It should better read: Learning. Because it's a process with progress, lol.

So here's the thing:

I painted walls in the past. But never wood. Or stuff that pretends to be wood that is. In this case: MDF Panels. And I am learning a lot while preparing this stuff for later assembly.

After I sanded the future control panel, primed it, sanded it, primed it, sanded it, coated it, sanded it, coated it and sanded it again, I added the first layer of clearcoat.

And then I did a mistake.

Two actually....

1. The. Way.

Wenn I started this project, I used a layout for the whole cabinet I purchased over ten years ago. However, the arcade controls (buttons, joysticks, etc.) I got from aliexpress didn't seem to really fit the layouts offered in this kit. So I needed to design a custom layout based on what I have and what I wanted.

Problem is: I didn't quite know what I wanted. Also I was aware of the fact that these layouts usually follow some design rules (that I don't know) based on experiences (that I...

Well, well, well,...

Who would have thought this? I mean... as I said in my last post: Using cheap Drywall Screws for mounting the ARC Controller to my Arcade Cabinets' control panel just seemed... cheap to me. Also I think, that it's not the best way to do it in regards to the blobbed IC on the backside of the PCB.

So I decided to design a simple PCB Mount (yeah... I know... it could have been simple distance sleeves as well (and now that I think of it, I actually have some here...)).

However; it took...

Although a lot of family stuff used up most of my spare time today, there is a little progress on my Arcade Cabinet project.

You see, I read a lot about working with MDF boards and there's a lot of tutorials out there. The thing that actually convinced me to invest (a lot of) time into "doing it right", was the fact that this stuff indeed consists of fibers... that actually soak in paint if you let it. And since I plan to coat everything with paint, I didn't want the boards to soak it through and through....

The project is going to progress the next days. I had the side panel cutout template printed on paper and it arrived today. All of the rest panels are basically rectangular. ;-)

As a kid, I saw a lot of movies in the mid-80s in which kids spent all their quarters in arcades playing games such as centepede, pacman, space invaders, galaxian and more. I always wanted to also make that experience, but unfortunately, in my country you couldn't find any arcades offering these kind of machines - especially for kids to play. Because here pretty much everythin g was declared as gambling and so made avilable only for adults.

Then, somewhen around the late 80s, my family visited legoland in...

I just had a thought... while scrolling through the current Arealist available in Fidonet, I stumbled accross a lot of russian areas and thought... interesting! Because, I guess Russia is kinda "controlled" in regards to what information is getting in and coming out by the government right now just like it is in China.

So maybe still using the fidonet may or may not be something people use to communicate "under the hood"? Don't know.

However.. I don't understand their language.

This is when I...

... it's 34!

To be more precise: 2:240/1120.34

Could anyone with an active Fidonet Point please drop me a netmail for testing purposes?

I am currently busy developing a .NET based Fidonet TUI client.

Because THOUGHTS don't let me go once they initially caught me, I started working on this weird idea of creating a new terminal ui for fidonet. Its technical stack is based on .NET 10 and it works pretty good so far. I can poll, toss, write, read, subscribe to areas, (retrieve) list (of) areas I subscribed to, retrieve the list of available areas and more.

No additional software neccessary....

I was wondering... since gopherspace is coming back, qotd is getting more attention again, people are reinventing web 1.0 including myspace,geocities,etc... and for each and everything, people even seem to give lots of love to terminal user interfaces what its called nowadays. Back in the days there wasn't graphical user interfaces, so we didn't need any distinctive word for it and just called it terminal or console.

Oh... got distracted... so what I was wondering: Doesn't anyone want to work on a new...

Not many people know this, but back in the days we at LightBrain have been working with a company called TLC Industries, Inc.

These guys were building arcade cabinets and were looking for development partners to stack up their lineup of supported games. And we were absolutely thrilled to see our game BomberFUN on an arcade machine.

To shortcut the story - it didn't work out, although we already had a very decent implementation of their API in our gamecode in place.

Thing is... today I am working on...

At around the year 1999, an old childhood friend of mine called me and asked whether I'd like to be part of a new project. I was a student at that time studying Computer Science in Engineering at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg.

Funny side story: At that time, the TUHH founded the Northern Institute of Technology and called it NIT (yeah... right). As students we made a lot fun of this, because the location was in Harburg, which in turn is located in Southern Hamburg. We thought "Southern...

I just watched "The Creator" and then it hit me: The general narrative is this: "It's not real. It's just code.". This is how people are able to just "shut down" the simulants with no moral implications whatsoever.

But how would we know the difference between "real" and "code". Because... we only think of us as real because we only "know" us.

What if an extraterrestrial species develops ai and "simulants" and then visit our planet. We wouldn't be able to differ between "real" and "code" and would just...

Heute mal auf Deutsch.

Kennt von euch jemand Die Fantastischen Vier? Und ich meine damit nicht die Superhelden aus den gleichnamigen Comics, sondern die Hip Hop Gruppe aus Stuttgart / Deutschland, die seit den frühen 90ern die Charts unsicher machen.

Obwohl ich die meisten Tracks der Gruppe kenne, habe ich das Album "VIEL" erst seit relativ kurzer Zeit (auf Vinyl) und als ich das Intro das erste Mal hörte, war ich total von den Socken.

Der Battle Rap mit Sabrina Settlur AKA Schwester S. ist ja wohl...

I managed to implement a Steam Lobby into my indiegame Bomberfun Tournament including slash commands and more. I didn't code it myself however, but had Claude Code do the work. It needed specific instructions though as well as a thorough understanding of the concepts and strategies used in the existing game code... which is more than 20 years old. However, when starting to wire up everything against the online networking for actual gameplay,... well, there is a german saying that goes like this: "Alles...

Today I had an interesting discussion with a collegue of mine. He is working on an app for managing pinball tournaments and as it turns out: Because this app allows user generated content (pictures taken from your own pinball, editable text, etc.), we need to feature a "Report User" button. Apples Reviewer Guidelines do clearly state how this has to work... and I understand that. Also, it's not that hard to implement in this case.

However, in a more or less private context, I am (finally) progressing in...

I don’t really like knowing I am procrastinating when I actually don’t want to. About a year ago I finally picked up an idea I had for years: Taking my game Bomberfun Tournament to the next level and replace its DirectPlay Networking layer with Steam Networking so that people can eventually play online again. The game is more than 20 years old btw. I even started implementing Steam Achievements and new items. However… I suddenly stopped working on it and now it’s already over 6months since I had any...

I am using claude code to implement a mobile app around an underground queue based internet radio station that also features regular live shows. One of the most interesting facts to know about this is, that the whole platform my app is working with, features a 70s/80s style of a commandline experience and so I also wanted my app to look and feel like this.

Claude took this serious and not only used a green phosphorous look similar to a CRT monitor experience from back in the days, but it also...