Don Lancaster's Free Classic Reprints

Please note that the Guru's Lair is best used with larger display systems. Especially for our many ebooks, classic .pdf files and high detail images.

Most of these construction projects and "how to" tutorials were from the "Golden Age" of hobby electronics and mostly appeared in various issues of Electronics World, Popular Electronics, Modern Electronics, Electronics, Radio Electronics and Electronics Now.

Plus a wild assortment of many others, including links to our columns.. Additional support can be found at our home page located at www.tinaja.com or mailto:don@tinaja.com email or by calling (602) 428-4073 during sane hours.

Nearly all of these files are available as a pair of USB thumb drives as well.

Many also are found at American Radio History, along with those of many other authors found in their superb collection.

We also have a presence on Research Gate and possibly on Academia and on Wesrch.

Sourcecode for many of our files is available on a Creative Commons basis.

For SHTML, right mousing on view page source should work. For our Acrobat .PDF files, see if there is a companion file in the same directory with a .psl trailer. These use our Gonzo Utilities and this tutorial.

Gonzo can be edited as an ordinary textfile and can be sent to Acrobat Distiller by using the magic and secret Windows command line incantation of //acrodist /F.

Boy, "they" totally trashed this one! It was supposed to be an innovative dual photoflood dimmer for photographers. Cool and balanced for composition and for very long bulb life, and only briefly full during exposure. Lack of feedback made this more or less useless for power tool control.

My For Low Cost, Count on RTL paper was from the January 22, 1968 issue of Electronics magazine, pages 74-76.

All hell broke loose on this, ending up with me being permanently banned from Electronics. Seems that the photographer who did the Popular Electronics Feb 68 cover chose nearly the same layout as the photographer who did the lead photo in the Electronics story.. Leaving a strong odor of "stole the plans".

Or at least "borrow the blueprints". Neither of which was me or had much input from me. You can find the PE cover here.

Which raises the question whether hell is exothermic or endothermic. If endothermic, eventually hell freezes over. If exothermic, eventually all hell breaks loose.

My Hardware Hacker I column series started in Modern Electronics and moved to a Hardware Hacker II series in Radio Electronics. Later, the series continued as Tech Musings in the merged Electronics Now.

Long ago and far away, the term "hacking" meant "pushing the limits of technical excellence." Preferably by using elegant simplicity to leave all the supposed experts shaking their heads in stunned disbelief.

Sadly, those media epsilon minuses and several law enforcement officials stupidly trashed and subverted a once proud name. Because I got tired of calls from felon wannabes and all those men in black camped on my doorstop, I changed the column name way on back in 1995.

This is the early Radio Electronics sequence. Only some of the columns are presently available individually as shown. The rest can be found in the archives as originally B/W coded.

These were the Electronics Now continuations of the original Hardware Hacker series. All these columns were done fully camera ready by using AppleWriter and PostScript on an Apple IIe with my Gonzo Utilities!

More info on column contents appears here

These were my Resource Bin columns on "where to go to get stuff". More info on column contents appears here.

Some of the columns have been redirected to their earlier archives as shown above.

Computer Shopper columns included both Ask the Guru ( more info here ) and PostScript Secrets ( more info here ). These are provided here as full original archives rather than as individual columns.

Midnight Engineering was the original home of our Blatant Opportunist columns. More info on column contents appears here.

Sourcecode is sometimes available by using a .psl trailer. Otherwise, many of these are good candidates for our Director's Cut techniques.

The GuruGrams were the earliest of "all web" and "magazine free" of our tech columns. More info on actual column contents appears here.

Software is often available via a .psl file trailer.

Director's Cuts are my method of restoring Linotype era books and stories to beyond their formal glory. Major benefits include very compact file sizes, "perfect" typography and backgrounds, color addons, full URL linkings, removal of all hyphens, paragraph ledding, voice, phone responsiveness, and more. But it is time intensive and has a steep learning curve. More details here.

We once tried publishing collected BOD archives on various topics. These are dated, and BOD itself has largely failed. First because, the web is now overwhelmingly superior than printed text.

And secondly, because nobody, but nobody, ever properly addressed the need for economically priced home publishing shearing, jogging, and binding system solutions. Magic Lamp.

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