I went kind of overboard looking into issues with Altera USB Blaster clones a couple of years ago . While writing that post, I ran into some really frustrating intermittent problems in Linux with jtagd that I was never able to figure out: I also experienced a really weird unrelated problem in Quartus Programmer 18.1 in Linux while I was testing things on one of my computers. I could see corrupted

Last year, I bought a Macintosh Performa 410 on eBay. I wasn’t expecting it to be special in any way. The main reason I was interested in it was because I suspected it would have originally come with System 7.1P3, which was a weird Performa-specific OS version that nobody had preserved at the time. If you haven’t figured it out by now after reading my posts, I care a lot about software preservatio

Last year, I repaired an NZXT Signal 4K30 USB capture device that I bought on eBay for cheap. It was completely dead, and the cause turned out to be a bad solder joint on an inductor, which prevented power from getting to a crucial part of the board. After I fixed it, I tried using it to capture signals from a bunch of different HDMI source devices to make sure it worked correctly. As I said in my

I’m no stranger to pushing hardware past its limits. For example, seven years ago, I tracked down an issue that prevented 16 GB of RAM being used in a motherboard that only supported 8 . It ended up being a one-line GRUB hack to fix one of the ACPI tables that was mistakenly overlapping a PCI memory region with the RAM region and causing Windows to bluescreen. Around the same timeframe, I began co

Yesterday, for the first time in about a year, I tried powering on the Macintosh Performa 450 (LC III) from my past writeup about Apple’s backwards capacitor . It didn’t work. The screen was black, it played the startup sound, and then immediately followed up with the “Chimes of Death”. Nothing else happened from that point on. Here’s what it sounded like: This was a little frustrating because las

This post is about the original OMAP3530 BeagleBoard from 2008. Yes, the one so old that it doesn’t even show up in the board list on BeagleBoard.org anymore. The Beagle Board , not the BeagleBone. During my Chumby 8 kernel escapades, at one point I ran into a UART bug that affected multiple drivers , including the omap-serial driver. This led me to buy a BeagleBoard so I could verify the omap-ser

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I rescued a special recovery partition from an old Macintosh Performa 550’s dead hard drive . This partition had been lost to time and it was a race to try to save it before the remaining Performa 550 machines out there with their original hard drives were reformatted or destroyed. It has now been preserved on the Macintosh Garden . I have a few updates to that

I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now. This story starts with me on a lazy Sunday using Hex Fiend in conjunction with Eric Harmon’s Mac ROM template (ROM Fiend) to look through the resources stored in the Power Mac G3’s ROM. This ROM was used in the beige desktop, minitower, and all-i

I recently found myself needing to change the monitor that a cheap HDMI “dummy plug” pretended to be. It was a random one I had bought on Amazon several years ago that acted as a 4K monitor, and I needed it to be something simpler that didn’t support a 4K resolution. The story behind why is a long one that I’m still figuring out and might eventually become a separate blog post in the future. If yo

As part of my research into the Macintosh Performa 550’s factory recovery partition , I paid a lot of attention to eBay listings for these computers. I came to an interesting discovery that I had already suspected: big CRT-based Macs in this form factor are regularly damaged in shipping after being sold on eBay. Most vintage computer enthusiasts are well aware of this, but the plastic in old compu