Post some hardware porn

- Logitech G PRO X SUPERLIGHT 2 wireless gaming mouse
- Keychron M3 PAW3395 Mini Wireless Mouse
- Logitech MX keyboard
- Keychron Q6 Max keyboard

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- Logitech G PRO X SUPERLIGHT 2 wireless gaming mouse
- Keychron M3 PAW3395 Mini Wireless Mouse
- Logitech MX keyboard
- Keychron Q6 Max keyboard
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Is that a SAMS 'Unix unleashed" book? Some of those books were good, I noticed in my local Waterstones bookshop there are almost no programming books now, apart from 'dummys guide to javascript'. There used to be at least two full shelves of programming books, years ago. It's kind of a shame to see them disappear from the shelves. Maybe everything is online now? Even the university bookshop doesn't have as many as it used to.
 
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My stack of thinkpads and docking stations. Yeah, I know, I've "got a problem". 😂 Various different models, mostly classic series thinkpads. I can't be bothered to sell them for a few quid on ebay, they're not worth anything anyway, and you never know when they're going to come in useful. No company makes this kind of high quality hardware any more, including the modern lenovo thinkpads, so I'm hanging on to them; at least they don't take up very much space. And they all run freebsd!
 
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Well, this probably qualifies as "hand cranked". :) An 8-bit ISA bus dual 12-bit burr-brown DAC card for the IBM PC, designed by yours truly around 1986-7. This was a prototype, hand-taped 2-layer pth PCB, hand soldered. No CAD was used, the circuit was designed on paper and then the board layout designed on clear film with transfers, which was passed to the PCB shop to construct the board itself, which was a pretty primitive method even back then; we couldn't afford a CAD at the time (and software used to be expensive!). The board also had an 8-bit PIO port (the IDC socket), and featured its own local split-rail power supply using a DC-DC converter and low power voltage regulators, the board had to produce both +ve and -ve output voltages wrt ground. The two phono socket outputs were DAC-generated control voltages for another piece of equipment. I can't remember what the 3.5 mm jack socket was for. Those were the days; you would never get away with a pcb layout like that nowadays; well, I guess it's not too bad, too slow to worry about reflections etc. It all worked fine, amazingly enough. :)

The PC used to be a great platform for prototyping bits of hardware like this. It's nowhere near as easy with the modern pci-e stuff, sadly; nowdays you have to faff around with USB, or make the whole thing on an arduino or pi shield and talk to it remotely from the PC. This particular board had some calibration software written for it in assembly (using the trimmer pots you can see along the top edge), and there was other software used to drive it and the voltage-controlled external equipment.
 
Noctua NH-L9 on new MSI Tomahawk B860 board.
Built for my grandson (age 9) who is starting a 3D printer entrepreneurial business.
 

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I'm kicking myself.... I once had a motherboard which had both the original NexGen Nx586 cpu and Nx587 math copro chips. I think it was in the late 90s or very early 00's. NexGen was the cpu design company that AMD bought to kick off their own X86 cpu line. It was a cleanroom re-implementation of the x86 instruction set. I wish I had kept it, probably rare and perhaps even worth some money now. I probably threw it out in one of my 'clearouts'. :'‑(

 
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