Ghetto eprom erasing
[Note: As we all know cameras and I don't exactly work well together but i've tried to at least get semi-focused shots.]
I have been messing around recently with Psion Organiser2's. I'd wanted one when i was younger and they first came out but I had better things to spend my money on at the time (Girls, Beer and travel). Anyway I recently picked up a couple along with a couple of programpaks, rampaks and some datapaks. The rampaks are just battery backed up SRAM and the you can read/write to them willynilly as much as you like as long as the battery is still functional. Programpaks are normally PROM (or ROM) so you don't really need to worry about writing to them as you can't but the datapaks are EPROMs, so like the rampaks you can read/write to them however there are certain caviats. reading is fine, you can read from them until the cows come home and a couple of months beyond and writing is ok too, it'll drain the battery in the Organiser a  bit but no real problems, where there is a difficulty is that when you delete a file on a datapak it isn't really deleted it's just unlinked, the space isn't freed it's just not available so eventually you will have a datapak that you can no longer write too. When Psion were making and selling the Organiser they also made and sold a datapak eraser that was really just an eprom eraser in a psion labelled box and a 20 minute timer. I don't have one of those and I haven't seen one that runs on American voltages anyway and I no longer have a bog standard eprom eraser either so I needed to either build one or buy one. The thought of buying one does go against the grain for something so simple and the ones on evilbay looked like they either sucked, were unsafe or the drawer for the eproms would be too shallow. So I set about looking for instructions on building one. I found a link to some instructions to building one that looked quite nice http://highfields-arc.6te.net/constructors/other/epromerase.htm but I haven't seen a flashlight like the maplin one in the states for years and i wandered around a few pet stores and medical supply stores in the area and noone had the right tube anyway (i do plan on trying to find the parts to make the one in the link as it looks nicer than my "hack" but for the time being i'll use what I eventually ended up with.
Emulation (and Gaming) on the cheap
Over at hunterdavis.com Hunter has written a great post on using the dockstar as a gaming and emulation system. The dockstar is something I keep mulling on getting a few as they can be had for as little as $25 but i've not had the spare cash recently because what little disposable income i've had recently has been used to get psion organiser 2 and tandy model 10X stuff. I'm now definatly going to be saving my pennies for some dockstars (unless someone wants to send me a brace or two) though as i have a lot of emulators i use on a regular basis and i play wesnoth fairly regularly too. Even if you aren't that interested in Gaming and Emulation it's still a good article on the dockstar. the relevant post is here