What did Elliot Williams and Al Williams read on Hackaday last week? Tune in and find out. After a bit of news, [Vik Oliver] chimes in with some deep PLA knowledge. Then the topic changed to pressure advance measurements, SDRs, making super-resolution PCBs with a fiber laser, and more.
Want to 3D print wire strippers? A robot arm? Or just make your own Z-80? Those hacks are in there, too.
For the long articles, we talked about old tech, including the :CueCat and the Iomega Zip Drive. Let us know if you had either one in the comments.
What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.
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News:
- Google Unveils New Process For Installing Unverified Android Apps
- TICKETS TO HOPE 26 — 2600 Magazine
- Get Your Green Power On!
Mailbag
- History of PLA from Vik Oliver
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Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Direct Pressure Advance Measurement For Fast Calibration
- Building A $50 SDR With 20 MHz Bandwidth
- Using A Fiber Laser To Etch 0.1 Mm PCB Traces
- Build This Open-Source Graphics Calculator
- The Most Intricate Of Freeform Digital Clocks
- PicoZ80 Is A Drop-in Replacement For Everyone’s Favorite Zilog CPU
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Al’s Picks:
Zip drivers were based around the idea that the media was going to be expensive, so you’re going to be re-using it many times over.
CD-R was based on the idea that the media was dirt cheap, or at least that’s how it turned out. It meant you could do write-only where you’d be putting that 100 MB on a 700 MB disc and just not care because you were buying stacks of 50 discs at 25 cents a disc. True, those were pretty crummy discs that didn’t last a year, but they served the purpose.
Most of their purpose was getting pirated software from A to B when the internet was not that fast or available.
Further on the point: around the time of ZIP drivers, anything the users themselves would produce, be it a word document or an excel sheet, would in the vast majority of cases still fit on a 1.44 MB floppy because they didn’t do high resolution photographs or massive datasets. It was mostly just plain text with the occasional 100 kB GIF/JPEG for illustration.
So why do you need a 100+ MB disk? What else – transferring software install files and media, like collections of MP3 files, which weren’t available back then unless you ripped all your CDs…
Such a narrow point of view.
I had plenty of datasets that exceeded even that. I had a Jazz drive for a reason.
Yeah, you had a reason.
Most didn’t.
Well done dude, I don’t need it therefore it’s useless.
Think School. I went back to school when they were everywhere. Whole semesters worth of curicula, labs, programming projects, all there, a working copy and backup copy, work in the school computers or at home with the same data when the connection online at my house was still slow and online access may be limited. They worked great. Never had one die till years later.
I didn’t consider school because none of the schools I went to had ZIP drives, because none of the students had them so who’s gonna use em?
Course materials were handed out as photocopies, and assignments or homework were given and returned on paper, so there was very little need to carry anything on digital media.
Consider, if you wanted to read a PDF file you had to go to the computer lab, book a machine, wait for it to login slowly over the network, then try to read your file on some awful buzzing 17″ 1024×768 resolution CRT monitor. You did that exactly once – to send the file to the printer to get a paper copy.
My daughter was going to an at school and they used the zip drives to move stuff from school to home.
Someone at the school go the click of death, and it spread to all the computers at school, and to most home computers.
They were not going to have longevity in the market until they could prevent it recover from spreading the virus.
Cactus cactus…Cactus!