If your desk space is at a premium, making your O-scope do double duty is a damn fine idea.

From the page: " The Terminalscope is a full, bidirectional serial terminal that uses a PS/2 keyboard for input and displays 54x24-character output on an oscilloscope or XY display. It can be connected to a PC via USB-to-TTL adapter or directly to another microcontroller."

A few hours ago, somebody asked me to help them access their 5.25" floppy MSDOS backup files. at a remote location. The obvious solution would be an USB external 5.25" drive and DOSBOX, assuming it supports MSDOS RESTORE (and the 5.25" media was still readable, of course). Strangely enough, it seems such an animal has never been made, either as a commercial product or as an open source hack, though I have seen rumours of a long ago limited production device.

My first thought was to find an external 3.5" USB device and rewire it to a 5.25" internal drive, but it seems the formats are different enought that they won't use the same controller. I haven't given up on this approach, I've got a dual 3.5" and 5.25" drive that might just work, I last used it on a 1GHz machine...

The topic has come uip time after time on the 'net, with no clear resolution, as illustrated below. Would make a great hack, especially if it supported 8" drives!

I'm cutting a few boxen from the herd, and have come up with a couple dozen old CD-ROM drives that need to be repurposed.

The hack I keep running across is converting the spindle motor to serve as a motor for an electric model airplane. Here's a FAQ on the topic.

The quick and easy hack is to change the winding from a delta to a wye configuration.

This interesting hack is a hybrid between the two, simply change a pigtail to change the wiring configuration.

Rewinding the rotor is a popular hack.
English rewound cd-rom motor instructions
links for rewinding cd-rom motors
Rewinding a brushless motor
The RCGroups.com website has many more discussions on this.

Now, if I could come up with some use for the photodiode pair, the electronics and the other motors in a few dozen CDROM drives...

Page scrapes data from benchmark comparisons and prices from NewEgg to provide a current performance/price comparison for a huge number of processors. Imagine a beowulf clulster...

With the prices of LCD monitors dropping, I've been collecting very nice large CRTs from the dumpster, with the intent to create a video wall. This is the hardware I've been waiting for, a video card that can drive eight monitors at once.

Diamonds are an overclocker's best friend! DIY diamond abrasive based thermal compound, when you're serious about overlocking. Blend 5 grams of 60,000 mesh diamond powder with silicon grease compound containing polydimethylsiloxane and polytetraflouroethylene. Total cost, around $30. This could also be very useful when operating in extreme environments like the desert, high altitude or outer space.

From the site: "The most popular type of thermal compound has silver suspended in silicone grease. Research has been done by overclockers.com demonstrating a far superior type of thermal compound using diamond. Silver has a respectable thermal conductivity at: 429W/m K. Diamond on the other hand has a thermal conductivity of 900-2320 W/m K. So worst case scenario we double performance, and best case is roughly a 5x multiplier."

"Tests Results:
We have results for our first batch (8 grams compound with the 25 Carats of diamond) and our final batch for comparison. Even the thicker compound provided some improvements, but the right consistency does make a big difference.

System Idling System Max load
Arctic Silver with a fresh application
42c 57c

Arctic Silver with 2 week cure
39c 54c

Diamond Grease with a fresh application
29c 38c"

Visual guide to ports, RAM, CPU slots, and more. ID most any hardware I/O you're liable to run across.

Wow, why didn't I think of this?

From the site: "AllPinouts is a Web-based free content project to collect and list all known pinouts.
Pinout or pin-out is a term used in electronics to describe how an electrical cable is wired, or the function of each wire (pin) in a connector.
"AllPinouts collects information about hardware interfaces of modern and obsolete hardware, including pinouts of ports, expansion slots, and other connectors of computers and different digital devices (i.e. Cellular Phones, GPS, PDA, Game Consoles, etc.). This website is a Wiki, a website which the users (you) easily can contribute to and improve. All text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and may be distributed or linked accordingly. "

msiegel sent me to these very nice inexpensive breakout boards for USB, DB9 serial ports (M and F) and Ethernet ports. Great for the DIY experimenter, computer control, high speed/automated data collection and more.

From the review, they sound pretty rugged as well.

IBM XT to AT keyboard adaptor using a PIc chip. Source code included.

The differences between IBM XT keyboard protocols and modern AT, PS/2 protocols.