Some patterns…. the beauty in repetitive patterns, in nature and in art.
Author Archives: zedstarr
40 years later: reflections on 1981 – pop music’s greatest year?
Was 1981 pop music’s greatest ever year? There’s no doubt for me – it absolutely was! Débuts from several of the decade’s biggest names, Eurovision Winners and a novelty No.1, 1981 had it all.
RS232 flow-control & handshaking – Psion MC400 retro communications
Connecting my retro-laptop to the internet via 2 x RS232 serial connections to a Raspberry Pi… and defeated (for now) by lack of hardware flow-control signals 😦
5G on the moon?
NASA has ambitions to build a comms infrastructure on the moon using 4G LTE technology…
dot-com failures, skim.com & obsessive bag collecting
About my Love of bags – this one a dot-com era superstar from 2000/2001. Internet enabled fashion? Oh yes! SKIM.COM a y2k style bubble ready to burst 🙂
“My Life in Laptops” – am I Doug Rocket?
My homage to Doug Rocket’s art installation at Place “MY LAPTOPS 1991-2005”. It’s well Mexico.
Magellan GPS 315 vs. The Future – part 2
Some older GPS receivers can’t compute dates properly thanks to the original GPS system employing an epoch with 10-bit week number… a new epoch starts every 1024 weeks!
Record Store Day 2021 – crooked queuing
Why vinyl is more than the sum of its parts. “Record Store Day” 2021 and queuing for 2 hours to buy a black plastic disc. Independent record shops and teenage memories…
Retro & Online – Connecting Psion’s MC400 & Series 3a machines to “the internet”
Connecting 30-year old computers to the internet in 2021… for the LOLs. Revisiting RS232, null-modems and the like, all at 19200 baud.
Magellan GPS 315 vs. The Future – part 1
Comparing a handheld 1990s dedicated GPS receiver with the GNSS chip in a 2019 smartphone