Background Behold... Treasure! After literally years of considering, putting off, and reconsidering getting a Sega Mark III, I finally bit the bullet and snagged one at the fairly reasonable price of $160. I had been putting it off for so long because I really don’t collect console variations when they don’t grant me some sort of new functionality or capability, and I already own a Sega Master System. Two, actually… Don’t ask....
Background My friend Michael is a big fan of the arcade version of Groove Coaster. Whenever we go to the local Round 1, we spend a goodly amount of time in front of that machine. However, we don’t make it there more than maybe once a month, at best, and that just won’t do. Let’s bring it home! Home Versions We had researched previously what it would take to bring the arcade experience home....
Ok, so, it’s been like 5 years since a blog post. In my defense, I was getting my Master’s Degree at PSU over that time. Also, I’ve been raising a daughter, which generally keeps me short on time. Now that I’m fully a master at all of the computer sciences, I figured it’s time to take another stab at this whole writing thing. Besides, I’m always working on projects and nobody gets to know about them if I don’t do this....
This project has been a lot of fun. The point of it is to assist in conversations in a music-related Hangouts group chat. I’m not sure why everyone settled on Hangouts as the chat standard for our group, but people like it because the barrier to entry is so low. I’m used to IRC and having bots assist in the conversation, so I was a little bummed that everyone wanted to use Hangouts....
Back in December, my buddy Epitrope moved to NY, and was trying to get rid of the things he wasn’t going to transport across the entire US. One of these things was an older 720p plasma Zenith TV. He is a hacker extraordinaire, and after doing a bit of looking at the manual, saw that the protocol for the serial interface on the back is documented. He created a set of programs to communicate with this port to do some TV automation, which I thought was really cool....
This is my most recently completed project. “Complete” is a fairly subjective word though, as the likelihood that I pop the top on my Atari 7800 again soon is fairly high. The point of this project was to install the Atari UAV board inside my 7800 in order to get a much better video signal out of it. The Atari 7800 only supported one type of video output signal, ye olde radio frequency modulator....
Wow, it’s really been like two and a half years since I’ve made a new post. That’s no good. Oh well, can’t change it now. It’s a new year, and I’ve got a bunch of (hopefully realistic) resolutions, one of which is to blog more. As a way of getting back into it, I’m just going to write about my resolutions, and start from there. I believe my readership is like zero, so this is mostly for personal reasons, but hopefully next year I can come back to this and be happy that at least 50% were accomplished....
Well, I finally did it; I bought my first mechanical keyboard, a Noppoo Choc Mini 2M with Cherry MX Blue switches from Massdrop. As this is my first mechanical keyboard, I really didn’t know what to expect. I knew that there would be a few function keys to control some of the features, but I didn’t really take the time to read up on them, past noting that there was no way through hardware to rebind the Capslock key to Escape....
Over the summer, some friends and I are planning on reading some computer texts that are considered required reading. I’ll be adding to the post as we come up with other interesting books. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman The Art of UNIX Programming, by Eric S. Raymond Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter Working Effectively with Legacy Code, by Michael Feathers The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, by Robert C....
Songkick is a music service that finds local concerts based on your personal tastes. You give it some info about what you like, either through an exported iTunes library, Pandora playlist, or Last.fm scrobble history, tell it where you’re interested in going, and it lets you know who is playing and where. I’ve been a happy user for at least two years now, and it’s a really good tool for tracking tours and concert history....