Gee-k.net

Ever since I watched The 8-Bit Guy's Commodore series, I have thought about grabbing a VIC20 and a C64. He seems to love them and a lot of other people do too.
I liked the idea of a VIC20 as it's such a restricted machine, in terms of memory and character display. I'm not sure why I like machines like this, but I do. Maybe I like a challenge of developing for them. Not that I've started developing for any machine yet.
Today I managed to pick up a VIC20 not too far from me, and it was a great deal. The person had a bunch of games on cassette and cartridge for it, as well as a 16k expansion cartridge. Once I got it home, I gave it a quick test and everything seems to be... Read More!

I've had my PC case for a rather long time now. In fact I think it's about 8 or 9 years old now.
It's a pretty good case that I bought when I was really into my PC gaming, lots of air flow and water cooling ready. Not that I have ever used water cooling in my computers.

Due to lots of wear and tear of the front USB ports, they eventually disintegrated. This happened a long time ago and I even considered buying a new case to replace that one simply due to these USB ports being broken and looking hideous. However, I believe that you should always try to repair something before replacing it. Replace it only if it's not doing what its supposed to and irreparable.
Anyway, less of my beliefs and more about what went o... Read More!

My Father-in-Law was pestering me a while back to sell some "old computers" for him and I had mentioned at the time that I wasn't so keen on helping as they don't fetch much money.
Now, that was quite unusual for me as I quite like old tech (you'd never have guessed eh!?). But at the time I didn't have the inclination to deal with them.
After having spent so much time watching people fix their old computing equipment on YouTube I thought I'd at least have a look at these computers. I asked if the computers could be looked out and I'd get things set up to get them sold on.

I was told that there was a boxed c64 (more modern style, not a breadbin sadly) with cassette drives and a pair of joysticks. Three or four am... Read More!

I ordered my soldering station and all the paraphernalia a while back as can be seen with the date on my last post about it.
Finally today the last, and main, part arrived. It arrived whilst I was geeking (should that be gee-k ing) around with starting my Ben eater computer.
Obviously, I just had to have a play around with it straight away. I set out my heat resistant mat, which had mega static when I took it out of its bag. I hope I managed to destatic it before working on my raspberry pi.
I tried a couple of different soldering tips before I found one that I can work with. My first attempt at actual soldering was to solder on the header to my pi zero that I want to use for creating and programming things in the future... Read More!

I've been using a very old soldering iron which was left in the loft by the previous occupants of our home and it's... well, it's like trying to use a hot spade to make soldering joints.
Not only that, I don't quite know what I'm doing when it comes to soldering. I've never done much of it, and when I have it's not gone very well sadly.
I tried using the old soldering iron (which is an on or off type) to solder on the header to my raspberry pi zero. It didn't go well at all as the iron was too large to even get near the through-hole pads.
I've got a few things planned for my raspberry pi which needs the header on it (mainly learning about electronics and basic circuits) so the header pins will need sorting.
Becau... Read More!