs). Anyway, I happen to have won a bid and the nice snug little device arrived at my humble abode waiting for me to do something useful with it.  First of all, I was surprised that it actually worked!  It powered on and everything!  I say, "everything"...as it just sat there with a blinking cursor and didn't really do anything at all.  Oh and ther...