Not much to report this week other than we've decided to replace the air conditioner at the house, which will take place this coming Wednesday. Fun. Even though I'm not a huge football/soccer fan, I've been watching the last couple of World Cup games. I really enjoyed the France vs. England match yesterday (England won and obtained Bronze), but the big one is today in just a couple of hours (Spain vs. Argentina). Will be cooking come burgers and dogs and plopping down on the couch the rest of the day. Studio Infrastructure I’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work over the last couple of months. Some has been boring, business-related tasks, and other things have been more fun and creative. All of this has required re-organizing the physical studio as well as the logical layout of files and digital assets. There’s been hardware and software purchases, proof-of-concept testing,...
Author: Chewbode
Hot dogs!
Back Home and Gettin’ Busy
A Nueva York Cari and I spent the 4th of July weekend in New York at her sister’s house. My mother-in-law has been staying with us since early March (she came down for Dominic and Elvira’s wedding), and it was finally time for her Florida vacation to come to an end. She won’t fly, doesn’t drive, and is getting up there in years, so a solo train ride isn’t happening either. So, driving is the only real option. Here’s a run-down of the trip: Wednesday, July 1: Dominic and Elvira picked me up around 5:00pm and dropped me off at the rental car company, which has a branch in the Brandon mall. I got a black Mazda CX50, which is a crossover SUV. For a road trip with three people and a bunch of luggage, it’s decent. After driving it back to the house, we all packed and prepared to...
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Sticker
Delve into the mystery of this month's VGM pack-in bonus.
Some Semblance of Order
Studio Organization After printing, assembling, and mounting the left-hand unit, the side-cabinet project is now complete. I found that the methodology for attaching the mounting buttons to the side of the organizer was very cumbersome, even after making some adjustments to the cabinet design before printing this second unit. I need to spend more time refining this before releasing the designs to the public, as it’s a big point of frustration. All-in-all, I’m very happy with the results and the clean look vs. old, ugly, open shelves is a big improvement. Retro Computing As mentioned in a previous post, I obtained and backed up about 200 floppy disks for the ST. I finally spent time going through all the disks, of which there were about 120 that weren’t bad. The data has been dropped on the hard drive of my STE and is roughly cataloged. The only thing left to...
Side Cabinet, Side Trip
Not much of an update his week as I had a bunch of dental work done Monday morning and I was down for the count until Thursday. I'm back to normal now, though. Akro-Mils Side Cabinet Success! After a pretty extensive workout, my Bambu Lab P1P finished printing all of the pieces for my first cabinet. I was able to design all of the parts so they didn't require supports, which kept the print time down. The cabinet sections took the longest; about 36 hours of printing. Designing them to not need supports really helped that time be as low as possible. Printed parts weren't the only things needed. I had some hardware left over from a previous project and I purposefully designed the cabinets to use them. Here's what it takes: (Qty. 4) 3D printed cabinet sections (Qty. 4) 3D printed cabinet doors (Qty. 2) 3D printed shelves (Qty....
Archiving and Organizing
The Annals I've officially added an archive feature to the site. It's VERY early and there's only a single, silly item in there, but if you want to check it out, visit the Annals. As new things get added, they'll be mentioned in the Miscellany section of this blog. Video Games Another Atari ST boxed game arrived this week: Droid: The Definitive Collection published by Bitmap Soft. Although the original Droid and it's follow-up, Droid II, were released back in the '90s, there's recently been an enhanced version created of the first game by Jamie Hamshere that adds support for the Atari STE hardware as well as provides quality-of-life improvements to the gameplay. All of these are bundled into this boxed release. All of the materials for the box have been scanned, so I just need some time to get it into online archives. Studio Organization A while back I...
One Million Pac-Man Dollars
To start off, I wanted to keep it simple by adding something very easy: One Million Pac-Man Dollars novelty money.
Flopping and Thrusting
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...
Sneaking Up On 2026
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...
Draining
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...
