Fun

Someday there will be a proper writeup, and probably a video. For now, a placeholder: an archived message from an Amiga BBS in which Joe Smith explains how he got a Sony KV-25XBR talking to an Amiga, after discovering that nobody at any computer store, any Sony dealer, or Sony customer service knew where to find the cable.

He bought the service manual, decided the official PX-34 connector was overpriced and the SMK-0001 cable a gamble, and wired up his own breakout box instead: a 9-pin Amiga video connector, six RCA jacks, and two switches for sync-on-green and TV audio. The full 34-pin and 9-pin pinouts follow, along with the reference links he gathered.

This one has been sitting since we moved into the house, and I've finally had time to get back to it. The plan was to run Kickstart 3.1 with an adapter board to make it play nicely with this revision of the motherboard, which got me a black screen at boot. Putting the 1.2 ROM back in got me a yellow screen instead, which is not much of an improvement.

Then, somehow, I zapped the machine and everything came up working. Strange, but I'll take it. The floppy drive tests fine, so what's left is sorting out the keyboard and building a cable for analog RGB.

I have the case of a Mac Cube sitting around waiting to become a Linux box, and I keep eyeing the 2013 trash can Power Macs going for almost nothing on eBay. There are a lot of fun weirdo machines out there, and the Macintosh's 40th anniversary seemed like a good excuse to round up my favorites.

Every machine here was manufactured and sold to the public, so no prototypes and no what-ifs. Together they show off Apple's inventive streak and its willingness to gamble on odd shapes and odd ideas. Weird is a matter of taste, of course, so if I've missed your pick, say so in the comments.

Triggers are one of those database features that feel like cheating the first time you use one. Write a little procedure, attach it to a table, and the database quietly does the work for you on every insert, update, or delete. No application code to remember, no forgotten call site.

That same quietness is the problem. A trigger you wrote months ago is invisible in the diff, invisible in the stack trace, and perfectly happy to keep running long after you stopped thinking about it. Here is where I have found them genuinely worth the trouble, where I now reach for plain application code instead, and what I wish I had known before letting the schema start making decisions on my behalf.

It’s coming up on October 31st again which means it’s time for our household to start building out our Halloween decorations. We enjoy Halloween in our neighborhood. There’s quite a few kids on our street and we get into the spirit.

Order placed July 2021. Delivery a year and a half later. Somewhere in between I switched my color to eruption green and dropped the tow package, and I have no regrets about either. The green is perfect.

Ford sent order holders a photo of their Bronco coming off the line, which was a nice touch for a wait that long. Also here: a goodbye to my Honda CR-Z, which carried me almost a decade and close to 100,000 miles and still felt pretty damn solid at the end. Thanks to Lief Johnson Truck City for making the handoff an easy one.

My wife and I went with a Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme for the whole house this year, which finally gave me an excuse to build the Tom Servo kit I have wanted for ages. A puppet alone was not quite enough, though, so I set out to make him self-contained: battery powered, one button, a random clip from a pile of prerecorded Servo lines.

What follows is the build. An Arduino Pro Mini left over from last year's eyeball pumpkins, a DFPlayer Mini for audio, servos, speakers, and the awful popping sound that turned out to be the DFPlayer quietly insisting on a steady 3.3V. Code is up on GitHub.

Being new to the neighborhood, we wanted to do something fun, so we took a two pronged approach: a batch of eyeball animatronic pumpkins and a custom window animation. The pumpkins run on cheap servos and Arduinos, built off the usual tutorials, though every one of those assumes the Arduino can power the servos on its own. That works for a few and falls apart around eight, so I ended up with an external supply and a separate power rail for the eyeballs.

The window was the more fun half. My wife handled the design and all the skilled drawing, and I took it into After Effects for the animation loop. I love the way it looked.

A few months' worth of hardware purchases, gathered into one video: a Commodore4ever power supply to replace the old brick, a new monitor, a PenUltimate+ cartridge, and a selectable RAM expansion with a reset switch for the VIC-20. All rad.

Then a drive up to Funspot in New Hampshire, home to one of the largest collections of classic arcade games anywhere. Rows and rows of cabinets, most of which I am spectacularly bad at. Music from Mattie Maguire, The Basic Game, and Falcon Dives, and thanks as always to everyone supporting the channel.

A brief detour from vintage computers to vintage gaming consoles, because the holidays call for something a little more festive. My fiance is getting a Vectrex this year, and not a stock one either.

I walk through the whole gift: a restored and revitalized console, the BUZZ OFF mod kit to quiet that infamous hum, a Moray Labs controller with 3D printed shells, a light pen, Sean Kelly's multi-cart and the Vectrex32, plus a dust cover to keep it all looking sharp. Links to everything mentioned are collected at the bottom if you want to build one of your own.