[Dr. Gough] bought a generic USB 3.0 hub on an Asian website. Surely, USB 3 is mature enough that even the cheapest hub will have some IC in it that will work well, right? You’d think so, but a little exploratory surgery showed that the only thing about this hub that was USB 3 were the blue port connectors.

We have a few problem USB hubs ourselves, so it might be worth doing this to any you have lying around. The first clue: most of the connectors on the PCB only have four pins. On closer examination, the hub appears to be a USB 3.0 extension cable with a USB 2.0 hub made from two HS8836A chips.

Not only are these USB 2-only, but all the ports on an HS8836A also share the same USB 1.1 bandwidth. Some hubs can provide multiple ports full 1.1 bandwidth, using the higher-speed USB protocol to the PC as a backhaul.

There were quite a few other issues. Missing solder, cables soldered to the board directly, and no bypass capacitors. The per-port switches cut off USB power, but that wouldn’t stop a device with its own power from connecting. The hub has a barrel jack for power, but it would feed back to the PC, which is bad practice at best.

If you use Linux, try lsusb -t and look at the negotiated speed for your hubs. If they aren’t what you expect, it could be a cable issue, or it could just be that you also have a cheap USB hub. Don’t be surprised if your USB 3 hub shows both a USB 3 and a USB 2 hub; that’s common. But if you only see the USB 2 hub, something is amiss, or someone’s lying.

You can learn a lot about USB 3 reading Hackaday.

Ceefax was the BBC’s broadcast teletext service that ran until 2012, providing text and rudimentary graphics that were broadcast invisibly with the TV signal. In order to get this teletext data merged into the analog TV signal, special equipment was needed, of which [Nathan Dane] has a 1997-era unit on his bench to take a gander at.

Interestingly, until this time the Ceefax signal had been generated centrally in London, meaning that regional TV broadcasts might have Ceefax issues on occasion due to retransmission glitches. This makes this Ceefax Inserter  system so much more interesting, as it was one of the early examples of what these regional stations would end up installing in their racks.

At their core these units are regular PCs, running MS-DOS 6.22 on a 486-class CPU and all the typical bits and bobs that go with a PC. The speculation here is that these are essentially rebranded industrial PCs, which would make a lot of sense. As for how [Nathan] got his hands on these units, it required a deal with the company scrapping them, preventing him from showing details of the software configuration.

Following a booting demonstration, we get the teardown of a typical 1990s rackmount PC, revealing a rather interesting backplane with the mainboard being one of the cards on it. Of these, two ISA cards provide the special Ceefax sauce as well as a timing signal in the form of a PDC card featuring a Lattice CPLD or FPGA that VCRs could use to automatically start recording.

The Ceefax main event comes in the form of the inSERT Teletext Encoder card. This is pretty much its own computer system, featuring a TI TMS34010 CPU and its own RAM as well as IO. Compared to modern takes on teletext generators, this card appears to directly mix the analog signals, without any kind of conversion.

Although teletext systems have been largely shutdown now at this point due to the transition to digital TV broadcasting, there’s still a lot to be said for having such a service available for basic news and information.