Off-Topic / Dumping Thread

[+arcadeshopper]

Could I suppose someone here has one single 150ohm 16-pin DIP package for floppy drive termination?  I have an IBM drive that will not read, and I suspect the missing termination package is the problem -- but I cannot order them anywhere in reasonable quantities.  Yeah, I can get them for like $20 for 50, but WT* am I going to do with the extra 49?

Send me the source I'll stock them

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[RickyDean]

1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

Could I suppose someone here has one single 150ohm 16-pin DIP package for floppy drive termination?  I have an IBM drive that will not read, and I suspect the missing termination package is the problem -- but I cannot order them anywhere in reasonable quantities.  Yeah, I can get them for like $20 for 50, but WT* am I going to do with the extra 49?

I will look in the morning and let you know. Since I live in Se georgia, shipping should be fast and free.

[GDMike]

Anyone know what values are output from the PEB power supply board?

I'm getting 10, 4.2 and 20 last time I checked 3 connector points.

Edited September 20, 2020 by GDMike

[+OLD CS1]

15 hours ago, arcadeshopper said:

Send me the source I'll stock them

There are several sources ranging in price from $.33 to $1.75 each.  Mouser, All Electronics, eBay, etc.  But all have some minimum order requirement or shipping costs make it ridiculous to buy a single chip and I do not have anything I need to order to pad one up.  I figured any one of us around here has a better way, even if just throwing the chip in an envelope.

 

14 hours ago, RickyDean said:

I will look in the morning and let you know. Since I live in Se georgia, shipping should be fast and free.

Thanks.  Let me know.  We have one electronics store in town and I was thinking about giving them a call Monday while I am calling around for a replacement timer for my dryer.

 

[+InsaneMultitasker]

"Test fire of the Raptor Vacuum engine at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas. "

 

This was just too cool...

 

https://mobile.twitter.com/ThePlanetaryGuy/status/1309319812263358465

 

 

[+FarmerPotato]

You might have seen Google's "AI Generated Art". This stuff is similar, but you get to tell the AI what to visualize! 

 

The research was in the direction of training the AI to fill in the missing word, based on the picture.  For example "two people sitting on the ___ playing video games" (couch)

 

This experiment reverses the direction - the AI dreams up the picture from the words. 

 

https://vision-explorer.allenai.org/text_to_image_generation

 

Here's the article I saw it in: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/25/1008921/ai-allen-institute-generates-images-from-captions/

 

For example, try typing in:

"a TI-99/4A computer sits on the couch with a cat"

 

The image shows parts of the AI's neural network that (in the past)  have trained to recognize images of cats, computers, and couches. It's all blurry like a dream.

Obviously, it has been trained on a PC, a brown couch, and a tiger cat. In a world where everybody wears blue jeans. 

 

If you say "two people sitting on the couch playing video games" you get... something like that.

If you say "two people playing video games", the people are standing up. But the couch is still there, because the AI has been trained that a couch is a typical background in those situations. 

 

This infamous phrase from TI's Magic Wand Speaking Reader "mix and match sentences bar codes poster":

 

"Ronald Reagan ... played Footsie ... with Bo Derek ... on the subway".

 

Ed McMahon played that on the Tonight Show. It  got a stern letter from the White House! (My dad has a mounted poster of Ed McMahon holding a train, with a bar code that plays a choo-choo train accelerating. It came with a copy of that letter. You can type "chuff chuff, chuff chuff" in TE2 text-to-speech to approximate the Tonight Show performance.)

 

If you take out "on the subway" it is more like the PGA.

 

I tried some Story Machine phrases to see how things have changed in 40 years. (Go play the 4A cartridge, if you have never seen it.)

 

"the tree eats the apple"

"the boy dances"

"the tree walks to the house"

"the tree sits on  the house"

"the boy runs around the girl"

 

Hmm.

 

Back on testing the range of this thing:

 

"a snake meets a cat" I can't tell if it's the stripes from the tiger cat or from a snake. I thought I got some good Python scales yesterday.

"a huge snake killing a small mouse" is better.

 

"one celebrity in the mall" gives someone like Obi-Wan Kenobi in front of a crowd in a trade show.

"a droid in the mall"

"a spaceship in the mall"

"a spaceship in space"

"a spaceship in Florida" reveals something like the Space Shuttle carried on the back of a plane. I guess that's what it trained on.

"Darth Vader on the death star" is weird: a rose, stained glass, darkness, a CRT

"a spaceship with a rose" is improved by saying "a large spaceship with a tiny rose"

 

"a cow eats the grass" is passable

"a snake rides on a plane" seems to go back to that Space Shuttle image

"the president has a big case of coronavirus", and variations, shows that it knows about the beer. I suspect faces were always blurred out during training. 

"a big case of coronavirus" reveals the beer.

 

"Ruth Bader Ginsburg  at the supreme court" gets you a big audience at a tennis match.

 

"make big money in the valley" still foils my attempts to see if it understands "apple makes computers in silicon valley". It does look like California though.

"it is nighttime  in the valley" turns out the lights.

 

" a cowboy runs on the grass" gets you the cowboy doing nothing. He can do a lot of other things though. Sometimes it makes a cow-horse. "a cowboy on a horse in the valley" looks like a rider on a cow, but the scenery is improved.

 

I'm amazed how it gets the foreground and background to change across the sentences. It gets better the more specific you are.

 

It would be interesting to know if the AI can reverse the process: identifying the objects it put into the pictures.

 

[+mizapf]

To my fellow countrymen: Have a happy October 3rd. How fast 30 years have passed, incredibly.

[GDMike]

My rasberry pi B+ has all of a sudden just sits at a red light, I've tried making images on the 32gb sd card with noobs as well as the tipi images with no boot as a result.

Rasberry pi forum says check pin 1 voltage, I've got 3.3 and is supposed to be ok.

Red light is ack, so we know my 2 power supplies are fine I've been trying.

My laptop sees the SD card just fine, so I'm at a loss. 

[+arcadeshopper]

so this is like the third thing that's died in the last month dude you have power issues at your house are you using any kind of power regulation or UPS?

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[GDMike]

Actually it's the only thing, The ti peb power probs were self made being I just wanted to upgrade to an ATX PS, and then it failed on its own, but I shouldn't have used it as it didn't work for my pc at all and it ended up literally dying after 4 months, but I suspect it wasn't any good to start with, then replacing the original transformer I ended up shorting by accident a wire. So yeah,

but the raspberry pi Problems may just be an sd card issue, I dunno yet. Another is on order, and pi. But I'm not getting a pi 4, I'll stick to the pi 3.

 

 

Edited October 3, 2020 by GDMike

[+OLD CS1]

2 hours ago, mizapf said:

To my fellow countrymen: Have a happy October 3rd. How fast 30 years have passed, incredibly.

May you never need a second such holiday.

[GDMike]

We have great Weather forecasted for the next couple weeks, absolutely beautiful

[GDMike]

I couldn't just let my other peb case sit in Limbo, and I need a case for my tape drive and a hard drive. So I'll use this and jumper it to my laptop. (Well my pc died last year and I've been using the laptop for everything these days). Go figure, this plastic fan is loud and proud, but it's a blower!

I just need to connect the temp guage up inside the case somewhere..I guess.

Edited October 4, 2020 by GDMike

[GDMike]

Now they both have a purpose

 

Edited October 4, 2020 by GDMike

[adamchevy]

Super Mario Bros 2 is Shovelware, and a total waste of your life. Just play Super Mario Bros or Super Mario Bros 3. Super Mario Bros 2 was a shit game when it was first released and it’s even worse all of these years later. I played it because it’s one of Retro game clubs games of the week. I’d rather play Mythicon games all night or Sssnake. Super Mario Bros 2 is so bad that it makes me wonder how Nintendo was able to pull off Super Mario Bros 3.

 

 

 

 

[wierd_w]

What you talkin' bout willis?  There's some skill needed to do a straight playthrough of SMB2 (aka, DokiDoki panic, easy mode).  Seriously, the ice world (world 4) is tricky and needs some skilled control input to do properly. You're just upset that Japan got a real SMB title, while we got rebranded DokiDoki Panic.

[adamchevy]

What you talkin' bout willis?  There's some skill needed to do a straight playthrough of SMB2 (aka, DokiDoki panic, easy mode).  Seriously, the ice world (world 4) is tricky and needs some skilled control input to do properly. You're just upset that Japan got a real SMB title, while we got rebranded DokiDoki Panic.

 

I’m a huge fan of tricky platformers. One of my all time favorite games is Super Meat Boy. The mechanics in SMB 2 aren’t just tricky, they are poorly designed and implemented. The level design is monotonous and boring. The difference in character mechanics feels slapped on and an afterthought. It’s just a piss poor game that really didn’t deserve the golden seal or the Mario branding.

[wierd_w]

... Maybe I should do a recording of how to do 4-1 correctly then...

 

There's an area where you need to run, squat on the ice, and do perfectly timed squatting jumps, and allow the momentum of your sliding to continue through without getting hit.

 

However, I will agree that DokiDoki panic was not intended to be a major game release, note even in Japan.  It was created to fill a role in the Fuji TV Yume Kōjō '87 event.  It had a low production budget, and really-- just was not meant to be a major title. The US marketers for nintendo decided that the US market wanted something different from the original SMB, and wanted to shake up the format. Nintendo was busy as hell with too many projects of its own, and could not satisfy a wholly new format title to compete with the REAL SMB2 (lost levels). So-- they negotiated rights to DokiDoki Panic, re-sprited things, and called it a day.

 

Doesn't mean that there isn't some trick shot style mechanics in some of the levels though.

[HOME AUTOMATION]

Don't believe everything you hear from the horses mouth...

 

[GDMike]

my kids are driving me crazy with this

[GDMike]

Dang, I didn't know this game did this. If my son picks up his cell during the game then his player shows he's on the phone..

Cool beans.

[jrhodes]

Picked this up at a yard sale. Everything was marked "make a offer", rental property being cleaned out by land lord.

I got it, a 4-ft. hdmi cable, and a few old power outlet strips all for $2 total.

He really did not care how much he made on this stuff, just looking to get the place emptied asap.

 

I am tempted to paint it with some sort of black and silver paint job, affix a TMS9900 ceramic cpu to it, & hang it by my TI desk.

[HOME AUTOMATION]

I'd use a router to burn/engrave "ti" then stain ...dark oak or maple.

[Ed in SoDak]

Oooh, I got just the gadget for that, just no time or space to set it up with the lab full of work!

 

It's an old analog equivalent to DIY CNC, a Sears router pantograph. We created our own designs on the Confuser and put 'em on wood.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

One of my old workhorse machines experienced a power supply problem that just so happened to occur during a shutdown, of all times.  Grrr.  The OS partition took quite a hit in the process, fortunately, the other drives are ok (and I did set aside the previous backups just in case).   I booted with a backup OS drive and checked out all of the SMART stats.  I was surprised to see all of the drives have surpassed 50,000+ hours [6 years!!] of operation.  Kinda reminds me of TI equipment in that it just keeps chugging along so well that I seldom consider that it could fail.