u/weirdal1968

A friend scored a nonworking Vindicators back during COVID and we finally had time to unscramble yet another omelette.

Had to rebuild the PSU and monitor which wasn't unusual but the sound hardware was FUBARed. Volume pot was smashed and one TDA2030 was amputated when the heatsink got whacked. Replaced the amp IC and a 2N3904 that also took a hit.

Found a generic Alps 10K pot but discovered the Atari pot used nonstandard lead spacing. A little creative lead bending and viola!

Strangely even though the game was now playable it was silent. Not even a trace of hiss at max gain. Dug into the marquee box to check the speakers and both were blown. Dug into the parts pile and found two speakers from a parted out APB that fit.

i7-11700KF MSI RTX 3070 16GB DDR4 2xSSD 1TB HDD

Found in apartment moveout trash. Looks absolutely clean so probably seldom used.

I was checking our shuffleboard table this morning and noticed something odd. In front of both goals there were what appeared to be residue from a drink spill. Since they looked like wear spots I had previously ignored them. It was only when a slow puck caught on the patch that I noticed. I cleaned the gunk with some degreaser so it definitely wasn't tape residue or hand funk.

Is spilling something like a slushie in front of a goal some weird cheating hack to make protecting your goal easier by slowing a puck?

The ones I see here in the USA have the letters oriented RXR. Never seen an RXR sign with vertical and horizontal stripes.

Was running around in my old neighborhood and spotted headlights at a crossing. Found a parking spot and a few minutes later a pair of KCS 6 axles and a CP geep rolled into view. Crew saw me and decided to pull out all the stops for an unforgetable horn show.

Posted the video in a CPKCS group and an hour later the engineer messaged me asking for a copy of the video to show his kids.

Friend bought a game in a 19" Dynamo cabinet. It was working and cosmetically was 8/10. I found this creative crayon choice for a ground. Also - anyone using ring terminals on a Peter Chou needs to be my monitor discharge tool for a month.

A few years ago I was dumpster diving at some sketchy apartments. Saw a big pile of wet garbage in front of a dumpster but it didn't look interesting.

As I was walking away I spotted a corner of a box I immediately recognized - a Commodore VICMODEM. The box was a writeoff but the modem looked intact. Digging into the pile I found a bunch of 8" floppies. Some were wet but they dried out. Even got some unopened disk labels. One sheet tucked in with the disks is labeled Ektachem worksheet.

I'm not a collector of mainframe stuff but it felt weird to rescue 8" floppies out of the garbage in 2023. From the other stuff I found this guy had a collection of things from the 70s up through Windows NT based on the ruined booklets/etc. It probably got thrown out on a weekday and I missed it.

Pulled this out of our parts stash and assumed the mottled coloring was supposed to look like a bowling ball.

Cleaned it with Gojo hand cleaner and now.its as white as a factory G07 flyback.