8 years ago, that person announced that they were going to stop offering the FTP site. I jumped in, registered ballsofsteel.net and convinced them to allow me to host the archive. I offered all the things the original site didn’t; easy adding of new content, thumbnails, browsing, and fast speeds.

About 3 years ago, I started getting emails from someone in Australia named Wayne Gillard, or presumably, anyhow. This person claimed that I was violating his copyrights, and that I must remove all content that was in violation. Of course, no matter how many times I asked, I was never provided with a list of which material he considered to be infringing. Such is the way of the internet, I suppose.

Last Friday, GoDaddy null routed my domain based on a complain from this same person. It seems that GoDaddy is very quick to act on a copyright claim, but very slow to correct the action after the fact. It’s been 4 days, and they inform me that my site will be restored in a minimum of 10 days.

So I’ve been asking myself, what is it that I get out of this site? I provide a service which the pinball restoration community seems to appreciate, for sure. But that’s about it. I don’t earn any money from the site, and in fact, it costs me several hundred dollars a year to operate, not counting my time. Utilization has been dropping, and downloads of the art (i.e. non-window shoppers) is at an all-time low. It seems with the increasing availability of actual parts, the demand to make home-made parts has dropped sharply. I don’t know anyone who prefers to make their own parts, when professionally manufactured parts are available.

As such, I’ve decided to shut down ballsofsteel.net. I’ll probably reuse the domain for something new and different, and unrelated to pinball. If you have any ideas, feel free to let me know.

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…

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.

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.

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.

There’s still a few niggles; a couple of lights don’t work right, and I need to resolve an issue where a few switches don’t always register, but it’s playable and it’s as much fun as I remember.

I was also able to fix the Truck Stop that my friend Eric broke last Wednesday. So now all 7 games in my main lineup are playable again. For those keeping score at home, the current lineup changed quite a bit in the last two months. I currently have the following games set up:

• Scared Stiff
• The Addams Family
• Jurassic Park
• Truck Stop
• White Water
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
• The Machine: Bride of Pinbot

Next up is to design custom art for the front of my cabinet and have it printed. Oh, and I think I’m gonna modify the game with a subwoofer too.

In any case, I did some reading, some thinking, and came up with what I think has worked out pretty well. Here’s a before and after picture of the area that I repaired:

I scanned the playfield area using my HP 4600 scanner, which is the best scanner ever made, for usability of this type. I then edited the image in Gimp, cropped out what I wanted, printed it on photo paper, laminated the top, and used my Xyron Creative Station to apply adhesive to the back side of the picture, then cut it out, and stuck it on.

The Xyron is a really neat toy, but it’s a bit spendy. it can also apply magnet to the back of any flat item, or just do lamination (but I have a heat laminator for that purpose).

For anyone considering owning a Dr. Who game, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. Yes, it has a scoring system that is exploitable, but it’s still a heck of a good game for flow, gameplay, and keeping things moving.

Since I’ve a failing drive in my “work” workstation, I decided to replace it and reinstall today. We’re using Fedora 10 on the VM box, so I thought I would give Fedora 11 a try. While I’ve no major problems (a few niggles not worth complaining about) it’s really funny to me how easily you get used to your desktop being a particular way, and Fedora’s defaults are definitely nothing like Ubuntu’s. Fonts, window behavior, it all just feels a little “off” and that’s frustrating.

Maggie bought me a Korg nanoPAD for Valentine’s day. It’s a slick little device. Using Hydrogen (a drum sequencer for Linux) the device worked out of the box, with no configuration required. How’s that for user-unfriendly? If you’ve ever wanted to play around with drum sequencing on a computer, the nanoPAD can’t be beat. The price is right, at $59, and it’s USB, so you don’t need MIDI adapters or anything like that.

Left4Dead is half price this weekend on Steam. While I don’t have time to play it yet, it seemed like a good time to pick it up. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends who play Team Fortress 2 with me play Left4Dead quite a bit as well, so hopefully it will appeal to me.