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  • Flopping and Thrusting
    by Chewbode

    I’m going to try to do a weekly round-up. Try to establish consistency and all that…

    Retro Computing

    As part of trying to do my small part in preserving Atari ST history, I figured that it doesn’t take too much time or energy to find batches of floppies out there in the world and see if there is interesting source code or software that needs to be preserved.

    I recently won an online auction for very cheap that had 200+ disks. The shipment arrived this week. It looks like the majority of the disks are ST-related, with some being Windows/PC-related. I hooked up my external floppy drive/Greaseweazle enclosure and imaged the disks to my hard drive. I still need to go through each disk to see their actual contents, and from there, will determine if there’s anything that needs to be archived online.

    The Adventures of Johnny Thrust

    I’ve begun working on this once again. Nothing detailed to report at the moment, but I’ll update you soon.

    Video Games

    I’ve seen a rise over the last few years of independent programmers/studios making games for the ST. And interestingly, there are some who even make boxed versions of the games with disks, manuals, etc. This intrigued me enough to buy a few recently, even though they were a little pricey. I want to do my part to encourage developers to make boxed releases, especially for the ST.

    I spend VERY little time playing games on my consoles. Even so, I’ve been a PlayStation Plus subscriber for several years, but have finally deiced it’s not worth keeping and have cancelled the auto-renewal.

    For those who don’t know, the service offers up a few games each month that you can add to your library and play anytime. The catch is, those games will disappear if you cancel your PS Plus service. So, you’re renting. Since I have some time before that list of games goes away, I ran through it to see if there was anything I’d actually like to purchase.

    The industry has pivoted to this “you don’t own your games” mentality for years, where, if your game relies on online services in any way, and the publisher decides they don’t want to have those servers online anymore, then the game becomes non-functional. A related issue is if you buy a game digitally from the online store. The publisher is still in control of whether or not you can play the game leading to another “you bought it, but you don’t get to use it” scenario. So, it seems the best way around this is to purchase physical media when you can. I’ve started grabbing some discs for the PS3 and PS4, even if I purchased it digitally years ago. For some reason, this makes me feel better; like I finally own the game.

    Studio Infrastructure

    Over the past few months I’ve been experiencing severe network congestion in the house and studio. As I was troubleshooting this, I found it was my core 1U, rack-mounted PC that runs pfSense. This has served as my main edge firewall as well as has handled my layer-3 subnet segmentation for a long time. After extensive research, I found that the OS was partially crashing, and that was leading to the congestion. Not a full-on kernel panic, but close.

    So, I spent this past weekend retiring that device and replacing it with a new device that will serve the same purpose. Since then, everything is running very smooth and I’ve even seen my internet bandwidth increase.

    Stanley Cup Playoffs

    Been watching the playoffs the last few weeks, even though the Lightning didn’t progress past the first round. Currently, we’re in the finals, with Las Vegas and the Hurricanes tied 1-1 in the series.

    Miscellany

    Some physical video games added to my library this week:

    Blu-rays added to to the collection this week:

    Once again, a small stash of comics landed on my doorstep this month:

    • The Amazing Spider-Man / Venom: Death Spiral – Body Count: 1
    • The Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 7): 28 | 29
    • Aquaman (Vol. 9): 17
    • Doctor Strange (Vol. 7): 6
    • Doomquest: 1
    • Fantastic Four (Vol. 8): 10 | 11
    • The Mortal Thor: 10
    • Sorcerer Supreme: 6
    • Superman (Vol. 6): 38
  • Sneaking Up On 2026
    by Chewbode

    The last six weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. In early November, I took a couple days off work and ended up pinching a nerve/pulling a muscle in my lower lumbar. This probably happens every few years when I tweak something back there and I’m down-and-out for a day or two. Lucky me, this was a two weeklong ordeal. As the end of November approached, and I couldn’t really shake the pain and immobility, I decided to go to a massage therapist and see if they could work it out. And they did, just a few days before we were scheduled to fly to New York for Thanksgiving.

    In general, being in New York was great, but after only a day or two, my back decided to rebel. I’m pretty sure it was a result of sleeping on a different bed than I wasn’t used to. My bed at home is of medium softness where the beds at my sister-in-law’s are pretty hard. Most of the visit I was in pain and hunched over like an old man. It was difficult to move around.

    The day after we got home, I got another massage, a mere 10 days since the last one. Would this help like the last one? It did. I was still sore for a day or two afterward, but I could tell it was from the deep massage and not the initial “injury”.

    I finally felt like I was in the clear, but nope. A few days after returning home I started to get sick. It was early December and I’m pretty sure I picked it up either from the family or maybe the airport. For two weeks I was congested, coughing and generally feeling rundown. And, of course, as Christmas approached, I got my wife sick too. She went through the same thing that I did. But we both recovered a few days before Christmas and largely had a great time over the holiday.

    We’re creeping up to 2026 now, and I am spending the next week doing a lot of planning. There are projects around the house that I really want to tackle, but there’s so many that sometimes I lose track and get a little overwhelmed. That’s not to say I can’t get these things done, it’s about organizing. And yes, I’ve talked about this here before, but I’ve never really sat and made plans to get some of these things done. I’ve also never taken these projects and broken them down into steps and put them into a calendar. I know when I do that, I can accomplish things in a very timely fashion. And I think that, in the past, I simply tried to manage it all in my head.

    That’s not all I’m working on this next week. I really want to start grinding on creative projects. Those need to be put together and scheduled as well, and I really need to create a good creative life/personal life balance to get everything done (or at least started). I have some fun, creative ideas, and I received a Christmas gift that may be a game changer in getting some of these projects done. No spoilers yet, as I still have some testing to do. I’ve also spent time over the last couple of months purchasing some things that should make these projects happen. Again, it’s all about organizing, planning, then executing.

    So, I hope to stay motivated and continue to press forward. I think the likelihood is extremely high that momentum will be achieved soon, and I’ll have a bunch of interesting things to post up here.

    Even though January 1st is just a date on a calendar, it does hint at the idea of a new beginning, or sorts. I hope that everyone out there finds time to start doing something interesting, fun, or creative. Good luck!

  • Draining
    by Chewbode

    This summer has been hot and we’ve had the air conditioning running a lot. That’s a pretty normal thing in Florida, but I’ve also switched to working from home for four out of five work days, so I need it cool so my brain doesn’t bake.

    With the extra cooling, came an unfortunate incident where the condensation pan of my HVAC unit filled and overflowed. The result was water spillage that took a few days to dry out. The root cause was the drain line to the outside world got clogged with calcification. Subsequently, the leak detector in the pan (the one that comes with the A/C unit) didn’t work and didn’t shut off the unit. So, double-fail.

    I cleared the line with my Shop-Vac and replaced the PVC “S”-shaped trap on the outside of the house, which was easily re-built with new components.

    But, along with buying an IoT water leak detector and installing it in the drip pan, I also decided to get a drain gun. These use compressed CO2 cartridges (think: paintball guns) to deliver a blast of air/CO2 down the drain line to blow out any half-stuck gunk.

    When I got the gun, it was just in a simple bubble-mailer and needed a new home, so I documented the project of designing a new box. Check out the details here.

  • New Section: Projects
    by Chewbode

    For quite some time, I’ve been running a website on my internal LAN where I document all sorts of projects I’m working on. Since I’m the only one who sees it (my wife can too, but she has no interest), I feel like I’ve been curating this as more of a personal diary than anything else.

    Today, the Projects section of the chewbode.com site goes live. I’ll be posting everything I’m working on. My goal with this is two-fold: To hopefully inspire and motivate others, and also add more frequent content to this site.

    I update the internal site pretty regularly, and that steals energy away from blogging here. Why should I spend all this time documenting and posting internal blog entries then turn around and do it all again on the public website? So, I don’t. Or, I haven’t. By moving projects to here, I can consolidate this energy.

  • Re-Organizing the Organizers
    by Chewbode

    Oh, how good it feels to have a few days off. In addition to the long Labor Day weekend, I took two additional days off, today and tomorrow. So, if you count Friday night, that’s five and one quarter days to relax and enjoy myself.

    In such situations, someone might watch a movie (at home or in the theater, I don’t judge), get lost in a good book, touch base with friends, or just get out into the quiet bliss of nature by hiking or fishing. I think most people want something that derails their mind and calms it; makes it so they don’t have to think of things they might normally consider responsibilities.

    Me? Nope. I come up with another project and hyper-focus on it “while I have the free time to get it done.” Of course it’s around the subject of organizing things. Or rather, re-organizing things. Over time, I’ve found that the way I have been storing stuff has wasted space and made it hard to find stuff.

    I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but I have two large parts organizers hanging on the wall over my workbench. Each organizer has 30 small drawers and nine large drawers and I use them for holding electronics parts (capacitors, relays, switches, transistors, etc.). Up until I started this project, it was hard to find parts and the way the drawers were divided into their constituent compartments wasted space, so I decided to stop half-assing them and re-do everything from scratch.

    Akro-Mils parts organizers.
    The two parts organizers over my workbench. As of 10:00pm on 2024.09.02, I had almost completed re-doing the left one.

    This meant designing new drawers, from scratch, printing them on my trusty Bambu P1P, and replacing the factory-supplied drawers with the new ones. The design process did take a few hours to get just right, but the majority of the time spent comes from printing. If all goes well, I should be 100% complete with one of the two organizers today.

    I’m famous, or maybe infamous, for starting projects and not completing them. This will be the first project where I’ve implemented a encouragement and reminder system for getting it done. Basically, making notes to keep plugging away every day until it’s complete. I’ll have to see how it goes, and will report back.