Tony is a Geek

Okay, so these particular one's are not "new", they have been sitting on the shelf for the past few years gathering a bit of dust.  I did stick 2xAA batteries in the back (as that is all they need), but they turned on and went straight off again.... I assumed they were broken or something.  Then I found the CMOS battery slot hidden behind the IR cover, swapped that out for a new one and plugged the external PSU for the Atari Portfolio (more about that later!) in and lo'and'behold, we have working devices!  I started with the 1MB model, just to make sure I didn't fry anything and then I moved over to the more "precious" 2MB model.  I also switched out the Duracell batteries for rechargeable ones and then had to find out how to "up" the contrast so I could see stuff! Well, I was mightily impressed by these little devices, they are awesomely powerful with their little 486 motherboards and no moving parts.  They run MS-DOS v5 too...  I'll f...

UPDATE: okay, okay, okay....so my time machine is playing havok with me at the moment, I got my timeline out of sync.... apparently this event is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN for another 3 WEEKS!  But, it will happen and I imagine the following will still be 100% valid :-) ..... so...this weekend will be noted by most people as being pretty much the same as the past X amount of weekends during the COVID-19 lockdown...it'll involve minimal "going out", maybe an essential trip to the supermarket and far too much viewing of Netflix or Amazon Prime. However, I am a little shocked (but not surprised) about the total lack of news / information that this weekend is also the time when 'Perseverance' is going to land on Mars.  Yes, yet another piece of robotic NASA junk is going to be hurled at Mars, drive around a bit, crush some rocks, gather some questionably grainy images and pretty much not do much and be a total waste of "normal" peoples time.... Well..... this tim...

Well, the plan is to "finish" off the mess I made in the garden during Lockdown v1.0... but current snow & freezing weather conditions may put a halt to that, we'll see.... it might be nice to get outside for 4-5 hours per day, moving soil around and filling in the failed "canal" that I built.... anyway, if it does end up being a week of sitting inside with the heating on....I'll make sure I flick through this book: Although, that IBM PC 110 will always be winking at me from the background, wanting me to "do something" with them....we'll see...

Ooooo looksie...a new Raspberry Pi board...hang on, for $4?  what, what, what now? https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale Okay, yes, it's not going to be a Desktop PC replacement ( DELL can stop having a heart-attack now ), that is the purpose of the full blown Raspberry Pi 4.  So what is this little device for then? Well, if you've ever done anything "useful" with a Raspberry Pi, then you'd know one thing.... the GPIO pins are digital ( okay, some geeky person will point out that "actually pin x,y,z can be used as an analog, so you're wrong", so best I say ), there may be a limited amount of analog pins available for use. Again, the normal humans amongst us will be scratching their heads and saying, "what?" Let me introduce you to my little friend.... the Arduino .   Yes, the wonderful Arduino device that has been keeping geeky people very happy since, well, I don't know exactly ( I could look it up, but...

Yes, you read that correctly.  I've finally managed to get my IBM PC 110 devices running MS-DOS and hooked up to the internet.  The follow page is basically a reminder for myself on how to take a stock device that may or may not have been purchased from Buyee.jp and get it configured for Internet awesomeness... CLICK THE LINK BELOW to READ & SEE HOW IT IS DONE: https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/p/setting-up-ibm-pc-110-for-wifi-from-ms.html It is indeed possible - if you have enough time and patience, which funny enough I seem to have an abundance of at the moment..... BTW - for context, the IBM PC 110 device is SMALL and I mean really small, considering it was made in 1995, the dimensions are: (HxWxD) (158mm x 113mm x 33mm) - it's the size of an external 3.5" floppy drive ( if you're old enough to remember what one of those is ) https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/p/setting-up-ibm-pc-110-for-wifi-from-ms.html CLICK THE LINK BELOW to READ & SEE HOW IT IS DONE: CLICK...

Okay, okay, yes, I know.... who the hell needs to know these? Well, I do actually!  I've been pulling my hair out trying to make a Bootable CF Card for my IBM PC 110 devices...I've tried all sorts.  Yes, I've booted to a MS-DOS v6.22 floppy disk and executed SYS C: or Format c: /S and all "looks good', then setup all the other files etc... but when attempting to then boot from that CF Card, all I get is a boot up error of I9990302 (or I9990305), which indicates this is not a bootable drive. Well, now that I've found THIS LINK , I believe that what I need to do is perform an FDISK /MBR (will confirm this later) and this will rebuild the Master Boot Record... if this doesn't work, then I'll describe indepth what I'm trying to achieve and what I've tried and what is failing and then go crawling the internet to find other people who might be able to help.... I've ordered another 3 x Viking 256Mb CF Cards and a 48Mb PCMCIA ATA card just to see wh...

" Soooo....what ya' been up to today? ",  " It being a Saturday, y'know that day of freedom and no work? "... Well, working, but playing, if that makes sense.  Okay, so I decided that today was going to be a day of "going back Marty, going back.... to 1995/6" I have burnt a LOT of time trying to get the IBM PC 110 laptop device to work with a vast array of WiFi cards - yes, I know I'm asking a lot to get it to run from MS-DOS, but, y'know, my other device, the HandBook 486 doesn't seem to be having any trouble with the config/setup. I've narrowed it down to the hardware.  I had to have a bit of a refresher on the device, I'm glad this guys website is still up and running (I'll leave links here for the future, also if they every disappear the WayBackWhen machine can be used to go fetch the archives, if they have been archived) http://www.basterfield.com/pc110/pc110idx.htm Pressing F1 on the physical device (with the external ...

As a distraction update, yes, I know I'm meant to be doing stuff with a Raspberry Pi 4, servos' & 3D printed robot heads...but y'know...I get bored quickly and like to hop between things.  My latest piece of old tech of fancy is an Atari Portfolio: Click HERE to read more about it . and a quick YouTube video (I love how even this video feels retro!) Whilst I await for that to be packaged up and posted over, I thought I'd dust off the old Atari ST that I've had stacked up in the corner of the room for, well....let's look when I last did a post about this?...errrr... since....let's see, well, it wasn't THAT far back...cough cough.... okay about 3years ago... which isn't bad for me... I mean I can have projects knocking around for 10years+ before I get back to them.  ah, the luxury of time that we waste in our youth... of which I am no longer and have to be very careful with how I spend my much valuable time... Anyway, check out these links for some...

In todays update of the ever so exciting and riveting exercise of doing something a 14year old with the attention span of a gnat could do in 20 minutes - my excuse is that I have a day job that consumes me pretty much 85% of the day and the rest of that 15% has to be juggled very carefully, oh to be 14 again... actually, no, let's not. CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST UPDATE WHERE I GET SOMETHING TO WORK! - I demonstrate that Python isn't 100% useless (I've always stated, "it is good for cardboard mock ups"), even though the Tracking stuff is not all available, even after doing everything, everyone said on the internet (maybe that was installation error - we'll see) - I am very happy that CPU usage is down to sub-30% for the object tracking on the RPi4 - I get rather excited for adding the face recognition code to the front of this code and make what I've been wanting to make all along.... and then add in the servo code... I reckon, fingers crossed, with a fair w...

Now I just purchased this book solely based on this one review - oh, how my eyes were watering, I "feel you bud - double heart tap and salute tap thingy"... https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07XYX6FQL/?pldnSite=1 anyway, if you know, you know why I love this review.... the best part is, well all of it: click on the image to zoom in to the text. I applaud you Sir, and I eagerly await the delivery of my copy of the book....  and it arrived, just in time for the weekend!  wow! it's got some girth! 800+pages....

 IBM PC 110 (Palm Top PC 110) Yeah, I've got one of those devices..... (in fact I have a few!)  and I know they are useless, I know they aren't much use for surfing Tw@tter or watching YouTube, but, y'know there's more to life.... Someone just wrote a Spotify for MS-DOS.... (okay, so that was a lie, but maybe I'll give it a go) CLICK HERE TO SEE LOTS & LOTS OF PHOTO's OF MY LOVELY DEVICES And yes, I do own "one that works...fully".... and yes, I do know just how rare that is...and no, I'm not lending it to you for the weekend. CLICK HERE TO SEE LOTS & LOTS OF PHOTO's OF MY LOVELY DEVICES Here's an official LGR review of the same device from YouTube-land:

Whilst hunting high and low for the Wifi extender (that I did find in the end!), I managed to do a lot of tidying up of my home office...and during that tidying up phase I found a few old laptops/netbooks/handbooks .   I also found the old Netgear Wifi router that still has WEP security on it (only way I've found (so far) to get the old DOS equipment on the Wifi network).  It's a pretty simple setup, as detailed at the bottom of the page HERE , except I foolishly (or not?) did a factory reset on the Netgear router and therefore "lost" all the previous config setup.  I did what I thought was logical based on the screenshots from before, but it was still eluding me.  I created a new WEP key, I added that into the DOS autoexec.bat, but it just didn't seem to want to connect.  I set the Netgear router up to only allow the MAC address of the Wifi card, so I'll hopefully reduce any drive-by opportunistic sniffers jumping on my network (not that I'll be leaving t...