The World's Most Expensive Arcade Emulator?

At least one of the three heads of xena, the warrior system now has multiple purposes (for a sufficiently loose definition of purpose).

Last year, I put RetroPie (a wrapper for MAME, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator) on a dedicated Raspberry Pi 3B+, and DOSBox (a game oriented MS-DOS emulator) on a spare Raspberry Pi 4B.  (They could not share the same machine because RetroPie needs an older OS version, but the newer faster Raspberry Pi 4B needs a newer OS.) The MAME host was fine, and the DOSBox host worked reasonably well but was running flat out with newer games. 

I love Raspberry Pi units for their low power consumption, which is why I run a use one for our router and two others to run emulated IBM mainframes on them 24x7.  But none of those units clutter my office desk; the two game emulator hosts sit mostly powered off right under my nose.

xena is also on the KVM at my desk, but while she's physically huge she is completely out of the way under the desk.  When running Ubuntu Linux, she supports both RetroPie and DOSBox, and while she is ten years older than the Raspberry Pi units, she was built for top of the line performance, not cheap efficiency. That means that even today she can handle MAME more easily than any Raspberry Pi.

So yesterday both RetroPie and DOSBox got migrated to xena, freeing the two Raspberry Pi units for other nefarious purposes away from my desk. xena has purpose!

Been There, Broke that

 

Old (torn) Strap Top, Spare Strap Bottom

I've previously noted that I torque my right leg and thus the right foot strap tends to slip off my exercise bike. It happens enough I usually check (and have reset) it every time I use the bike.  Of course, this increases the wear on the pedal strap, and I discovered it was torn this morning.

This is no big deal because I've got spare straps. I grabbed one, verified it was a right (not left) strap, and went to install it.  that's when I looked at it closely, and realized it was not actually a new strap: it was already torn.

Time to check the rest of the inventory, more carefully, and toss any other dead straps.

(And yes, if you look carefully in the photograph, both straps are torn.)

Update: I had three open sets of straps, and all the right pedal straps were torn; I threw them all out. I had one sealed set, used the right pedal strap from that, and ordered two more sets.

Voodoo Hardware, Unearthed

Thermometer Used in My Previous Offices

OK this is truly strange.

This is the thermometer I used for years when I worked in an office to check the building temperature versus my perception. It's a WYSIWYG device; it shows the current temperature and that's it.

I haven't used it since I left Google, and of course the battery was quite dead. Today, I was curious about the temperature in my office closet and had a spare battery; I threw the battery in.

The thermometer displayed a reasonable temperature about a degree low compared to my office thermometers (one is my office thermostat and the other is a weather station with three remote sensors); that's fine, the two thermometers don't always agree with each other exactly.

But then things got weird.

I've flipped it over to see the back of the case, and when I flipped it back and could see the display again, the LCD suddenly had "Mem" in a corner.

(It has no buttons to turn on a memory function or any other display. It just doesn't.)

I power cycled it (by removing & replacing the battery), and it powered up with "Min" & "Max" also showing.

I power cycled it, and it powered up with a clock display (WFH?).

I power cycled it, and it powered up with a blank display.

I power cycled it, and it powered up flashing.

I power cycled it, and it powered up with just the current temperature.

I quit while I was ahead (or least breaking even). I set it aside, putting the thermometer in my (chilly) office closet, which was in fact the planned original destination.