Technology tidbits and other meandering thoughts.
(Forward: This blog article began as what I felt would be a straight-forward documentation of an obscure sector of the old Packard Bell computing world. It cycled into a lot more and became a massively rambling mess spanning months of time, especially the latter half involving the master CD chaos. I used this blog in... Read More
The buzz around the internet is of the return of McDonald's Monopoly. A game that for many years was a fun tradition, if we ignore how it was later revealed to be laced in fraud due to a few bad actors. In the 1990s, I remember the fun of sticking collected pieces to the foldout... Read More
If you're arriving here after having your longstanding Facebook account suspended without notice or cause, happy new year! An untold number of Facebook users, myself included, kicked off their much-anticipated holiday break to the shock of of a suddenly disabled account. Individual experiences vary, but I'm making this post to compile a running record while... Read More
UPDATE NOVEMBER 2024: Based on comments received here and on YouTube, Pioneer is no longer honoring repairs for this condition when out-of-warranty. That is a great disappointment considering Pioneer has previously admitted the problem was widespread and a manufacturing defect on their end. This means that many owners of their defective head units from 2020-2022... Read More
(This is part of an ongoing effort to document the various CRT monitors and televisions that I acquire, with information that may be of relevance to others who Google the same model!) Here's another freebie new-old stock set I picked up last year. For a 20" set, the inclusion of component inputs makes it inviting... Read More
(This is part of an ongoing effort to document the various CRT monitors and televisions that I acquire, with information that may be of relevance to others who Google the same model!) This is a fairly bulky 27" curved television set, and one of the rare instances where it feels as back-heavy as it does... Read More
This week's obsession came when I decided I wanted to repurpose my recently repaired Samsung Galaxy Note S10+ as an overhead camera for the workbench. Its image sensors vastly outperform any ordinary webcam, including my $200 Razer Kio Pro. The distance from my homemade ceiling mount to the workbench tabletop makes the 2x optical zoom... Read More
Overview The Bally Arcade / Bally Astrocade / Bally Professional Arcade was an ambitious home computer and video game console combo released in 1978. It sported a 24-button calculator keypad, four joystick ports, a ROM with four built-in applications (Gunfight, Checkmate, Calculator, Scribbling), a light-pen connector and expansion bus and 256 possible colors (8 simultaneous... Read More
(This article will serve as a compendium of knowledge about the incredibly elusive Cybervision 2001 system, for which few sites or articles exist online and no prior service manuals, schematics or reference materials have ever been published. This post will serve both as a well-documented exploration of my repair efforts, technical documentation, media details and... Read More
Overview Google caused a lot of controversy when it decided to phase out the free edition of their popular G Suite (Google Suite / Google Workspace), which they had previously grandfathered in for personal users who acquired it when the solution was still free-of-charge. Many relied on the service for custom domain email management... Read More