richfiles

HIIIIISSSSSSSS!!!

They eventually got their mods updated, and I bought one... Then I stayed up till 7 in the morning building the piano. I'm sooooo tired! I'd like to complain that I'm an idiot. LOL

My local Walmart is refusing to sell the new Nintendo Labo Kits that were released today! They have them in stock, now. They know today is the release date. They just can't sell them, cause someone higher up the chain screwed something up. Apparently, they dun goofed. The store did not get updated "mods" for the Nintendo shelf section. "Mods" is short for modulars. That's basically their product placement guide that instructs where each item goes on the shelf. Apparently, if the mods don't show a product occupying shelf space, they can't sell it, and since they did not get their mods updated in time for the product release date... No Labo! I was real annoyed too, cause online, it said local pickup was an option, so I went ahead and drove there! Now, I got a notification that the medium sized Instant Pot that I ordered arrived... So I get to drive BACK to Walmart... I had bought another brand of similar digital pressure cooker, and really liked it, but found it way too small. Their shelf layout has the brand I bought in one aisle, with rice cookers (I originally wanted a rice cooker, but saw the extra features and decided to go for it), and the larger digital pressure cookers on a completely different aisle with the slow cookers! I "settled" on the very tiny one, cause I didn't even see a bigger model! Well, I ended up letting a friend take the tiny one, cause I wanted one big enough to participate in potluck at work, make more than individual servings (that I could just toss int he fridge), but not so enormous as to feed a whole family. So what does Walmart have? An out of date display model of the medium model, no medium model in stock, and the mini model's boxes by the medium display... Apparently, It looks like Walmart now only stocks the Mini and the feed-an-Army size, and I mistakenly bought the mini... just of another brand now... I returned it last week, and ordered the medium model online, with free store pickup (so an $80 cooker wouldn't sit unattended in front of my door, while I was at work). ... And now I get to drive back to Walmart, for the second time today, so I can pick it up and be reminded that they derped up the Labo release, and I can't have one yet.

You know the song "Waiting is the Hardest Part" by Tom Petty? it comes to mind for no reason at all... as I wait on a slow boat from China carrying my new soldering iron.

Cause they're IN another time zone, back in the stock area of the store.

When one employer likes to pretend your other job doesn't exist, and you end up working from 9 AM to 11 PM across two jobs, just to keep up- fall behind less ...

Honestly, I'm all for keeping this thing goin' forever! I like the massive repository of information, and I still trust that Mulbin isn't going to abandon this. He just gets busy. Might I suggest simply offering to pre-format the updates, and simply private message them over to Mulbin for a good old copy/paste into the main post? Just a thought.

He he he he he he... The "Virtual Device" absolutely looks like rows of honeycomb! While Resident Utility bee was the last line of defense for the Virtual Device honeycomb, the bees were prepared to defend it at all costs, and had their best sniper, Service bee, in place. Processing Utility bear is getting darn close, but Service bee is prepared to Execute Processing Utility bear while Resident Utility bee lays distracting cover fire to defend their sweet, sweet home! (Program) bear (It's a nickname, earned on the battlefield) is Logging an attempt to aid Processing Utility bear by hopping those Database walls, but dang it, the chance looks slim... Service Bee already has line of sight and is ready to Execute (Program) bear. He's ready to fall back and Transfer back to where the bears have their Communication Equipment. (Program) bear is feeling guilty about it though... He knows if he Transfers, he leaves grim chances for Processing Utility bear, who has only the slightest chance of falling back to the Database wall. (Program) bear knows if he can draw Service bee's fire so Processing Utility bear, can jump the database wall, his chances of falling back and Transferring to the Communication Equipment is high. Will the bees defend the Virtual Device honeycomb? Will the sniper Service bee take out Processing Utility bear, or will (Program) bear's distraction let him slip away? What is even going on further away from the front lines? Find out, on the next episode of B*A*S*H! Mah LOLs, they're genuine! I had to look that one up... That is A VERY creative censor!

I'd love to see that! Genuinely LOLed! I'm not even a hardcore one! I just want a cheap flashlight that does the job and looks kinda cool, while not being very big. I like the Lumintop. The cheap ones were about $20 US, and that brass one was only $5 more. I have a buddy who goes and spends $80-150 on freakin' flashlights! Rechargeable on a base, a dozen settings and strobes... I just... want a small cheap light that has a couple settings and is bright. The Lumintop keeps it simple and cheap, but the build quality and style is still nice. It's still cheap "Chinesium", but it's built well. Yeah, they just released a really cool product that I had no justification to buy, and then they released something that I did have justification to buy, but they don't offer it in the already existing style and features that I want. Aren't nerd rants exactly what this thread needs!

So, there's this tiny little flashlight I got a couple years ago, a Lumintop Tool AAA. I like it. It runs on one AAA battery, puts out decent light (low, medium and high), and well, I ended up getting a brass one last year. Same thing but with a Nichia LED that, while not as bright as the first one's Cree LED, does better color reproduction. I use both for different things and they're both small enough to carry around anywhere I go. No problem. Then they released the "Blue Titanium" Tool AAA. It's so nice looking. A bit spendy, cause you know... space age titanium!!! That's also BLUE!!! I passed on it. I can't justify spending money on ANOTHER AAA flashlight, just cause it's "pretty". Ain't happening. What I DO want though, is a AA flashlight. Something that will run longer, shine brighter, and only be a little bit bigger, and use a single AA battery, instead of the smaller, lower capacity AAA. Sure enough, just this year, Lumintop releases the Tool AA. NICE! I'm happy! I go to buy... Only available in anodized aluminum, and only available with a Cree LED... Don't get me wrong... It's CHEAP, and i bought the blue one anyway... But Blue anodized aluminum is NOT blued titanium... There's NO comparison. Also, the part of the reason for wanting an AA version was to get one with the Nichia LED so I could have something brighter and longer lasting than the Nichia AAA, and even the Cree AAA, even if not as bright as a Cree AA. I have to settle with the lesser housing and the brighter, but poorer color rendering Cree LED. I kinda hope they release the AA version with the Nichia LED and the blue titanium housing as options. No idea if they ever will though. Regardless, I have to wait for it. On a positive, I'm sure the aluminum one will make a great gift to my father, should I ever get to upgrade. I'm sure a compact light like that would be absolutely perfect for late night chores on the farm. Also, the Cree LED would be fine, as brightness would be more important than color reproduction, for most agriculturally inclined endeavors. Why must the thing I want be a combination of things that DO exist, but not all in one single product!!!

Yeah, The Danger Zone keycap set was an incredibly popular group buy at Massdrop, and organized/created by the user Data over at https://www.geekhack.org and it looks like it may get a second run in by the end of the year or maybe next. The set's been requested over 4600 times since the group purchase ended back in 2015, and the original group buy was over 1500 sets! And yeah, it's absolutely themed on the movie Top Gun. Some of the optional extra keys were called things like the "Maverick" pack! There was even a "Goose" pack, which contained a few last minute additions that "didn't make it" during initial design of the key cap set! I hope you weren't drinkin' when you read that!

Look up the Red Green Show. It's a low budget Canadian comedy (hybrid sitcom/sketch comedy) that ran from 1991 to 2006, that tends to sometimes air on PBS stations here in the US. Not sure about elsewhere. Lots of jokes about duct tape, getting old, stereotypical "guys and their outdoors fish and game lodge" stuff, run down cars, and WILDLY repurposing things (most of the time not realistically... though they did make a "hot rod" bus once...). It's kinda like Canada's version of our rednecks, but on TV! I've seen most of 'em, but I still watch it now and then. The Harold character was the stereotypical nerdy type (over the top nerd), but did actually produce the show. In the early years, that computer and switch panel actually served as the means to switch cameras and do transition effects, and was legitimately operated within the show. As the show got popular, and got better funding, they got better camera setups, but always kept that gadget in the corner as a tribute to the early seasons. Wow... Looked it up... 15 seasons, 300 episodes. Not bad for what started as little more than a small budget comedy based on a comedian's sketches from the late 1970s and mid 80s! The keyboard was off a TEC Mini-Tec terminal from the late 1970s. It's probably not actually doing more than serving as a few hardwired buttons for the transition effects machine. There are a few dials and switches on the longer portion of the controller. I believe those actually performed the camera selection. The keyboard was mostly for show, if it even did anything at all. He'd usually do some random clickety-clack "moves" to play up the use of the controller. For years the cast said they thought they scavenged the keyboard from a Commodore 64, but leave it to the internet to know better than the actual cast's memories! LOL

I have visions of Harold Green now!

The trick with protocol conversion is simply having a go between. You have a small board that emulates a USB HID keyboard, with he same layout as the keyboard you are using with it. That device then reads the serial protocol of the older keyboard, and sends the appropriate HID compliant keypress over USB. You don't even need to mod the original keyboard, unless you wanna hide the converter inside of it. Some people do that. Others just have a small converter box between the keyboard and the computer. Also, most keyboards use a scanning matrix. You send a pulse down a series of rows, and then read if any columns have a signal (you can flip which is scan and which is read). The controller knows as it scans a pulse down each row, that if any column is active when read, that the key at the intersection has been pressed. A good keyboard will have diodes at every switch, so you don't generate ghosted characters when pressing combinations of keys. By rapidly scanning each row, and reading if any columns become powered, you can scan every key on the whole keyboard.

If you want to do a retro keyboard, that's cool. I'd say keep it stock in that case and use this: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=24965.0 I happen to be a regular over at the geekhack forums, and found this thing. Looks like it'd have you completely covered, as far as using the Mac Plus keyboard on a modern USB system. Remember, the protocol is vastly different. You can't just slap a USB connector on the end of the cord. You'll need an adapter like the one I linked.

The protocol is an old style serial bus that even Apple abandoned after the Mac Plus. It uses a connector similar to a landline phone. While you can build a protocol adapter of sorts if you know how to do the programing, you'd still need a Teensy 2.0, at least, and the code to read the protocol, and translate it as USB protocol. What are you wanting to do with the keyboard anyway? If you're wanting to cannibalize it for use as a KSP controller, you're probably better off buying some cheap switches or buttons off ebay that are to the style of your liking, and connecting those to an Arduino or Teensy. There's little about the switches used by the Mac Plus keyboard either. Just cheap Mitsumi switches that don't quite have the right stem for modern key caps.

Not really. A computer like that is most valuable to a collector restoring a Mac Plus. The keyboard isn't even USB. USB wouldn't exist for over a decade after the Plus came out.

Still being crushed at work, but I thought I'd share what finally showed up today! That "RIP JEB" makes me "AYY LMAO"! So, I expect I'll use these keys on the CRT side panel, if I ever get around to building it. Main controller is first priority, obviously. I definitely appreciate the inclusion of Pluto. What I'll likely do, should said project ever get underway, is I'll use the planet keys to select primary SOI, and have some up/down keys to cycle through a local planetary system's moons and planet, to select what map to display on the CRT. I wanna keep things simple, if I ever do the map project, so It'll likely be a top down and an edge on view of the selected body, with the craft's orbit plotted around it. That's ever if I git gud at programming. It'll be a long while, if it happens. I want to focus on completing the main controller. First step to that is finding free time again.

Uh... I have 4 email accounts set up with my Comcast account. My three secondary email addresses send and receive email just fine. My MAIN email though... Can only send, not receive! I've checked the password, and nothing has changed in the configuration, at all. It's configured identically to the three secondary accounts, and I can still see all the emails I can't download just fine in with Comcast's "Xfinity" web browser mail viewer. What I don't get, is why the ONE email account won't work, while the other three do work. All four have the same configurations. I can't imagine the three working and the one not, if the mail server was down. The only difference is the one that doesn't work is my main address, tied with the account itself. The others are secondary addresses. I just can't figure this out.

SO much NOPE!!! D:

I put in my paperwork to renew my medical insurance last year... I've received NOTHING back. No bills, no acceptance, no denial... Just, nothing... The website will let me make a payment (of course), but it has no actual status information at all. Figures they got the part where I blindly give them money figured out. Anyway, I'm freaking out now about whether I'm even covered, and worst of all, I discovered some... eh, swelling... It really needs to be checked ASAP... I might get screwed and have to end up paying cash, out of pocket. Aging sucks, and I'm not even technically "over the hill" yet! Still though... Soon™ Well, that's the goal anyway.

I'm on the edge of my seat... Don't leave me hangin'! As for me... I didn't get a shower for nearly two days... Or get to flush... Apparently, the sewer pipe was clogged with sticks. We also got several inches of snow... The thick, heavy, wet kind. Just a pain to deal with. Also, someone stole the year tags off my car's license plates! Here in most US states, vehicle taxes are paid and we receive a sticker that has a serial number and the year. This is our license plate renewal. It's fairly inexpensive for older cars, but can be rather expensive for newer ones. Apparently, someone stole mine, presumably to visually make their car look like it's plate taxes have been paid... As long as they don't get pulled over, it's actually useful. If the thief's plates actually get run though, it would come back unpaid. This is, amazingly enough, the SECOND time this has happened to me. The snow twice the height of my shoes is certainly enough of a deterrent to looking at license plates in the parking lot, to see if I can find one that matches the serial number on the receipt of of my old plate's year sticker. I kinda hope whoever stole it does get pulled over... They'll get hit with not only driving with expired tags, but probably be hit up with some manner of additional charges... I don't know what, but if there's one thing I know... It's that when the tax man cometh, and the tax man does not receive... His book comes down hardest!

Wait, the k-OS screen is stock?!? I assumed it was the scripting mod.

I have been consistently amazed by the speed, organization, planning, quality, and talent that you've packed into this spectacular build! Truly an awesome controller!

Hehe... That K-OS blue screen. This has turned out beautifully! One tip, regarding mounting holes. If they don't line up perfectly, just drill them out. drilling will create a new hole alignment. If you can't get screws to bite anymore, then epoxy some nuts on the inside, so the screws have something solid to thread into. Sawdust and glue can also be used as a filler, and you can then redrill new holes as required. But seriously... That build is so awesome!