Portable Power Tue, 07/20/2010 - 22:13 — nathan

My phone, like many modern "smart-phones" has a tendency to go flat when used heavily for internet browsing etc. Unfortunately this is exactly when you aren't near power to charge it up with, so when I found some old iPod replacement batteries in the local Maplin an idea occurred to me. The idea is fairly simple, put a large capacity battery intended as a replacement for the now almost extinct 1st or 2nd gen iPod into a box with a charging socket to charge it, and a power output so it could charge something else.

Spectrum re-fit Sat, 06/26/2010 - 19:49 — nathan

Last week I was at the UK's first Vintage Computing Festival and picked up a new keyboard membrane for my ZX Spectrum and a replacement metal cover as the one that was on the speccy when I got it was a bit corroded. I took the opportunity to do another couple of jobs on the old computer.

It's a snake - OggCamp presentation slides and source

These are the slides and the source code from the talk I did at OggCamp 2010. It's all Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike.

Update 14 May 2010

Thanks to all the people who have given me positive comments about this talk. I was really pleased to hear people say that they had been inspired to solve problems they had with Python, providing some inspiration was my main goal in preparing this talk, not necessarily showing you how to do things.

Z80 Project Updates and Revision Control Fri, 03/26/2010 - 22:39 — nathan

It's been a (very) long time since the last update to this project. I've been busy on loads of new stuff for the project. The system is now capable of booting a binary from SD card or USB memory stick formatted in either FAT16 or FAT32. There's also full PS/2 keyboard support, a much more sophisticated interrupt control mechanism and a VGA display now.

Z80 Project Mark 2: More UART Shenanigans Mon, 01/18/2010 - 22:38 — nathan

A couple of minor updates you might be interested in. I got a quick demo echoing characters back to the PC working last week. This uses the interrupt on receive feature of the UART setup to trigger a send routine as soon as a character is received. The demo code is available on the Z80 Project page.