More DVD reviews

So, while finishing up the Christmas Cookie work (which is now done!), I decided to finish up the movies in my DVD queue.

Captain America: Civil War

It was OK.  Not as good as the first Captain America or Winter Soldier, but still good.  I think the reason the movie was just OK was that it was a "set up" movie for something later on.

Spiderman: Homecoming

This movie just failed to grab me at all.  It wasn't a bad movie, though.  I just couldn't get in to it.  But then I realized that they made it like the first Spiderman comic: for teens.  The reason Spiderman took off was that the hero was in the same demographic as the comic book readers.

So this DVD went off to the "give away" pile.

So now the DVD queue is empty.

(Well, that's not quite true.  Dawn has the Little (out)House on the Prarie box set there, but I'll only watch that with her.)

Pocket Computer 4 printer (more)

So, here's more details about what I did (along with pictures).

The green/black wires used to be hooked up to the battery.  The yellow/purple (hard to see since I cut most of them away - near where the black/green wires attach to the circuit board) used to be hooked up to the AC adapter plug.

The green wire is negative and it's hooked up to the center pin.  The AC adapter that I used...

is something I picked up at the "junk store" and is just a 6V power supply.  I normally use these with my TRS-80 Model 100/102s.

The original battery pack was a set of 4 AAA NiCd rechargeables, so 6V was right.

Side note: I tried a couple of other "6"V power supplies, but they were showing me 9-10V on my volt meter.  Strange.

Anyway...  it's working.

Sorry for the sideways video.  I had hoped that it would have auto rotated.

All I did was a simple program that loops 1-20 and displays the number and the number multiplied by 10.  I used Mode 7 to send the output to the printer.

Notes:
1. This will not work with the cassette interface hooked up.  Only with the printer directly connected.  I don't know why.  But since I use the cassette interface so rarely, I probably won't look into it.
2. You must have the power supplied to the printer before turning the PC-4 on.  Otherwise, you'll get an Err 9.

But overall, I'm pretty happy.  I liked working with these.  It was a nice learning experience.

Pocket Computer 4 printer

They live!

So I have 3 Pocket Computer 4 printers.  I smoked one of them a while ago.  So that one is on the "display" unit.

The PC-4 printers were originally powered by NiCd batteries.  After 30 years, they are shot.  This was always one of the issues with the PC-4 printer.  You couldn't charge it and use it.  You could only do 1 at a time.  So once the batteries wore out, the printer was kinda useless.

My solution was sort of against the rules.  I diked the batteries out.  I de-soldered and cut out the wires that led from the AC adapter to the charging circuit.  Then I attached the wires that came from the batteries to the AC adapter port.

This means the the printer is now powered by the external AC adapter.

As expected, the 6V 20mA adapter that originally came with the printer was pretty much useless.  But using a 6V 400mA adapter (that I use with my Model 102) powered the printer just fine.

I performed the same process on the other PC-4 printer and it worked fine too.

Pine A64

But all is not well.

I pulled out my Pine A64 to see if I could replace Dawn's aging Dell Optiplex with it.

Upon hooking it up, it failed to boot.  So I reflashed the SD card.  Still no go.
I've tried on 2 different keyboard/monitor/mouse configurations and nothing.  Just the red power indicator.  No indication that it's doing anything.

I'm pretty sure it's dead. 8(
Another item for the elementary school "show and tell" box.

Addition:  I checked the 'Why won't my Pine A64 boot' sites.  One of the reasons was a corrupt SD card.  So I used a nicer card, verifying the card after flashing it.  No go.

Pocket Computer 2 printers

So when I got my lot from the Tandy Corporate Auction a while back, in it was a Pocket Computer 2.

When I "examined" the lot (from the pictures on the web site), it had a bunch of stuff.  Including some Model 100/102 stuff and Pocket Computer 4 stuff.  I had a PC-4 through college (I purchased it with my high school graduation money) and I wanted to get the stuff that I couldn't afford back then.  And then there's my Model 100/102 addiction that I seem to have gotten.  8)

So the working PC-2 was an unexpected bonus.  And I've fallen in love with the device.  So I purchased some cassette/printer interfaces from eBay.  I did get some cassette interfaces in the Tandy Lot, but they were for the PC-1.

The two PC-2 cassette/printer interfaces that I got were not complete functional.  The cassette part worked just fine (did you know that you can load/save programs via the sound board in your PC?) but the printer part didn't.

So I decided to see if I could get the printers working.  But no luck.  I did find a problem with one of the printers.  The guide rail for the print head was loose.  I fixed that.  But they still give me an "Error 6" when first powered up.

Now, I did have to do a battery-ectomy on both.  The NiCd batteries were 30 years old and starting to leak.  According to the information on line, the batteries were only there to give the printer a boost since the solenoids for the print head needed > 1A of power when firing and the AC Adaptor only produced 500mA.  So I made sure that I had a big enough power supply (2A in this case).

The printer seemed to come alive with the print head moving a bit, but still no go.  Ah, well.  30 years is a long time.  I'm surprised that these lasted as long as they did.

But I also took apart one of my PC-4 printers.  And I'm reasonably sure that I can get that working.  Another project!

Bacon Marmalade

This stuff is awesome!

You can get this from the Rockford Cheese Shop downtown Rockford.

Doctor Strange

Now that I have extra time on my hands, I'm catching up on my DVDs.  So I finally popped Doctor Strange into the DVD player.

I have to say that I'm rather disappointed.

It's not that good compared to the other Marvel movies that I've seen.  Too much eye-candy (but not to the extent of Speed Racer) and too little story.  Plenty of action, so it's not boring.

I guess that I just expected so much more.

Unemployment

Another new experience: I just signed up for unemployment.

Talk about bureaucracy (or should I say burro-cracy).  I still have to jump through a couple hoops, but things actually went rather smoothly.

I probably won't get anything (yet) because of severance and the like.  But still...  New experiences are always a good thing (even when they aren't fun).

Latest

Wow.  No update since May.  But I have an excuse since I've been busy and big changes have happened.

I've gotten a TPDD2 for my T102 and I had fun playing with that.  I've also gotten LaddieAlpha working on my Raspberry Pi 0 W.  My latest project there is to make a drive activity light work.  I also need to make a button that reboots LaddieAlpha.

LaddieAlpha is C#/Mono.  I tried to update it to use .Net Core 2.0, but there is still no hardware support in .Net Core, and LaddieAlpha needs to change the serial port settings.

I'm playing with the idea to logging into the Pi 0 W using the serial port.  But the TELCOM program on the T102 is very limited.  While it does work to play some games (like Adventure), it's very hard to edit a file using vi.

I've also gotten my PC-2 and PC-4 software loaded through the cassette cradle and the sound card on my PC.

I am no longer on my condo board!  Yay!  Certain people on the board want to personally be "The Board" and make decisions without the input from the rest of the board.  Those people are also unprofessional, abusive and (should I say it?  Yes!) stupid.  Rather than deal with this, I'll just let them self-destruct (or hopefully get the abusive one out when she does something improper).

But the big change is that I have, for the moment, joined the ranks of the Unemployed.  Yes, after 20 years, my "position has been eliminated", which we figure is pretty true.  They aren't doing any new development.  Heck, all the programmers pretty much went to the outsourcing company.  So if we don't have any programmers and aren't doing any new development, why do they need an architect?  Makes sense.

The only problem with their thinking is that the outsourcing company is pretty much staffed by newbies.  They aren't dumb by any means.  But they don't have any experience.  Some don't even know how to install the developer tools.  I figure that sometime later this month, I'll get a call to "consult" with them (i.e. "please come in and work hard to pull our rear ends out of the fire").

I intend to have a new job before then.

I now have 6 recruiters looking out for me.  I have 2 companies that have expressed an interest and I've applied at about 10 in the last week.  So not too bad.

I'm not in any big rush since the severance package kicks in soon (which is one big reason why my ex-company and the name of the outsourcing company will not be posted here).  So I basically get my paycheck until Feb. 2018.