Sunday, November 30, 2008

Getting back the Sent to desktop as a shortcut

I am obsessive about cleaning up stuff on a computer - the one in the shop lost it's send to desiktop as a shortcut link missing and I found this: here
geekgirl.tip: Missing Send To…Desktop as Shortcut
If you can't find the Send To...Desktop as Shortcut option on your Send To menu or if you accidentally delete its shortcut from the SendTo folder, here's how to get it back:
  1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the SendTo folder.
  2. Right-click in an empty space in the SendTo folder and select New, Text Document from the pop-up menu.
  3. Name the newly created text document:
    Desktop as Shortcut.DESKLINK
    and press Enter.
  4. You'll be warned that changing the file's extension may render the file unusable. Click Yes to change it anyway.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Electronics hobby – the wonder of it all

I started down this path a very long time ago and on the way – 

  • Watching lights blink and buzzers buzz with a battery and a couple of wires was endlessly fascinating ...
  • The wonder of the first crystal radio.
  • The new Popular Electronics showing up each month ...
  • Off to college studying for an EE
  • Building a square root generator with discreet components (transistors for the uninitiated) 
  • Learning how to properly bias a pentode
  • Never having to study much for the first 3 quarters – most of it (except the math) I had sitting in a junk box at home – well that isn't exactly true – I didn't have any 100 horsepower motors in the basement...
  • A newly minted engineer– differential and integral calculus – transient waveform analysis dancing in my head. The telephone company bringing me down to earth rather rudely – just miles and miles of wire strung on poles. With the odd repeater or load box .... terminally boring.
  • Photography At home – building a home densitometer - trying to keep logarithmic circuits stable and calibrated in a cold and damp basement – the fun was endless..
  • The first DIY digital clock
  • Making the densitometer digital....
  • The smell of exploding 150,000mfd capacitors, hot acid, overheated insulation, ozone from 150,000 30,000 volts...
  • Headaches from watching the strobe light too much...
  • Numbers from the past .159 ,12BA6, 2n3055, 741, 723, 555 (now there was a part)...
  • Marriage/children keeping me upstairs too much – the solder oxidizing and the iron rusting over time, that is until they personal computer was published as a kit. building two and a half of them – ahhhhh 8k of memory and toggle switches on a front panel... 
  • Mourning the passing of Southwest Technical Products...
  • The Radio Shack Model 1 and the Apple 2e – Opening the box full of Model 1... 
  • Lots of pixels bouncing around on the screen and endless hours with the adventure series (on tape mind you)...
  • Modems and Running a BBS - 

Fast forward to recent times...

Owning 7 or 8 functional computers – and scads of whale bones... Multiple monitors and flat screens, A home network that fills a full Visio page. All the software known to mankind loaded on terabytes of storage... Coding and Solving immense enterprise software issues daily...

What am I doing for wonder? I'm down  in the basement – melting solder, playing with 'Duinos, making LEDs blink and motors whir, and having the time of my life...