So, I have this nice monitor, a SUN GDM20D10 which relates to a old Sun workstation that is dog-slow by todays standards and which I therefore no longer use for anything. I had built a adapter-cable for it's strange connector a long time ago, but never found a graphics card that outputs
composite sync signals.
Those sync signals tell your monitor when it has to start drawing a new line, or when it has to begin at the top of the screen after it has reached the bottom and todays PCs usually carry those signals on separate lines. And because SUN monitors are different, they want those signals merged together on a single input pin which my graphics cards is not able to provide. (Well, it is, but there is currently no simple way to tell it to do so).
I always planned to build one of the
circuits whose schematics you can find on the web for that purpose, but always forgot buying the necessary parts. Now while cleaning up the cellar, I stumbled upon that lonely 47LS00 you can see soldered to the white cables and held by the oscilloscope probes.
Granted, my VGA connector now looks a little bit odd, but finally it sends something looking almost like a good composite sync signal onwards to the CRT.
And it's good enough to persuade the monitor to display something (and not just turn off and going into power-save-mode).
Finally, no more tiny icons and blurry text on that old and crappy 17"-tube. That makes me happy.
After the attempted train-bombings here in germany, our minister of the interior promptly declared that he had already spoken to the representatives of the german bundesbahn to have the number of cameras in trainstations increased. This is done, so that we can catch more of those TERRORISTS, of course. Now obviously this plan has been carried out already, because since the last time I visited hamburg the number of cameras on the S-Bahn in Altona and Sternschanze has doubled! If you look more closely at the camera housings (those photographs are so shoddy, you cannot even see the label :-( ) they are clearly marked as "camera 4" and "camera 4 (redundant)". I feel much safer already.
