Category: Gadgetology

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Gadgetology Toiling In The Pixel Mines ToyBox

That’s no time machine, that’s a space st…no, wait. It IS a time machine, isn’t it? Never mind.

I’ll show you around my TARDIS in a moment. But first, a look at the print ad running for GreenhouseFX.tv in the July issue of Entertainment Fort Smith:

GreenhouseFX.tv ad
(The only difference is that the one in the magazine has my phone number in it.) I’m trying to make a virtue of the fact that, once I’ve got a baby boy running around, I won’t be in a position to go shooting very often (on the site, from day one, it’s said that I do shooting by special arrangement only). I’m hoping I’ll get some decent business off of this ad; as I’ve mentioned, it runs in the bridal issue, so if that doesn’t work, I clearly need to figure something else out, like renting my organs out for medical experiments. (While I’m still using them.)

And now, a fond farewell to an old friend, who, after serving faithfully for 20 years, is going to a better place. Well, if “out with the trash on Monday” is considered a better place:
Old Weather Radio
Never again will your sickly siren wail reverberate through the walls of my home, for now the sound of impending death from above is the sound of a power pellet in Coleco tabletop Pac-Man. Goodbye, old friend.

And now, click here to peer into the TARDIS. … Read more

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Gadgetology Music

Flat on our backs, taking the rest of the day off

I’ve had a couple of days this week where just about nothing got accomplished. My right foot, or more specifically the middle toe of my right foot, has been killing me for a couple of weeks now, and the pain got to where I almost couldn’t walk. I went to see the doctor, thinking “broken toe,” had X-rays taken…and lo and behold, no fracture.

I do, however, have funky mutant feet. I’ve always been able to pick things up off the floor with my toes and then “hand” those things off to an actual hand. Turns out there’s a reason for that. Two of the toes on my right foot are actually fingers – they have three segments and three joints, whereas your typical human toe has only two of each. The injury is an inflammation of a joint that, if you just look at the toe from the outside, doesn’t seem like it should be there. The one next to the little toe on that foot looks like a talon waiting to be deployed. So now I suppose the real question is: will my son have funky mutant feet too?

Anyway, my “sentence” is to take anti-inflammatory stuff twice a day, soak my foot a lot (and it just so happens that I’ve got a little mini-hot-tub thingy for that, something I bought for my wife for Christmas 3 or 4 years ago that never came out of the box until yesterday), and not walk any more than is necessary. I was given pain meds as well, but the first one I took – over 12 hours ago – is still just now trying to wear off. (I probably have the opposite of an immunity to pain medicine, because I don’t regularly dose myself with aspirin, Tylenol, Advil, etc. etc., and I can’t even imagine taking this stuff “every 4 hours as needed” like the label says – I’d be in a coma.)

In other news, I haven’t been checking homestarrunner.com as much as I used to, but this thing is pure gold. I must have played with that for half an hour. That has to be one of the neatest Flash apps I’ve ever seen, and it beats the pants off of a similar (well, similar in concept, certainly nowhere near this in terms of graceful execution and ease of use) thing the BBC did a while back to let people remix the original Doctor Who theme to their liking. Even if you just watch the cartoon, it’s very amusing, but don’t forget to click on “mix your own style” at the end. Even folks who aren’t Homestar fans can appreciate this one for its sheer creativity.

Speaking of making strange sounds come out of the speakers of electronic devices (I should have the equivalent of a degree in that by now), I recently tried some experiments with my cell phone to see if it would play an MP3 as a ringtone, and voila, it does. Suddenly, all those classic video game sound FX CDs that I’ve accumulated and thought “Well, that’s neat, but what possible use could anyone have…?” have become much more useful.

Oh, and one tiny little plug: if you like a bit of Star Wars, you might want to check theLogBook.com’s Monday update. 😉… Read more

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Gadgetology Gaming

The amazing true story of Frankencable

I have a bad habit of collecting video game memorabilia, and new games, and then letting it sit for a while before I get around to testing it or playing it. This weekend saw a collision of two items that were put on the back-burner…and one of them didn’t survive!

Case in point: a shiny new Starpath Supercharger for the Atari 2600. For those not familiar with it, the Supercharger was a huge honkin’ thing you plugged into an Atari’s cartridge slot, with a headphone cable dangling out of it. The Supercharger is sort of like a co-processor that boosts the graphics and sound abilities of the machine (which, let’s face it, wouldn’t take much). Since it’s eating up the cartridge slot, the headphone jack connects to a tape player, and the games for the Supercharger are loaded from cassette (this was 1983 or so, don’t forget, though I remember that I already had disk drives on my screamin’ fast mighty 64K Franklin Ace 1000 computer).

Exhibit B: a Texas Instruments “data cassette” player that I got from the great haul of TI gadgetry right before Christmas ’04. Haven’t touched it ’till now…and found out it doesn’t work. There were leaky batteries in there that had corroded their way right out of the battery compartment…ouch! So that baby’s going to the curb.

So how was I going to get the data from the tape to the Supercharger? I stood right in front of the Atari for about 15 minutes, thinking up all kinds of maddeningly convoluted ways to accomplish this task. Methods that would require a quarter mile of wiring.

And then I realized that, three shelves above the Atari, if I stood straight up, I was staring right into the controls of the cassette deck that I use maybe about once a month or so to make a tape to listen to in the car.

Oops. Funny thing is, I had to be staring at that tape deck for that entire time before it hit me. Sometimes I think I’ve gotten so used to my own cheap-ass, Rube-Goldberg way of hooking my gear up that I’ve forgotten that Simple Is Good.

But not so fast – there was no way the dangly short headphone cable from the Supercharger was going to reach three shelves up. I grabbed a short RCA cable and enough adapters and barrels to clobber someone to death with, and created…Frankencable.

Frankencable, savior of the Supercharger

Fun Facts: Frankencable = large headphone jack-to-RCA adapter + 1 foot RCA cable + large headphone jack-to-RCA adapter + large headphone to small headphone adapter + small headphone “barrel” (female both ends) + Supercharger cable.

After all this, I thought, this game better knock my socks off. Well, the Supercharger adds a heap of processing power to the 2600, improving its graphics and sound considerably – the one Supercharger game I have brings its A-game up to the level of a poorly coded VIC-20 game! 😆 I need to track down a copy of Escape From The Mindmaster or Stella Gets A New Brain or something.

This concludes the story of Frankencable. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog entry, already in progress.… Read more

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Gadgetology

A perfectly lovely way to spend an evening

So…my #2 computer fries again. I only got it right before Christmas, but Orac II is already toast – or at least its hard drive is. I left it rendering a piece of animation for the PDF DVD project on Wednesday morning, came back and found that the whole system had shut down. As best I can tell, I will not be able to recover any of the material from that machine’s hard drive. This was the only machine I had which was willing to run Paint Shop Pro 8 (which mysteriously stopped working or allowing itself to be reinstalled at all on my main PC right before New Year), and it had a nice overhead of RAM that made it a great animation machine. The good news is that it can probably do these things again once I get a new hard drive in it. The bad news is that I’m kinda outta hard drives – I had actually been contemplating finding a 100gb drive to stick into this machine as drive E/G/B/D/F/etc.; now it looks like I’m in the market for a new hard drive, period. So this kinda critically slows down the PDF DVD and any other production work that might be in the pipeline. I don’t have a backup to put in its place – this thing was the backup/replacement.

It may or may not be a coincidence that the corner of the desk occupied by this machine was recently torn to bits by Oberon, who decided that he would stop at nothing to nab Burchuss from his perch on top of the hutch. But there isn’t much point in worrying about that. (It is funny though, after years of indifference from any number of housecats, that Burchuss now has a stalker.)

In the meantime, I’m just SOL.… Read more

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Critters Gadgetology Home Base

Scoping the place out

I hang out on video and computer game collecting message boards where my friends always boast of massive hauls from garage sales, yard sales, and thrift stores, and I never have that kind of luck.

Tonight, I can report that I continue to have precisely not that kind of luck. My wife, however, is a different story. Because in addition to finding a really adorable (and, for this part of the country, kinda unusual) stuffed moose for the baby (my baby was bit by a m00s once…), she also snagged this setup for me:

Orbitor 6500

Oh, but wait, there’s more… … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gadgetology Serious Stuff

And so it goes…away.

Poor old Vonnegut – I hate to admit to being so ill-informed, but even when that book of essays came out a year or three ago, I assumed it was posthumous.

I know a great many folks compared Douglas Adams to Vonnegut over the years, often enough that Adams railed against it if reminded. Which is one area where I have to disagree with my favorite author – if I had written any fiction that was compared to the works of Vonnegut, I would’ve hung it up right then and there just in case my next project didn’t live up to that praise.

Vonnegut’s work was informed by an edge of bitterness that, at least until “Mostly Harmless”, Adams just didn’t have (and even in “MH,” Adams didn’t deserve to claim that bitterness). Bitterness and yet just a smidgeon of world-weary hope that maybe humankind might gets its act together and learn the folly of its ways – it was such a weird mixture, and I’ve never run into anything quite like Vonnegut’s writing. I doubt I will again. I’ve been really bothered by my inability to write an obit for the news section that came close to even being in the same solar system as an adequate send-off. I’m going to write it off as me being tired and just not quite able to process the news.

I figured out how to beam new wallpapers and MIDI ringtones into my wife’s phone via infrared from my phone. Talk about a convoluted way of doing things – her phone isn’t bluetooth capable. Oddly enough she didn’t want any Katamari Damacy music or “Xanadu” as ringtones!

In news that will stun absolutely no one, the “video game characters” theme seems to be out the window where the baby room is concerned. I knew that idea was going to last about 10 minutes tops (and I wasn’t even the one who suggested it). Ah well. Guess I’ll just keep that little idea about painting the baby room to look like the interior of the TARDIS to myself…

I’m a little scatterbrained and burned out mentally right now, so you’ll have to forgive me for not having more to say at the moment. During the course of the day, it really hit me how damn tired I’ve gotten after the almost completely sleep-free Week Of Worrying, and I’m looking forward to crashing this weekend, with my head on a pillow and a bed full of warm kitties.… Read more

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Gadgetology Television & Movies

Blessed are the MIDI makers

So I’ve got a new phone. This one’s only my second cell phone in three years, so I think I’m doing good on the whole not-switching-phones-every-three-minutes thing. To me, cell phones are like cars: if they do what they’re supposed to do, who cares how blingy they are? Still, this one’s got some nifty options, and I’ve been playing around with a couple of them this morning, shooting .MID files over to it via Bluetooth to use as ringtones. So yes, for a few shining moments, I’ll be joining the annoying ringtone crowd…and I’ll probably switch ’em off after a few days and go back to a plain old ringer sound. But it’s fun to mess around with some of the free MIDI files I’ve downloaded – I’d seriously consider assigning different ones to different callers if this phone could do that (bummer, my old phone could do that until it met with that Unfortunate Accident this weekend). Right now, anyone calling me sets off a boisterously loud (and really good) rendition of Ben Folds’ “Steven’s Last Night In Town”. Though I can think of individuals who I’d rather have setting off, say, The Prisoner, Doctor Who, Katamari Damacy or Monty Python themes, or Alan Parsons’ “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”. Ah well – I’m sure the fascination will wear off pretty soon. It’s still just a bleedin’ phone. I’ll probably get more mileage out of making kitty wallpaper for it.

I see in this news item that BBC America is bringing Torchwood to the U.S. at some unspecified future date. I wonder just how chopped up it’s going to be – I haven’t had Dish in over a year now, so I’m not sure what BBCA’s standards are on language, nudity, and big damn gay space heroes. The press release also says something about BBCA showing an “all-new season of Doctor Who” – eh what?? Are they ripping it out from under Sci-Fi? That’d be a bummer, simply because BBCA is still satellite-only fare in a lot of places.… Read more

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Gadgetology Music Television & Movies

The night the video gear slept

Trying out a new Winamp crossfader plugin today. I’m sure that’s old hat, but I didn’t even know that such things even existed. It’s quite a bit of fun, actually. I gotta try this out with an all-soundtrack mix and a hot game of Dune 2000. Seriously, when massive corporate ownership has leached local news (and therefore any local value to anyone other than advertisers) out of radio, do we need radio anymore with stuff like this around?

Dave gets a mention in USA Today in this article about Lost and the unusual number of characters named after prominent philosophers, and whether or not that’s a coincidence. I thought it was a pretty interesting article myself. Dave also writes our nifty Lost guide, and I’m sure he’s already wondering how to tackle this week’s episode. Which, for those who might’ve missed my last entry, I loved. 😆 Be sure to check out his blog, which is rapidly becoming more frequently updated than mine.

With some of our first bad weather of the year inbound, I’ve powered the Avid down, possibly for a couple of days until things clear up. If one operates by the axiom that doing a lot of powering up and powering down of a computer is less stressful on the machine than simply leaving it on, a computer with external SCSI drives and outboard modules and a VTR is even more susceptible to problems. So it gets a day off. It’s on a pretty robust surge protector, but I’d rather not take a chance with it.

Congrats to Doctor Who, Galactica and SG-1 for their Hugo nominations. SG-1’s 200 was nominated, which I’m kinda iffy on, but it’s been the most entertaining episode of the current season to date, so I’ll give ’em that. Unlike the Nebula nominations, which went to the Galactica boxing episode, the Hugo nod is for Downloaded (see if I didn’t call that one here). Again, The Girl In The Fireplace was nominated, this time accompanied by School Reunion (ehhh…I loved the episode, but I’m not sure I really see the great SF storytelling in it) and Army Of Ghosts / Doomsday (ehhh…see above). I guess nobody watched The Idiot’s Lantern after all. My prediction: Downloaded will take the trophy.… Read more

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Gadgetology Home Base

Blog reruns

I hate to throw “blog reruns” at you, but I’ve just been thinking recently about how much the topic of this blog entry has changed my life. I’m not going to try to claim that my freelancing life is a stampede of success, but y’know what? I’m much, much happier than I was the past two or three years at the station, by far. Even some of the health problems that plagued me while I was at that job have cleared themselves up. Best of all, it provided the answer to a question we didn’t even know we’d have until later (i.e. “who’s staying home with the baby?”) – by the time that one came about, we knew what the answer was.

So naturally I have the whole thing completely powered down right now – bad weather’s on the way in (it’s mere minutes into March, and we’re already under a tornado watch), and even though it’s on a heavy duty surge protector, I just prefer to unplug this machine from the entire universe for the kind of bad weather that hits us here. Needless to say, the Avid will get a lot of rest during the spring and early summer months. 😛 I’ve grown so used to the deafening ROAR of the outboard equipment, every piece of which has its own fan, that the quiet is somewhat mesmerizing in and of itself.

I went back and looked at the original “won the Avid” blog entry and saw that there was a link to the original eBay auction – or at least that’s where the link led at one time. Since the original auction has of course vanished from eBay’s database, I’ve put this selection of screen captures I took at the time up for your amusement. At the time, these seemed like a bit of a vanity piece, but now…well…this machine has turned out to be terribly important.… Read more