@ifixcoinops@retro.social
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ifixcoinops

@[email protected]

Hello! I fix #pinball machines and #arcade games, and tell you all about it! I fix lots of other things too, and occasionally tell you about that. I also run one of the web's longest-surviving #textAdventure games, called Improbable Island, and I often write here on Fedi about decade-scale online community management stuff. Husband, dad, professional Thing Fixer and amateur woodworker in my early 40's, an #immigrant from the UK to the USA. Gun enthusiasts pls do not follow/interact.

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ifixcoinops, to random
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Watching a mutual ask for printer recs and receive a chorus of tired tech folk going "Just get a Brother, they're fine" and man

MAN

Like this is actually kinda fascinating honestly, Brother is now the best printer brand, the one that every Computer Person recommends, and is it because their printers are good? Their printers are fine, they print, whatever, no, it's because everybody else's printers have gotten Innovated out the wazoo, every innovation making them way worse, until it's gotten to the point where I wouldn't have one in the house even if it were free, and meanwhile Brother's have remained consistently Fine I Guess, which now makes them the best printer manufacturer simply by virtue of them opting out of the Who Can Get Crappiest Fastest race

Brother have gotten to where they are now, by NOT innovating

ifixcoinops, to random
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If you're in the US and you've also been idly wondering why "I don't like to drive at night" has become such a common thing to say in the past few years, stand near to a modern LED streetlamp and block it with your hand. In about two thirds of a second, the whole road brightens up as your pupils open.

You're not just getting old; between over-bright streetlights, over-bright headlights of oncoming cars, over-bright instrument clusters, over-bright porch lighting, nobody can see in the dark anymore.

Just in the last decade we've made it much harder and more dangerous to drive at night. Oh, and we also gave up the stars.

ifixcoinops, to random
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Kid had her first taste of dodgeball today.

I honestly didn't know that this was a real thing. Figured it was one of those made-up-for-cartoons American School Things.

I am doing a big FFS atm

ifixcoinops,
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🤓 "Mr Fixes Coin-Ops, nurse office here,"
🦝 "Hello again yes what is it this time"
🤓 "Black eye from getting hit in the eye with a football"
🦝 "K thanks for letting me know."

*** picking up kid

🦝 "So you got bonked in the face with a football eh, what game were you playing"
🦄 "The hit-each-other-in-the-face-with-a-football game."
🦝 "Cool, where was the teacher while you lot were playing the hit-each-other-in-the-face-with-a-football game."
🦄 "Watching and calling it dodgeball."
🦝 "So dodgeball is a real thing that real kids really play huh."
🦄 "I guess."

ifixcoinops,
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Schools 🐇: Dodgeball is a shit game, let's stop doing it and play something else instead

Everyone 🐍🐠🐴🐀🦊🦝: thank god for that

Dickheads 🐩: I HAD TO DO IT AND IT SUCKED SO MY CHILDREN SHOULD HAVE TO DO IT TOO, SOMETHING SOMETHING SNOWFLAKES ETC

🐇: scared!

🐍🐠🐴🐀🦊🦝: FFS

🐩: oh that was easy, know what else I don't like?

ifixcoinops, to random
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Boosts appreciated:

Every time I get my calipers out to measure a thing I go "Agh, these calipers are a load of flimsy shite and the batteries run down even when I'm not using them, I should buy a better set," and then I never do, so fedi, please recommend me a good set of digital calipers that you've got firsthand experience with.

Difficulty level: I live among AMERICANS and am subject to their measuring nonsense so it has to give fractional inches as well as proper.

ifixcoinops,
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Every time I use these calipers I go UUUUGGHHHH

But I've had them over a decade and they STILL WORK THOUGH is the thing, they're Good Enough™

"Dan if you've had them that long and they're still kicking then they can't be that bad now can they" oh my friend I promise you they are

You ever had a tool where you actually wish it'd break irreparably so you'd have the excuse to buy a better one, but the crappy one stubbornly refuses to break, it just keeps on chugging, committed to mediocrity forever, it's the only thing worse than a tool that breaks the second time you use it

ifixcoinops, to random
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My daughter is she/her but we've just gotten the most aggressively they/them bike I've ever seen, this thing is rad as hell

ifixcoinops,
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Walmart wants like $130 for this, I got it for $20 at the local annual block sale.

Just wanted its tyres pumped up and its brakes fiddled with a bit.

Now this is Dan Fixes Coin-Ops, not Dan Fixes Bikes, but I had some fun with those brakes. It uses side-pull caliper brakes on the front and V-brakes on the back.

So I note the back brakes are being a bit finicky in their adjustments and not returning to their neutral positions cleanly, so I do the silly thing and give them a couple drops of oil. It works. Later on I get the manual and find out oh, that's actually what the manual recommends. Then I adjust the handlebars for her and that throws the back brake alignment all to bollocks again so I figure alright, it's good enough, let's let her do some more riding (not really riding, still learning, but we're having fun) and I'll have a better look when she's in bed.

So we put her to bed, I pull these calipers off, and what do I see? Remembering that the manual recommended lubing these things?

Nylon pawl wrapped around a brass bushing with a steel washer underneath.

Aye. They wanted me to put oil on that. 😑

So I give them a damn good scrub and take off all the nasty gunky grease the factory put in there, along with the oil I added, get it all clean and put it together dry and of course now it's smooth as butter, I guess the moral is ignore the manual ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ

ifixcoinops,
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I'll have to get a better picture of this thing, it's called TEMPEST and my daughter refers to it by name, as in "I'm gonna have some quality time with Tempest, she wants to go fast"

ifixcoinops,
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Anyway if something doesn't work, take it all apart, give it a damn good clean, look at it really hard, put it all back together and after all that if it nearly works then fiddle with the adjustments and if it doesn't work then take it all apart again and look at it again but HARDER this time until you go "oh, THERE you are you little bollocks, such a tiny thing causing all these problems." This works for any problem, good night

ifixcoinops,
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If you're scared to take things apart, if you think you won't be able to put them back together again or whatever, it's alright, just take lots of pictures with your phone while you're taking the thing apart. Video is even better.

If the thing you're taking apart was designed by people who put some thought and effort into it, you won't need the pictures because you'll find it's not physically possible to put it back together wrong. Those are good machines. But do take lots of pictures anyway because there aren't all that many good machines in this world

ifixcoinops, to random
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Is there some kinda open-source PC based Dance Dance Revolution knockoff with thousands of songs and if so is it any good

ifixcoinops, to random
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In case y'all were tired of hearing about popular Fediverse people making bad decisions, just thought I'd let y'all know I bought a 1980's hybrid pinball/videogame tonight

ifixcoinops,
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@WizardOfDocs Gameplay-wise or tech-wise? Because the answer to both is "Barely, but in an amusing way"

ifixcoinops, to random
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Fedi, my internet router sucks, drops wifi every few minutes, recommend me a different one?

Barest requirements:

  • I need to be able to hit a button and cut off the littleun's MAC address.
  • I'm buying it once and then I'm done, I'm not signing up for anything. If that means buying an old pre-capitalism-collapse one off eBay then fine.
  • If I need to screw with it then I'm going to 192.168.1.1, I'm not installing any damn apps. On my current Netgear one I have to tell my phone to pretend to be a desktop before it lets me in and it sucks.
  • I don't wanna screw around with OpenWRT or custom firmware or whatevs, I do enough of that on every other bloody thing I own and I don't have time for another hobby.

Nice to have:

  • Have the "Turn off the kid's internet" button press itself at a certain time. My current router has a really crappy thing where you can choose times and days for the littleun to have internet or not, I don't want that - I only want the kid to have internet when I say she can have internet, not when the router says it's time for internet. So right now inside the parental controls menu the internet is blocked on all time slots, and when she says dad can I have Scratch time I go to 192.168.1.1 on my phone and flip the "Parental controls are ON" toggle, but my problem is I forget to turn the block back on so she's sneaking Scratch time early in the morning, so I want that button to press itself at night. I want "Internet off until ask Dad" functionality.
ifixcoinops, to random
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So I downloaded a whole bunch of free or pay-what-you-want Game Boy games off itch.io for my Game Dad. They're all made with GB Studio (which is a free super-easy game-making program to make Game Boy games) and so far they're all pretty chill.

A highlight is Analog Age Rainy Day, which has you playing as a kid trying to survive a rainy day; catch is it's 1984 so there's no phones or game boy or anything so you've gotta find ways to amuse yourself.

A lovely benefit of using the Game Dad for Game Boy games is the ability to shift the palette so that it's red-on-black for playing in bed without giving me insomnia. It only works for Game Boy games though, not Game Boy Colour or Advance; I wish this were an option I could toggle in Retroarch for all my games.

I'm getting into the idea of writing my own Game Boy game and I think I want to make it about a tiny smol officeboy/retailboy who gets laid off and joins a moving company to make a bit of quick cash, and finds that he loves using his body and feeling those aches and becoming stronk. And like this is possible now, it's very do-able to make a game that isn't about saving the world or whatever, doesn't have to have mass appeal enough to justify burning a bunch of ROMs and moulding a bunch of cartridges, you can chuck it up on the internet as easily as we could copy a tape game in a boombox thirty years ago and if ten people fall in love with it then Hooray.

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