EricBall

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a new Mac Mini. I gave up and went with the i7 / 780M iMac (which was probably a better match for my requirements anyway).

The Atari 2600 didn't have any way to lock out cartridges, unlike the Atari 7800 (digital signature) & NES (lockout chip). With a lock-out, the console manufacturers could charge third party publishers for the games which were made. This is true even today. The console maker wants to make $$ for every game sold, not just every console.

Ripping tools are often just GUI wrappers on OSS command line tools. With some research you might be able to avoid the MKV -> M4V transcoding step. Guides / code written for Linux is often easy to use / port to OSX.

While I custom built quite a few PCs (286, 486 & Athlon) my last two PCs (not including laptops) have been a Dell & an iMac. I just found a Dell to be quite price competitive for what I needed. (The iMac was because my wife converted to a MacBook back in the "I'm a Mac" days and I've gotten tired of dealing with Windows - although I still have a netbook with Win7 SE & my corporate laptop also runs Win7.) Even if you decide to still "build your own" or buy retail, there's still value in checking out Dell for price & features. I'd also recommend checking out the Ars Technica System Guides (most recent: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/ars-technica-system-guide-bargain-box-april-2014/ ). I also lean heavily on http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ to compare CPUs - you probably don't need an Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2, but you probably want to avoid an Intel Pentium E5200. For Linux compatibility the easiest way to check is with a Live CD or USB of your distribution. These days going 64 bit is a no-brainer. I also recommend buying the best you can afford today. You might upgrade RAM & hard-disk but probably not. Also budget in a big external drive & use it for backups. And while it might be difficult to upgrade your current system - how often are you going to? My last Dell was practically silent (and the iMac is silent). However, for really quiet computers, check out http://www.silentpcreview.com/

So given your average monthly spend, how many more months is that?

I've been playing Half Life (1) on the new 27" iMac - bigger is better! I've gotten most of the way through chapter 11 - Surface Tension, but I've discovered I bypassed getting the Tau gun back in chapter 10 - Questionable Ethics. Sigh.... I even managed to get through the whole drain hatch / minefield section without killing the helicopter gunship. I guess it's back to an earlier savegame. It's still one of the the best games.

Oooh! I was going to ask if there was a playlist or similar in Vimeo so I don't have to search for each individually. Hopefully I can get my Apple TV to find & handle the Vimeo channel.

Something tells me it's going to take significantly longer than a week to get everything back into the office. Hah! Not if your SO has anything to say about it. And if you didn't do it when you were taking the stuff out, now is a great time to purge before you blindly try to squeeze everything back into the room.

Nuisance to whom? If you enjoy it, it's not hurting you otherwise and you're not making demands on anyone else then there's no reason to not do it. However, I do understand the difficulty in continuing if you are having to be your own cheerleader.

Google Image Search for "bird with black cap and yellow stripe" the first two results are for Golden-crowned Kinglet: http://share2.esd105.org/rsandelin/Fieldguide/Animalpages/Birds/Smallbirds.htm http://freidaybird.blogspot.ca/2012/10/stalking-wild-kinglet.html But the head/body proportions don't look quite right.

Looks good. It might be an alternative to donor carts, especially if you can color the PU and the material characteristics aren't bad.

The typical SF story goes like - the Quotile are an expansionist, xenophobic race with an insatiable need for natural resources. (Actually, their problem is they evolved from a species with a high birth rate.) The canon is part of an automated scout which is preparing the Yars system for colonization. When the Quotile scout first landed on the moon the Yars attempted to make peaceful contact. This was unsuccessful and none of the attempts were enough to trigger the scout's automated defenses. The Yars were quite unprepared when the first attacks occurred and had to re-discover how to use their natural abilities in an offensive manner.

When the big studios are involved, the profits from a box office hit evaporate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

I think one of the interesting themes in CA2 is Cap's struggle with being part of SHIELD - a "shadow military" organization. Cap was much more at peace during WW2 - taking on a well defined enemy & objective. As he said during the opening mission "I'm getting tired of being Fury's janitor." (Hmmm... and what does that make the Winter Soldier...)

Yes, you need to watch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and it's a good thing to see CA2 before watching the current episode). For the movie, I am mostly in agreement with Howard Tayler: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/captain-america-winter-soldier-movie-review#disqus_thread

Ahh, the classic Radio Shack "Archer" TV/game switch - often the source of interference patterns for those early computers and consoles.

It's too bad thunderbolt is so dang expensive. Although I've subscribed the new iMac to Backblaze, the initial backup of 400+GB of photos and music transferred over from my wife's MacBook is going to take many moons to stay under the 60GB/month cap. So I did some shopping for an external drive to use as a local TimeMachine backup. I looked at the various thunderbolt drives, but they all had multi-hundred dollar pricetags. Even the Seagate adapter for their external drives is $200 - and that doesn't even include the cable! Instead I got a USB3 3TB drive for C$110+tax from Amazon.ca. Not as fast as thunderbolt (especially since it will be running at USB2 speeds), but a heck of a lot cheaper.

For MH370, I suspect (possibly very soon) the main search effort will be called off because the batteries in the black box transmitter will have been depleted (http://english.astroawani.com/news/show/mh370-black-box-locator-has-two-days-to-search-32830) making detection impossible. And they are not fools for searching for the literal equivalent of a needle in a haystack - there are many parties who want the wreck found; and not all of them will take ending the search well.

Note: 2048 is a clone of 1024, which is a clone of Threes: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/214122/Threes_clones_and_cornflakes_A_view_on_casual_games.php (I haven't played any of them...)

Skeleton+ plays the "footstep" sound on both channels, but at different volumes to try to provide a direction indication. This was more critical in the original Skeleton which didn't have the direction indicator.

On Friday we picked up my new 27" iMac with the i7 and 780M. The place I bought it from also put in 16GB of RAM for $230, bringing the total up to 24GB for about the same price as Apple would have put in 16GB. I also got the 1TB Fusion drive and the Superdrive (which sits nicely on the "foot"). I also bought a Unicomp Mac layout buckling spring keyboard. I have to say the screen is very, very nice. It doesn't dominate the room like a giant TV (or maybe I'm just used to bigger TVs than I used to be), but when you use it the amount of real estate is impressive. I had to set the mouse sensitivity to near the top just so I wouldn't have to move my whole arm to cross the screen. This is going to make stitching panoramas much easier. (And Apple hasn't announced a new Mac Mini yet.)

Today I finally priced out the parts for this project and it's ~$60, which breaks down as: $27 Teensy++ w/ pre-soldered pins $5.50 USB panel socket $8 shipping for above $12 connectors (two styles) $8 shipping for above Hrmm... I need to think about this. Desoldering the connectors will save me $20 - although my first attempt was not successful, this is extra motivation to try again.

Yeah, the typical option is to convert the PS/2 connection to USB. (There's even one which builds it into the SDL cable.) However, these have two problems: 1. A converter does nothing to reduce the current requirements. Because the logic appears to be based on open collectors with external pull-ups, this means the controller wastes a lot of power - sometimes more than USB likes to provide. 2. The firmware is limited by both protocols and the original controller implementation. So if the original controller will only support 2 simultaneous keypresses, there's no way to work around it.

I took the keyboard apart last night (yech - board chow) and had my first look at the PCB. Hrmm, those pins are finer pitch than I remember... There's also a few more components than the circuit diagram I found which would need to be removed or bypassed. So now I'm rethinking my plans. My new idea is to either extract the membrane connectors or buy new ones and connect those directly to the Teensy.

I now have the nut driver, and it was only C$3.95 (including tax) + 17 miles of gas. Hoo-rah! Now I can't wait to get back home so I can take the keyboard apart and beep out the PCB. Although I won't be using it, the Adafruit BlueFruit EZ-key is very cool. It's a Bluetooth keyboard + mouse controller with several different input options: 1. It has connections for 12 NO buttons for easy connection to any digital controllers (like an Atari joystick or an NES controller). 2. It has a serial input for simple ASCII transmission. 3. The same serial input also will handle HID events from a direct keyboard (or mouse) controller.