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Showing posts from October, 2018

Using a CompactFlash card as a computer hard drive replacement

Hello everyone! Today I'm going to explain why one would want to install a CF to IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics, the internal drive standard before SATA) adapter in an old laptop (or desktop). It's worth keeping in mind that you can also use the much more popular SD card, but a CF has a big advantage, which I'll explain later. I'm going to use my good ol' Zenith Z-Note Flex , on which I did a review on three months ago. The laptop ran windows 3.1, but I also wanted to have access to 95 whenever I needed. That's one of the reasons why it's a good idea to install one of these adapters in a system: You can store two different operating systems on two different cards. I, as an example, installed windows 95 on an eight GB card, and windows 3.1 on a one GB one. The second reason is the flexibility: You can easily take the "solid state drive" out of your computer, and plug it in any cheap CompactFlash adapter, to easily transfer files to or fro

My first B&W Television!

I finally got one. A real, actual, monochrome TV. And it also works. Perfectly. It's apperently a Brown King Personal B&W Televison. The exact model is BR1804. It uses the SECAM standard, which was mainly used in French and the Soviet Union. It has four knobs on the back for adjusting Brightness, Contrast, Vertical Hold and Horizontal Hold. It can also run from dc power on 12V 1200mA. The fact that it has a built in antenna would have been very convenient when this was brand new, but since no analog television signals are broadcasted anymore, it is basically useless. What is still very handy, is that it's got two RCA jacks, which can accept modern-ish composite signals. This is how I can connect it two pretty much anything. It also has a switch for changing between Antenna and RCA mode. It only has two rca jacks because the speaker is mono, which means it doesn't need an additional one for stereo sound. The two dials on the front would have been us