Fun

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.

Picking up where the first episode left off. The keyboard fixes finally get finished, the power switch gets sorted out, and the memory cartridges get tested to see what actually still works. From there it's on to Vic-20 expansion options, and then into the stranger corner of the software library, where the machine offers to measure your IQ and size up your personality.

It ended up being way more involved than I intended, but I had a lot of fun making it. I also mention the ANTIC Interview with Jay Balakrishnan of HESWare. Antic is a great podcast and well worth a listen.

My first official video, in which I admit I don't really know what I'm doing with the Commodore Vic-20 and then set out to fix that. The plan is simple enough: get my hands on a Vic-20, see if it still runs, and clean the whole thing up. I get most of the way there.

A few things are still outstanding, though, along with a handful of side projects that piled up along the way, so those will have to wait for the next episode. Also included are the YouTube videos and the podcast that got me started, plus links to the replica dealer sign and dust cover I picked up.

Somewhere on YouTube there is a video of a horse making a sound. Presumably a normal sound, as far as horses go. But to my ear it came out as yodeling, clean and tuneful and faintly alpine, and once I had heard it that way there was no hearing it any other way.

So here is the result. The original clip, the horse, and the yodel I could not stop hearing in it. No larger point, no lesson about sound or perception or anything else. A horse sounded like it was yodeling and that seemed worth doing something about.

Local television advertising has a way of lodging itself in your memory and staying there long after you have any reason to think about it. 650-Gold ran spots like this one during the height of the cash-for-gold boom, when the price kept climbing and every other strip mall had somebody willing to weigh your old jewelry.

This is the first of them. There is not much to say about the ad itself, which is short and does exactly what it sets out to do. I am putting it here because nobody else seemed to be, and because I would rather it exist somewhere other than in my head.

Second of the spots for 650-Gold. The premise is not subtle, and it isn't meant to be: everybody is buying gold, gold is worth more than it used to be, and here is the number to call. A commercial this short leaves no room for nuance, so the pitch is the whole thing.

What I like about making these is the constraint. One idea, one line worth repeating, a hard cutoff, and anything that doesn't serve the sell has to go. Below is the finished commercial, with a few notes on what changed between the first one and this one.

Third in the 650-GOLD series. Thirty seconds of local television advertising, kept here because nobody else was going to keep it: the phone number sung twice, the cheerful insistence that everybody is buying gold, and the unstated suggestion that you ought to be selling.

No commentary, no analysis, just the tape and the jingle. If these ads ran during the late movie where you grew up, the melody will arrive fully assembled and you will not be able to put it back. This is the third one I have posted, and probably not the last.