A Not So Retro Electric Vehicle
We recently moved to Hawaii from Okinawa, in an pandemic, with a dog. That’s crazy you may say, and you’d be right! Our work was having none of it and we had to move. I drove a regular Prius before…
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Sunbeam Coffee Master C30 Model B (c30B)
Like most of the rest of the world, here at RFE HQ we are spending a little more time at home due to the threat of COVID-19. This has given me some time to take a few photos and videos,…
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My Predictions for 2030 from 2020
It’s the start of new decade by most peoples figuring. What will the 20’s bring? Besides way too many references to 100 years ago and the roaring twenties. Here are my personal predictions for 2030 on a few tech trends….
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Fusion drive with internal & USB SSD on 2019 27″ iMac i9
Intro UPDATE 1 July 2020: So after about 6 months with this setup I can’t recommend it. There were a lot of little strange errors. I ended up to buy the ifixit imac opening kit, put in a 4TB SSD…
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Decorating you Mac desktop for Christmas in Catalina
It’s Christmastime 2019 and I want to decorate up my Mac and Linus machines with a little Christmas cheer. Computer desktops haven’t been around all that long, but back in the 90’s there were a lot of desktop customizations for…
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Receiving Slow Scan Tele-Vision (SSTV) from the International Space Station (ISS)
Introduction The ISS is humankind’s only (current) permanent home in space. Many of the engineers and astronauts that live and work on and with the ISS are into all sort of geeky hobbies, including Amateur (Ham) Radio. As such there…
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2019 iMac with Intel 9th generation i9 and Vega 48 graphics vs 2013 iMac 5k with 3.5Ghz i5
Here at retrofuture HQ we’ve been using a trusty 27” iMac for over 5 years. This is the longest I’ve ever used a single computer as my “main” computer, but as desktop advances have slowed it hasn’t made sense to…
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This is a sub article from my main Lionel raspberry pi controller project. The switches I have were originally purchased for my father in the 1950s. They have been carelessly stored in attics, a rain forest, and garages for the…
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Managed vs Unmanged ethernet Switches
About 2 years ago I started running out of ports on my 8 port switch fairly regularly. It has connections for my main desktop computer, a hookup to the downstairs switch, phillips hue hub, ooma VoIP service, and any number…
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Power Line Networking, a lot better than 10 years ago!
Here at RFE central, we live in a 2,000 SqFt (185SqM) house made from steel reinforced concrete. It’s not the friendliest to Wi-Fi, and darn near impossible (especially as a rental) to run Ethernet cables everywhere we’d like. We had…
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HP 48GX vs HP Prime Graphing Calculators
Engineers love their tools, in the 60’s an engineer may love a slide-rule, the 70s to 80s a PC or perhaps an LED calculator, to most engineers of my era (college in the early 90’s) the graphing calculator is the…
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A retro 1950’s kodachrome Flashback
I came across this great site recently and it has a spectacular collection of vacation photos from the 1950’s shot on Kodak’s Kodachrome. Not exactly retro future, but maybe just retro. A lot were taken of Florida’s space coast around…
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Magic Mirror
For a long time I’ve wanted to make a information station for the house. I had a Sony Dash Clock that filled most of these needs, but the servers for it are gone forever as of July 2017. This points…
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SSH compression levels, Raspberry Pi, Pine64, and iMac
Most of us are well versed in SSH, used for general terminal access, port forwarding, inter-computer communication and more. SSH supports compression, but the man page has had this line in it as long as I can recall (at least…
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Buckminster Fuller, the king of Retro-Future
Buckminster Fuller, the undisputed king of retro-future architecture. We can only imagine what the world would have been like if not for the depression and WW2 stoping his dreams. Probably we would all live in Bucky-balls and long for square…
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Reading old books is talking with the dead
Here are RFE, we also like all things Retro, even if they aren’t about the future or electronics. Today this book arrived in the RFE mailbox: The Complete Barbecue Book by John and Marie Roberson. (Available from Amazon for US$4…
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Pine64 wood case arrives
I ordered this cool pine64 case from Amazon for $15, almost the cost of the computer itself! It went together easily, came with all the hardware and spacers needed. And it looks pretty cool. Here are the pics! The last one…
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