Bread Machine Action

Yesterday I loaded ingredients into my bread-making machine, and then about 3 and 1/2 hours later - BREAD!




Hey, I geek like me will make bread using a microprocessor-controlled gadget like this. After all, we don't live on bread alone.








Bread flour mix, yeast, and water. Simple & easy. This is an Italian herb bread mix.

















First, water is put in at around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. That's around 27 degrees Celsius I believe. Second, bread flour mix on top of the water. Third, yeast on top of bread flour mix.


Then just start the engine.







This loaf came out great - filled up almost the whole chamber. Crusty on the outside, soft & delicious on the inside.
















DEEEE-LISH!!!




This was great. More bread machine mixes will follow. Plus I've found some websites with bread machine recipes.

Old Computer Motherboards

Today is Friday the 13th, and this is my 113th post.

What a coincidence. I'm feeling lucky. Strange how this blog always puts a time stamp on my posts that is west coast time, but I'm on the east coast and my PC is set to the correct time & time zone.







I have a couple old computer motherboards that have some cool chips on them. They seem to be Intel 286-based boards and they each have a 287 math co-processor on them

They do not have the main 286 CPUs, apparently they were stripped, along with the ROM chips on one board.



















The 287-3 co-processor has a nice bit of information at http://www.cpu-museum.com/ and I've even seen this and similar chips on e-bay.















Here's how RAM looked in the old days. These 2 boards have what they called 'piggy-backed' chips, since there was one chip soldered right on top of another.

It amazes me how much information you can find on the internet about old computer technology that hardly anyone has anymore.

Geek Project: Microprocessor Trainer

Here's a hobby electronics/computers education kit that I bought a couple years ago at a yard sale for $1.

It's a Science Fair kit that you wire up according to the instructions. It teaches how to understand and use commands for a little microprocessor that has some pre-programmed ROM in it. It has a small amount of RAM memory for coding in your own shtuff.

Allegedly, this microprocessor is a close relative of the ones that powered Speak-N-Spell children's toys.

This picture came out

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It's a list of the commands that the microprocessor 'knows' you could say. It's quite complicated even to do simple things like adding numbers together.

Here are a couple pages from the text.

Daunting.

So far I understand how to take some data and add it to a register, and also how to display the contents.

This is a video of the program for a countdown timer. On the left you can see how many minutes are left in the countdown with the 3 left-most LEDs, in binary numbers, and then the next 4 show the tens column for the remaining seconds, in binary, and the digit on the right shows the ones column for remaining seconds.

Now give yourself 1,000 Geek Points if you can read binary coded numbers!

Wordless Thursday

Today is a Wordless Thursday.

Enjoy.