Category Archives: Programming

I Just Wanted Clean HDMI on a Note 10+ (Telephoto)

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This week's obsession came when I decided I wanted to repurpose my recently repaired Samsung Galaxy Note S10+ as an overhead camera for the workbench. Its image sensors vastly outperform any ordinary webcam, including my $200 Razer Kio Pro. The distance from my homemade ceiling mount to the workbench tabletop makes the 2x optical zoom of the Note 10+ a perfect fit. But in all the years I owned this phone, I never realized that only the native Samsung Camera app allowed use of its telephoto lens. All other applications, free or paid, are only able to interface with the front-facing cameras, wide angle and standard 1x back lens.

Unlucky for me but fortunately for everyone with slightly newer models, Samsung finally introduced clean HDMI out with their native Samsung Camera app as part of the One UI 5.0 release. Note 10+ and lower are ineligible for the upgrade. My Note 10+ is currently running One UI 4.1 and Android OS 12 with kernel 4.14, all of which are pretty much end-of-life for the phone beyond security patches. Read Full Article

Bally Arcade: Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge 2022 Breakdown

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Overview

The Bally Arcade / Bally Astrocade / Bally Professional Arcade was an ambitious home computer and video game console combo released in 1978. It sported a 24-button calculator keypad, four joystick ports, a ROM with four built-in applications (Gunfight, Checkmate, Calculator, Scribbling), a light-pen connector and expansion bus and 256 possible colors (8 simultaneous or 2 in BASIC). The joysticks included a trigger button, directional joystick and a 256-position analog wheel on top. Unfortunately, the system was plagued by delays and manufacturing shuffles and never caught on compared to other systems at the time. Several planned add-ons and expansions never came to be, or were only produced through third parties including a full-featured keyboard. It made a cameo appearance in National Lampoon's Vacation and a few catalog appearances, but didn't get a lot of media fanfare beyond that. However, for many years there existed a very devoted group of users, newsletters and more.

45 years later, the system still has a small but ambitious group of enthusiasts involved in the preservation and advancement of the system. Major shout-out to Adam Trionfo and Paul Thacker who have done an incredible job scanning and preserving all artifacts of Bally on BallyAlley.com. Much of the archives originate from the Bob Fabris collection, who ran the largest newsletter Arcadian for years and generously offered tens of gigabytes of materials for preservation. This is the polar opposite of many vintage systems where almost all traces of documentation have been lost or remain in some dusty corner of a basement. Read Full Article

Retro Fix: Montgomery Ward CyberVision 2001 (Work In Progress)

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(This article will serve as a compendium of knowledge about the incredibly elusive Cybervision 2001 system, for which few sites or articles exist online and no prior service manuals, schematics or reference materials have ever been published. This post will serve both as a well-documented exploration of my repair efforts, technical documentation, media details and more.)

I recently acquired the all-but-forgotten Cybervision 2001 (trademark stylized as "CyberVision 2001") , another late-70s attempt at breaching the home TV-hookup computer market. This system was sold exclusively in the Montgomery Ward catalog, and was featured prominently in a two-page opening spread in its 1978 Spring/Summer edition. The set sported the RCA 1802 CPU, 4K RAM and 1K ROM. The one I received is of multiple levels of despair and with little to no information, schematics and materials to go by online I figure I'll start a blog post to chronicle my experience. I will fill in with photos and/or videos in time. Read Full Article

GUIDE: Downgrade Google Suite to Free Edition for Personal Use (November 2022)

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Overview

Google caused a lot of controversy when it decided to phase out the free edition of their popular G Suite (Google Suite / Google Workspace), which they had previously grandfathered in for personal users who acquired it when the solution was still free-of-charge. Many relied on the service for custom domain email management using Gmail behind-the-scenes, and others for the Office-like suite of web applications for word processing and spreadsheets (Google Docs, Google Sheets).

In my case I had a couple G Suite accounts tied to my personal blog and portfolio domains, and have had them since the beginning of G Suite. Back in the day, they were offered as a free service by various hosting companies including my personal recommendation of Dreamhost Shared and Dreamhost Dedicated (affiliate links).  This is why it was so unfortunate to see that option phased out many years later. Read Full Article

Retro Exploration: MDT-870 Mobile Data Terminal (1986-1996)

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I recently impulse bought an ElectroCom Communication Systems MDT-870 radio car terminal for $5 at a surplus sale. Never knew much about these sort of computers but learned a lot since, and yet remain largely in the dark about this particular model given the complete absence of any documentation or schematics online.

This model in particular was common in squad cars in the 1980s-1990s. Some metadata extracted from a ROM that I dumped when troubleshooting indicated "COPYRIGHT 1986-1996 ELECTROCOM AUTOMATION INC." and the particular ROM in this unit had a generation date of March 25, 1996. Based on this, the department may well have used it for the better part of a decade before phasing it out in favor of more contemporary solutions. Read Full Article