Red Is A Flavor

I bet there is not a techie anywhere that has not seen a Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) cabinet and not wanted one.  Building one is somewhat akin to earning an eagle scout badge, in the world of geekdom.

For those of you who’ve never heard of a MAME cabinet;  it is a PC built within a normal looking arcade cabinet, running a specialized piece of software which “emulates” the old hardware of real arcade machines.  This emulator allows the actual ROMs from arcade games to be loaded and run, in all their 8-bit glory.

Apparently MAME’ers like to brag and gloat, because there are a ton of information online about MAME cabinet projects, because .  While the best source of information is Arcade Controls.com, it was Chris Moyles’ “The Story of a Cabinet Built in 24 hours” that gave me the itch.

Do you ever find yourself right in the middle of reading an article online, when you have to walk away from your desk?  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could quickly transfer the URL to your iPhone or Android?  Try this simple tip.

Create a Bookmark with the following bookmarklet as the URL:

javascript:(function(){location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/
chart?chs=150x150&cht=qr&chl='+
encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)})()

This bookmarklet will take the current URL you are viewing and convert it to a CRcode you can quickly scan with your phone, using Google’s Charting API.

Enjoy!

Ever wonder how Posterous shortens URLs? It was accidently revealed by @drummondjessica’s post-a-rama today.

Five characters positions cycled through the alphabet in each position, first in uppercase, then in lower. Easy and simple…and provides over 380,000,000 unique URLs.

I just looked at my YouTube Insight (built in stats), and noticed that the video of Jennifer and Jessica wrestling has 20 times the views than any of my other videos.

If your house is anything like mine, the chore of setting up and taking down Christmas crap is a back-breaking event. This year my wife was recovering from a surgery so I had to come up with a way of getting the stuff down out of the attic without her. All I had was me and my six year old. Some of the boxes weigh over 75 pounds, so it was doubtful he was helping me much.

I came up with the idea for a pulley system to raise and lower boxes out of the attic, using just a couple of scrap 2x2s, some rope, and a 100lb rated eyelet.

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Most trusses are 24″ on center, so it was easy to make a mount that would just slip over the truss’. What makes this better, is the fact that the attic opening is also directly between truss’. To the right is a rough sketch of what I built (click to see it larger). It could obviously be enhanced with a block and tackle if need be, but for my purposes it works without it. Note that the rig is not permanently mounted to the truss, it simply is placed on top. This makes it easy to move where you need it or loan it to a friend.

Using this “attic-rig”, I was able to quickly load the boxes into the sling in the attic, then lower it down. My six year old, easily guided the boxes to the ground, unhooked the sling, then pushed the boxes out of the way. We were able to unpack the attic in 1/2 the time in normally takes, and I didn’t have to take aspirin afterward. Needless to say, the repacking of the attic will be using the same setup. Good luck!