Over time I have ended up with a couple of customisable Tipro MID keyboards without the custom lead to connect them to a PS2 port. These leads are no longer available for sale so I decided to figure out the pinouts. This is a quick summery of that work.

As the keyboards have a pass-though port for other PS2 devices and were unlikely to have a common ground and 5V line I could use a multimeter to check what was the “Gnd” and “Vcc” easily. This worked and I had those figured out after a few minutes.

Now I had the power sorted I just had the clock and the data pins to figure out. I realised that there were only 30 possible combinations and the keyboard were already programmed so would behave like, well, a keyboard when a button was pressed. Rather than mess bout I decided to just try all combinations and to wee what one worked. There was a remote change this could damage the hardware but that was very very unlikely and I had little to loose. As luck would have it it worked on the 3rd attempt.

So now we have the results. The layout is not dissimilar to that of a a PS2 connector albeit mirrored. Hopefully this will be of use to at least someone and save some hardware from the skip.

My next challenge is to reconfigure them. The configuration utilities (MIDWIN and MIDDOS) are still available from the Tipro drivers archive although it is recommended you use Windows 95, 98 or 2000. Wish me luck.

This is a question that I ask myself a lot and keep having to look up almost every time. Sometimes I am not certain what distribution I am actually using. Here is the summery version that hopefully will save me having to look the command up each time, and perhaps help you as well.

To find out all the version information about the Linux kernel you are running run the command…

uname --all

To find out the OS release (such as the Ubuntu version) have a look in the os-release file…

more /etc/os-release

…and on most systems you can look at that same information neatly formatted using…

lsb_release

As part of my ZX Keyboard project I wanted to run a Spectrum emulator in full screen on the Raspberry Pi.

The good news is the Spectrum emulator Fuse has already been ported to the Raspberry Pi and is easy to install if you are using Raspbian. The bad nest is that all the guides I found were to install the “GTK” version that runs under X windows, and I wanted to run in full screen on an old CRT TV. To install the Fuse “SDL” version (that will run in full screen from the command lane) just log in and from the command line run the following command…

sudo apt-get install fuse-emulator-common fuse-emulator-sdl fuse-emulator-utils spectrum-roms

Next we should make it start in full screen. From the console type in “fuse-sdl” and the emulator will start. Next press F1 (yes, sorry, the ZX keyboard does not have an F1 key so you will need to use another keyboard for now), select “Options”, and “Full Screen”. To make this the default press F1 and select “Options” again, then select “Save”. To exit use the F10 key.

Now I think we will need a good old game to play. The best place to look for Spectrum games that are distributed legally is at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ . The simple way to load a game using the ZX Keyboard is from the command line. For example we can load Manic Miner (assuming we downloaded the game and extracted it to the working directory) with the following command.

fuse-sdl –tape “Manic Miner.tzx”

Annoyingly I have come across one problem with Fuse and the ZX Keyboard. Fuse maps each key to a Spectrum key, letter to letter, number to number, shift becomes Caps Shift, and Ctrl become Symbol Shift. All other keys are ignored. This is a problem as we are interpreting and translating the symbols already. For example the Symbol Shift P as a double quote (a shifted 2), but the emulator treats this as the Caps Lock being pressed. We could make the ZX Keyboard work flawlessly by turning off our translation, but we would lose compatibility with PC software. I might look at building in a way to changing modes but we will have to cope with this for now.

Recently this blog has been the target of a silly amount of spam comments and I am having trouble keeping it up because of that, so I have disabled comments for now.

4 years ago my blog received about 200 spam comments a month caused me to install Akismet. The spam continued to increase slowly until it got to an average of 2,000 comments a month. Even with this number Akismet was doing a good job and blocking almost all of it, leaving just a handful of comments for me to moderate manually.

Annoyingly things have rocketed now and last month I received 68,897 spam comments. That is around 90 spam comments every hour. This I could still cope with easily, but they tend to come in short waves and I am having trouble keeping my site responsive when that happens. If you have experienced an unexpected wait for up to 20 seconds and them the site just works again, then this is why. Ironically it is using Akismet that is causing the delay, but not using something like this would be clearly be impractical.

The truth be told I do not blog as much as I did, and that most people interact with my blog externally on Twitter and Facebook instead of the comments, so I have just disabled all comments for now. I am considering using nginx instead of Apache to better cope with this kind of traffic, or using a service such as Cloud Flare, but for now I hope disabling comments will keep the site fully responsive all the time.

Update: I am experimenting with some WordPress plugins to block some bot nets before Akismet is called. Fingers crossed this will reduce the spam to a level that my server and Akismet can cope with again. Very few users should be blocked in error but if they are then they can click back, wait a minute, and try again.