I was told to avoid smoking the RIFA, so not sure if I should pre-emptively remove these - at least they're on a separate board and have a plastic shield over them to contain any explosions!

I've been hearing an unnerving creaking when putting force into the pedals for the past 2-3 weeks. I guess that would explain it! Only had solid axles before where a snapped axle failure is rather more obvious and catastrophic, the quick release skewer has put up a good fight...

Another weekend, another CE-125 on the workbench... I don't intentionally buy them, but it seems most of the time you buy another Sharp pocket computer or accessory it comes attached to a CE-125 full of leaking Ni-CD batteries and gooey disintegrating belts.

I should have bought a decent solder sucker years ago. I suspected a bad RAM(1) in this PC-1211 and had replacements (and built a RAM tester) but couldn't get the old chip out with my regular solder sucker. The Engineer SS-03 made it an absolute doddle to remove, and another PC-1211 lives again.

I did pick a couple of new Sharp devices in the month of #sharptember - a programmable scientific calculator, the surprisingly small EL-512, and a "faulty" PC-1251 for parts to replace the front cover on the one I damaged when replacing the LCD. Amazingly, the original LCD on the 1251 fully works!

Spent a lovely few days on the Isle of Wight last week.

A 1983-vintage Ni-CD battery pack strikes again!

I had been putting a little preferred resistor value program on the PC-1211. DEF S sets the series (e.g. E12), DEF L prints a list of values in the series, DEF F finds the closest match (here I asked for 500Ω resistor in the E12 series). benryves.com/bin/sharp-pc...

Two Sharp PC-1211 pocket computers that were increasingly hard to read due to failing LCDs back in service after installing modern LCD replacements. The new ones are green instead of that classic yellow but at least they're not going black around the edges.

I feel the English translation they've gone for here lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

Wondering if it's worth the hassle of keeping old (and unvisited) forums online these days. I'd been doing it for archival reasons but over the past few months the amount of bot scraping has gone through the roof and brings the DB server to its knees (my guess is training data for AI LLM)? PITA!

Tonight I'm attending a cat's tenth birthday party. An ABBA tribute band are putting on a great performance in his honour. Happy birthday, Cosimo!

I much prefer a paper manual for reference but didn't have one for my PC-1248. Here's my first attempt at some DIY book-binding using stuff around the home, think it turned out OK and it certainly beats scrolling around the PDF!

I think it's fair to say Guitar Wolf have been the most fun band I've gone to see live - highly recommended if they're playing near you. So so sweaty... but all very worth it!

Name a film flop that you wish had done better at the box office. #filmsky

The Secret Life of the Home was one of my favourite parts of the Science Museum so it was sad to see it close last year. Here's a nice guided tour from Tim Hunkin recorded just before its closure: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqpv...

I'd like to order some small LCD panels from a US supplier who refuses to post to the UK. Has anyone had any good experience with cheap parcel forwarding services from the US to the UK they could recommend? As the panels are $20 each I don't really want to end up paying more than that in postage!

It's not entirely perfect, but I've found a way to access the whole screen on an IQ-8000 when using the 16-column-only IQ-707 BASIC card. Only requires a couple of POKEs, but figuring those out was a bit of a faff. www.benryves.com/journal/3763...

I guess that silver conductive "glue"/paint for PCB repair has a shelf life. I had a sealed new syringe of it in the fridge (I bought a three pack in 2023 and kept them all in there), it seemed to flow OK and I painted on a replacement pad. A couple of days drying later it still measures >2MΩ.

The postie just brought me my £20 job lot of assorted "vintage calculators" from eBay. There were two items in this listing that made me think it was worth it, which do you think they were? Everything's a bit grubby and will need a good clean!

Lovely ride up to Richmond to watch the sunset (and enjoy a pint) last night.

I used to think that ugly silver paint that shows all the scratches on early/mid-2000s electronics was my least favourite enclosure style choice, but I'm learning to dislike disintegrating rubberised coatings even more. At least it prints, and can solve the P↔NP problem by pressing Shift+Enter.

This is great flux, but I usually end up losing half the bottle due to how prone they are to tipping over. I think I've figured out why the seller's best-selling option is the three-pack...

One day I'll realise it's a bad idea to pick up old electronics that have soldered-in Ni-Cad battery packs. Or maybe I just like the challenge. Nice and crusty in here, either way!

Trying to figure out why my Osaris won't read CF cards formatted by Windows, but will when formatted by my digital camera. I think it's the partition ID that's the issue that can be fixed in DISKPART with SET ID=06 (Windows uses 0E by default). Can even get my 1GB card to show up now!

youtu.be/kimRqP-aHqM One way to get people to remember your birthday is to open an album with your date of birth. Happy birthday, Josh Homme!

Got a little soggy tucking into our packed lunches but the sun's out now so very nice to be out for a walk on a bank holiday.

Oh that looks lovely 👏 Cycling along the Wandle Trail, you might have come across the Earlsfield Gap, where you have to leave the riverside and join busy motor traffic. If you’d like to see this fixed, please sign the petition set up by the Wandle Valley Forum www.change.org/p/fix-the-mi...

What a lovely day for a bike ride! Packed some sarnies and took the back roads up to the Strand with the Croydon Social Cycling group then cycled back home along part of the Wandle Trail. Took the folding bike because, well, why not?

Turns out there is a cure for the summertime blues, and that's booking tickets to see Guitar Wolf when they visit London in a couple of months... www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPS6...

What better way to spend a Friday evening than getting your plotter to draw an indomitable Gaul? Program from "Le Sharpentier": archive.org/details/Shar...

My Sharp PC-1500/CE-150 work but are in a pretty shabby state and are missing most of the accessories and manuals. I'd been looking out for the missing pieces but ended up buying this set a few weeks ago, which is much more complete (and slightly less corroded): one can never have too many pokecoms!

Why is there a Greggs sausage roll on my bike?

I keep replying to posts from people with "rot" on their calculator screens that massaging and baking allegedly work, but I've never tried it myself. Time to try it for myself, I guess... Funnily enough this wasn't in visible in the listing, so must have occurred in transit?

Any bright ideas what this secret chocolate bar hidden inside the Sharp PC-1500 is for? Two of my three computers had it in there and I can't figure out any useful purpose for it, though as it's degraded over the years it does make quite a mess of the circuit board! youtu.be/xxVN_1a00AQ

A new month means a new calendar for the fridge door. This month I'm using the PC-1500's CE-150 plotter, and there's something very satisfying about watching it work away (excluding how dried out the green pen is!) youtu.be/WgAM5RWzc1c

Since they moved the ports to the wrong end of mobile phones, wouldn't it be nice if you could rotate the screen 180° so you could still use them when you have headphones or a USB cable plugged in? Or is it a ploy by Big Cable to get you to keep buying new items as the stress breaks the connectors?

The next - and final (for now) - ep of Digi Level 2 goes live in less than an hour, and we'll be in the chat. Hope to see some of you there. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NJ4...

Every Sharp ZQ-700 I've seen for sale so far has a faulty screen. Buoyed on by my success with the EL-9900 I thought I'd try fixing them, and I've had some success with this minimally invasive and aesthetically sensitive repair.

Adapted a very clever program from hachyderm.io/@bazzargh/11... which renders The Great Wave using fractals. Running on a Sharp IQ-8000 via the IQ-707 Scientific Computer Card. It's a 16-column card so can't print text on all 40 columns, but graphics primitives work on the full screen.

I've got a couple of these Texas Instruments PS-6800 organisers and they're not bad little devices, but I keep making typos on them - can you spot the problem?

Unlike TI's calculators these Sharps need a "crossover" cable rather than a "straight-through" one. As I don't have any suitable 2.5mm TRS plugs to wire one up, I made a little adaptor board, and left access to the pins to snoop on the communications protocol.

Yet another problem solved by poking it with a hot soldering iron until it complies. youtu.be/J0jNvEVuXbI

RIP David Lynch. Loved his work and this video is a beautiful tribute. youtu.be/TqZpi8zAqe0

eBay is getting to to know me too well. "This isn't what you were searching for at all, but how about this broken calculator?" "Oh, go on then..."

Considering how difficult it was to find a case with an optical drive bay I'm surprised the "ayes" are so high. I even had to cut the corner off my burner to get it to fit in my current case (three bays, only one is deep enough to fit an optical drive). Do you still rock optical media?

Noodle restaurants are better with resident cats.

Parky out!

For as section titled "Suggest activities" in Duolingo I wasn't expecting quite so much discussion of death in the first three lessons...

Got another five De-Dead Zone mod boards made up, which means another evening of Daytona USA on the Dreamcast to test them. I'll try not to sing along too loudly for the sake of my neighbours.