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Child's Desk Becomes Mission Control Panel

posted by LaminatorX on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the New-Amateur-Scientist-Awakens dept.

Barrabas writes:

"From Hackaday:

Jeff Highsmith's son just started school and needed a desk to do homework on. They had recently visited the Kennedy Space Center, and his son found a new interest in all things space, so Jeff make the desk into this mind-boggling control panel.

The video demonstrating the project is quite impressive check it out."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by kebes on Monday March 03 2014, @01:28PM

    by kebes (1505) on Monday March 03 2014, @01:28PM (#10125)
    Well there were of course multiple incidents...

    The one I was thinking of was when I was trying to get a video game running on the computer. This was in the DOS/Win3.1 days, and I was modifying AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and IRQ settings all over the place, without really understanding what I was doing. Needless to say, I got the system into a state where it wasn't booting, and was just spewing errors. I believe I figured out how to boot from a floppy, reverted the boot files to some defaults, and eventually got the boot settings back to something more normal (so that the programs others cared about would run). In the end, the fixes were trivial, but at the time I was freaking out (since my dad would use the computer to do all his financial work). It certainly taught me the importance of taking notes while fiddling with a system you care about...

    I remember another time (when I was a bit older but still not old enough, apparently), I had saved up my money to buy an extra stick of RAM. But I bent the contacts when I tried installing it. The store wouldn't take it back, of course... so I spent a long time trying to bend it back into shape and push it into the slot without bending it worse. Amazingly, I got it working.

    So many mistakes. So many learning experiences.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 1) by zaxus on Monday March 03 2014, @10:35PM

    by zaxus (3455) on Monday March 03 2014, @10:35PM (#10402)

    Nice! I also have many hardware horror stories, bent pins and broken DIMMS (and SIMMS!) and what not. However, the most embarrassing one is my dad (who was an IBMer and worked with PCs all day long) and I were taking apart a working 386, and I think changing the RAM, which due to the case and the installed cards basically meant disassembling it. So we had parts all over the kitchen table, got the RAM swapped out, and dutifully put it all back together, with no parts left over. We hit the power button...and nothing happens (natch). So we open it back up, check all of our connections, close it back up, and hit it again. Nothing. We're both sitting there scratching our heads, and my mom walks by and says, "is it plugged in?" Yep, you guessed it. The two brain surgeons had unplugged it for safety, and then forgotten to plug it in. Doh!