Thoughts on the Altair-duino

After building the Altair-duino, I discovered there are actual clones out there, including the S100 bus instead of the expansion the Altair-duino uses, but I am perfectly content with the one I built, and thought I'd post a few thoughts.

My kit was missing a single 1k resistor, so I was afraid I would have to wait to finish the kit, but I discovered through the documentation that this resistor is used to limit volume level of the built-in sound. I left it out until I get a replacement (or something close), and continued assembly.

After I finished, I booted up using the USB port and started playing around with some of the included floppy and hard disk images, especially the Infocom one, and discovered how to configure it so that my favorite floppy and hard disk images are already loaded at power-on, so all I have to do then is load the correct rom and boot into that image. This saves a little bit of toggling of switches to get into an operating system with a disk already mounted.

The kit also includes a built-in VT100 terminal which uses a VGA monitor and USB keyboard. It is very picky about what keyboard it will accept, though, to the point that I was nearly convinced that I had a poor soldering joint on the USB connector or something. I used all of the USB keyboards I have, including an IBM M Keyboard which has a built in Soarer's converter (which converts it from a terminal keyboard to USB), and none of them worked. Then I remembered seeing an old Saitek keyboard of my wife's out in my garage, so I grabbed it and... Success! There a jumpers on the RGB lines so that you can set which of the three colors you want the VT100 to be. I don't know if you can mix them, but I currently have it set to green. I may replace the jumpers with small switches on the back of the machine.

Using the VT100 terminal leaves a serial port open, which I am considering using to connect a WiFi "modem" to, allowing me to "dial" into other systems, or possibly run a CP/M-based BBS system off of. I hate to leave this thing sit here idle, or just use it for the occassional game of Zork.

Altair 8800 replica (Altair-duino)

I spent this past weekend building this beautiful replica Altair 8800.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to anyone still reading. Got some projects I hope to work on in the coming year, but not going to announce until they're well underway.

New developments in CassieIsWatching

From the "Cassie Is Watching" discord server (yeah... a handful of us never quit playing the game... We've got less than three years to solve the final anagram before the 20th anniversary of our first failure to do so cost us Cassie). Ahcapella made an interesting observation.
The WHERE poem from Oct 2, 2006 (and solved on Oct 4):
--
Inside the gate you will defend
the doe-eyed moppet’s only friend
The picture has not yet commenced
so depicts a rose in soil fenced (soil fenced anagrams to second life!)
The garden where the killer wined
Still holds the cup for you to find
--
The interesting bit was the double anagram, as Cassie's presence in Second Life wasn't known until the Revelation 3 video.

Another interesting tidbit is that Cassie's Second Life avatar was quite obviously created to look similar to Jessica Rose, the actress who played Bree aka Lonelygirl15, which CiW played off of. "Depicts a Rose in Second Life," indeed.

A final interesting tidbit it that the picture I posted the other day was from the Revelation 1 video from October 1, 2006. (Due to a technical issue with YouTube back in 2006, the last second(s) of videos were frequently cut off. We're not sure of the puppet master of CiW would have been aware of that. Until YouTube fixed that issue years later, it would not have been possible to discover that clue). We missed that clue. Since discovering the picture, I have speculated that we may have missed a drop, but it was still likely to have been recoverable. If he was the picture of the cathedral back then, there were a group of players in CA ready to go looking.

So frustrating to be 17 years removed from the clues to be able to verify any of this, as the puppet master of CiW remains a mystery. I have my suspicions, along with other players, but those suspicions continuously sing towards then away from one particular party. These recent developments point those suspicions squarely at them. If it were them, I don't think they'll ever break their silence, which would be the only way to confirm any of these thoughts at this point. A physical drop in a public area is likely long gone. And a virtual drop in Second Life is most definitely long gone... Unless anyone who reads this has an in at Linden Labs, and Linden Labs happens to have backups from that long ago which could be scoured. lol

edit: A final, final interesting tidbit. I had partially solved the first Maddison Atkins 1.0 clue as TWO BAGS. I was not aware at the time (and Jeromy eventually had to find another way to get us the final solution) but this was a reference to OpAphid clues frequently being double-encoded. I wonder how many other double anagrams Cassie slipped in which went unnoticed. But this leads me to believe maybe, just maybe, OpAphid's PM was already double-encoding clues before they launched OpAphid ;)

Missed CiW clue!

Last frame of Revelation 1

Perfect

This kid has some serious talent:

Beth

I do not remember much from my childhood from before I was a teen, and even what I do remember is generally not very specific. But every now and then, something will open some floodgate and memories will come rushing in. Usually, that something is completely random, such as a random video about rock power ballads which didn't include the Kiss song "Beth," which I suspect should top everyone's list of hard rock ballads if they're over a certain age. And since the person posting the videos invited comments, I posted that this would be number one on my list, and the floodgates opened. Suddenly, I was transported to Lehigh Acres, Florida, and I was eight years old. I only lived there for just under two years, but I had a small group of friends. James, Jay, Sean and I were pretty inseperable for the short time I knew them. We were in one of their homes, I can't remember which, and they had just gotten Kiss - Alive II. My dad, who I lived with at the time, and his various wives had always had country music on the radio, so hard rock was entirely new to me. And I fell in love with it right away. I was too young to really understand most of they lyrics, but I knew I liked the sound of it, and "Beth" just oozed melancholy to eight-year-old me. And I loved it, too. But the memories didn't stop there. I remember we moved to Florida with my dad's third wife, but she wasn't in the picture very long after the move. But I also don't remember my dad being around much, either. Just me and my two sisters most of the time, and us hanging out with our various friends. I remember in the winter of fourth grade, my class were all required to take either band or orchestra. If you took band, you had to buy or rent your instrument from a music store, and my family was way too poor for that, so that left orchestra. The school had a couple of violins, cellos, and upright basses which could be loaned to students, and a couple of girls got the violins. I was way too short to handle an upright bass, so that left cello. So I learned to read sheet music, and the first stringed instrument that I learned was cello. I don't remember being particularly good at it, but I do remember practicing it, and I remember having to lug that thing back and forth between the school bus stop and my house, which was not an easy task for such a little guy. Poor eight-year-old me would have been able to carry a violin much more easily ;) I don't remember much about my time in Florida other than that, and an aligator walking into our kitchen while my older sister was preparing dinner once. Sometime during the fifth grade, my sisters decided they wanted to move back to Ohio to live with my mom, who had remarried by then, and my dad gave me the choice of going with them or staying with him. I don't know if he would have honored my choice if I had chosen to stay with him, but they were my sisters. What kind of choice did a 9-year old really have? I think I saw my father one time after we moved back in with my mom and step-dad, when I was maybe 15 or 16. He wanted to give me advise about some personal stuff one of my cousins had told him I was going through, and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him at that point. I no longer even resent the man. I just don't know him, so don't really have any feelings at all at this point. I do know he remarried yet again, and had another family. So I have two half-sisters and a half-brother whom I've never met.