@ifixcoinops@retro.social
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

ifixcoinops

@ifixcoinops@retro.social

Hello! I fix #pinball machines and #arcade games, and tell you all about it! I fix lots of other things too, and occasionally tell you about that. I also run one of the web's longest-surviving #textAdventure games, called Improbable Island, and I often write here on Fedi about decade-scale online community management stuff. Husband, dad, professional Thing Fixer and amateur woodworker in my early 40's, an #immigrant from the UK to the USA. Gun enthusiasts pls do not follow/interact.

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skyfaller, to random
@skyfaller@jawns.club avatar

Got a free compost tumbler off FreeCycle, hauling it home on my bike trailer.

#CarryShitOlympics

The composter from the rear with its legs sticking out the back of the trailer

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@skyfaller phwoar, now THAT'S an oxbike!

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

I've got a row of LEDs running across the front of my house that I turn on and reprogram at Halloween and winter solstice time, and I'd like to run them in Pride too but

  1. I've probably only got a couple of years before people start making Assumptions about my lights having Pride flag colours rather than Progress flag colours, but
  2. I don't have any brown LEDs

Fedi, how are you handling progress colours with RGB LEDs this year? Bonus points for folks running a single LED line 'cause that's what I'm doing, post pics pls!

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Maybe asking this question during daylight hours was daft 'cause now the people who've figured this out will be waiting to take a pic before they tell me how they did it

ifixcoinops, (edited ) to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

So you remember how yesterday I was all "Fedi, recommend me hub dynamos for my bike," and you were all "Sure thing Dan, here ya go, hundred bucks" and I was all "Pfft sod that I'll buy the eight-dollar vaguely-dodgy-looking USB charging bike lights off Amazon instead"

Well they turned up today and they're moldy

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

As many of you know (because I won't shut up about it) I've gotten back into enjoying bikes after a brief two-decade hiatus

During that time, youtube was invented, and bike mechanics are on it, and oof mate I watched a video the other day

Dude was complaining about bikes being a durable good and there being so many bikes around and the manufacturers have to come up with new things or they won't sell any bikes anymore and that'll be bad for the industry and this was just such an illuminating look into the other end of how people approach these machines

Like, bikes are free. They cost nothing. There are so many of them. People put them out on the kerb on bin night. People chuck them in skips. The river's full of them. Once you've scrubbed the rust off and spent a few quid on new tubes etc a bike that you found waiting for the bin van still goes as fast as a brand new bike from today because they're powered by sandwiches that you were gonna eat anyway. Zooming around on trash night laughing your arse off on a bike that still has the "FREE BIKE" sign flapping in the wind feels like sticking your middle finger up at capitalism

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

🦊 I spent a grand on my bike but I'm hungry
🦝 I spent a tenner on my bike and I've just had a sandwich

who gets to the pub first?

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Seeing the furries moving their IMs to a different IM thing and I'm at once nostalgic for Trillian over dial-up and also quietly astonished that we still basically need Trillian, the basic problem of instant messaging being that all your friends are on different services is still the same problem here in 2024

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

the problem with instant messaging is that it's a solved problem, but every five minutes some techbro turns up and tries to solve it Better

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Need some lights for my bike, I see they're all USB rechargeable now and the dynamo-powered ones are scarce and have crap reviews

I mean I figured in the twenty years I've been out of biking, what with LEDs and such, the new lamps would draw so little juice you'd hardly even notice the jenny was engaged, maybe it could even charge up a wee battery or supercapacitor on the downhills, but instead it seems we're all taking our lights with us and plugging them into the wall?

We just not doing dynamos anymore I guess?

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Thanks your your recs everyone, I see that hub dynamos are apparently the way things are done these days

Shame they cost more than any of my bikes haha

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

I need to stop being surprised that some folk actually pay money for things and don't just drive around the posh neighbourhoods on trash night

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Brace yourself for the wide-eyed Linux newbies romping through their computers in unalloyed delight only to trip over the GNU Image Manipulation Program and faceplant into a stinking sticky pile of secondhand cringe

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

You know that bit in Willy Wonka where the kids find the edible room and they're frolicking and eating flowers made of lollipops

🦝 🎵...in a woooorld of pure imagination,🎶
🐁 HOW is this POSSIBLE it's so BEAUTIFUL
🦝 haha that's right my friend, I'm so happy to finally share this with you
🐁 everything is so FAST it's RIDICULOUS
🐰 I won't change the name
🐁 Where has this BEEN all my life!
🐁 hang on who's that
🐰 I won't change it
🐰 I won't change the name
🦝 ah, yeah, uh, haha um
🐁 he's... I've never seen an actual tantrum before
🐰 YOU'RE having one. YOU'RE having a tantrum! This is CENSORSHIP
🐁 jesus. uh. this is repulsive, who the hell is this
🦝 this...
🦝 sigh
🦝 This is your new friend

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

🦊 Where will I go to find information about why my computer is the way it is
🪟 You might try "Windows for Dummies"
🐧 You might try "reddit.com/r/hobbydrama"

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Linux weirdo: 🐧 man Linux is terrible
Other Linux weirdo: 🦊 oof yeah it's a mess huh
Windows guy: 🐰 hey guys yeah haha Linux is kind of
🐧 HISSSSS
🦊 GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE BEFORE I

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Wanna guess what I'm making?

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

You see what I had to squeeze my hands into here, STILL EASIER THAN RETROARCH

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@csilverman it's a generic Bowlers special, if I remember right it was a whopping 233mhz

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Right, last night I FINALLY figured out how to use a bluetooth joypad under RetroArch, with the buttons in the right places, and without killing the built-in controller on the #gameDad.

I'll do a full write-up for https://gamedad.club later in the week, but as for the general gist, there's a bug in RetroArch where saving a controller profile associates your bindings with the wrong bit of hardware, so when you exit and reload, it loads the bindings for the Bluetooth controller onto the inbuilt controller, breaking both.

RetroArch has a database of controllers that it can, in theory, automatically set up properly; in practice, they're guesses, Clippy for your controller. To fix this problem, I had to erase all the guesses (KILL CLIPPY) and write my own .cfg files.

Sounds hard but honestly that was super easy, it worked pretty much just like 90's MAME or whatever, just press each button to get its code then copy it into the file, the part that took three nights of fiddling was figuring out that Controller Clippy was the problem.

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

The phases of owning a #gameDad are curiosity, delight, finally getting over your awe and actually playing some games, fiddling, frustration, satisfaction, finally getting over the fiddling and actually playing some games, fiddling some more,

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Anyway can we please as a society move on from RetroArch, thx

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Like I can make room in my life for bad software made by lovely people, I might tolerate good software made by jerks depending on how much of a jerk we're talking about, but somehow the emulation scene seems to have settled on using infuriatingly bad software written by buttheads

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

🦝 Right screw all y'all, I'm going in the freezing chamber until you sort this out.
❅🦝❆
🕛 2034
🦝 Right, you there, with the neon, how do you play Sunset Riders
🦄 oh uh right so, back in the 20's people got annoyed with RetroArch's crap interface so there was this new thing called Ploopli, now what Ploopli does is it goes and downloads retroarch and it provides a front-end for
🦝 thanks, back to the freezer
❆🦝❅
🕛2044
🦝 Hey how d'you play Sunset Riders
🐴 aw man you're asking a mouthful there, so you'll wanna get a thing called BumFarter, and what that does is it automatically joins all the Ploopli Wankels so you can -
🦝 the heck's a Wankel
🐴 frontend for Discord
🦝 gotta run
❅🦝❆
🦝 the heck year is it now
🐯 Depends who you ask.
🦝 cool, how do you play Sunset Riders
🐯 MAME
🦝 finally I can smash this freezer
🦝🔨💥❄❅❆
🦝 Alright where do I get MAME these days
🐯 From the central library, it's a four-day hike to the East
🦝 ugh fine
🐯 and then you just set it up to emulate a 2020's-era PC and download RetroArch,
🦝 noooooooooo

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

RIGHT, FIRST ACTUAL GAMEPLAY ON THIS THING HERE WE GOOOOOO

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Man, it is SO much easier to accept this cheesy dialogue from these little dudes, they've so adorably insufficient, they've got like a nipple's worth of polygons between them

ifixcoinops, (edited )
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

When you have three background guys flexing in rhythm, and those guys are made out of the spare pixels that got swept up off the floor round the back of the arcade, they look fun and quirky. When those guys have photorealistic sweat and bump maps for individual veins, it looks goofy and weird, they should not have remade this game

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