Posts

Introduction In my last post, I went through some of the interesting (at least, to me) insights I gained through the 1001 Albums process. One thing I didn’t discuss much was the mechanics of listening to an assigned album 5 days a week for 4 years. It turns out it can be tricky to stay the course. Various distractions can happen, such as vacations, business trips, or just really busy workdays full of meetings, that can make keeping up a challenge. It’s worth noting that if you do miss a day, you don’t miss your chance to listen and review the album. However, if you miss a week or so without reviewing, the site will pause your progression. We never actually ran into that, but it warned us it was going to do it at some point. ...

Introduction After more than 4 years, I’ve finally completed 1001 Albums Generator. Here’s the summary post. I don’t really know what I want to say about the experience. I just feel like it needs properly documented and celebrated. Statistics Looking through some of the main statistics, I think I’m not surprised by many of the results. Punk being my favorite genre is no surprise, although it could have also been metal. I think looking at the styles given, grunge and hardcore both land in the “punk” bucket, while thrash and alternative metal are in the “metal” bucket. Grunge is a pretty big deal for me, so yeah… ...

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. However, I’ve been obsessed with how sleek the Mark III looks, and found myself checking eBay on the regular in the middle of the night. Once a good deal finally came across my screen, I was hitting that “Buy It Now” button, and as soon as I had, I knew I’d need some other accessories to make my Mark III setup legit. ...

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. As far as the software goes, there is the Steam version and the Nintendo Switch version. There’s also running the arcade version from your PC, but then you’re also beholden to running it in a vertical monitor setup, and that doesn’t jive with my game room projector setup. ...

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. So, here goes… ...

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. After a bit of research, however, I found that there are actually a handful of bot frameworks for integration with Hangouts, all leveraging the Hangups Python library. I looked over a few, and found one that hangoutsbot had the feature-set I was looking for. This came with all the hooks to extend it effectively, as well as a small ORM called peewee to abstract out any database functionality. I think peewee is the first ORM I’ve used in Python, and it has been fairly straightforward. I think I still prefer the feel of something like hugsql over ORMs in general, but peewee is painless. ...

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. After doing him the favor of taking the TV off his hands (I’m an altruist at heart…), I decided I wanted to use the same programs, running on a dusty Raspberry Pi 1 I had laying around instead of using a full computer like he did. ...

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. You may remember the box doohickey you’d screw into your TV’s coaxial connector from the NES. The 7800 has the same thing, except the box is integrated into the console itself. This is, in fact, the worst consumer standard for video (and audio) output. It combines all the signals into a single crappy signal that is then adjusted (magically) to appear on channel 3 of your old-ass television. Needless to say, this doesn’t look great on a modern digital television. It really never looked good on older analog TVs either, but our expectations have changed since the 80s. ...

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. We shall see… ...

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. After looking at many keyboards and failing to find this feature, I’ve made my peace with it. But I digress… ...