What's on those old disks?
If you found yourself staring at a pile of Commodore disks you had stored a while back in your basement/attic/garage and forgotten about, then you might also be asking yourself the question: "How do I get the contents transferred over to a PC so that I can have a look at my old games and programs, some of which I wrote myself?".
A number of solutions certainly exist that can be used for that purpose, but here I shall present my own answer to the above question: the IECHost hardware. Based on an inexpensive circuit board provided by the Arduino community and matched up by its GUI client program running under Windows (XP, 7, 8, or 10) or Linux (e.g. Ubuntu), IECHost can scan through and backup a whole 5'1/4" Commodore disk in about 22 seconds, taking advantage of the ubiquitous USB connection to a PC.
IECHost is currently being developed further in order to add even more features and was designed from the ground up after I got fascinated (and a bit obsessed) by Commodore's Disk Operating System as described in the book Inside Commodore DOS.