This story starts, as most of my hardware hacking stories do: a stupid impulse purchase. In this case, it’s the Atari mini pong Jr. I’m pretty sure (judging from stock levels) I’m the only one dumb enough to pick this one up. So, I set about to hack the thing. It’s almost disappointing, as this isn’t as much of a ‘hack’ as it is ‘this system is wide open.’ Here’s what I’ve been able to determine/do with zero hardware modification. (TLDR; Everything. Install and run apps, usb devices, adb shell, etc)
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Like many of us, I’ve been spending the past 6 months living in a frightening emotional rollercoaster. Covid-19 has devastated so many lives, and the extent of the long-term increase in mental illness, depression, and negative feelings are still unknown. I, like many, have been dealing with feelings of loneliness and isolation.
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It’s been a few weeks since I extracted myself from instagram. Not nearly as difficult as it was removing myself from Facebook last year, though I hardly know why.
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I remember how I used to feel about email. It was many years after my first email address that I got a gmail account. It was both ephemeral, and permanent. I never had to worry about storage, that little storage counter was always going up! I would email myself small attachments, keep archives in very nice hierarchies, and generally revel in my ‘unlimited’ email account.
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Ugh, is there anything worse than token management? Permissions, scopes, leaks, bleh. Avoiding the cycle of security patches and constant upkeep is a major reason I migrated this blog to gh-pages.
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As readers of this blog may have surmised, I’m working to decentralize my online presence and own my own data. For the most part, that means replacing social networks and services with open-source alternatives I can host myself (or on GitHub.)
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As I was setting up a new development machine this morning, I found myself traversing through my old GitHub projects. One such project that was always close to my heart was QuickGrapher, the JavaScript graphing library Mark and I wrote during our start-up years.
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Like many of my readers, if I find out there’s another type of input on a device I’m going to plug something into it. Usually some kind of video game. So, when I realized the backup camera/monitor setup on my van had an extra input, I was compelled to install something new.
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It’s been about a year since I threw Johnny Castaway up on the web, and I thought it might be time for an update.
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Did you know you can temporarily deactivate your Facebook account without losing your Facebook messenger?
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