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Still need some time away from writing new things, so here is an article I was going to post when I finished cleaning and reorganizing my workshop in the basement. Many of the objects described below will be happily donated to a good home if you ask nicely.

Adapted from a twitter thread…

I expected this to go badly, but it actually went pretty well. I used the FC5025 controller from deviceside.com with a 5.25″ drive I JUST RANDOMLY FOUND NEW-IN-BOX while cleaning out the basement hooked to an ancient macbook running Ubuntu 12.04. (The macbook is unreliable and out of date and i keep it around partly as smart terminal and partly for potentially-dangerous experiments I don’t want to risk a “real” computer on but which might be easier on an x86 than a raspberry pi)

Contrary to expectations, most of my PC 5.25 floppies read fine despite their long slumber. On average, I’d say I had fewer read errors on the 5.25″s than I did on the old 3.25s I was ripping via a cheap USB floppy around the same time. Is there some other device I can plug into a modern computer to read floppy disks? USB floppy drives seem to not quite be able to handle the range of disks that IDE ones could.

One annoyance with the FC5025 is that you have to tell it the format of the disk – it can’t guess for you. And if you tell it the wrong one, it seemed to need to be unplugged and re-plugged to reset it. I discovered that you can USUALLY BUT NOT ALWAYS tell the difference between a high density (1.2mb) and low density (360k) PC disk by the absence or presence of a plastic hub around the hole in the disk. This was a pretty reliable indicator, though I still made some mistakes…

Possibly the biggest surprise: The 5.25″ floppy version of SimLife came on one high density floppy and one low density floppy.

Ripping PC disks went incredibly well and I am VERY impressed by the FC5025. Ripping Commodore 64 disks, on the other hand, was wildly unsuccessful. Out of a couple dozen disks, only two ripped with no errors. Though I’m not sure how bad the errors were; hopefully they were unused sectors on the disks in most cases? A significant number of disks didn’t rip at all. Were they really cooked, or was it a variant format the FC5025 couldn’t handle? And were the disks even really bad or is it just a limitation of using incompatible hardware?

Flippy disks, of course, were a complete non-starter; most PC drives will flat-out refuse to read an upside-down disk. For the record: no, it does not help if you slice open the casing and reverse the media itself. I did find one commodore disk that had a second timing hole in the mirror position, so I might try that one some other time to see what the drive makes of it.

So why are the commodore disks so much worse to read? Is it that they’re 5-10 years older? Is the media less reliable? Is it just drive incompatibility and an actual 1541 might work? Or that the PC disks spent 20 years in my bedroom while the C64s lived in my wife’s attic?

Here’s some things I found:

• A program called “MHZ+”. Can’t track down anything on the net about what it does. I kinda have a feeling it was a TSR that promised to just magically make your computer faster. This sounds incredibly sketchy today, but at the time it was probably something innocent and useless like “It changes the memory caching settings”.
• QBasic source code to what might be the first game I ever wrote, a Star Trek game where you fought a space amoeba using the Enterprise crew as described in Roddenberry’s original pitch document.
• A dBase III file containing a uncatalogued of all the Doctor Who off-air VHS tapes I used to have.
• One paragraph of a Doctor Who fanfic. I have no idea where it was going.
• A backup of my Netscape bookmarks from 1997. Literally nothing on here still exists.
• The ancient games Phantasie and Phantasie III, but not Phantasie II.
• A 1 TB hard disk new in box. I have no idea why I have it. Based on where it was, I thought it was a cold spare for the NAS, but even the old broken NAS had 3TB drives.
• The Old Broken NAS. It’s a Patriot Javelin that was a fine starter NAS. Its flash memory started to go bad a few years ago. I assume you could rehabilitate it if you replaced the flash memory, but there’s nothing to be gained for me personally by doing that. Free to good home, I guess.
• Memory sticks. A lot of memory sticks. Remember Memory Stick? Sony’s attempt to do a format war against SD?
• How many of those little MicroSD-to-SD card adapters does a person need, anyway?
• I don’t need this many PC power cables, do I?
• A whole box full of broken fans. Case fans. Slot fans. USB fans. Desk fans. Whole box.
• The keys to my old office in grad school
• A skate key.
• A bunch of USB thumbdrives whose outer shell is a soft plastic that turned sticky and gross.
• Many XT-to-PS/2 adapters.
• A truly epic amount of cable. I’m talking like 20 pounds of coaxial cable. I’m talking just about every combination of serial cable. I’m talking KVM cables. I’m talking… Um… There’s this one cable which is a DE-9 serial connector at one end and a headphone plug at the other. What even is that?
• The Vadem Clio HPC that I won for coming in second in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition.
• The keyboard off a Commodore Plus/4. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a whole Plus/4 (I am keeping this, so don’t ask).
• A complete set of Microsoft Developer Network CDs from 1996.
• A Zip-250 disk. I’ve never owned a Zip-250 drive. I have no idea what’s on it, where it came from, or how to read it.
• My Pentium II from college. A full tower case with five 5.25″ drive bays, a 3.25″ floppy bay, two internal hard drive bays, and eight expansion card slots. I’d had one bad experience with not having room to add on something I’d needed back in my 386 days, so I went overboard allocating room for expansion
• A 1989 Bill Wegman baseball card.
• A Cobalt Qube server appliance they were getting rid of at the real estate agency when I was a temp twenty years ago. Anybody want it? I upgraded the ram at some point, and it was, technically, the most expensive ram I’ve ever bought, since I was buying new-old-stock ram from the nineties in, like, 2008.
• Why do I have two food dehydrators?
• A Chumby. Neat little device. I hacked mine and wore out the flash memory, but I’d love to salvage the display and case if I can figure out a way to replace the brains with a raspberry pi. I just love the look of the Chumby One – very retro Space 1999 vibes.
• Some kind of headband with a knob on it and a rectangular plug with many pins. I have no idea what it is. Seems like possibly a part of a head-tracking system?
• A pile of Wyse Windows Thin Clients from a period when I thought it might make sense to put thin clients all over the house. That was dumb.

 

Just no.

Like clockwork, my daughter bounces around in her bed demanding companionship and hugs and silly voices until about ten thirty. Like clockwork, my son, despite many and varied threats, comes downstairs at eleven thirty, midnight, and zero dark thirty, to demand we turn his music player back on. This is just kind of background to why it’s so damn hard for me to get any writing done. I’ve been hovering at “Just gotta draw some sort of conclusion and we’re good to go,” on the next War of the Worlds article for like three weeks now. I totally should have it ready for next week, I mean, unless some other big exciting distracting thing were to happen Thursday or something.

So instead, I’m going to rant for a bit about AC Adapters. You know what’s bullshit? AC Adapters.

As part of cleaning up my workshop, I went through and sorted all my AC adapters and made notes of what I had and their identifying markings. I have 95 AC adapters, not counting the USB ones. Here is what I have found:

• Despite there being a wide range of kinds of connector for an AC adapter, there is absolutely no relationship between the kind of connector and the voltage, amperage, polarity, or even whether the output is AC or DC. There is also no standard set of names for the different sizes or form factors of connector.
• Speaking of, AC to AC adapters are a thing. I’ve got three of them, which output 9, 8 and 24 volts AC. Only the 24-volt one is visibly different from every other AC/DC wall bug I’ve got, which seems like a recipe for blowing myself up.
• There’s almost a correlation – the 5.5mm barrel plugs mostly belong to 12 volt supplies and the 3.5mm barrels mostly go with 5 volt, but there’s loads of exceptions, and there’s also a handful of other sizes at complete random.
• In addition to the critical features of length, inside diameter, and outside diameter, connectors have a number of other physical properties which don’t directly impact what they can be plugged into, such as the color of the dielectric, whether or not there’s a ridge on the sleeve to improve friction, or whether the inside is a complete metal sleeve or a spring clip. These traits could easily encode information by correlating to, say, the voltage, amperage, or polarity of the output. They do not.
• The overwhelming majority of the adapters I have use 5.5mm barrel plugs. The thing is, there are two common inner diameters for that form factor. Measuring the inside is not something I have a convenient way of doing, and the larger size will fit a jack meant for the smaller one – it might even work, just be a little loose. To make matters worse, a lot of these have a spring clip inside, so potentially they actually could fit both sizes fine.
• There seems to be great disagreement among the manufacturers of these things whether it’s “Adapter” or “Adaptor”.
• Most of them don’t have a wattage listed, but among those which do, only some of them make sense. Watts should equal volts times amps, but sometimes… They don’t. Is this an efficiency thing? Or is one a max and one an average?
• When did the NEMA C5 (“Mickey Mouse”) plug become a thing? I know a few years ago, I had to buy one because I owned zero and suddenly needed one because I bought a new computer which needed it and didn’t come with one, But suddenly, about half the power bricks I have use them. The older ones use a C15 (Traditional computer power cord) or a C7, but it seems like C7 is on the way out. There’s one that takes the non-official variant asymmetric C7.
• I’ve got twelve adapters whose markings do not specify the sleeve polarity. D-Link is particularly lackadaisical about this. This wouldn’t be a huge problem, except…
• One. I own one AC-DC Adapter which is marked with a positive sleeve polarity. Every other one that has a marking is negative. 9 volts, 800 milliamps, 5.5mm plug. A normal sort of voltage, normal sort of amperage, the most common kind of plug…. But it will definitely explode whatever I might plug it into.

So there we are. I do not need ninety five of these taking up space in my house. And yet without any rhyme or reason to the combination of parameters, how am I ever meant to safely discard some of these?

I spent a good chunk of the weekend hiding out in the basment instead of writing. I mean, I’ve been at this for a long time and I am tired and the children are always here. I’ve been dragging this War of the Worlds thing out a bit, I know. What’s left on the roster? Well, I’ve got one and a half more episodes from season 1, and two episodes from season 2, plus one more print book I foolishly picked up, and one more comic series I’d like to look into. Plus, there’s two new TV miniseries. I’ve watched a bit of one of them, and I’m not sure how deeply I care to address it; so far, I can’t really see a solid reason why I should count it as an adaptation of the original, but, I mean, that seems like a petty complaint at this stage.

Given that the UK copyright has run out, there’s also a glut of books appearing in the Kindle marketplace, which… I’m really just not inclined to bother with. I noticed that there’s a follow-up to The Last Days of Thunder Child which seems to be centered around a French ship. I’ll go ahead and suggest that to anyone who’s into Victorian-Era Naval History, but I rather emphatically am not such a person, despite having liked the first book well enough.

The main thrust of this post, though, is the basement thing. My workshop has become sort of unmanageable, due to a complexity of “Other people keep storing shit there” and “I never have time to put things away properly so the stuff I deliberately store there gets buried.” I have a strong hoarder instinct – an innate rejection of the wastefulness of minimalism: it gives me anxiety to think that I might someday need something which I once owned but threw away in the name of “Not hanging on to useless junk.” I’m kicking myself over finally working up the nerve to get rid of my beloved old 486, because it turns out that it was probably the only thing I owned that could’ve salvaged the data off the cache of old 5.25″ floppy disks I found.

So I thought I’d ramble a little about the ridiculous things in my collection in the hopes that someone might comment in the form of “No, seriously, you don’t need that,” or at least, “Oh, hey, I could use one of those send it to me and then you will feel like you weren’t just being wasteful.” For example:

• I have a surprisingly epic number of POTS phone cords. How many of those does a person need? How much should I hold onto? I might have some rj-11 connectors, so maybe should I just throw all the cords away safe in the knowledge I could make new ones if it came down to it?
• How many USB-A to USB-B cables does a man need? What are those even for these days?
• I think printers used to use them, and maybe hard disk enclosures?
• Technically, I also have this question about A-to-micro-B, but I’m pretty sure the answer is “Keep all of them because they will over time disappear into the infinite void of Dylan’s Room no matter how many times I tell him not to.”
• I also have quite a lot of computer power cables. How many of those does a fellow need? Seems like they’re starting to be phased out as well?
• I only have a few Mickey Mouse cables, and will be keeping those.
• I have a bunch of glass cabochons. Anybody want some?
• Remember MemoryStick? I got a crapton of those too. Is there any reasonable justification for keeping those?
• Okay, AC Power adapters. From time to time, I’ll run into something that needs a power adapter and doesn’t have one, and I’ll search through the mountain of them in my workshop and try to find a compatible adapter. Usually this doesn’t work. But sometimes it does. How do I decide which ones to keep and which ones to toss, and is there some better way to sort and store and label them that will lead to it taking me a finite amount of time to find one fit-to-purpose or rule out its usefullness?
• Some years ago, I bought a home monitoring kit with four cameras and a DVR. Turns out the DVR is only accessible via an activex control that won’t run on anything other than IE4 on Windows XP (or, inexplicably, an iPhone). But the cameras are just an ordinary sort of night-vision analogue wired camera. Anything cool I should be doing with those instead of landfill-slash-craigslist?
• I’ve got an ancient first or second-generation Drobo. It’s a USB RAID storage array that works fine but is way too slow for anything other than backups. I think I offered this to someone a few years ago who was interested but couldn’t take it at the time and I don’t recall why. If it’s you, or if you’d like it, let me know.
• Another broken thing I have is a Patriot Javelin NAS. I think its flash memory is shot.
• Old RAM. Is there any reason to keep Old RAM? Most of this RAM is older than my children.
• How ancient does a USB thumbdrive have to be before it’s no longer worth keeping? I don’t use them very often any more, but, like, I could, I guess.
• I got this box full of cables. Serial cables. VGA Cables. I think there’s some coax. Maybe even a Centronics cable? How much of this crap do I need?
• I don’t want to get rid of my old Nintendo accessories but maybe they would be more appreciated by an actual collector? Or is there something cool I can do with a Power Glove? I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.
• Okay. Old hard drives. I got rid of a bunch, but there’s still a bunch left. Am I ever gonna need an IDE Hard drive? How many?

You may recall that a few years ago, I built a networked music player for Dylan. Recently I switched up the control code because the joystick jitter was making it go off at random times in the night, and he’s started using it again (There’s still an outstanding problem where sometimes there’s a caching delay while it loads a file over the network, at which point he starts hammering the buttons and then everything goes to hell, but I’m working on it).

My younger child is mostly content to listen to Alexa, but a few weeks ago, she told me that she’d like a music player like Dylan’s, except red. After a bit of prodding, I worked out that she didn’t mean the networked one; Dylan also has a portable mp3 player – a SweetPea 3 player, which is a small, fairly rugged mp3 player with a speaker. She’d had it in her room for several years, but at some point Dylan reclaimed it.

Unfortunately, Dylan has the original model of the player, and the current model has significantly worse reviews. Also, it’s not available in red. So I sort of offhandedly said I could build one, and she just lit up at the idea of her daddy making her a music player.

So I was on the hook.

Making an MP3 player isn’t all that hard, really. The B43 module is an mp3-player-on-a-chip with an SD card reader that costs about two bucks if you buy it from China. And I did order one, but Evelyn also specified that she wanted it to have a screen. Adding a screen to a chip like that which showed something meaningful would mean sticking a microcontroller in there too and now the complexity level goes up quite a lot. I was working on talking her into being happy if I just stuck some LEDs in there when I happened upon a “car” MP3 player – probably the exact same module wired up to a faceplate with buttons and a small screen. And Amazon’s price is like five times what you’d pay on aliexpress, but I really wanted to Just Get On With It, so I paid retail and got it last Monday.

Last week’s post showed the module with its wires spring-clipped onto a USB power adapter and an audio amplifier circuit I happened to have left over from an earlier project (This was my first project where I actually ended up using it. The last one turned out not to need it). I also had a couple of 3 watt speakers just laying around.

I looked at a few options for cases, but ended up finding a pencil case at Michaels that seemed like a good fit. This one is a little flimsier than I wanted, and they seem to carry a sturdier one in a similar size, but I couldn’t find it in stock. They also had a smaller one, but you had to buy them by the dozen. This is about twice the size overall of the SweetPea 3. I could’ve gone smaller, but the extra size made it a lot easier on me to build it and a lot less fiddly about keeping the wires from touching.

The most surprising thing is how good it sounds. The speakers in Dylan’s player on paper should be better, but they always sounded tinny. Good for audiobooks, but not really great for music. Evelyn’s player actually produces pretty good audio. Certainly good enough for a hand-held device.

Because the power is via USB, you can use any USB power bank to drive it (or a wall adapter if you like. I had a bit of trouble doing it that way: one of my wall adapters kept shutting the port off because it was drawing so little current. I had thought about just getting a normal rechargeable lithium battery and attaching it permanently, but then it would need to be taken away from her for hours to recharge – a power pack you can swap out was a better idea.

I used a USB cord with a switch on it instead of wiring up a switch on the far side of the USB adapter mostly because I forgot to add the switch when I did the soldering and soldering the leads for the mp3 module was incredibly finicky. Unfortunately, none of the glues I had would attach ABS to polypropylene. In fact, I tried a silicone adhesive and that kind of anti-glued it – not just “didn’t stick” but almost seemed to actively repel each other. I had to use screws there, which stick out a bit. There’s also a nut visible at the top of the picture. I added a screw through the latch of the case to discourage opening it. The nut popped off later and I’ll reattach it when I find some better adhesive. I cut sheets of styrofoam to fill in the space around the battery to make it more secure. Cutting styrofoam with a hot wire cutter is shockingly satisfying.

This is the final product. It works well enough, and the styrofoam blocks inside give it just a little extra bit of structure. The light from the display also spills through the inside giving it a neat glow in a dark room (Though the shadow of the USB cord did make Evelyn think a large spider was inside it for a moment). It works pretty well.

The main improvement I would’ve liked to make is some sort of sleep timer. I can build short-duration timers, but something that could cut the power after, say, an hour isn’t really something I could manage in a practical amount of space. The battery pack will last for hours, but since it doesn’t shut off on its own, “hours” means “one night” unless someone cuts the power once Evelyn’s fallen asleep. The controls are a little clumsy – no playlist support, and the volume buttons are overloaded with the track-change buttons (Though this is also true of the SweetPea3), but she’ll get the hang of it.

She’s over the moon about it. I am, allegedly, the best daddy and the best maker of music players. Hopefully she takes it okay when she finds out there is no way in hell she will ever be able to take it on an airplane.

Not even time for the vidya games this week. Been working on a project…

 

Jetpack is discontinuing their “automatically switch to a responsive theme if needed” feature.

A Mind Occasionally Voyaging will look weird and ridiculous for a bit while I sort out how to make it look a way I like again.

I haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, so I don’t know if I’m doing this right.

But wait, there’s more…

Filler due to upcoming Holiday: a few tweets by me I wish to memorialize:

If you ever think your idea is too dumb to offer up to the world, remember: there are MULTIPLE times in human history when a person said, out loud, “I know. Let’s do a post-apocalyptic movie about a bloodsport based on roller derby.”

— L. Ross Raszewski (@lraszewski) November 12, 2019

In all things, be as bold as Toto, shoving the words “Kilimanjaro”, “Olympus” and “Serengeti” into a single line.

— L. Ross Raszewski (@lraszewski) August 12, 2019

I just want to remind people: I know “The kessel run in 12 parsecs” has been canonized as a shortcut… But Han is literally answering the question, “Is your ship fast?”
It’s not a shortcut. The “He’s just tossing out random space jargon to impress the rubes” is the right read

— L. Ross Raszewski (@lraszewski) November 6, 2019

Look, I’m not saying it’s IMPOSSIBLE, but if a rich white straight man claims to be the victim of hate speech, and you assume he is actually presenting a bad-faith argument to silence reasonable critics, you will never ever be wrong.

— L. Ross Raszewski (@lraszewski) November 3, 2019

I’m glad that opportunities to use the word “polycule” don’t come up that often for me, because I am pretty sure I’d misplace the word and say “polyglot” instead and then wouldn’t I look ridiculous.

— L. Ross Raszewski (@lraszewski)November 3, 2019

I just want to reiterate: there are many things wrong with this movie, but FAR AND AWAY the worst is that at no point does anyone say, “It’s daylight saving time!”

— L. Ross Raszewski (@lraszewski) November 23, 2019

Me: Did you know that one-seventh of Doctors Who died horribly to a Xenomorph?

Leah: Are you rounding up?

Me: No. One-seventh.

Leah: How many Doctors are there?

Me: The current one is thirteen, but John Hurt’s in the middle.

Leah: Hee hee. John Hurts In The Middle.

Me: The less-successful prequel to John Dies At The End.