This time we’re look­ing at a Beatles clas­sic for our cart­ridge com­par­is­on. Penny Lane from the Cana­dian press­ing of 1967 — 1970. Which will sound bet­ter?Read More »

Two cart­ridges. One vin­tage, the oth­er new. Which sounds ‘bet­ter’? What is bet­ter? I get to play with charts and audio stuff, and play cool tunes to You­Tube! What’s not to like. And maybe we find out a bit more about these two cart­ridges.Read More »

Five minutes with a wire and some cre­at­ive bend­ing…Read More »

Just a quick post to cap­ture the first play­back of the Franken­stein Cart­ridge.Read More »

At the begin­ning of Novem­ber 2023, PLEX enabled some new fea­tures that have turned out to be a bit of a PR and Pri­vacy night­mare. Basic­ally, they’ve star­ted email­ing all mem­bers of a PLEX serv­er with the recent view­ing habits of oth­er mem­bers of that serv­er. Even if the mem­bers don’t know each oth­er, PLEX […]Read More »

A din­ner party and a movie review. The fam­ous Bel­gian detect­ive and friends dis­cuss Knives Out.Read More »

Updat­ing my slowly-evolving ana­log audio pro­ject wherein I under­take to rebuild/recover my enjoy­ment of observing the phe­nomonon cre­ated when a tiny dia­mond rides mer­rily through a vinyl groove, delightedly vibrat­ing, pro­du­cing a minus­cule elec­tric­al cur­rent that even­tu­ally (through amp­li­fic­a­tion magic) becomes the sweet sound that we call ana­log music. The pro­ject makes pro­gress and it’s revealed that young­er-me was a bone­head. #Vinyl #Vin­tage #TurnTables #Audi­o­phile #FakeAl­bum­Cov­ersRead More »

An old turntable, a new cart­ridge, and a list of awe­some albums to pick up. What’s not to like!Read More »

Short post to just doc­u­ment the prompt I use with Chat­G­PT. It works ok, for short flights. For some reas­on, Chat­G­PT seems to stall out if the flight­plan has more than five or six user way­po­ints, in addi­tion to the depar­ture and des­tin­a­tion way­po­ints. I should prob­ably look at optim­iz­ing this prompt, it’s a bit long 🙂Read More »

An AI chat­bot leads me on a cod­ing adven­ture that ulti­mately ends up ignor­ing all the work the AI did in the first place.Read More »

Ship­ping some­thing a fair dis­tance? Pack it well or use a pack­ing ser­vice. I learned a les­son the hard way.Read More »

Bob tries out a new plane on a short cross-coun­try mid-winter flight into the Rock­ies. Things go wrong, but Bob pre­vails.Read More »

Some steps to adding a new boot drive to an exist­ing Win­dows 10 sys­tem.Read More »

Part four already? Memory — that thing where the more you’ve got, the bet­ter things are for your com­puter? Yeah, that stuff. We’ll be upgrad­ing this vin­tage com­puter using a bit more mod­ern tech to get it up to a whop­ping 16K. Oh, and there’s a bit of gold in this story too…Read More »

The Mood Mosa­ic albums are a series of com­pil­a­tion albums that fea­ture a col­lec­tion of eclect­ic and diverse music from vari­ous genres and eras, often arranged around a cent­ral theme or mood. The first album in the series, titled “The Mood Mosa­ic — A Touch of Vel­vet, A Sting of Brass”, was released in 1996 […]Read More »

Pre­cau­tions have been imple­men­ted to ensure safe space launches amidst the grow­ing threat of space debris. These meas­ures include advanced detec­tion and avoid­ance tech­no­logy, enhanced launch vehicle design, pre­cise launch win­dows, orbit­al cleanup, and emer­gency pro­to­cols. By imple­ment­ing these meas­ures, we can mit­ig­ate the risks asso­ci­ated with the Kessler Syn­drome and pro­tect valu­able assets in orbit.Read More »

Last­Pass suffered a secur­ity breach, but there’s been no activ­ity since Octo­ber 2022. The com­pany has enhanced secur­ity meas­ures, and we’ve got the details in this AI-sum­mar­ized blog post. Find out what happened, what Last­Pass has done, and how you can pro­tect your­self.Read More »

In case you are look­ing for a few reas­ons bey­ond ‘I just don’t want to’, which is fine, and a val­id reas­on on its own. Here’s more.Read More »

If you’ve been fol­low­ing along, you may recol­lect that this jour­ney to mod­ern­iz­ing my vin­tage Timex Sin­clair began when I watched this four-part video series by The Byte Attic, and decided ‘yeah, that looks like some­thing I could do’. If you’re jump­ing in at this point, well, I’ve done things and have more things to do. This post will look at con­vert­ing the video out­put of the com­puter from an RF sig­nal to a more mod­ern com­pos­ite video sig­nal with a simple hard­ware modi­fic­a­tion.Read More »

I’m work­ing on a web­site, build­ing pages that have ran­dom pull-quotes on them. And I’m mak­ing mockup / place­hold­er pages. Many mockups. This gets old pretty quickly so I’m think­ing to myself, “Self? Let’s see if we can have some fun with these quotes”. But, rather than just do a search for quotes, I thought I’d […]Read More »

What do you do when your benchtop power sup­ply does­n’t have a switch to ener­­­gize/de-ener­­­gize the cir­cuit, just a mas­ter power switch? You make one: https://www.printables.com/model/387401-compact-benchtop-power-control-with-this-switch-boRead More »

As I’d men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous post in this series, I’ve been pok­ing around my TS1000 a bit and doing some online dig­ging.  I found this series about refur­bish­ing and upgrad­ing a Sin­clair ZX81. And since I wrapped up my last post test­ing the that unit is still alive and kick­ing (I think. Video is still a thing to veri­fy with the MK One eye­balls, though it looks good in the mul­ti­meter), it’s best to jump on to the next stage. Upgrad­ing the power con­vert­er.Read More »

Star Wars is a uni­verse of myths and legends, a place where the impossible becomes pos­sible, where dreams are made real, and where her­oes rise from humble begin­nings. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story con­tin­ues this tra­di­tion, weav­ing a new tale of hope, sac­ri­fice and cour­age into the fab­ric of the Star Wars uni­verse. The […]Read More »

I was play­ing around with the Chat­G­PT arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence recently, and decided to prompt it to see how well it could cre­ate a Dun­geons & Dragons adven­ture. Sur­pris­ingly well, it turns out. I’m temp­ted to run this some­time… Aban­doned mineshaft near Oak­dale Prompt: Using the 5th edi­tion Dun­geons & Dragons rules, cre­ate a small dun­geon […]Read More »

#ret­ro­com­put­ing has been tak­ing up more of my atten­tion recently. Spe­cific­ally, I found this series about refur­bish­ing and upgrad­ing a Sin­clair ZX81. Since the Timex Sin­clair 1000 is essen­tially a ZX81 that jumped the pond (and doubled it’s nat­ive RAM in the pro­cess), I’ve got one. And it’s been sit­ting in a box for 20ish years, used heav­ily pre­vi­ous to that. Time to rec­ti­fy (ha!) that situ­ation.Read More »

One of the neat things about using vin­tage com­put­ing equip­ment is fig­ur­ing out mod­ern ways to work with the older tech­no­logy. Why vir­tu­al print­ing? Recently, I wanted to explore prin­ted out­put from my NEC PC-8201a. For one thing, work­ing ‘on the hard­ware’ in this case has a dis­play lim­it of eight lines of forty char­ac­ters […]Read More »

Ori­gin­al expan­sion RAM for the NEC PC-8201a and Tandy Mod­el 100 is pretty hard to find these days — so I made some.Read More »

As I was con­vert­ing NEC bat­tery packs to be rechareg­able, I wondered just what the run-time of a bat­tery pack would be. So I came up with is a simple BASIC pro­gram to run the com­puter bat­tery down, and record the time that it dies and cal­cu­late the run-time. This is the story…Read More »

Back when the early days of per­son­al com­put­ing, you did your work on your com­puter and either prin­ted out the fin­ished work, or stored it to work on later. Early on, cas­sette tapes were the stor­age medi­um of choice as they cas­sette tape record­ers were com­monly avail­able, and reas­on­ably afford­able. Some com­puter sys­tem did have […]Read More »

Well, finally got a chunk of free time to get back to my ‘Mod­el 100 school’. My goal is to learn about these m100s through hands-on learn­ing. A new friend (Hi Larry) sent me his ail­ing m100 to fur­ther my edu­ca­tion. Who knows? Maybe I can get it run­ning again — it’s a nice look­ing […]Read More »

Picked up Gloom­haven. Think of it as D&D as a boardgame. It’s the num­ber one game on BoardGameGeek, so it’ll likely be pretty good. Also, the reviews like it. We set up and star­ted get­ting famil­i­ar with it last night. Con­sider it Ses­sion Zero in D&D par­lance. Can­’t wait for Ses­sion One!Read More »

Wel­come back to part three of my res­tor­a­tion and adven­tures with an NEC PC-8201a vin­tage com­puter circa. 1983. Let’s get to it! Strip­ping Down It’s actu­ally not that grungy to look at. Sure, a minor scuff or two, but from the looks of it, this unit is actu­ally quite clean. So, let’s get it apart and get […]Read More »

These were great bat­ter­ies, 40 years ago. This was a good task to start on. It’d been years since I’ve done any ser­i­ous elec­tron­ics work, and my pre­vi­ous Ardu­ino pro­ject, while suc­cess­ful, reminded me just how much I’d for­got­ten about elec­tron­ics over the years. And my skills had mostly van­ished too. So a nice easy pro­ject was […]Read More »

Back in the early-to-mid ’80s, per­son­al com­put­ing was find­ing it’s way. Desktop com­puters were becom­ing more vis­ible in smal­ler busi­nesses, but the work of com­put­ing still had to be done at the work­place. Port­able com­puters were really just shrunken down desktops — they were called lug­gables at the time. Then came the revolu­tion, as they say.  […]Read More »

Update Jan. 23, 2021: Looks like the Joy­stick cir­cuit has failed as it no longer toggles the Mute func­tion. Well, I wasn’t too happy with the ini­tial wir­ing job so this may be an oppor­tun­ity to update that. A while ago I developed an interest in Ardu­ino micro­con­trol­lers, and this is my first ‘actu­al’ pro­ject. […]Read More »

(Char­ac­ter sketch and back­ground for a Dave Gross Call of Cthul­hu cam­paign: Hor­ror on the Ori­ent Express, 2016) The club was lively; a typ­ic­al Thursday even­ing at our usu­al retreat in Birm­ing­ham. When our sched­ules per­mit­ted, we traveled north to escape the din and bluster of Lon­don as the week ended. Benny Peyton’s Jazz Kings […]Read More »

So a week or so ago I tweaked some­thing on my print­er. Maybe it was ini­tial lay­er height. Maybe I adjus­ted a bed screw. Not sure, but all of a sud­den my prints would­n’t stick to the bed prop­erly. Using the ‘paper drag’ meth­od of bed lev­el­ling ‘sort of’ worked. But it really was tri­al […]Read More »

I’m really happy when I can com­bine two of my hob­bies. This time it’s Boardgam­ing and 3d Print­ing. Often, many games have tokens or chits that are pooled for play­ers to take at dif­fer­ent times dur­ing play.  Usu­ally, these sit in piles around the main game area. On Thingi­verse, swholmstead shared this neat design — which I […]Read More »

Pretty cool what a little time, 3d Print­ing tech­no­logy, some cre­at­ive design work, and a spool of PLA will get you. I’ve been test­ing vari­ous dun­geon com­pon­ents to see how well they’ll work with our play style. And how good they’ll look once painted and fin­ished. The crates above have yet to be fin­ished. Usu­ally, I […]Read More »

Meco — Star Wars and Oth­er Galactic Funk: Star Wars (HD Vinyl Record­ing) — You­Tube.Read More »

Gior­gio Moroder — Battle­star Galactica — You­Tube.Read More »

We had these ugly plate-stand style photo stands for some alu­min­um photo prints. Had that ‘wrought-iron’ look. Totally not suit­able for a very white shot of our dogs. 3d Print­ing to the res­cue. Then I found these simple ‘feet’ on Thingi­verse — a per­fect solu­tion. I prin­ted off one batch, but had a bit of a flash­ing […]Read More »

Stand­ard Lun­ar Lander — because it’s Fri­day.Read More »

Needed to reset the router. Did so, lost inter­net con­nec­tion while it was reboot­ing. Had Chrome open and refreshed my con­nec­tion. This neat little run­ning jump­ing game appears. It appears to just be a ‘no con­nec­tion’ screen… but press the space bar. And have fun!Read More »

About five years ago, we got a cute little R‑Pod 173T.  It’s a trail­er with a pop-out tent to extend the intern­al liv­ing area by about 36 sq. ft. Very cute and just the right size to be towed by our Santa Fe. A couple of years ago, my very patient wife sug­ges­ted we remove the sofa […]Read More »

Work in pro­gress, paint­ing Ali­en Fron­ti­ers game com­pon­ents.Read More »

Well, I fin­ished paint­ing the colony com­pon­ents. Look­ing at the pho­tos, they kinda look messy. Note to self, don’t rush, even if you have 40 of the little bug­gers to paint. Ah well, on the game board at nor­mal view­ing dis­tances they look ok. I did­n’t want to paint the ori­gin­als that came with the game so […]Read More »

Recently I’ve become aware of a trend to paint the often gar­ishly-col­oured mini­atures and game com­pon­ents you find in mod­ern board games. My first attempt was with Mice and Mys­tics, and now I’m work­ing on Ali­en Fron­ti­ers. This time, I decided to pro­to­type my  col­our schemes digit­ally. To do this, pho­to­graphed the com­pon­ents just after prim­ing, so […]Read More »

This week­end Archive.org, the Inter­net Archive people, released a huge trove of Win­dows 3.1 applic­a­tions and games. Powered by a Javas­cript browser ver­sion of Dos­Box, these pro­grams load and run in any mod­ern browser. And there goes the week­end… Source: Soft­ware Lib­rary: Win­dows 3.x : Free Soft­ware : Down­load & Stream­ing : Inter­net ArchiveRead More »

Well, I’ve finally fin­ished them. I’ve learned a lot, and quite a bit has changed since I last painted minis (about 20 yrs). I think they turned out fine, and I’m look­ing for­ward to my next set… not sure what that will be yet. Maybe some­thing Star Wars. Here’s a gal­lery of the fin­ished Mice and Mys­tics set. […]Read More »