ifixcoinops

ifixcoinops , vor 29 Tagen

@foone damn, what's your secret

ifixcoinops , vor 28 Tagen

@foone I meant getting a Samsung to last that long ;)

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Alright here we gooooo

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

The telly weighs 55kg, I weigh 77kg, to test whether my new CRT stand can handle this telly I'm gonna set this so-called square (actually a triangle, scam) here, sit on the shelf and see how much deflection I get.

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Here's how much deflection we get with no additional strips and only two sides on (no back). This is already acceptable considering that I'm not as wide as the telly and I'm sitting in the middle rather than spreading the load the whole width of the shelf; the telly's 22kg lighter also, so there would be pretty much no sag at all. Nonetheless I'm still gonna add some 2cm thick strips below this shelf for extra stability when the cats jump on top of it.

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Doing a test fit before I sand and finish, brought the stand outta the workshop upstairs to the telly 'cause I thought since the stand is lighter, it'd make more sense than taking the telly downstairs.

Aye the stand's lighter all right but damn is it awkward to move around

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

🦊 Nice TV stand, by the way do you happen to work in the coin-op industry
🦝 How did you know that
🦊 eyeing up the shoe rack in the background also using 3/4" plywood to hold 2kg of shoes at a time Lucky guess

Telly's in, no noticeable deflection on the telly shelf so we're good!

Now I guess I'll take the telly out again and sand this down and Polycrylic it

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Q: Why do the sides of the stand extend up along the sides of the telly, why not just stop when the telly's supported?

A: So I can have a shelf atop the telly to fill up with Various Junk

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

I don't wanna take it downstairs again FFS this thing has barely existed five minutes and I already resent the idea of moving it

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Might just run it outside and lacquer it

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

ugh nope can't lacquer it outside because of the baby robins

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

wax in situ maybe?

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

I bought a new HVLP sprayer in like February when it was on sale and I had a lucky coupon, I said to the guy "Boy I can't wait til I can try this thing out in like May," bloody robins wait to hatch until I'm just about ready to spray some lacquer

🐣 Whatcha got there Dan?
🦝 Something that'll kill you dead as heck if you get so much as a whiff so instead of firing it up and trying it out I'm just gonna grumble about it on the internet

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Also this lad's back again

Bit of a special day today innit, hatchy robins, visiting fawn, it's all go in my yard today

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

"Remembering when it's faun or fawn" is right up there with "How to spell parallel (or rather how to stop spelling it)" on my list of Language Things That Dan Has Made His Peace With Never Quite Grasping

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

So last time the fawn visited, it was gone by they time I picked the kid up. So I didn't tell her about it, didn't want her disappointed that she'd missed it.

This time, I clocked it were still there from the road, told her it was a special day and she had to be quiet and smooth and slow and not go any closer than me, and we went and saw the fawn.

THEN, we went and saw the baby robins.

THEN, while we were watching the robins, we heard movement, and there was the mum, up the hill, with the fawn around her feet.

"Wow," I whispered to her, "Quiet fawn, didn't hear him going up the hill."

So then we got our bikes down and took them past the original fawn FEDI THERE ARE TWO FAWNS

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

I've waxed furniture before, but I've never used wax as a finish, as in literally just rub it into freshly sanded wood.

Ain't no finish in the world that's gonna be fine with having a CRT TV rubbed all over it within a couple hours, it's gonna scratch up either way under the telly, so I went with wax because it's quick and not too fumey and I hadn't used it before so I was curious. Plus robins.

You literally just wax-on-wax-off, two coats because the wood just swallowed up the first one. It turned out pretty nice! Look how well it filled in this end grain!

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Put a nice sheen on the top and all

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Folk are liking how good home depot plywood can look after rubbing with this wax, and I agree. That's what my wood normally looks like after three coats of poly, three hours apart. I'm liking this wax.

I bloody well should be, considering it costs FORTY FIVE DOLLARS A CAN

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

(to be fair to it though, I used maybe a twentieth of the can for the whole TV stand, so this'll last me bloody years)

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Here's the wax, for those asking. Made in Kent so imported here, so back home it's probably cheap as chips lol

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

big Dad Wiring sigh

Right, one component input on the telly, 3 HDMI's on the amp, one HDMI to component switcher, wanna split the sound off through the amp of course...

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Upstairs CRT gaming is going on!

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Resi 2 time! But where's the PlayStation? And what's that lurking under there next to the amp?

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

It's the Game Dad!

This whole thing was secretly a #gameDad project!

Now I got video, I got sound, and if y'all will kindly recommend a decent Linux-compatible Bluetooth controller from your own personal firsthand experience, Project Big Dad will be complete :D

ifixcoinops OP , vor 28 Tagen

oh my god retroarch is just THE WORST

it was easier to set up multiple controllers for an emulator twenty years ago

when you got your ROMs on a CD-R off a tarpaulin on the pavement outside a bowling club in Manchester, because when the internet screamed EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-BRLGHBLRRBGHLEGHREE for forty seconds it'd still take half an hour to download Ghouls and Ghosts, when you had to start MAME from DOS, using multiple controllers was easier because at least you didn't have to deal with the emulator trying to help

two decades later these retroarch lads have put Clippy in your controller and I've spent literally five hours trying to figure out what the hell retroarch is trying to do, but I'm no closer to figuring out how to tell it to stop

ifixcoinops OP , vor 28 Tagen

Me, playing Raiden 2 quite happily until the MAME devs put more effort into emulating the copy protection, more perfectly emulating its ability to know it's a bootleg and crash, killing the game for years: 🦝 This is a retro-gaming elitism thing isn't it

Me, two decades later, trying to connect a controller: 🦝 This is a retro-gaming elitism thing isn't it

ifixcoinops OP , vor 28 Tagen

I work in coin-ops, I want my controls to break because a rat chewed through a wire or someone puked on it, I don't want it to break because the software got too complicated and tripped over its own arse

Like how is this hard it's 2024 for heck's sake, I thought we had joysticks pretty much sorted out in the 70's

ifixcoinops OP , vor 28 Tagen

When I was sixteen years old I took one of these drawer-style cassette racks and drilled holes in the top to accommodate an arcade joystick and ten buttons.

I took apart a PlayStation controller, sanded off the solder mask, and soldered wires directly to the copper traces, running from the PlayStation pad to my arcade stick's microswitches. Then I went to a computer market and bought a PlayStation to parallel adaptor and plugged this abomination into my printer port because I was still waiting for someone to invent USB, then spent a merry afternoon figuring out how to get DOS to see it, then get MAME to see it, then I enjoyed me some Sunset Riders.

THAT

was an EASIER CONTROLLER SETUP

than FUCKING RETROARCH

ifixcoinops OP , vor 28 Tagen

Hahaha, the pictures are still online!

ifixcoinops OP , vor 28 Tagen

Look at this crap, I only had access to the wiring through holes the size of cassette tapes

Still easier than RetroArch

ifixcoinops OP , vor 28 Tagen

You see what I had to squeeze my hands into here, STILL EASIER THAN RETROARCH

ifixcoinops OP , vor 27 Tagen

Right, last night I FINALLY figured out how to use a bluetooth joypad under RetroArch, with the buttons in the right places, and without killing the built-in controller on the #gameDad.

I'll do a full write-up for https://gamedad.club later in the week, but as for the general gist, there's a bug in RetroArch where saving a controller profile associates your bindings with the wrong bit of hardware, so when you exit and reload, it loads the bindings for the Bluetooth controller onto the inbuilt controller, breaking both.

RetroArch has a database of controllers that it can, in theory, automatically set up properly; in practice, they're guesses, Clippy for your controller. To fix this problem, I had to erase all the guesses (KILL CLIPPY) and write my own .cfg files.

Sounds hard but honestly that was super easy, it worked pretty much just like 90's MAME or whatever, just press each button to get its code then copy it into the file, the part that took three nights of fiddling was figuring out that Controller Clippy was the problem.

ifixcoinops OP , vor 27 Tagen

The phases of owning a #gameDad are curiosity, delight, finally getting over your awe and actually playing some games, fiddling, frustration, satisfaction, finally getting over the fiddling and actually playing some games, fiddling some more,

ifixcoinops , vor einem Monat

@foone well dang I can think of at least half a dozen off the top of my head, well played

ifixcoinops OP , vor einem Monat

Linux is a bit shit sometimes,

There's your headline. I don't care whether you use linux or not; ten years ago that might have mattered, I might be trying to get more people to use it so that adobe or whoever would put more effort into supporting it, but that doesn't really matter anymore, these days everything either Just Works or there's a native equivalent that's better and I've no selfish reason to recommend linux anymore, so if you're happy with windows stick with windows.

If you're not happy with windows, here's the other half of that sentence at the top of this post:

Linux is a bit shit sometimes - but when it's a bit shit, it's a bit shit in the way of a cat who watches the mouse run across the living room floor, not in the way of a cat who suddenly decides to bite you for no reason. It's not actively malicious, it's just a bit shit sometimes, which these days is tbh pretty damn good compared with a lot of stuff.

Like, it's not bad because it's being hollowed out for investors, it's not bad because it's spying on you to make more money, it's not bad because its makers know you've gotta take it anyway, it's not bad because it knows it can get a lot worse before you look elsewhere, it's just... bad. But bad in like a normal way, like a bike with a wonky gear shifter and tyres that keep going soft, not like a bike that shows you adverts.

There's my linux recommendation.

LINUX: It's A Bit Shit Sometimes™