Floppy Disk Sales Are Higher-Density Than You Might Think

September 21, 2022 by 52 Comments

Floppies may be big in Japan, but nostalgic and/or needful Stateside floppy enthusiasts needn’t fret — just use AOL keyword point that browser toward floppydisk.com. There, you can buy new floppies of all sizes, both new and old, recycle your disks, or send them in to get all that precious vintage stuff transferred off of them.

That delightfully Web 1.0 site is owned by Tom Persky, who fancies himself the ‘last man standing in the floppy disk business’. Who are we to argue? By the way, Tom has owned that address since approximately 1990 — evidently that’s when a cyber-squatter offered up the domain for $1,000, and although Tom scoffed at paying so much as $1 for any URL, his wife got the checkbook out, and he has had her to thank for it ever since.

My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It’s shocking to me. — Tom Persky

In the course of writing a book all about yours-truly’s favorite less-than-rigid medium, authors Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar sat down to talk with Tom about what it’s like to basically sell buggy whips in the age of the electric car.

Tom also owns diskduper.com, which is where he got his start with floppies — by duplicating them. In the 80s and 90s, being in this business was a bit like cranking out legal tender in the basement. As time wore on and more companies stopped selling floppies or simply went under, the focus of Tom’s company shifted away from duplication and toward sales. Whereas the business was once 90% duplication and 10% floppy sales, in 2022, those percentages have flopped places, if you will.

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Mechanical Color Picker Types Hex Codes For You

September 21, 2022 by 18 Comments

Hex codes are a simple, unambiguous way to designate colors in digital media. However, going from a color in your head to a hex code can be difficult for the unpracticed. [Guy Dupont] built a little gadget by the name of the Dial Toner to do it for him (Nitter).

The Dial Toner has two dials for each color channel – Red, Green, and Blue. By turning the dials, one can choose a given color in the 8-bit RGB color space, and that color is then displayed on the device’s included RGB LED. Once selected, the button can be pressed to type the selected color’s hex code into a text box. The Dial Toner runs on a Xiao RP2040 microcontroller board, and is coded in CircuitPython.

[Guy] hopes to sell the Dial Toner on Etsy in future, and is even working on a CMYK version for print addicts. We’ve featured [Guy]’s work here before, too, in the form of his extended-play HitClips cartridges. Video after the break.

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Raspberry Pi Grants Remote Access Via PCIe (Sort Of)

September 20, 2022 by 28 Comments

[Jeff] found a Raspberry Pi — well, the compute module version, anyway — in an odd place: on a PCI Express card. Why would you plug a Raspberry Pi into a PC? Well, you aren’t exactly. The card uses the PCI Express connector as a way to mount in the computer and connect to the PC’s ground. The Pi exposes its own network cable and is powered by PoE or a USB C cable. So what does it do? It offers remote keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) services. The trick is you can then get to the PC remotely even if you need to access, say, the BIOS setup screen or troubleshoot an OS that won’t boot.

This isn’t a new idea. In fact, we’ve seen the underlying Pi-KVM software before, so if you don’t mind figuring out your mounting options for a Raspberry Pi, you probably don’t need this board. Good thing too. Judging by the comments, they are hard to actually buy — perhaps, due to the chip shortage.

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Ride-on Star Wars Land Speeder Gets A Real Jet Engine

September 20, 2022 by 11 Comments

When it comes to children’s ride-on toys, the Star Wars Land Speeder is one of the cooler examples out there. However, with weedy 12-volt motors, they certainly don’t move quickly. [Joel Creates] decided to fix all that, hopping up his land speeder with a real jet engine.

First, the original drivetrain was removed, with new wheels installed underneath. Initially, it was set up with the front wheels steering, while the rear wheels were left to caster freely. A RC jet engine was installed in the center engine slot on the back of the land speeder, and was controlled via a standard 2-channel RC transmitter.

The jet engine worked, but the wheel configuration led to the speeder simply doing donuts. With the speeder reconfigured with rear wheels locked in place, the speeder handled much more predictably. Testing space was limited to a carpark, so high-speed running was out of the question. However, based on the limited testing achieved, it looks as though the speeder would be capable of a decent clip with the throttle maxed out.

It’s not a practical build, but it sure looks like a fun one. [Joel Creates] has big dreams of adding two more jet engines and taking it out to a runway for high-speed testing, and that’s something we’d love to see.

RC jet engines are a bit of a YouTube fad right now, showing up on everything from RC cars to Teslas. Video after the break.

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Open Source: Free As The Air You Breathe

September 20, 2022 by 18 Comments

[Carolyn Barber] recently interviewed a 15-year-old who has been making Corsi-Rosenthal boxes for people in his community that are at risk for COVID. Not only is it great that a teenager has such community spirit, but it is also encouraging that [Richard Corsi] and [Jim Rosenthal] made an open-source design that can help people at a greatly reduced cost.

If you haven’t seen one of these boxes, it is essentially a box fan inside a cardboard box with MERV-13 filters on all sides. While these high-quality filters aren’t as efficient as HEPA filters, the box makes up for it by moving a prodigious amount of air and by being much less expensive. The article says you can build a unit for $60 to $100, which is considerably cheaper than other filters with similar performance.

There’s been at least one research paper on the efficacy of the filters and the results were generally quite positive. Schools are taking a great interest in these boxes because they are inexpensive and effective. Of course, the filters don’t last forever, but one of the creators estimates in a classroom with 25 students, a three-year run of the box would run about $4.46 per student per year. Not a lot to pay for clean air.

We love hearing about tech helping people and especially open source that makes big impacts. Usually, when we think of air filtering, we are thinking about laser cutters or 3D printers. However, we have seen inexpensive HEPA filters, too.

IGY: The Year We All Got Along

September 20, 2022 by 24 Comments

If you are a Steely Dan fan, you might know the Donald Fagen song, “IGY.” In it, Fagen sings about a rosy future with high-speed undersea rail, solar power, giant computers making life better, and spandex jackets. Since that song was on the 1982 album Nightfly, it is already too old for some people to remember, but the title goes back even further: the International Geophysical Year which was actually a little longer than a year in 1957 and 1958. The year was a concerted effort by 67 countries to further mankind’s knowledge of the Earth. It was successful,  and was big news in its day, although not much remembered now.

The real origin dates back to even earlier. In 1882 and 1932 there were International Polar Years dedicated to researching the polar regions of the Earth. In a way, it makes sense to do this. Why should 60 or more countries each mount difficult, dangerous, and expensive expeditions to such a hostile environment? However, instead of a third polar year, James Van Allen (who has a famous belt) and some other scientists felt that advances in many fields made it the right time to study geophysics. From the scientific point of view, the IGY coincided with the solar activity cycle maximum. But there were other forces at play, too.

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Walkmp3rson Is An MP3 Player Like Sony Never Made

September 20, 2022 by 29 Comments

If you weren’t already well aware, the 90s are like, so hot right now, and that includes cassette tapes for some reason. (Even though we personally didn’t have a CD player until 1998, they were around as early as 1982.) But if you don’t dig the quality of cassettes, or if you’d just rather carry around more than 45-120 minutes worth of music, than [John Edgar Park]’s Walkmp3rson is definitely the build for you. That’s pronounced ‘Walkperson’, as in a 21st century MP3-based update of the classic Walkman.

Inside this amazing 3D printed enclosure, you’ll find an Adafruit Feather RP2040 controlling the screen, handling input from the rotary encoder and those sweet mechanical keyswitches, and of course, playing audio files from SD cards through the amplifier breakout board. And no, this isn’t just another MP3 player — well, it kind of is, but the presentation really goes a long way here.

There are tons of retro-modern nods, like the cassette reel animation that plays on the TFT screen, the boxy enclosure, and the fact it involves physical media. Oh yes — you get to insert an SD card whenever you want to change albums/discographies/genres/whatever. In fact, this would be a great use of older, smaller SD cards. You could go all out and make tiny album art to slip inside those milky plastic cases. Check out the brief demo video after the break.

Looking to play your tunes on a microcontroller, but not a fan of the Walkman aesthetic? In June we covered a similar audio player powered by the ESP32 that does an uncanny impersonation of a portable tape deck that you might be interested in.

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