Completely agree with this. It's very odd that the eBay algorithm has a hard stop, as it directly discourages the price from rising when the bidding is hottest, and is absolutely susceptible to sniping.
It's a shame Zilog stopped making Z80s. Presumably this means you can't make one of these from new components any more. Perhaps someone could create a new iteration of the same idea.
The Z80 instruction set lives on via the eZ80, Z180 and others which are binary compatible with the original Z80 instruction set. Unfortunately Zilog stopped making the 40 pin DIP package a couple years ago so yeah this specific board will be hard to source. You can still find them on gray market, mostly ones that have been desoldered from existing boards.
Even if you made a version of this board with the footprint changed to the QFP eZ80, it probably wouldn't work because the eZ80 has different memory mapping and clocking differences.
The Z180 has however had its PLCC packages discontinued. Personally, I find SMD CPUs to not be appealing for these sorts of projects, even if the Z180 is a great chip.
The 80's/90's VeriFone Tranz 330 credit card terminal, which has a complete Z80 computer inside with DART, CTC and PIO chips, 32K RAM, and a socketed EPROM.
The Cidco Mailstation, which has a Z80, sizable monochrome LCD, and full-ish size keyboard, perfect to hack into a TRS-80 Model 100 style laptop.
Luckily so many were made, they will be around for a while yet. For years now you've been able to buy (recycled?) ones on Ebay or Aliexpress, and at a price much cheaper than the new ones sold for.
It will probably be a decade or longer until those sources start to dry up, but even at that the Z80 will never become as rare as say, a SID chip.
I know in Europe we have the GDPR regulations and in theory you can get bad information corrected but in practice you still need to know that someone is holding it to take action.
Then there's laundering of data between brokers.
One broker might acquire data via dubious and then transfer that to another. In some jurisdictions once that happens the second company can do what they like with it without having to worry about the original source.
I am also curious to know wether a domain name still confers a solid advantage. Now that so many people use social networks like Instagram, does (the SEO or domain name, etc. of) your website remain a critical part of the process?
Actually the SEO plays an important role in some areas, for sure.
I'm a parent of four, and the family controls on Android, paired with sensible oversight of laptop use at home, are perfectly sufficient. We've enabled WhatsApp, but check it every so often for the younger ones; they have a timeout, can use Wikipedia, and have a time limit on their use of AI. They can't use the stupid services like Tiktok.
> 8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
This can absolutely be made to work very well. When Josh Long did this at Goto, it was an absolute masterclass. He used timed zooms to almost turn it into comedy. The rehearsal involved must have been considerable.
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