relwin

Nice work! I'm assuming score rollover is detected so your awesome final score is correct. Also saving game settings of total balls (3 or 5) and extra ball enabled is useful when comparing scores.

Anything pinball on HN is a good day :)

E-bikes are very popular with teens and cost almost nothing to ride. The downside is many youthful riders have no concept of traffic rules...

In the US you may broadcast FM with a Part 15 device limited to about 200 ft (61 meters.) However, finding such devices and transmitter ICs is becoming rare as this device market has mostly transitioned to Bluetooth. Low Power FM requires a FCC license and appears to be stagnant with no licenses granted since 2013.

https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/low-power-radio-general-info...

Building your own pinball game is challenging! Here's a site to get you started:

https://pinballmakers.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

I found the original video and uploaded to archive.org so everyone may enjoy.

The Space Wars (1977) gameplay video is me playing my old arcade game with my son. The video is copied from my YouTube channel -- maybe this guy should attribute the source of his gameplay clips...

I sold the game years ago as it is rather large. I also worked with a few ex-Cinematronics engineers back in the day. They claimed it was a "hack shop" but a lot of fun at times.

I shared an office with a smoker back in the day -- one or two smoking visitors would leave a cloud hanging for an hour. About 10 years later (several years into the smoking ban in the U.S. workplace) went on a business trip to Japan where all the smokers at work were confined to a small "smoking lounge." You couldn't see their faces through the window due to the thick smoke! Nowadays I can easily smell someone smoking a block away. It's kinda the same reaction as when a vintage 60's car putts by trailing unburned hydrocarbons...

Try NTE Electronics for thermal fuses -- used to get these at Fry's (in the US) for $2. Today's inexpensive coffee makers usually use specialty plastic screws making disassembly difficult.

This filter is not perfect so you'll have a few audio artifacts that you won't want in your final mix. Mixing with the original audio hides these artifacts somewhat. Using this filter also increases your audio mixing effort (you're mixing in a second vocal track) so it's easiest to mix the 2 audio tracks at constant levels then adjust when you hit an artifact. This is my personal preference on this style of audio mixing, and others who watched (and gave feedback) couldn't tell it was enhanced and had no difficulty understanding the speaker.

I did so on the brewery tour:

https://youtu.be/M5pdHVoXQHE

I used this filter to reduce wind noise during a tour guide of BB63:

https://youtu.be/1LDlOmKtfeQ?t=60

This is a 20 yr old vid shot at Pearl Harbor on the deck of USS Missouri with a low-end consumer Hi-8 camera using built-in mics. Notice flags and clothes rippling in the wind. This filter works pretty well in this case. Maybe it was trained on a New York accent? Mixing in the enhanced track as needed works well. Using only the enhanced track may sound artificial at times.

Here's another vid shot at a brewery where this filter helped clarify the brewmaster's voice over a noisy restaurant and outdoor machinery (again, built-in mic):

https://youtu.be/nANSdnYj-R0

I found this filter useful.

Read the book a few years ago, then watched the series. Doesn't quite follow the book but is entertaining anyway. You also have to pay attention as not everything is explained right away. The series 1 ending is a bit confusing. The only complaint I have is the actors' accents may cause you to turn on CC at times.

Thunderf00t has an entertaining analysis on the absurdity of NEOM:

https://youtu.be/rB_X5ZUcZlE

Don Lancaster has been commenting on the absurdity of the hydrogen economy for over 20 years, saying hydrogen is a "pollution amplifier":

https://www.tinaja.com/h2gas01.shtml

Built the prototype in-vehicle data collection system used by NHTSA to evaluate vehicle safety devices back in the 90’s. Probably the first MPEG2 encoder used in a car to record various cameras.

Co-produced “Pinball 101”, helping thousands of pinball players up their game: https://youtu.be/_RroLKc4wEQ

Created “Le Dominoux” for a 555 timer contest. Now popular electronics project. https://youtu.be/PQOjkuJtBfM

San Diego Technical Books -- one could easily spend an afternoon in there! However, I couldn't afford to shop frequently there.

30 years ago? I remember:

1) Burn and crash embedded development – burn EPROMs, run until your system reset. Use serial output for debugging. Later, demand your dev board contains EEPROM to speed up this cycle.

2) Tools cost $$$. Cross-compilers weren’t cheap. ICE (in-circuit emulation) for projects with a decent budget.

3) DOS 5.0 was boss! Command line everything with Brief text editor with text windows.

4) Upgrading to a 486dx, with S3 VGA – Wolfenstein 3D never looked so good!

5) The S3 API was easy for 1 person to understand. With a DOS C compiler you could roll your own graphics with decent performance.

6) ThinkPad was the best travel laptop.

7) Sharing the single AMPs cellphone with your travel mates. Service was expensive back then!

8) Simple GANTT charts scheduled everything, +/- 2 weeks.

9) You could understand the new Intel processors – i860 and i960 – with just the manuals Intel provided.

10) C Users Group, Dr Dobbs, Byte, Embedded Systems Journal and other mags kept you informed.

11) Pay wasn’t great as a software dev. No stock options, bonus, or overtime. If your project ran late you worked late! A few years later the dot com boom raised everyone’s wages.

12) Design principles could be as simple as a 1-page spec, or many pages, depending on the customer. Military customers warranted a full waterfall with pseudo-code, and they paid for it.

13) Dev is much easier today as most tools are free, and free info is everywhere. However, system complexity quickly explodes as even “simple” devices support wireless interfaces and web connectivity. In the old days “full-stack” meant an Ethernet port.

Tracfone is interrupting voice calls with a message asking to move your service to a Verizon SIM. My young son has Tracfone service and I am now unable to call him reliably, or him call me. Since when can a carrier insert ads in your voice calls?

$2.1 billion 10 mile light rail extension, completed last year:

https://www.sdmts.com/inside-mts/current-projects/uc-san-die...

"Video Games: a Public Perspective." Atari's attempt to quell fears that arcade video games harm our youth. Vintage 80's style with a few cameos from classic game creators. I digitized this VHS copy years ago from an arcade game collector. Also uploaded somewhere on U-tube.

The denoising works very well. I found that mixing the enhanced audio with about -3 to -6 dB with the original voice audio works very well. (short clip at a brewery) https://youtu.be/M5pdHVoXQHE

I also tested with wind noise (outdoor speaker) and the audio "recovery" is amazing. It rescues bad field recordings that you normally can't use. I'm impressed!

My Thanksgiving Bullet Enumerated List:

1) I'm thankful my elderly parents and in-laws are healthy and survived the worst of the pandemic.

2) I'm thankful new relatives are healthy and thriving (who doesn't adore babies?)

3) I'm thankful my immediate family is OK. Zoom-schooling and masking is not ideal but we adjusted and adapted.

4) I'm in awe of the medical professionals who withstood the brunt of the pandemic and continue to provide for our well-being.

5) And the technologists that support the medical professionals -- the those who build the tools, design the scientific instruments, operate the equipment, push the tech to incrementally do more -- all this seems like magic but is comprised of late night debugging, inspired insight, that blood-sweat-beers workpersonship that keeps society chugging along.