I have nothing arcade related to report today. I am sorry to let you down. I am working on a very cool project that I got for my birthday, and will post about it when it’s complete. I’m going to need some more parts for it, so unfortunately I can’t write about it for at least a week or so.

Checkout this screw up I just spotted on the homepage of CNN.com:

Click on that image to see it full size. I’m no expert on politics and junk, but that guy looks an awful lot like Jay Leno to me.

and I feel like this dude:

I can’t imagine what it will feel like when I hit 40. If this site is still up then I will let you know.

My wife got me a very cool electronics project that I’m tempted to post about today, but I think I will hold off until it’s all together and working. In other news…

I finished up my Baby Pac control panel:

I couldn’t decide whether or not to paint the bolts black. Many of the pictures I saw online showed black bolts, but they also looked like they had refinished control panels. I saw some with unpainted silver bolts, and most of the bolts on mine showed no sign of paint (just rust)…except for the bolts along the top that hold latches in place:

Those bolts look to me like they were painted half black to line up with the black stripe at the top of the overlay. I didn’t bother doing this, and I went with unpainted shiny bolts for the whole thing. Here are some glamor shots.

I finally got around to working on my Baby Pac-Man control panel this past weekend. Here it is before:

and with all parts removed:

Look how nasty this hinge is!

I had to shut the radio off for this part, because I only have 1 circuit in my garage and it usually blows when the heat gun and something else is running at the same time.

Here it is naked:

The picture above is AFTER I removed the adhesive left over from the overlay. I use Jasco Adhesive Remover, which is messy and a little toxic but works great. I figure if I have any brain cells left, they are tough enough to withstand a few minutes with this stuff.

Here it is with the new overlay on:

I used Windex first on the bottom half in case I didn’t get the alignment right the first time. It was a mistake. I’ll never use it again for a CPO. It made it not stick as well as the rest, and I had to mess with it for a long time to get it to stay down.

The controls are upstairs soaking in Pinesol in the sink…I’ll post a pic when I have them installed.

I just spotted this cool video on Neatorama.com.

Someone needs to give this guy a job at Nintendo.

So I was sitting on the couch, watching American Idol and I see a roll of duct tape nearby. I like American Idol, but it’s 2 hours long on Wednesday. I needed something to pass the time while listening to Simon insult people, and here’s what I ended up with:

It’s actually quite comfortable. I’m wearing it as I write this. My wife told me that she will divorce me if I wear it when we go out together, so I will have to wear it when she’s not around.

Here it is next to one of them expensive store bought varieties:

I was thinking of posting a picture of me with it on, but I’m afraid someone will photoshop my head onto the body of a goat. You will just have to imagine me wearing it. If you want to imagine me with a goat body I guess that’s OK too (you sick, sick bastard).

If you need any dance shoes, checkout this spam I just received. If you decide to make business with them, please let me know how it goes – because all my dance shoes have holes in them from doing the funky chicken.

I thought about what to post today, and couldn’t come up with anything spectacular. SO…I will now bore you with my IC socket lego sculpture:

I got these on eBay from Sure Electronics in China. What you see above is equal to 2 of these sets. Each set was $10.50, which works out to about .23 cents per socket.

For those that don’t know, these are machine pin sockets. I like them, but for some reason everyone seems to crap all over them lately (not literally!) on the KLOV.com message boards. I had a bunch of these before and went through most of them working on my Baby Pac-Man. The big stack of 4 pin sockets is going to be pretty useless, but the 40 pin sockets are what I really needed. I stacked them up like legos so I can fit them in my parts cabinet:

Here’s what I was waiting for from eBay

I think I’m going to hang this somehow from the ceiling so it’s on an angle, but I haven’t figured out exactly how yet.

I don’t really have a test bench per se (I just use my computer desk), but I now have a test bench monitor:

I was searching the KLOV.com forums for ideas on setting up a small test monitor, and found this thread. It explains how to hack a Sony PSOne 5″ LCD screen to work on RGB video signals. The thread was 3 years old, and mentioned that they were on sale for $13 at K-Mart! Well….that sale is long gone. I found one on eBay for $40-ish. I had to get a power adapter at Radio Shack too, but it was worth it.

I don’t feel like writing a tutorial on this, because I’m feeling exceptionally lazy. If you have any questions on how I did it let me know. I took the info from that KLOV thread and it was pretty simple.

Here are a few pics I took while working on it.

After following the instructions, I hooked it up and I thought it wasn’t working at all. Upon further inspection, it was showing an image but it was very dark. The backlight wasn’t turning on.

I searched Google like crazy and finally found the solution. I found this page that explains if you have a PAL (European) version of the display, the backlight won’t come on unless you give the LCD +5V. They explain how to do this on that page, and show it in the 4th pic down. You can see the mod I had to make here:

See the second white connector from the left on that circuit board? (say yes.) I had to take the first wire, cut it about 8 inches down, and then solder it to a tiny little pad on the circuit board. After doing that, it came right up! Now I can test boards while I’m working on them without having to run back and forth to their cabinets.

I’d like to take a moment to thank all the smart people that figured out how to do this.

Did you ever see a news headline that you just have to click on? Here’s one that seemed a little strange:

This was on MSNBC.com, in the local section for my area. What was this “hot dog incident”? Did he eat too many and get sick on someone? Did he throw a hot dog at an old woman? Click here to find out.