The battery in my trusty Casio fx-570x calculator finally died. I thought it was broken at first, until I remembered it used a battery. The tiny LR14 was the original battery (made in Japan) in the calculator when I bought it. It got me through A-levels and University back in the late 1980s, and has been calculating for me ever since. Except now the blasted battery died. Oh why can’t we rely on electronic gadgets these days?

I’ve put a new battery in and will report back in 2038 when Unix runs out of dates and I need to replace the battery yet again.

Edit:

I’ve just realised, I have still not yet pulled off the protective plastic film from the aluminium face. I might save that for a birthday treat. It’s like peeling dried PVA glue off your fingers. Hmmmm, satisfying :-)

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I was recently tasked with transferring files from a failed laptop. The laptop kind of worked, but some bad sectors had started to appear in a number of vital system files, so it was very unstable.

This was an old WIndows 98 system, and I could not simply plug in a USB drive, because there were no Windows 98 drivers around for the external USB drives that I had. In the end the disk had to be removed, and connected up to a working machine with a flying lead.

Since then, I have come across Puppy Linux. It seems to be ideal for this type of thing. By booting it directly from CDROM or USB key, it is possible to have a working Linux box in 60 seconds flat. It is then a simple matter of mounting the local drive, plugging in a USB drive, and transferring the files across.

Puppy Linux is not something I have ever come across before, but it is now a part of my standard toolbox. It also looks like the ideal platform for building custom appliances, such as video players and thin clients.

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