This past holiday season nostalgia took over and I started collecting old animated holiday TV specials. It wasn’t a very big leap to go from animated specials to classic cartoon shorts and TV series. Soon my mailbox was stuffed with discs to rip and place on my server. Messing around in Plex I discovered a little shuffle button over on the side (the one that looks like criss-crossed tracks) which will randomly select a show and start playing it. When the show ends it’ll...

One of my favorite channels on YouTube is Steve Ramsey's Woodworking for Mere Mortals . At the beginning of December he did a video showing a game called Quoridor and showed how to make the board and the pieces for it. It looked like a really interesting strategy game, something that both my nephew and I would enjoy playing. But if I make something for him, then I've got to make something for his little sisters too. Plus I was concerned that Quoridor had a lot of small pieces that...

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...

I run a small web hosting company called MagicEdit which lets web designers setup a CMS using standard HTML pages. It works great because it gives non-programmers an easy way to create websites that they can give to clients and their customers can edit right in their browser without having to mess with any kind of confusing backend. Yesterday one of our customers complained that some of his sites were loading a little slowly. He had done some investigation and thought maybe there was a problem...

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...