As I’m continuing to build a collection of cartoons, TV shows, and movies on my plex server, I’ve put together several scripts to make converting and splitting video easier . For the most part though I’ve been working with digital copies of things. While I have been working on digitizing old home movies shot on 8mm video tape, I’ve been using a digital 8 camcorder which has a FireWire interface and handles the digitization, so on the computer I’m working with...

I recently picked up a CoCoSDC board and after assembling it, the first thing I did was load it up with games. I quickly discovered though I wasn’t going to be doing any gaming without a joystick. I don’t own a Tandy CoCo compatible joystick, so I did what any normal person would, I figured out how to convert something I already had: an Atari 2600 joystick. Atari 2600 joysticks are absolutely horrible though, so it didn’t take very long for me to want to go back to my ninepin...

A while ago I stumbled into a conversation between Eric Nelson and Rod Hull on twitter. Eric was mentioning that for a long time he has wanted to get a ZX Spectrum to add to his retro gaming collection, but living in the US they weren't exactly easy to come by and he also wasn't sure how hard it would be to make one work in the US. I jumped in and somewhat jokingly said that when he gets one I'll have it shipped to my house so he has to come over and play some air hockey. A...

During the last month several new spam networks have been flooding my servers. Instead of being just a few IP addresses here and there, they’ve been using huge subnets to send their spam. My old system of banning single IP addresses just wasn’t keeping up. Last week I started working on a new system that would be better able to track messages as they are handled by my mail servers. I run about a half-dozen mail servers for myself and for clients, and I’ve set them all up so...

A cassette adapter works, but is less convenient It’s been a while since I last made a PCB  but I finally had need to make another circuit board. The board I needed to make this time was a simple circuit that would be installed in a ZX Spectrum +2B which would bring the record and playback lines out to standard headphone jacks so an external source like a smartphone could be patched in instead of having to use one of those cassette adapters. It came about because when the...