This is not a new acquisition, it has been in my backup box for a while, I suppose I bought it a few years back for a "bargain" price and because of that, thought nothing of varying from my normal brands of trusted flash drives. It has been trouble, it always needs repairing when inserted and therefore it is not a wise choice for a backup device, so I decided to fix it....
Around this time in 2004 there was great excitement in life, well, when I say great, it was during my working life so most things of distraction were marginally exciting, and usually, anything acquisitional to do with technology would float my boat.
There was a need to transport files from work, personal files not work files, and Kingston Technology brought out their 1GB Datatraveller Elite. That was ONE gigglybyte, it was HUGE and in the Futureshop flyer they had a screaming deal, C$99.99 with a C$30 mail in rebate which I am sure you older readers will remember, buy something, send in the proof of purchase and the rebate form, wait patiently and it would eventually arrive long after you had forgotten about it.
There it still is, nineteen years later, on the right complete with free lanyard and Canadian Tire fishing lure doobery to stop me from losing the top.
Ignoring taxes, the gigglybyte comparison is rather impressive, it was, nineteen years ago, C$69.99 for a single gigglybyte and here and now, C$0.078 or 7.8 cents, which is a lot less, 896 times less.
This is a handy statistic to hold in your head for the next time someone mentions down at the brewery how much beer was twenty years ago, or how cheap shoes, tee-shirts or hoodies used to be, it is true, things used to be bigger when we were kids, take Wagon Wheels as an example, they're positively tiny nowadays compared to what they were back when my hands were half the size.
Ok, I don't know what my point was now, I just want a Wagon Wheel.
Presenting an ACER Nitro 5 Intel i5-8300H with Nvida GTX 1050 Ti. The first computer in this house to be running Windows 11, version 23H2 and unfortunately this "progress" is inevitable because of the imminent demise of Windows 10 as I will attempt to explain.
I have been thinking for a year or more about my next steps for my daily computer, I have always run a laptop for most of my needs, and I have a separate, more powerful computer for gaming. It is an unfortunate fact that Microsoft is once again murdering their baby on the 14th October, 2025 and replacing it with an intrusive, highly controlling, operating system that has strict hardware requirements. That being said, they are replacing an already intrusive operating system with something more intrusive and restrictive and it is a fact that Windows 11 will not work on processors older that eighth generation and computers without a specific generation of TPM module.
We reluctantly moved from Windows 7 and grumbled, and it is merely history repeating itself now, and there are rumours of Windows 12 being released before the demise of Windows 10, a sort of reflection that every other release is a good one, a bit like Star Trek movies, although that paradigm has been broken with the last few movies being pathetic and cartoonish. I have heard bad rumours about Windows 11 but it only seems fair that I should try it for myself.
I don't mind improved hardware, but I do mind Microsoft forcing me into it when I can get by with perfectly adequate older stuff, so in the meantime...
Step one has been going on for almost a year now, I set up a Linux OS computer for appraisal as a "daily driver" trying one version and then taking advice and settling on another. It was noticed during the year that the little NUC computer we have attached to the TV for streaming was being bogged down by the various "secret" windows updates in the background, so about a month ago, let us call it step two, I created an identical NUC but with Linux installed. These two machines have been ticking along nicely, doing what is expected, they wait patiently when updates are available for user permission and there are no windows shenanigans...
Step three to improve things took place this week. I run Windows 10 Pro on a Lenovo T530 laptop, specifically that model as I like it with the backlit keyboard and if we look at the age of it, well the processor is from 2012 and an i5-3320M, Intel Ivy Bridge and over the last few months Windows has slowed, as it does so it needs a total refresh. In terms of Microsoft's plans and industry opinion, this laptop is obsolete, yet it is, in my humble opinion, perfect for everything I need in a daily driver. I bought another from a chap in Victoria last week on eBay for the total cost of $65 and I have set up a fresh Windows 10 installation without compromising my existing machine, it is now fully functional, a clone of my older T530.
Step one, two, three all entailed a machine that will not officially run Windows 11 and I need to plan for October 2025, which will arrive quicker than expected, due to the odd nature of forward time travel in retirement. The Acer Nitro, being fully compliant with all Microsoft requirements for Windows 11 is a stepping stone, an educational computer to dovetail me into their new ways.
The question is, will it be adequate for Windows 12 when it inevitably arrives?
In early 1985 I was sent to McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, California to represent the Uk based APPH Stress Office for development of the US Navy Hawk Derivative, the T45TS, a jet trainer aircraft based on the BAe Hawk T.1 and my responsibility was structural integrity of the main landing gear. That is just the background to the 38 year story arc I am about to tell, the story is a minutia from my life, but it reflects how our brains store it all, well, most of it anyways.
Hewlett Packard had brought out a couple of programmable scientific calculators in the previous years and several in the American design office had either the HP-11C or the HP-15C and the more affordable of the two, at seventy-five US dollars, was the HP-11C. In those days Hewlett Packard sold their calculators by mail order, or through specialist shops, and the one shop I frequently "window shopped" at was a camera store in a mall near to the McDonnell Douglas facility.
I was twenty-seven, I had some extra cash in my pocket and I went into this camera store, with full intention to buy the HP-11C Calculator, but instead was distracted by the latest Minolta Freedom camera which I eventually bought, focus free, auto flash and for small format 35mm cameras it was the cats ass as they say. I took a lot of good photos with that camera in the short time I had it, one day, while out with the other adventurers somewhere in Southern California, I put it down on a wall while I had a sandwich, forgot about it and walked away. I often wonder what images I lost at that moment, in the subsequent thirty-eight years it wouldn't be the last camera that went missing.
So, the Hewlett Packard was forgotten about and when back in the UK a month later I bought a TI-66 Programmable calculator, again landscape format, same capability as the HP-11C but input was algebraic, not RPN. I held onto that calculator for almost a year, but subsequently, it was lost through no fault of my own when my Mark V Cortina was stolen from a Liverpool car park outside an MFI furniture store. I had gone in after work to look for a coffee table, good job I did not buy one because when I came out, the car, and my briefcase containing the TI-66, were gone.
A week or so later, I received a phone call at work, someone had found the briefcase on the shoreline, my paperwork and reference books were still in it, but the calculator long gone, I picked the case up and did not give the guy anything, mainly as I suspected he was probably linked to the bastards who had stolen the car, perhaps I was wrong about him and he was just a good samaritan in the right place at the right time, cynically I suspect he was just attempting to steal another quid out of my pocket.
So, I could carry on for the other thirty-seven years, but to end it here, the arc is complete as in the last month I have bought myself the HP-11C calculator and the owner's handbook. The total cost for the pair works out at a cash deal with a local seller of $50 for the calculator and via eBay, a price of $38.73 for the book, making a grand total of $88.73 which is in good old Canadian dollars, about sixty-four of those US dollars, so in reality It looks like I saved myself eleven bucks by waiting, however, looking on eBay for the box, if I ever want one, it looks like I will certainly blow the budget....
The Bitscope has a wave generator built in, but I felt that, as part of my soldering apprenticeship, I should build a kit that would add to the understanding of an oscilloscope, so I had ordered a five dollar XR2206 based waveform generator kit which arrived last week and we will travel through the gauntlet of welding it together. This is basically what you receive in one of these kits, components, main board, case and difficult to read instructions :
It has been a good week, the eureka moment with the Bitscope and the success in the waveform kit.
The electronics journey is continuing and I worked out my multimeter needs, my bench power supply requirements and I decided to investigate oscilloscopes. I have to admit, I am mostly clueless about all of this, brain the size of a planet but it is becoming more and more unwilling to allow things to stick, sort of a low gravitational pull, things land in there and then bounce right off into space.
Multimeters, Bench power supplies, oscilloscopes. The amazon marketplace is an absolute quagmire full of questionable products, so for weeks I was looking at oscilloscopes, digital ones, and I was contemplating a used Tektonix TDS 1012 from eBay, sourced from a Vancouver university and probably fifteen or more years old, and on the other side of the coin, a new Chinese import on amazon, both of which would be setting me back around two hundred and fifty buckeroonies.
The Chinese unit by FNIRSI, named I assume by throwing a bunch of random scrabble tiles at a fast moving bucket full of poo, was a contender and as prime day arrived the price came down a little, but I have faith in my fate and I resisted.
I was off at the swap and shop, talking to the retired electrician, and he mentioned a contact on used Victoria, so I logged onto the website and found him, and we had quite a good chat about oscilloscopes. The chat made my enlarged brain think more deeply and I was in doubt about the meaning of life, the origin of all things and the existence of toast. It seemed to me after the large thunking session, that an oscilloscope would take up a lot of real estate on my finite sized bench, and right there on my workspace was a keyboard and screen in the form of my laptop, so perhaps there was another solution?
It was a fortunate moment, for there on the auction site was a thing called a Bitscope, an external piece of hardware that would interface via USB into a computer and the software would create a DSO or Digital Storage Oscilloscope, in effect a solution for my needs and limited desktop space. In addition, the used unit would only end up costing me ninety dollars, a definite incentive for purchase and investigation.
One last thing, this unit also has a waveform generator built in, which is very important because when you have nothing to do you can connect it up and spend hours just staring at pretty little graphs on the screen and marvel how much more intelligent you are than a tree stump.
I say another bench power supply, but I don't think I did a blog on the first one, let me check....
There is something about having an electronics hobby that seems to encourage buying more of things, I bought six or more multimeters before settling on three that I now use, the others have been sold back into the marketplace, a couple still lurk around the house, but they too will probably be sold, I say probably as it is perhaps wise to keep back a sacrificial multimeter for bonfire night, whatever night that might be.
I digress.
The first bench power supply was a KORAD KD3005D that I bought from Digi-Key and it is a 30 Volt, 5 Amp unit, is a well built, accurate, linear unit that is my primary supply. This blog is not about that one because it is somewhat boring.
The one I will talk about is a project right out of the box, I knew that when I ordered it, so it will be a bit of interest for the blog, it too is a linear type of power supply, not a switching supply, but not as sophisticated as the KORAD, which is saying little. The second power supply does not really have a brand name, more just a model number of 1502D+, and don't ask me what the plus is for...
