Old Book Teardown #10: Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design (1973) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Component Wrangler

In this video I take a look at Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design by Fredrick J. Hill and Gerald R. Peterson published in 1973:

Here is the laundry list of links to things which came up during this video, including a few duplicates:

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Rigol PLA2216 Compatible Logic ProbeThis is an image of the product.notes

Let’s go shopping!

JMP001 Symbol Keyboard now on Debian Linux

Thanks to my mate @edk from IRC I learned of the compose key. I configured my KDE Plasma desktop to use Right Alt as my compose key in System Settings -> Input Devices -> Keyboard -> Advanced. Then I updated the firmware and deployed a .XCompose file that I generated, and now I have a symbol keyboard on my Debian Linux workstation!

Subversion @ GitHub

I wanted to use Subversion to checkout one of my GitHub repo branches, because an svn checkout only downloads the files it needs, not a full copy of every file ever added. But I discovered that GitHub sunset Subversion integration earlier this year. Sad face. Still, I suppose the economics justify that decision. As a consequence of my research, which was a bit sketchy because there is still heaps of documentation out there referring to the GitHub features which no longer exist, I did happen to learn about:

Kubuntu 24.04

I want to install some software to check it out (MySQL and MySQL Workbench) but I’m having trouble making it work on Debian. So I decided to spin up an Ubuntu instance for this job. I picked Kubuntu 24.04 (Ubuntu with KDE Plasma desktop) and this is my first go at using Ubuntu 24.04. Figured I should document the installation experience, which I have done here.

Getting info about recent core dump (on Debian)

This is a note for Future John about how to report a recent coredump (with debugging symbols) on Debian:

DEBUGINFOD_URLS="https://debuginfod.debian.net" coredumpctl gdb

Then bt is a magical gdb command to run to give you the call stack of the thread which… failed?

Disable HTTP gzip compression in W3 Total Cache

This is a note for Future John.

I recently installed W3 Total Cache for WordPress for my blog.

Then I started having this weird problem where sometimes when I loaded the blog home page I would see binary garbage rendered as text in my browser. I think the problem was either that the Content-Type header was being set incorrectly or that the data was being double gzipped.

On the second assumption I found this setting:

W3 Total Cache > General Settings > Browser Cache > Enable HTTP (gzip) compression.

I disabled HTTP (gzip) compression and now my page seems to be working correctly again. But I will need to keep an eye on it. If you have a problem accessing my blog, please let me know!

New WordPress plugins for the blog

I have been rolling out CloudFront for a few of my domains, including blog.jj5.net.

In order to integrate CloudFront with WordPress I used the W3 Total Cache plugin.

And in order to set the <link rel=”canonical”> element I used the Yoast SEO plugin.

At one point I had a problem with garbled content in my browser. Looked like the browser was trying to display compressed content as text. But now I can’t reproduce, so hopefully whatever the issue was it is now fixed…