Category: Gadgetology

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Funny Stuff Gadgetology

Why yes, yes it is. And I call it HAL.

Another friend’s story about an insurance person’s raised-eyebrow “oooooKAY!” comment reminded me of a classic insurance-person story from my swingin’ bachelor pad days. I used to live in a second-story apartment in downtown Fort Smith, in a building around a hundred years old that also housed a bar called Old Town. Even back then I had what looked like a really elaborate setup, but the truth is, circa 1995, is was really mostly stereo equipment. I had a mixer that I used to do legendarily strange mix tapes with, and a video monitor so I could watch stuff via my VCR (yeah, yeah, I know) without having to be tied to my main TV (the same 19″ Zenith that my brother took to college, and the same one I keep hauling to events like OVGE). Most of the stuff in that immediate area didn’t have jack crap to do with my (even for this time) embarrassingly underpowered XT PC. But it was all packed into such a small space that you could be forgiven for thinking it was all one great big computer.

Assuming you didn’t know a single thing about computers, that is.

Also built into my computer setup was a nifty little lighting rig, which you can see in the photo above. On the right hand side of the screen, right beneath the two monitors (one monochrome amber CGA monitor, one plain old video monitor), you see something green that looks like exposed circuit boards…because they are, in fact, exposed circuit boards that have nothing to do with anything that’s actually plugged in. They stood up by themselves in that hutch, covering up a fluorescent light tube under the monitors. I could also switch off that fluorescent light and switch on a bunch of Christmas chase lights which I wrapped around a metal rack that was intended for VHS tapes. That would result in something like this:

…except smoother and a bit more relaxing. (If you’re not seeing it animate, click here.) There was something amusingly low-tech, 1970s-BBC-sci-fi-prop about this setup, and I loved it dearly. I’d really only fire up the fluorescent light when I needed a bunch of light; most of the time I kept the chase lights going just because they looked cool. And if I had company coming over? Oh yeah. Chase lights on. Because how cool was that?

Another neat thing about this cavernous apartment of mine was that there was a large walk-in closet that had its own electrical outlets. At the time, I still had quite a collection of Apple II computers (and compatibles) and green screen monitors. I don’t quite know why either – two of the computers and one of the monitors had been mine for many years, and the rest had been given to me by people who actually stepped up to PCs on schedule. I kept these computers on a steel shelf in the closet, plugged on; the monitors stood on top of my bookshelves in the room to which the closet was adjacent, and I’d fire up suitably techie-looking stuff on these screens, just for giggles really. Or sometimes I’d run the attract mode loops for old Apple II games like Lode Runner or Taxman. So the computers would be tucked away in the closet, while four or five green monitors would be sitting there… displaying… something… from somewhere.

Enter the insurance agent. He had to look the place over and give me a quote on renter’s insurance.

As per usual, I had all of this crap fired up and running. You know, there’s probably come cautionary tale about why in the world I felt the need to convince any and all passers-by into thinking that I lived in the Batcave, even a tongue-in-cheek low-budget version of it (at this point, I was probably keeping all of that stuff around just in case Jump Cut City leapt up and came back to life); I think the answer to this is that I was in my early 20s and was enjoying the hell out of my slightly dungeon-like apartment. Everyone else thought I had a dandy bachelor pad going there, but I converted it into quasi-gothic-geek-chic, thus ensuring that I never, ever got even one iota of action while I lived there (until July ’97, at which point I moved the whole setup – hidden Apple computers and all – to Green Bay).

Like the building, the insurance adjuster was also around a century old. He came in, looked at the kitchen and bedroom and bathroom and living room…and then came to the computer corner, lights a-flashing, monitors a-glowing (with, as I recall, the attract mode loop to Apple II Donkey Kong), and I could see he was trying to work out where all the wiring was. (As it happened, the cables for the Apple monitors could be tucked away neatly between the carpet and the baseboard without damaging cables, carpet or baseboard.)

His expression grew more worried as he looked around. Finally he looked at me and pointed at… well… everything. “Is all of this… one… big computer?”

I still wonder how sky-high my insurance quote would’ve gone if I hadn’t started explaining it to him at that point.

Where are they now: the circuit boards are still with me – as a matter of fact, a high-resolution scan of these circuit boards forms the background artwork both on-screen and on the package for the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs. I still have all of the slightly-translucent giant circuit boards – they’re waiting to be turned back into some kind of cool display, somewhere, someday. Maybe at OVGE. Maybe if I find a new string of chase lights – after a number of the bulb holders gave up the ghost, I finally retired my trusty, over-a-decade-old string of Christmas chase lights a year or three ago. They served me well: they blinked until they were blinkered. I gave away the desk and the just-the-right-height hutch/monitor stand right before leaving Wisconsin. As for me, I still live – and get no action – in a room that looks like it’s one… big… computer. (And this time, it’s a heckuva lot closer to being reality than it was back in ’95.)… Read more

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Gadgetology Gaming

More randomness and shenanigans

This was e-mailed to me tonight via theLogBook.com Media’s contact form (hey, it works!), and while it’s just a little bit on the late side for me to even round up some DVDs to send there (what with the 10 days until the event and all…) I thought I’d pass it along for any retro-computing folks in New Jersey:

This year’s Vintage Computer Festival East will be held September 12-13 at the InfoAge Science Center located in Wall, New Jersey.

VCF is a public event celebrating the history of computers from the 1940s – 1980s. The morning schedule is for lectures and workshops; the afternoons are an open exhibit hall where everything is turned on and working.

Among this year’s highlights are the keynote address about RCA computers in the 1950s, an 8-bit musical concert, BASIC programming challenge, and the build-your-own terminal workshop.

Details are posted at https://www.vintage.org/2009/east/ where you’ll also find the latest VCF news. A 2-minute video montage of last year’s show is on YouTube. Or refer to the simple event brochure. Tickets are $10 for one day or $15 for both days; 17 and younger get in free.

The event benefits the InfoAge Science Center, which is a 501c3 non-profit.

RCA computers from the ’50s? Does that include the Studio II? Oh…wait. Studio II was the ’70s. Not that you could tell by looking.

I also wanted to draw everyone’s attention to the August edition of Le Geek – Ben may not get his site updated as often as he’d like, but it’s always worth the read. I also like the fact that the site is now in gamma – screw being in beta, we’re going straight to gamma! I look forward to the delta and epsilon editions.

With a not-even-remotely-heavy heart, I’ve decided to close my long-dormant MySpace account. I think tonight was the first time I’d logged into it in 2-3 months. Since almost everyone in my friend list over there is in my Facebook friends, I doubt anyone will be too disappointed (in fact, I’ll be surprised if anyone even noticed without me mentioning it here).

Still. No. Kittens.… Read more

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Feedback Gadgetology Should We Talk About The Weather?

I’m warning to the idea

A couple of days ago, I mentioned my intention to ditch the TV side of my cable subscription and go to a seldom-mentioned internet-only tier of service. In that entry I mentioned that one of the few things that gave me pause about ditching cable TV (especially since I haven’t gotten a DTV converter box) was that I’d be losing the local channels for severe weather coverage. Unless you’ve lived in tornado alley and have intimate knowledge of the kind of “combat readiness” that living here in the springtime entails, that may sound silly, but trust me…it’s a biggie around here. I have a weather alert radio to fill that gap, but I was curious about the possibility of what they’d call “a software solution” in the business world.

I did a little bit of research and found Interwarn, a commercial software package that offers TV-style warning crawlers on your monitor, as well as graphical watch/warning maps (sort of like the things that, anymore, take up about a quarter of the TV screen during bad weather). It’s astoundingly customizable – you can decide what kind of warnings will trigger a crawler, and not every crawler will trigger an alert sound (which can be whatever kind of .wav file you feel like making it – the temptation’s definitely there to bust out the old Star Trek red alert sound…); the degree to which you can define the area involved is amazing too. I live on the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma, and I can pick counties out of two states for the program to keep an eye on. If I wanted to, I could have it watch out for my old stomping grounds in Brown County, Wisconsin too. It takes up a startlingly small slice of CPU resources and bandwidth, despite checking in for new warnings about every 90 seconds. (As with so many other things, you can slow that down so it’s only checking every 3 minutes or however often you like; honestly, in this part of the country, I left it at the check-as-often-as-you-can default.) Quite by accident, I also discovered that it happily pops warning crawlers up on top of full-screen video – there you go, you can still get warnings while watching a movie or what have you.

Here’s a shot of the live National Weather Service radar loop with Interwarn’s live watch/warning map. Who needs a TV station anyway?

Interwarn

(Why am I watching Oklahoma’s watches and warnings? Since we’re on the border, it’s a given that what barrels through Oklahoma will wind up in Arkansas; this is also why I used to watch KTUL during severe weather events and then turn to the local stations when the stuff actually arrived here.)

The company behind Interwarn also has a software package called Stormlab, but it’s geared toward a higher-end market – real live meteorologists (or students thereof) and/or storm chasers. My inner weather geek is more than happy with Interwarn alone.

The registration fee is $40, but since we’ll be saving that much on our cable bill within two months by dropping TV, I’m not even blinking at that figure. While my cable TV’s still hooked up, however, this afternoon was stormy enough to provide a live-fire test. I watched the local TV stations and I watched Interwarn running on a machine that, other than also keeping the live radar in a browser, wasn’t doing anything. Interwarn was either neck-and-neck with the TV station warning crawlers…or, more often, it was faster than the TV stations. (Fun fact: Interwarn isn’t worried about pissing off sponsors by running a crawler during a commercial.)

The one problem is that whatever machine’s running Interwarn, in a severe weather situation, really needs to be a machine that you don’t mind leaving up and running in that sort of weather. I recently “decommissioned” Orac and all but gutted it, but sometime between now and next spring, Orac may return as a bare-bones machine that, when push comes to shove, won’t be a great loss if it eats lightning, but until then will serve a fairly vital purpose, especially during storm season.

Software solution found. I don’t think I’ve ever gone from “let’s see what this shareware trial version does” to “oh yeah, baby, let me know where to send the money for the registered version!” in the course of an afternoon…but I’m totally sold on Interwarn.

Links: Interwarn… Read more

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Gadgetology Home Base Television & Movies

Cut the wire

You are watching 7-Zark-7 on PAY-PER-VIEW!Is it possible that my son may not have the experience of channel-surfing at home? That might sound like a crazy idea, but at the very least, we’re giving it a try. After a great deal of deliberation, we’ve decided to have our cable subscription reduced to internet only. No cable TV service at all. Our television “diet” is already pretty slim – what we want to watch, we either get on DVD or we download. Evan’s got a surprisingly hefty DVD collection already, so very little channel-surfing is done on his behalf at the moment.

It’s an entirely reversible decision, of course, and the funny thing is that the customer service rep at Cox lied like a dog until I pointed out that I knew other customers of theirs who had done the same thing (and had also reported that Cox would lie through their teeth about whether or not such a tier of service existed). Such a tier of service does exist – and at $45/month, it’s still plenty profitable for them – but it doesn’t help Cox report that they have X million cable TV subscribers when they negotiate with entities like Viacom, Time Warner or the corporate entities that own local TV stations (who try to put the screws to Cox when negotiating a contract for how much they’ll be paid for the privelege of having those stations carried on the cable). Since the internet-only tier doesn’t benefit Cox much aside from a bit of income, they actively deny its existence.

And then when a nice guy like me adamantly but politely calls them on their BS, they roll out a few lame reasons why you shouldn’t go to that tier: you’ll lose your local stations! It’ll cost you to reinstate TV service! No more breaking news on CNN! And, my personal favorite: you’ll be depriving the world of income accrued by the taxes paid on cable TV service! Holy crap, I’m not doing my economic duty to the state! Off to Room 101 with me.

As long as it has an internet connection, that’s okay. The only real major misgiving I had about dropping cable TV was severe weather coverage…but even there, I’ve got a weather alert radio, and access to the National Weather Service (including warnings and radar) via the ‘net. If the power goes out, there’s plain old radio – in other words, we’re no worse off than before, other than missing out on excited live TV chatter about rotation…which still brings me back to “no worse off than before,” frankly. (Besides which, nearly every local TV station has deals in place to have their live severe weather reports rebroadcast on specific radio stations, if I really need my rotation fix.) And as for local news…well, if you’re not north of the Bobby Hopper Tunnel, you practically already have to turn to the web for that; the TV stations have collectively all but abandoned all points south because of the perception that northwest Arkansas is where the money is.

Never mind not doing my economic duty to the state – I’m not doing what everyone’s expected to do: I’m not propping up the dry, frail skeleton of the pre-broadcast information economy. I’m failing to give a crap about the DTV transition. I’m putting myself in a position to be, more or less, completely bypassed by advertising.

Enough stuff streams, or is freely available, that I don’t think we’ll succumb to the “cut off from the world” effect.

I can think of worse things to give my son than a home where being a couch potato really isn’t a frequent-flyer option.… Read more

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Gadgetology

Holly Hop

As if fighting to keep a web site on the air over something like six or seven weeks wasn’t enough, I can also announced that I have slain another technical dragon: I finally declared victory on getting the wife’s living room media center PC working, and only a few weeks after Mother’s Day too. It plays Master Of Orion II, it plays movies, it plays music, it plays Monopoly. In theory it can browse the web and do e-mail too, but let’s not get too carried away – it’s using a fairly old TV as its monitor and I’m having a hard time imagining trying to do a lot of reading off of it.

Meet Holly

Thank God the machine’s previous owner set up a restore partition on the hard drive; I must have reinstalled the OS something like 20 times. The thing is, while the machine runs on XP Media Center edition, I was never actually able to get the Media Center crap to work. The Media Center functionality is really cool, at least in the brochure – you have a remote control that lets you navigate your media files in a very-easy-to-read-on-a-TV environment and play any of them at the touch of a button. Neato, eh? But the problem, I suspect, is the fact that I put a new video card in it that would do S-video out. Somewhere, having that new card in the machine gummed up the works with some arcane hardware conflict, and so I finally said “@#$% it, I’ll install Nero.” Except that didn’t work too gracefully either. Reinstall again.

I had previously planned on naming this system “Gambit” for network purposes, but after all the reinstalls, I started to think that Holly – from Red Dwarf – would be considerably more appropriate.

Another few reinstalls later, I was scratching my head as I installed Winamp (for music purposes). Now, I’ve been using Winamp since it came out. You know what? Nobody ever told me that it’s suddenly become a damn good video player as well as a damn good music player. I had no idea. Solved all my problems right there. Didn’t bother with Nero. Didn’t need to. With the possible exception of the Media Center-specific DVR functions, that pretty much got me on track. I’m still not sure what to do there – I suspect, however, that I’ll continue to use binaries newsgroups as my DVR for recently-aired stuff that’ll be wiped again as soon as it’s watched. (I know, I know – tut tut tut, shame, iTunes is out there and it’s legal! But how much do you pay for every show that you record and then wipe off of your DVR/Tivo? Heh. Thought so.)

Meet Holly
My wife’s favorite part about the new machine: the wireless keyboard. This and the new video card were virtually the only pieces of the machine bought brand new. Total expenditure on the whole project barely crossed the $250 line – hooray for tax refunds!

To sidetrack for a moment: I was gazing at Winamp doing a damn good job of playing some video when I noticed that the playlist window was still up. And that I could add stuff to it. And that’s when it dawned on me: around 1995 or so, when I was working at the (original) Fort Smith Fox station, the station purchased a computer-based commercial playback system which, when hooked up to a cable spot insertion timer (normally used to drop local spots into place unattended at a cable TV head end), could practically run prime time by itself. There are no words to describe what hot shit that was in 1995.

And here we are, barely 15 years later, with a system, in my living room, that could basically run a whole station. If one carved up a show into segments, and then had commercials on the hard drive to run between those segments…

…one would really be onto something if there was still room in the world for standard definition. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t think it’s one I’m going to put into practice anytime soon, not even for fun. Because unlike the guy I worked for back in the day, not every single little idea that occurs to me needs to become a company memo and a “hey, let’s try this!” But it sure would’ve been neat in 1995, aside from the whole thing about not needing many human operators anymore that almost certainly would’ve followed.

In the meantime…happy Mother’s Day. Only about a month or so late.

P.S. I’ve kicked off a summer special for some of our DVDs, to celebrate the site’s seismic shift to a vastly superior hosting service; you can order a bundle consisting of the 4-DVD Classic Gaming Expo set plus either Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2 or the Phosphor Dot Fossils Brown Box (Level 2 + the first Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD). If your DVD shelf has a gaping, “stuff-produced-by-Earl”-shaped hole in it, and you dig video game history, you can find the limited time special prices here. I had tried to start this deal earlier in the month, but then we got bitten by vampire Globats. The prices on these are good both inside and outside the U.S., so get ’em while you can! End of plug.… Read more

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Gadgetology

Technical difficulties

Warning: geekspeak contained within

Mr. Levar Burton would like to say AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!Not too long ago, I surprised my friends by suddenly switching to Firefox, something I hadn’t been too keen on before. Now, I may surprise them again – after an extended and extensively frustrating battle, I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to turn the media center PC I got for my wife for Mothers’ Day into a Linux box, or into an oversized and expensive doorstop. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gadgetology

Come fail away with me

To boldly go...nuts.I know, everyone reading this is wondering what I thought of the new Star Trek movie…well, I think it’ll be great if I even get to see it this weekend. Evan’s come down with something (yet again) that includes a really nasty hacking cough (again), so our chances of making it to the theater anytime soon just kinda dropped to roughly nil for this weekend. I’m really worried about the little guy – the cough just sounds nasty. I’m more worried about him than I am about missing the movie.

Dave recently asked what I thought of the Star Trek: Countdown comic miniseries – it’s kinda cool. It’s kinda like your last familiar exit before you enter completely unknown territory. I’ll probably do a book review later this month, though it’s been a long-standing not-quite-a-policy-but-more-of-a-tendency here at theLogBook to wait until there’s a trade paperback (a.k.a. TPB, FYI) to do a comic review. This one, though, may be worth making the exception.

Much of my day Thursday, aside from trying to entertain a sick toddler, consisted of trying to get a media center PC installed in the living room for my wife in time for Mother’s Day. Before you go rolling your eyes and saying “How romantic” with sarcasm dripping from every syllable, keep in mind that she’s a fellow geek – and one who has been without a computer to call her own since shortly before Evan was born. This machine has full DVR capabilities, and replaces the CD player, DVD player and VCR that were sitting there (though the VCR is still present as a less-complicated means of channel-surfing). By cobbling the thing together from bits and pieces, I’ve also augured this unlikely machine in for a landing for under $300. There are still a few bugs to be ironed out – namely a stubborn wireless keyboard that seems to hate me – but it may actually be online for the weekend. Considering that it’s looking like a miserably rainy weekend, maybe that’s good timing.

One thing I’ve done with the new box – and every other PC in the house – is ditch Internet Explorer. I don’t have anything against open source software, but for a few years now the smug evangelizing going on from the Firefox crowd has put me off of checking that particular browser out. I’m finding that this might just have been my loss. I’m still not crazy about the grass-roots PR – it reminds me of the South Park episode where a cloud of “smug” was generated by hybrid cars – but I’m impressed with the browser. I’ve added a handful of security add-ons, and I’m well pleased – with just a few add-ons, it’s a damned handy diagnostic tool for someone whose website is under near-constant attack. Not that I’m gonna name any names there. I wish there was a way to remap CTRL+A to open bookmarks, as I have years of deeply-ingrained hotkey sequences burned into my head that are completely thrown off by CTRL+B. Hopefully before long I’ll resume the whole punching-stuff-in-like-a-concert-pianist routine.

Hopefully Evan will be back to his happy old self soon too. He’s been learning at least a word a day, and is rapidly approaching the point where you can have a whole conversation with him about important topics like dinner, kitties, doggy, and bed (nap is a very dirty word, FYI). Once we can talk about poop…well, you know what comes after that.… Read more

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Gadgetology

All my router friends

ZAPI mentioned a day or so ago that my wireless router was fried in one of this week’s copious lightning storms. I have a lot of stuff networked between machines, especially with regards to the Avid (though it’s not like that sucker’s even plugged in during this kind of weather!), so that’s kind of a big item. Fortunately, one of my friends on the Digital Press forums has got my back on this one and is sending me a router that had recently been made redundantin his network, for which I’m indescribably grateful. A big shout-out to “NoahsMyBro” for his beyond-merely-generous help on this one.

In the meantime, I’m sitting here watching a pretty active lightning display while typing this, so maybe I should get a clue or something.… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology

Gambitronic

Vila meets GambitI’ve begun prep work for a media center PC that I hope to install in the living room, God and/or the IRS willing (is there really a difference between the two in terms of sheer power?), come tax refund time. A while back I asked if anyone had any ideas on a maniacal supercomputer name to go with the new box. I have a LAN set up in the house called WOPR. My main desktop PC, Zen, is the WOPR hub; other machines already on WOPR are Orac (secondary desktop & file server) and Colossus (Avid). Zen and Orac are supercomputer names from the adorably outdated (and not just a little bit campy) BBC space opera Blake’s 7, while Colossus is the Forbin Project (and a nod to the sheer physical size of the box that runs the Avid).

The new machine will reside on the WOPR network as well, and it’ll be called Gambit. Gambit was yet another supercomputer that made a one-off appearance in the 1981 Blake’s 7 episode Games; appropriately enough, it spent all of its time entertaining an eccentric hermit and occasionally dishing out digital death via its automatic defense systems too. Gambit wound up getting cozy with Orac, and despite all of the advantages inherent in keeping Gambit around for future stories, naturally it was never heard from again. Of course, my wife will see Gambit as an X-Men reference, so it’s a win-win situation. Sort of like the time she named her new kitten Olivia, swearing that she was breaking the cycle of Shakespearean-named cats in our household (see also: Othello, Iago, Oberon). (I had to point her toward Twelfth Night – which features an Olivia – at a later date and then get out of book-throwing distance, because that all-inclusive Shakespeare book of mine weighs a ton.)

So that’s the important issue of naming the machine settled. Will the real Gambit get cozy with the real Orac? Only time will tell. Current plans call for Gambit to be equipped with a wireless keyboard/mouse combo (we’re looking at this one, again as funds permit). Ideally, it should be able to record as well as play back. It’ll also be browsing the web and doing e-mail, so I’ll install the usual security/antivirus/antispyware/antispam stuff on it, and I’ll be keeping a fanatical, Friddle*-esque eye on the thing’s health too.

It’d be nice to have another terrorbyte** drive to stick in there, but you know, I have a feeling that’s something that we’ll be needing to ask Santa about.

Can I actually put another system together and successfully convince it to not suck? Stay tuned, true believers. … Read more