GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

The classic game “Battleship” has captivated military sailors and civilians alike for at least 100 years as players attempt to hone in on a strategy to destroy their opponent’s ships placed on a game board while avoiding detection and certain destruction of their own ships.  The game became one of the earliest home computer programs when it was released on the Z80 Compucolor back in 1979, according to Wikipedia’s sources.  And for more than 35 years since, it has been a concept one could use to test someone’s knowledge of programming a system in an elegant way. Recently, I sat in with a colleague of mine while he interviewed a prospective employee.  The idea of using Battleship as the pseudo-coding exercise came to him while he was surfing articles on the Internet regarding good thought exercises to engage interviewees.  We work for a company where object-oriented programming is the flavor of choice, and so we were interested in how our prospie would arrange the...

A great deal of my time was spent from Memorial Day weekend up through now trying to produce this gigantic piece of functional furniture, and now I am pleased to present an Instructable on how to make one for yourself!   Here is a link to the Instructable . Hint: It is helpful to have a Makerspace handy. I actually started this project back in January in an effort to get certified on the CNC table router at Dallas Makerspace and start cutting pinball playfields.  I made a post previously about my experiences and learnings from that particular endeavor, but as you can tell by the edits, I didn't quite get it right the first time.  It took a bit of time before my schedule could clear up in order to try 3D parts again, and lest I forget the procedures involved with using the table router, I thought it'd be prudent to try building an even bigger NES controller than what I did to get certified.  My proficiency test involved making a 16x-sized controller, but here I w...

I'm a collector.  My wife doesn't help me with my problem.  It's something I've done since I was young, and growing up as an only child, it brought me joy to share these things with others.  On the other hand, she comes from a big family but has also come to appreciate stuff.  There are things we collect together, such as retro video games, which led us to the Let's Play Gaming Expo which was in Plano, TX on 6/18 and 6/19.  We brought eight of our home console systems with at least one game per system from our personal stash,  and two pinball machines .  (Not to mention the gigantic 100x NES controller.) We have seen a staggering evolution in technology and aesthetics in our just shy of 30 years in existence, and what's more interesting to me about this evolution is the things we don't do anymore rather than the new things that have evolved.  For instance, print media has declined drastically over the past 15 years, pay-phone booths are virtual...

I was invited to attend Google I/O 2016 at pretty much the last second -- only about 10 days before the start of the event.  This is my first time here, though my wife DoesItPew has been here twice before already.  We got to attend the convention together for once, and now I am dodging the cold wind blowing in over the hill here at dusk from the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA. Prior to the event were many different Day Zero parties including a really large one thrown by Intel.  As an Intel Innovator (though I rarely speak about that because I suck at publicizing myself and/or I mostly use their products on projects covered by NDAs), I got to show off some new hardware prototypes made recently and impressed several people who are fond of homemade hardware and/or LED products.  Unfortunately, my favorite prototype died on Wednesday after the Google I/O keynote; it probably got shorted when one of the power wires poking through my shirt decided to come ...

There are several ways to configure Maven to run designated tests separately in a Java project.  Usually, people want to distinguish between unit tests and other types of automated tests during a build.  Unit tests are fast because you are mocking all the external services that the particular code under test is relying upon.  They’re also typically smaller than functional tests, since they are (supposed to be ;) testing a unit of code rather than an entire feature . However, functional tests are also critical to the success of your project.  You or your managers are probably interested in seeing automated end-to-end usage of your application running constantly without errors, but how is this possible without annoying the developers as they wait for all the tests to finish? The Maven Failsafe plugin is most helpful in separating unit from functional tests.  By default, it focuses on tests whose filename follows the specific pattern: **/IT*.java *...

I could have just asked around to see if anyone had an EPROM validator, but why ask when you can spend several hours doing it yourself, and then several more hours writing in pedantic detail about it?  Of course, I must have the DIY bone... Who still uses EPROMs, anyway? While working on old solid-state pinball machines from the 1980s and late '70s, you might run into a situation where a dead ROM chip needs to be replaced.  Certain types of machines (I'm looking at you, all you Gottlieb System 80's) suffer a problem where coils can get locked on due to bad grounding design throughout the system, and then cause transistors and all sorts of other things on the driver board and even possibly the main board to fry themselves.  In other cases, battery corrosion might leech into the ROM chip and possibly compromise it.  No matter what the case is, you might find yourself in need of new ROMs at some point. Now I could easily go and find new ROMs for my game, order ...