A half-written draft of this piece has been living on my HDD for nearly half a year. Recent discussions re: the subject of “aging and death of PC irons” prompted me to dust it off and quickly post. Regularly-scheduled programming will resume shortly… “The tools, the means and the methods disappear under the overwhelming dead […]

Below is the output of a new test-fire of the PCB radiography system, this time using FujiFilm “Super HR-T Medium Speed” (25×20 cm) film in place of the earlier self-developing dental Eco-30. However, the time has not yet come to molest the MacIvory — first, we must characterize the film and the pertinent chemistry. This […]

I currently have three Symbolics MacIvory CPUs. (Do you, reader, have one to sell? Please leave a comment!) One is currently installed in a working machine and was not yet molested; the two remaining chips, I obtained in 2017 by bartering away a Symbolics 3620. At some point I will cut one or more of […]

This article is a continuation of “X-Ray Microscopy Kindergarten.”. Preliminary experiment with multi-energy x-ray (colour channel combination), distinguishing materials by absorption at different wavelengths. The tube appears to exhibit some “heel effect” at the longer wavelengths. Exposure: 75 sec. @ 35kV, 21kV, 20kV (R, G, B) film: “Eco-30”.

This article is a continuation of “X-Ray Microscopy Kindergarten.”. Here, we see a stereo pair (approx. +/- 25 deg. one-axis rotation of the object from the horizontal plane, while film is stationary) of the device from before. The vias are clearly distinguishable. Exposure: 70 sec. @ 34kV; 0.3mA + 2x beam spread; film: “Eco-30”.

This article is a continuation of “PCB Radiography Kindergarten, Continued.”. The radiography system is equipped with a “microfocus” tube, and its beam has a 30 degree spread cone. So we can get a look at that very same FG TRNG XC9572 CPLD seen earlier, but with 2x magnification: Click for full resolution (Warning: 7MB) This […]

This article is a continuation of “PCB Radiography Kindergarten”. This was a second test-fire of that radiography system, using yet-another board where I already know where everything is (on account of having designed it.) This time, the victim is a FG TRNG Mainboard: Click for full resolution (Warning: 16MB) For comparison, a visible-light photograph of […]

It so happens that AMD resisted the informal NSA ban on the manufacture of LinuxBIOS-capable x86 CPUs slightly longer than Intel did. Or perhaps they were simply slower to succumb to Microsoft’s Fritz chip decree. Whichever may be the case, vintage (pre-2011, with some caveats, inquire within) AMD Opteron motherboards are a precious and increasingly […]

From Richard Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law: “It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region […]