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Saturday, May 26th, 2012
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[  epi_lj : As an aside... @ 2:38a ]
...on the classic computer front, for myself I bought an Amiga 500. I have no nostalgia for Amigas; I've never had one. But I thought it would be a fun system to learn about and I figured that I might be able to use it as a musical instrument.
The first thing that I noticed was that there was no obvious way to connect it to the TV. It turned out that the Amigas used very weird connectors, and making an adaptor isn't as trivial as with the TI. But it also turns out that the port labelled "MONO" isn't monophonic sound; It's mono video, so I *can* hook it up, just with no colour. So I did so, and got as far as a picture of a hand holding a Workbench 1.3 disk. Which wasn't included in the "complete" system, either.
I found a vendor online, and paid not-a-lot-but-more-than-I-would-have-liked to get a copy of the Workbench 1.3 disk. (You can download disk images online, but not only does my Mac not have a floppy drive, but even with a PC, you need a special device to hack your floppy drive to be able to write Amiga disks.) I also ordered, from Australia and at great expense, an adaptor that allows it to be hooked up to the TV and modern monitors.
The Workbench disk arrived the other day. I fired up the Amiga. It's neat! Except... the mouse doesn't work. The buttons work, but the directions don't. I've found all kinds of references online saying that the Amiga mouse requires +5V, and there are various components on the motherboard that can blow that will cause said supply to fail, but I tested the pins in question and they read +5V on my multimeter. So I'm not sure what to make of that. You can also test it with a joystick, but I didn't (then) have one. Now that I have the Atari stick, I might check to see if that works. However, barring all of that, I'm going to assume for now that the mouse is busted, which sucks in a big way.
Replacement mice aren't THAT expensive, but they're not super cheap either, and since the Amiga was mostly popular in Europe, they mostly ship from there are exorbitant rates. You can also get an adapter, which everyone seems to think is a good idea, that lets you use *some* modern mice on it. This adapter is very much not cheap, but maybe worth it. Then if it turns out that it's useful for music, I'll have to get a MIDI interface, and I don't even want to guess what that'll set me back (I did see one reasonably priced recently, but I don't know how common that is, and the seller noted that they weren't sure it worked).
I'll probably also need one of those SD-to-floppy things.
So yeah. Cute $30 computer, probably at least a few hundred bucks in replacements and accessories needed to make it work. Whee!
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[ epi_lj : AAAAAGHFDSJKLSDAJIDSJAKLFFFFFFUUUUU!!!! @ 2:29a ]
That about sums it up.
Okay, so a little while ago, the Brantford Personal Computer Museum was having a garage sale to raise funds. and I attended. At said sale, she saw a TI-99/4A, which set her squeeing to beat the band, because she has a lot of nostalgia for the system from when she was a kid. I was verbally assured that it was complete and tested. The price was only $15, so I bought it for her.
On the way home, she told me many stories of having played MunchMan, a Pac-Man clone, for hours on it. We stopped at her sister's place and her sister's first question upon learning that we had it was whether or not we had MunchMan.
When I got it home, I noticed that there was a post-it note attached to the *underside* of the box that said, "NOT TESTED".
When we took it out of the box, we quickly discovered that the box contained only the system itself and a power brick/adapter. Notoriously missing was the video cable. However, the connector looked like a 5-pin DIN connector, so out of curiosity, I went a-googlin', and I found diagrams about how to build yourself a video connector. I have plenty of 5-pin DIN connectors hanging around because that's what MIDI cables use, and like most people with lots of A/V equipment, I have tons of composite cables, so I was able to crack out the soldering iron and build a video cable from scratch right there. And lo, it worked! I was very pleased.
However, it didn't take long to discover that there's not that much to DO with a computer with no storage whatsoever. I did pull up one of those, "games for your TI" magazines from the 80s on my iPad and I spent something like two hours studiously typing in a BASIC implementation of OTHELLO. Both and I played it once (each), and then we turned the machine off, losing all that work, since there was no way to save it.
So step one in making this a fun toy for was to go on eBay and get a copy of MunchMan. This turned out to be really easy to do, setting me up for unrealistic expectations for the future perhaps.
It eventually arrived, and we fired it up, only to discover that it's next to impossible to play with the keyboard. Joysticks were needed.
It turns out to be very hard to get TI joysticks. On top of that, they're widely considered to be among the worst ever made. There are, however, ample instructions online on how to create an adaptor that allows you to connect a pair of Atari or Commodore joysticks.
In the meantime, I tried to procure storage. This turns out to be a ridiculous effort. The primary way to add a disk drive is to buy a gigantic chassis larger than most tower systems called a PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box), and then to buy a disk controller for the PEB, and then to buy a floppy drive for the PEB, connect all of them together, and connect this to the TI. For a machine we just wanted to stick in front of the TV for the occasional game, it wasn't going to fly. Also, all of this stuff is ludicrously expensive.
The other option is to buy a standalone disk controller. Then you can either hook up a standalone floppy drive to it, or you can buy a device that uses an SD memory card to emulate a floppy drive, reading disk images (which you can download from the internet). This is pretty much perfect, and nowhere near as massive as the PEB. The problem is that because back in the day most people serious enough to want a floppy drive bought a PEB, standalone controllers are exceedingly rare. One just came up the other day, and I bid $40 for it. I was winning (at $31) until 29 seconds before the end of the auction, then it jumped to $147.51. :/
Today, I managed to get down to A&C Games and procure an Atari joystick (actually, a third-party one that's compatible). I also went to an electronics shop in that area and got all the parts I needed to make the adaptor.
To say that the soldering job making the adaptor didn't go smoothly is the understatement of the century. The page I got the instructions from said it would take about an hour, and it took me something like three just to get a basic "wires twisted together, not in a case" test kit together. Just about everything that could go wrong, did, and I was pretty much ready to take up drinking. But I got it done, and the moment of truth came. We hooked everything up and...
...it worked! Kind of. Everything but "UP" worked.
So then I spent the next couple of hours testing everything meticulously. I took out the multimeter and re-did my earlier tests to make sure every pin and jack that I'd soldered had connectivity. I then connected them all again and did through tests. Then I tried it again. No dice.
I started connecting them with alligator clips, so I could switch things up easily. I couldn't solve the problem, but I also couldn't pinpoint it. I flipped the up and down pins, and discovered that I still couldn't go up, but I could go down. That meant that the "up" direction on the joystick worked. I checked my adapters again, everything checked out.
There was only one conclusion to draw. After all this, the TI's joystick port was busted. And to make matters worse, I had just spent a lot more than I wanted to buying two more games on eBay. (I had bid on four from a particular seller because they had reasonable shipping and did combined shipping, but I only won the two I wanted least.)
Frustrated, I decided to call it a night (almost 2am by that time). The next day I would pop it open to see if I could fix it. I was really annoyed and ticked off at this point, so I took some time to rant on Tumblr and Twitter and try to cool off. Then I decided to do some last google searches, mostly to see if I could find a picture of the joystick port and how it connected to the motherboard to get some idea of what the odds were that I could fix it if I popped the system open the next day and took a look.
And in doing so, I came across an article containing the following text:
"Port in the back is for the cassette cable to download Scott Adams adventure tapes and Teach yourself basic tapes etc. One on the side is for joysticks. With caplocks set joysticks still work but are limited. They don't go up or something like that. If you get nothing then its either the joystick or the TI."
I went and hooked everything back up, and carefully made sure that caps lock was disengaged... and it worked.
On the plus side, it works. We'll be able to enjoy all the games, and eventually this will just be a funny story in the past.
On the minus side, I'm just this side of homicidal with frustration, and it turns out that the past few hours of work were just because the TI joysticks don't work if you have caps lock depressed (which you do most of the time because in BASIC, you generally want it on).
So. Damned. Annoyed.
But... tomorrow is another day, I guess. Tomorrow, now that I've verified that it works, I can trim off the cables that aren't needed (several pins are left disconnected), get the last connections soldered and sealed in with heat-shrink tubing, and try to find a tiny box (like an Altoids box or something, or a small plastic project box from an electronics shop) to put the adapter in. And when that's all done, I'll probably feel better about the whole thing.
(Presuming I don't go ballistic trying to find a way to cut the holes for the ports.)
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(comment on this) Friday, May 25th, 2012
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[ tithonium : 25 May 12 @ 11:00p ]
One person left who is having facebook problems. Trying to figure out what's causing them. At wits end.
Some gardening.
Upgrading all my iOS devices to 5.1.1 and jailbreaking.. the iPad3 is now jailbroken, yay.
Just as I was getting used to the limitations of a non-jailbroken device...
Din Tai Fung for dinner.
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[ lyonesse : garden @ 8:51p ]
first four strawberries today! for teh yum :)
i also spent a lot of time weeding, mostly for the aesthetic sake of my roommate mike, who likes a trimmed look to the yard. (i personally prefer the urban meadow aesthetic.) he's recently bereaved and out of town. i bet he thinks i did an insufficiently tidy job, too.
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[ mamishka : Oh, hello... @ 5:29p ]
So um, yeah. Not really here any more. But today I bumped into Tiggy at a screening of Wrinkles and was reminded that I haven't told anyone where I'm going to be this year during SIFF or what I'm seeing. Last year I found writing reviews a real chore so this year I gave up on the idea entirely. Just not enough time and energy. But I will try to make an effort to post something about what I'm up to for those who might be interested in hooking up for a screening. :) So that said, here is what I know so far! May change and likely will get more films added.
FRIDAY:
11:00 - Wrinkles - Pac Place
1:30 - El Gusto - Pac Place
6:30 - Paul Williams Still Alive - Egyptian (was going to see Lola Versus, but it's now on Standby)
9:30 - Extraterrestrial - Pac Place
Midnight - Game of Werewolves - Egyptian
SATURDAY:
7:00 - Take This Waltz - Egyptian
9:46 - King Curling - Egyptian
SUNDAY:
11:00 - Bol - Uptown
MONDAY:
11:00 - ELIMINATE: Archie Cookson - Egyptian
1:30 - The Painting - Egyptian
4:00 - 360 - Egyptian (?)
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[ clawfoot @ 6:10p ]
OMG YOU GUYS I AM UNPACKING THE BASEMENT STORAGE HOLY CRAP YAY
And it's taking forever. Mostly because every single thing I unpack is absolutely filthy with drywall dust, so I attack it with a duster to get the worst off, then I wipe it down completely with a damp cloth, and if it's wooden furniture (which a lot of it is) I then Pledge the damn thing to within an inch of its life.
I smell like lemons.
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[ jwz : Turtles, all the way down. Or gliders. Or glider turtles. @ 12:15p ]
Conway's Game of Life, emulated in Conway's Game of Life:The life simulator used is Golly which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose "metafier.py" from the scripts list). 
Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata Meta-Pixel: The metacell uses a period 184 tractor beam, which acts as a clock. It pulls a block downwards by eight cells per impact, releasing a glider in the process. Some of the gliders are utilised; the rest are eaten. When the block reaches the base, it is restored at the top to begin the cycle again. Period 46 and 184 technologies (which are compatible) are used extensively throughout the configuration.The rule is encoded in two columns, each of nine eaters, where one column corresponds to the 'Birth' rule and the other corresponds to 'Survival'. The nine eaters correspond to the nine different quantities of on cells (0 through 8). The presence or absence of the eater indicates whether the cell should be on in the next meta-generation. The state of the eater is read by the collision of two antiparallel LWSSes, which radiates two antiparallel gliders (not unlike an electron-positron reaction in a PET scanner). These gliders then collide into beehives, which are restored by a passing LWSS in Brice's elegant honeybit reaction. If the eater is present, the beehive would remain in its original state, thereby allowing the LWSS to pass unaffected; if the eater is absent, the beehive would be restored, consuming the LWSS in the process. Equivalently, the state of the eater is mapped onto the state of the LWSS. Previously, previously, previously. Mirrored from jwz.org.
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[ maribou : 2312 Invincible Gadget Kaleidoscopes @ 12:04p ]
You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier
Some parts of this were preaching to the choir in my case; other parts pissed me off (hey, writers, if you base an extended analogical argument on biological "facts" that are WRONG WRONG WRONGER THAN WRONG, it kills your cred and makes me want to throw your book across the room). Still other parts were deeply alienating in the stop-mischaracterizing-or-ignoring-my-subcultures-and-while-you're-at-it-quit-dichotomizing-so-much sense; a few parts were usefully provocative. I think overall there was not enough of the last of those, too much of the middle two. It did fill me up full to the brim with thinky thoughts while I was reading it, though, which is good.
(100)
Kaleidoscope, by Gail Bowen
I am so fond of these characters. This one has a lot of lectury bits, there are a few people I don't mind being lectured by. The story is good, but as usual the whodunnit is almost beside the point. Start at the beginning with this series, I think? Deadly Appearances is the first one.
(101)
2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson (ARC)
Kim Stanley Robinson is part of my two-handed handful of favorite writers, and so it's unsurprising that I loved this. I was a bit surprised by the experimental nature of the text. The reader has to do a lot of work to keep all the threads together in his/her head, and there are poetic streams-of-consciousness and lists and chapters consisting solely of extracts from fictional textbooks, but it's satisfying work. The structure-building part of my brain was quite sated by the experience. I suspect I will be even more pleased with this book when I eventually reread it.
(102, A2)
Invincible, the Ultimate Collection, vol. 2, by Robert Kirkman et al.
Overall, a joyful, galumphing read. There were some bits, though, that really had an uninflected comics-are-for-stereotypically-immature-het-male-readers thing going on. (Pro tip: If you repeatedly show your sympathetic characters complaining about something being "so gay," IT WILL TAKE ME OUT OF THE STORY and into being-irritated-world. I much prefer being in the story.) In any case, we're talking ... 10 pages? out of about 400, so I'll still be reading these.
(103)
current mood: sleepy but eager
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[ lyonesse : ok... @ 1:15p ]
the dog is doing pretty well on a new anti-nausea med and four small meals of easy-digesting dog food a day. huzzah!
we seem to have had a power surge or something while i was gone, and most everyone on our net suffered somehow. my server required a new disk, followed by goodness-knows-what (new cd? new mobo?) that ended up with me just sticking it into the corpse of another box. i believe things are mostly restored now, though i also think i lost about fourteen hours' worth of mail and logs; i can live with that.
should be doing stuff now, but tired, so not so much.
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[ quirkybird : Family Man, Page 253 @ 12:05a ]
Originally published at Dylan Meconis. You can comment here or there. 
(permalink to this week’s page)
Mother knows best. Or does she? Maybe next week you’ll find out what that leather neck strap is for, at least…
This weekend I’ll be in beautiful British Columbia, at the first ever Vancouver Comic Arts Festival! You can’t miss me – I’ll be right by the entrance at Table 30. I love Vancouver and I’m really excited to finally have a comics convention that gives me an excuse to visit.
Admission to the Fest is FREE, so Vancouver residents, please come by and support the show!
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[ anosako : Japan: end of the week @ 4:06p ]
There are moments where I want nothing more than to impose myself upon the people around me. But sometimes I feel like I'm the eyesore, and I don't really know why. I just don't feel like my ability to converse is up to any par of adult conversation they would expect from me. Just as well. This wall of not speaking in Japanese is starting to kill me. I need to start studying. I need to get into a conversation class. I wonder if I got to work for Gaba, if I could take part in their Japanese lesson courses for foreigners. That would be amazing. I need to stop wishing and start DOING. OK. Today's to-do list
x. finish school for the week (yay!)
x. find a large mall with a big bookstore
x. pick up conversational Japanese book
x. pick up JLPT N3 study guides (kanji/grammar)
x. call it a night and take care of home The bugs are biting again. This is going to be a testing weekend!
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(comment on this) Thursday, May 24th, 2012
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[ tithonium : 24 May 12 @ 9:38p ]
Mostly working on the campaign service. Some planning meetings, which I didn't pay enough attention to because I was working on getting a deployment working.
Came home to continue reading 2312. 38% complete. The action finally started a couple chapters ago. I'm not sure I like where this is heading, but because it's KSR I expect it will head somewhere else.
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