Sunday, March 14, 2021
          
          	I have spent the bulk of my free time during the past week 
          taking care of things around home - mostly cleaning, although I 
          have also prepared the garden beds for spring planting. My 
          projects in the home lab have all taken a bit of a back seat, 
          which is fine because I feel I have hit a sort of 'writer's 
          block' in regards to them. Although I have plenty of spare parts 
          and extra components laying around, I feel that building another 
          machine using what I have on hand right now would just be like 
          building one of my existing machines again, and I can't think of 
          anything interesting I could do with a duplicate of one of my 
          machines that I couldn't do instead on the original. With that 
          thought in mind, I have concluded that now is the time for me to 
          learn how to solder electronics.
          
          	Considering the type of 'disaster computing' I like to 
          engage in, people always seem surprised when they learn that I do 
          very little actual repair work on the machines I come across - my 
          home lab is made up almost entirely of salvaged office machines, 
          so the parts that make them up are never terribly noteworthy and 
          it is easy to find replacement parts in the remains of other dead 
          office machines. This practice has limited the kind of hardware I 
          have access to however, since finding something like a Z80 or a 
          68K-based machine in the wild, in operable condition, at an 
          accessible price is basically impossible. Even older x86 hardware 
          has been hard for me to acquire - my Vectra desktops, as much as 
          I love them, are not exactly very versatile and everything about 
          my 486 tower has cost me through the nose. In addition to 
          lowering the cost of entry into other vintage hardware, getting 
          some solder chops means I could start making my own stuff out of 
          the piles of kits that have been coming out more and more lately. 
          I still have a line on damaged and defective video game consoles 
          as well - maybe I could learn to turn that into a source of 
          income.
          
          	I have been kicking the idea around in my head for far too 
          long, literal years at this point, only to be cowed by the 
          initial expense. I caught myself about to spend a couple hundred 
          dollars on a Tandy the other day and finally decided that enough 
          was enough. I sent off for some soldering kit late last night, 
          hopefully to arrive near the middle of this week. I have a few 
          project ideas lined up already - after I get comfortable with the 
          little practice alarm thing I have coming, I have a Sound Blaster 
          Gold 5.1 I have been wanting to get fixed for quite a while now, 
          as well as a 486 motherboard I ordered from Ukraine years ago but 
          was rendered inoperable in transit. After that, the sky is the 
          limit - dead computers, power supplies, keyboards, maybe even 
          other stuff like monitors and audio equipment. The more I think 
          about it, the more I wish I had had the opportunity to learn this 
          type of stuff years ago. So many missed opportunities!
          
          -Prokyonid