Long-term CDR storage

For testing a external USB DVD-burner I needed "something" to test it with. That brought me to 2 packs of CDR-blanks that have been laying around here for ages, I think they have been bought when my trusty old Yamaha CRW4416 x4-Burner I'm using until now was new. That makes them about 5 years old? Well... those CDR blanks were still in their original packaging, with the plastic foil intact. But they looked quite interesting, with a dull finishing and something that reminds me of frosted glass-windows.

Playing with old junk, episode 756412

I found a nice a old HP 82240 thermal printer in the cellar once. You can use it to print stuff from those pretty HP reverse-polish calculators like the HP48. Unfortunately they only speak the proprietary red-eye protocol over infrared so I had to resort to a little bit of hackery using a Atmel Tiny2313 and a IR-diode... And now, it prints! :-) Hooray.

New Toy

The scope is set to 0.2us/DIV x 10 on the horizontal axis. Power consumption is after about 10 minutes of warmup.

Ortsveränderliche Elektrische Betriebsmittel

Here are our tax-euros hard at work. I just had a visit from a guy of the german TÜV here checking the portable electrical equipment. Note the portable. So he put a sticker on every lamp or electrical socket, but NOT on the extension cord that is made non-portable by fastening it with cable-ties to my desk. And he did not even find the old shoddy and most-likely non-TÜV-safe halfway broken extension cord hidden under the other Desk!

Pessimism

tanning salon