So many old hacks. Where are they now?

 

Blondihacks has been running for seven years now, and it’s been quite a ride. I have many, many more hacks in the pipeline right now, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to look back on a few of the older hacks and see how they’re holding up. If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you’re probably a lot like me- your life is surrounded by old hacks. Whether it’s the 3D printed MacBook Pro dock on my desk at work, the head-liner mounting bracket for my radar detector in the car, or the bar holding my dish towels to the cupboard door; everywhere you look in my life, you see a hack. Some work out better than others over time, so let’s take a trip down memory lane.

I’d like to start with what is probably my favorite hack to ever run on this site. You might think it’s Veronica, and you wouldn’t be wrong in a sense. Without a doubt Veronica is the thing I’ve built that I’m most proud of. However, my favorite hack on this site here is actually the lowly Dish-O-Tron 6000 Extreme. Why do I like it so much? Well, it’s probably the “purest” invention I’ve ever come up with. It was a relatively original idea, and I felt the solution was very clever. It’s not easy to automatically detect the state of any dishwasher entirely from within a box stuck to the front, and with no connection to the machine itself. All this was done with a couple of passives and a pair of 555 timers. I was always really pleased with this one. Where is Dish-O-Tron now? Sadly, in a box in the closet. You may recall that Blondihacks relocated a while back, and my new home has a drawer-style dishwasher. This completely defeats one of the main techniques the Dish-O-Tron uses to detect the state of the dishes (when and how long you have opened the door, based on angle). I could adapt the Dish-O-Tron to this using some other door activity detection method, but the new dishwasher has its own built in mechanism for what DoT does, so it hasn’t been worthwhile.

 

 

Next up is a recurring guest here on the site, my elliptical cardio machine. It’s been featured many times, and I’m happy to report it is doing very well. I continue to exercise on it every day. And by “every day”, I mean “three times a week”. And by “three times a week”, I mean “when I can drag myself out of bed in time before work”. Let’s just leave it at that.

 

 

The steel Elliptifeet are holding up brilliantly. Because of course they are- they’re freaking steel, and so overbuilt that when the apocalypse comes, all that will be left of my house is those feet sitting on a pile of burning rubble. The rollers have had some iteration since the last post on the subject. I replaced the two-piece factory bushings with a single one made of tubing. The two-piece bushings weren’t holding up under the lateral stress of two separate wheels (in place of the one-piece factory U-roller). I also added a big fender washer to the outside, which helps the wheels track better. I have to say though, the made-for-stair-bashing extreme roller-blade wheels are holding up incredibly well.

Meanwhile, at the top of the machine, the hacked-together power supply has held up incredibly well. It’s been in continuous service for five years now, and has never given me the slightest trouble. Considering the rate at which this machine used to go through expensive C batteries, this hack was one of the best I’ve ever done in my home in terms of quality of life improvement. Why this machine wasn’t mains-powered to begin with, we may never know. It’s a much better product when plugged into the wall, though.

 

 

All of these improvements have made the cardio machine so much more pleasant to use that I find myself using it more often. That’s a good thing, because being in good physical condition is helpful for catching runaway koala bears. Those things can really run! You have no idea.

Next up is Johnny, another regular on the site. He’s had many repairs done since becoming a citizen of Dunki Freehold, and for the most part has held up very well. Unfortunately, I don’t think I chose my lubricants wisely when I rebuilt his robotic arm. It worked very well post-rebuild, but not for very long. The consumable X-nut has worn out again, and the glove is offline as of this writing. The X-nut is designed to last for a couple of years in a heavy-use commercial environment, so the fact that it wore out after only a few hundred games in my home means I probably used the wrong grease on the threaded rods. I have more parts, so we will rebuild him once again!

 

 

Speaking of Johnny, remember the battery relocation project? In case you doubt the value of getting batteries away from PCBs, here’s the state I found my desktop mouse in this morning:

 

Sometimes the simplest hacks are the most satisfying. A while back I replaced the piece of go-shi that was the light switch on my magnifier. The factory switch lasted approximately eight seconds, but my replacement has provided trouble-free service for two years of heavy use (so far!). I still use it at least a couple of times a week.

 

 

Not all hacks work out so well. After a few attempts to get my vacuum former working, I threw it back on the junk pile from whence it came. Really, these things aren’t hard to build, if you have a heat source, or are willing to fill your kitchen with probably-poisonous fumes. I don’t make enough types of things that would benefit from a machine like this, so I’ll find another use for those materials.

 

 

Okay, okay- you’re all asking: “What about Veronica?!”. I know that project is the main reason many of you frequent this site, based on the email I get. Rest assured, Veronica is alive and well. She currently lives as decoration in my living room, but gets pressed into service on occasion.

 

 

I have a particularly cool project in the pipeline for Veronica, so stay tuned for that. She’s far from gone from the pages of this blog.

 

The next item is one that I bet most readers won’t see coming. It’s the repair of my salad spinner. The comments on that post were probably the most negative I have received, honestly, and I suspect most readers skip over it as an uninteresting project. However, there is something imminently google-able about it, because it draws more email questions and thanks from non-readers than any other post by a large margin. Seriously! There is a world of people out there who own that salad spinner, have had it break, and are grateful that some nutty chick took it apart to show the world how to fix it. I would not have guessed it, but it goes to show that the internet is a big place, and not everyone appreciates the same kinds of things.

 

 

Over next to Johnny sits my MAME cabinet, which I call the Blondicade. This thing has continued to perform flawlessly through many parties and many Saturdays wasted trying to finish Moon Patrol. It’s a crowd pleaser when guests come over, no question. I’ve been very happy indeed with how it turned out.

 

 

Another recurring guest here is my relatively recently acquired Apple IIc Plus. It has had many projects done with it, and some have been more successful than others. The gamepad and ROM update have been raging successes. I continue to use the gamepad for most of my 1MHz gaming, and I offered up the ROM modification to many thankful folks at KansasFest this year. It’s not all tortoise-shell kittens and homemade ice-cream, though. The much-anticipated Teddy Top has actually been kind of a bust. It seemed great for a little while, but the hinge mechanism hasn’t held up, and I had to stop using it. I plan to revisit this at some point and come up with a stronger design. We have some exciting new tools here in Blondihacks Labs (more on that soon), so my options are much better for solving this problem now.

 

 

 

That’s the broad strokes. Anything else you’re wondering about? Drop me a line in the comments. The bird house still has nobody living in it, feathered or otherwise. I may need to put some bedding and seeds in there to make it more hospitable. It continues to rust nicely though, and would make Furiosa very proud. The toothbrush that started this whole site is no more, I’m afraid. After being brought back to life in a second repair, it died shortly thereafter and would no longer charge properly. Something in the charging circuit started killing every battery it touched, the problems are pretty fundamental. I needed something smaller for travel anyway, so it got upgraded (blasphemous for Blondihacks, I know). Mr. T. In a Box was subjected to one-too-many paint-swapping incidents in a 24 Hours of Lemons race, and is no longer among us. The Race Clock, on the other hand, lives on, but in a reduced form. The ignition circuit it relied on for automatic resetting was removed from the race car, so it’s now just a big clock. Still useful, but a shadow of its former glory. The Bread Head, HexOut, and Juice Bridge still get used in every electronics project I do. That’s amazing for the latter in particular, because it has the first PCB I ever etched, and it’s absolutely dreadful. Frankly amazing that it works at all. My salvaged amplifier with the extremely sketchy origin story lives on, as does my cushioned bed frame. The latter had some zip-ties added recently. Never stop iterating!

 

I could go on all day, but you get the idea. Hacking is a way of looking at the world. It’s a belief that you can control your environment, and a passionate dedication to the idea that everything can be made worse with enough effort.

 

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