Now to the fun part. The rest of this series will cover the customizations I’ve made to my arcade cabinet. They’re not completely new ideas, but they’re things that I myself wish I’d been able to find guides for before I dove into the deep end. Let’s start with something…
Category: Technology
Nostalgia-Tron, Part 4: A crash course in RetroPie
Here’s my dilemma: I want to give enough detail to make this series worth reading, but not so much detail that it gets mistaken for a step‐by‐step tutorial. After all, I’m largely following other people’s plans here, and if I wanted to do a tutorial I should’ve taken twice as…
Nostalgia-Tron, Part 3: Hardware miscellany
Before your attention flags, I want to wrap up the hardware portion of this series and move into the software. But first I need to cover some odds and ends.
Nostalgia-Tron, Part 2: The control panel
Last time I told you a story of how I built an arcade cabinet out of a couple sheets of MDF. The part I left out was the making of the control panel — the MDF board that will hold the buttons, joysticks, and other controls.
Nostalgia-Tron, Part 1: The cabinet
In part one of a too‐many‐parted series, learn how I turned a couple of sheets of MDF into an arcade cabinet with several pounds of sawdust as by‐product.
Birdcam, or: the unexpected virtue of dumb ideas
I don’t have the patience to learn new skills for their own sake. Most of what I know about computers, including everything I do at my day job, was something I learned because I needed it to do something cool. In 2001 I needed to learn PHP to make a…
After Monday’s keynote confirmed that there would be no iPhone in the near future, I walked into a nearby CompUSA and walked out with an unlocked Nokia 6682. I’d been waiting for an N80, but at this point it’s only slightly more feasible than that Star Trek communicator‐thingie. Tonight I finally figured out the proper settings to use it as a GPRS/EDGE modem for my MacBook Pro. 200kbps downstream! Somebody pinch me!
Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
Senior vice presidents [at Microsoft] sometimes review UI designs of individual features, a nod to Steve Jobs that would in better days have betokened a true honor but for its randomizing effects. Give me a cathedral, give me a bazaar — really, either would be great. Just not this middle world in which some decisions are made freely while others are made by edict, with no apparent logic separating each from the other but the seeming curiosity of someone in charge.
The ability to pick shit up quickly and solve problems is far more important than the ability to regurgitate arbitrary facts. If I can hand you anything from a broken mail configuration to a broken coffee machine, and you tell me “I know nothing about this, but I’m on it,” you’re somebody I want working with me.