M635 J520

UPDATE 2021/06/30 : This whole procedure is now super simple if you go the EmuELEC way following this guide:  https://retrogamecorps.com/2020/11/12/guide-pico-8-on-retro-handhelds/#EmuELEC  It's basically just to put the pico-8 in a specific folder, and any roms (unless you just use splore) in another. Last weekend I built the ODROID-GO Advance Black Edition with my daughter. (Apart from re-experiencing my childhood's Commodore 64 an Amiga games,) One of our goals was to run PICO-8 , the great little fantasy console, on it. That seemed possible, given that it shares a similar CPU to the Raspberry PIs – where it runs great. However, it was not that easy to get it up and running. Here’s what worked, but first, what didn’t… Official image First we installed the official image from HardKernel on it. But alas, no luck getting things to run properly. EmuELEC Next up was EmuELEC . There we managed to get PICO-8 to run in all it’s 8-bit glory! But! Controls didn’t work when la...

We can't stop playing games together even if we are confined, now, can we? But, what are our options? (Apart from spawning players within your confinement, but that tends to take 7-10 years...) This is a living post -- constantly updated. (Last update 2020-04-06.) Table of content Video conference compatible boardgames Tech Random-Writes Eurogames Party games Forever alone Solitaire games Games with official solitaire variants Games with unofficial solitaire variants Games I have played as solitaires Virtual board games Online tools Dedicated apps Unofficial web apps Play by (e)mail Video games Video games without (too much) screen Discussion Video conference compatible boardgames One of the reasons boardgames are so appealing is that it gets us away from our screens. Using video conference technologies might be the best way to play games with remote players, with the least screen nuisance. The basic idea is that one player runs the game...

In my constant... need... to get everything music instrument related to communicate with each other, I wanted to look into ways to get some of my keyboards/synths with only MIDI over USB to talk to devices with regular good old-fashioned 5-pin MIDI ports from the eighties. Cables! First I had a quick look at off the shelf solutions. The most interesting one being the Kenton MIDI USB Host – providing MIDI host functionality for USB devices as well as regular MIDI in and out in a small box. Unfortunately it is rather expensive (~125 €) and a reliable online source warned me that it was not entirely stable in collaboration with my OP-1, so I started thinking of more... home-grown solutions. I decided to try to use my old Raspberry Pi and see if that would serve as a USB host with a borrowed MIDI USB adapter. (Thanks Simon.) A cheaper, and, as an added boon, a nerdier solution. Step 1: Get the USB MIDI device up and running This was the easy part. The device I have been lent ...

We have a couple of laptops that are still technically working, but we have moved on to greener pastures so we no longer need them. Around the corner there's a charity that reworks old tech, so the laptops are heading there. Prior to that I figured it would be a good idea to securely wipe their hard-drives -- by basically writing random garbage to them several times over. Luckily there are quite some tools made for that. After some trial and error here's what I ended up doing: 1) Found an old USB disk, fittingly sporting a Batman logo. 2) Formatted it as a FAT (MS-DOS) drive. 3) Downloaded the free ISO of Darik's "boot and nuke" data wiping tool (DBAN) from  http://www.dban.org/ 4) Dowloaded Unetbootin from  https://unetbootin.github.io/ and launched it. 5) Used this to turn the Batman disk into a bootable disk based on the DBAN ISO. 6) Due to a bug somewhere in this pipeline (Possibly Unetbootin? Or DBAN itself?), I needed to edit the " syslinux.cf...

So, today I needed to scan something. And our Canon MP560 printer was out of ink... The beast never got past a screen saying "Ink tanks empty" on this and that colour, and thus wouldn't let me scan. Even remotely from my VueScan. And it was Sunday so our local friendly printer ink recycling store was closed. I suspected all hope was out, and cursed printer manufacturers conspirational grip on customers' use of their products, but did a quick google nevertheless. Lo and behold! " If you want to scan during an ink tank / cartridge error condition, press and hold the <Stop> button on the printer for at least five seconds, and then release it. The above procedure will disable the ink level detection. If the issue still persist, the ink cartridge would need to be replaced."  ( Source ) I put back the empty tanks. Turned on the printer. Held the red button (that I guessed was) called "<Stop>", and hey presto, I could scan.

A couple of years ago my (most of the time excellent) Maranz SR6004 acted up. It did't want to turn itself on. Properly. Just stood there and blinked rapidly. Its little red light that is. At me. The solution was so simple that I didn't bother to write it down as I was sure to remember it. Alas, no. Some weeks ago it did it again. (Can it be the heat?) Just stood there blinking rapidly at me. The manual just said - as it said last time around - that it was time to return the unit to it's maker. Or similar. Some googling led me to this page:  http://www.allquests.com/question/4056803/Marantz-XXX4-Series-Failure-Issues.html  The technical term for what I had experienced seems to be "The Pop of Death". Aïe. But!, humongous letters said: YOU CAN SOMETIMES RESET THE UNIT BY PRESSING SURR MODE, CLEAR AND EXIT SIMULTANEOUSLY And so I did. And so it was fixed. And all was well. (And now I have written it down for the next time.)