On 03/12/2017 I attempted to read a magnetic card strip using iron oxdie (FeO) powder created by decomposing steel wool with a blowtorch.

On advice from a friend, I ended up buying a Swticher V2 to connect to an immersion heater and replace the analog timer with a more modern digital one, which contains features such as timer mode, scheduler and power consumption calculator.

For far to long I have wanted to make PCBs at home. Even though there are many cheap PCB manufacturing plants in china, it takes time for the order to complete, and without paying an extra 20$ for expedited shipping (which can be 10 times the cost of the PCB), it takes weeks to arrive in the mail.

In one of my draws, I have a bunch of old HDDs from over the years, I was looking for a file related to an ond project I had created back in 2009, when I realized that old my older HDDs have an IDE/PATA interface and I will not be able to read them with my SATA adaptor.

In the previous part of this project I found that it is possible to boot a custom image on DigitalOcean droplets by writing a new MBR to the disk and the corresponding files.

A while back I signed up to DigitalOcean and setup a droplet (DO speak for VPS) and was happy to have a service that will allow me to deploy Linux test machines in a matter of seconds.