Within the last two days I started three different TV-Shows and Movies on Prime and Netflix... I I seriously cannot watch any of them. Why? Because I simply can't decrease my level of competency, intelligence and knowledge to a degree that is obviously targeted by their producers and story writers.

Every minute or so, the current situation is explained, people have inner conversations repeating what happened lately and there's always some Cpt. Obvious who pretends that something is so special-interest...

Yesterday evening, after having watched a concert of one of my favorite bands, I was able to extend my family calender setup with a PIR Motion Sensor that turns on the touchdisplay when movement is registered and off when not for about 5 minutes.

I also finally connected a new cirtuitry to my C64s' user port and wrote a couple of BASIC V2 lines that trigger impulses on PB0 so that eventually an LED flashes. Nothing special really, but it's only a start for a bigger project. Oh... and I connected an...

Die fantastischen Vier. Live in concert for free. Stream here:...

I guess this one will not make many friends, but I strongly believe that Visual Studio Code is the worst IDE in the world.

So my wife purchased a couple of electric tea lights. Those who flicker like candles. But instead of cells they use rechargable batteries and come with a charger board - which is awesome.

AND... they came not only with a cheap remote control, BUT... also a f*cking WAND! It has buttons... but you can pretend to be like Harry or Hermione. say out loud LUMOS! while you direct it towards the lights (and secretly push the ON button) and they illuminate. :)

That made me think...

She also has a couple of Book*...

The original soundtrack of Bomberfun Tournament is catchy, but its soooo 2000's. I would love to "modernize" it and I think I found the perfect way for this idea.

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...