Chris Moates’ adventures in the land of Mox

I have been wanting to comment on my experience with the Eye-Fi after having owned it awhile now. I really love it. I still haven’t had time to get the Linux software working with it, which would solve all of my complaints, like automatic uploading to F-Spot in Linux. However, the device works perfectly, and I use it all the time. Someone asks for a picture of XYZ, I take a picture, wait 45 seconds for it to show up on Picasa, and email them the link. Yes, I could plug it into the computer, and upload it to Picasa, but that’s more work. Fire and forget is a nice feature.

So in short, I highly recommend the Eye-Fi. It’s really not terribly expensive, and has some nice features.

The second pinball machine I ever owned was a Williams Indiana Jones. We had a good time with that game, but had it for about 5 years. Maggie wanted an Addams Family, so I traded it away. Well, not 2 or 3 months had gone by before Maggie told me she regretted that we had sold off the Indiana Jones. So last night, I brought home another. It’s going to need a lot of work, but it plays and play it she did.

The basement is starting to get pretty crowded; 8 games on the one wall. And all of them are games I consider keepers. I’m gonna have to come up with something more clever for an arrangement if I get too many more games in here…

Looks like Nagios finally had someone come along to fork it; there’s a new project named Icinga which promises to have better developer involement and an improved web interface, among many other improvements. This is a welcome change, and has long been needed. For more information about why they forked and why it was necessary, read their FAQ and Fork page.

I for one welcome our new overlord monitoring services. While I will probably not switch immediately over to Icinga in our production environment, you can be sure I’ll try it at home and keep a close eye on their progress.

Had a lot of things going on this past week or so, and wanted to comment on a bunch of them, but have been slammed. So here’s my thoughts, in no particular order.

The Allentown, PA Pinball Wizard’s Convention was this past weekend. I was only able to go on Saturday, but I had a great time. I didn’t find any really great deals to bring home, sadly, but I met a bunch of great folks that I talk to on rec.games.pinball, and I got to see and play some rare machines. The only problem with going to a show like this is that now I wish it was October so I could go to the pinball show in York, PA.

I have had some more time to mess with the Arduino. Wiring is a neat language, though still lacking in some “high level” respects. Of course, you’re pushing it onto a chip with 16k of RAM, so what do you expect. I’ve been experimenting with a switch matrix, the first major component of controlling a pinball machine, I think. Progress is good, but I don’t yet have a functioning model.

I had a crazy old lady accost me at a McDonald’s on Saturday evening. It was really quite amusing, if not bizarre. First she insisted that I stole her (empty with my receipt on it) tray, then she yelled at me for sitting in her chair, then she got angry that I left before she was done yelling at me. What can you do?

I really dislike drama. I don’t watch TV shows with a lot of drama, and I have a low tolerance for drama in real life. Unfortunately, I had a run in with some friends over a misinterpretation of something I said which ended up being way more drama that I wanted to deal with. I’m sad to say that I think it’ll end up causing me to distance myself from them, but again, what can you do? You can’t control other people, you can only try to influence them. But when that is more work than fun, it’s time to walk away.

Jamaica is only 36 days away! I really need the vacation this year. It’s been a long one with a lot of new responsibilities at work and with the Spring taking forever to get here this year, I’m really ready to get out into some hot weather and chill out.

My buddy Steve bought his first house! Congratulations Steve, welcome to the world of never ending trips to Home Depot and a constant desire to putter around with something or other that’s permanently attached to the Earth.

I’m still trying to come up with something interesting to propose I speak on at CPOSC. If anyone has an idea that they think is both interesting and that I’m a good person to have talk about, let me know.

I found out yesterday that Digg uses puppet to manage their servers. So in spite of the really awful community they’ve created, underneath that is a gem.

And last but not least, my good friend Todd Zullinger has seemed to fall off the planet. I can only hope that he’s doing something interesting, which knowing Todd seems likely.

Pepsi’s got a new soda out; Pepsi Throwback. Well, ok, it’s not new, it’s old. They’ve switched the sugar back in, and taken out the high fructose corn syrup. And my my, is it good stuff. Just like I remember, it’s funny how your brain doesn’t forget. Let’s just hope it catches on so I can continue to buy it.

A fellow pinball hobbyist has been collecting pictures of the “backglass” of pinball machines, or in other words, the art around the area where you score is displayed. One of the most notable things about pinball glass is that women’s breasts are always obscenely large.

Anyhow, this guy lost his hosting, so I agreed to host for him. His website is http://mrhide.pinnesota.org and he’s got a lot of really cool art already up, with more being uploaded all the time, as he works on getting everything restored.

There’s just so much detail and interesting art in these glasses, that I figured it was worth a mention.

My Arduino Mega arrived in the mail today. With any luck, I’ll have time to mess with it a bit this evening. That means, though, that I need to come up with artificial test cases, to learn the hardware.

For those playing along at home, my ultimate medium-term goal is to control a pinball machine with the Arduino. Probably a Williams Contact to start with, but maybe something fancier down the road. I guess it all depends on how hard/easy it works out to be.

Based on my referrer logs, a lot of visitors come here looking for icoconvert, a tool I wrote years back to convert ICO files to PNG. I’m going to see if I can dig up the source code for you all, and post it here soon. If this is important to you, leave me a comment so I know that it’s worth my trouble.

How on earth have I been on the net for 20 years and never seen this? I laughed until I cried.

http://www.pmichaud.com/toast/

Picked up a Family Guy pinball machine this afternoon. This was a “must have” for Maggie, so I happened to see one locally and surprised her. She’s thrilled to death. Here’s a picture:

Family Guy pinball machine