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Crazy Atari 800 Add-On Device

I am a sucker for cool modern hardware for old retro hardware. YouTube channel The Retro Shack has this awesome and comprehensive review of an “everything” add-on device for the Atari 800 computers called the Fujinet.

What do I mean by everything? It’s pretty much the kitchen sink here with emulation for 8 floppy drives, a modem (connects via Telnet), a printer (writes out PDFs), realtime clock, a cassette deck for cassette based software, and a network adapter that connects via Wifi. Even crazier is that it allows for mounting disk images remotely over the Internet! It’s not all that expensive either at around $80 or so.

The Atari 800 has an innovative serial bus that in some ways works like USB where a whole chain of devices can be attached to a single cable with each uniquely addressable by the system. The creator of this hardware went on to work on the USB standard.

I have an Atari 800 in the basement here. My father-in-law purchased one back in the 80’s for use as a family PC but it hasn’t been booted up in decades. If you’re interested I might do a video or a stream where we power it up to see if there’s any life left in it!

The 800 is of course also faithfully recreated on the MiSTer.

AI Upscaled Wing Commander 3

Per WCNews.com a group called CD1188 Entertainment is working on upscaling the now super low resolution video from 1994’s Wing Commander 3. You can see it on their YouTube channel, it’s looking pretty good given the source footage they are working with!

Wing Commander is one of my favorite games of all time. Wing Commander 3 really pushed the envelope back in its day. It required a pretty fast 486 or Pentium, double speed or better CD-ROM, and a whopping 8 megabytes of RAM at a minimum.

The Wing Commander series was know for being a great space shooter but it also had equally good story elements. In the first two games they consisted of animated cut scenes with a few minutes of voice acting. For the third game Chris Roberts went all out with professional actors (including Mark Hamill, Malcom McDowell and John Rhys-Davies to name a few).

I talked about my love for Wing Commander in this video. You can see how the series progressed as technology improved over the course of its five mainline games and spin-offs.

New Video: Synology RT6600ax Router Review

My latest video is a review of the new Synology RT6600ax router. Synology got into the routing business a few years back with products that by far have the best user interface in the business.

Their previous router was released 5 years ago (wow!) and I found in my review of it at the time to be a solid product. In fact it is still running a portion of my network today. Still, users wanted more out of it including the ability to set up network segmentation using VLANs and of course WiFi 6 capabilities.

The RT6600ax resolves many of those wants but still leaves me desiring more. The good news is that it does include VLAN support with the ability to have five separate networks managed by the device. The even better news is that this functionality is also coming to the prior router too. I also found its WiFi 6 performance to be outstanding.

But it leaves me desiring more.

Oddly the unit only has one 2.5 gigabit port on it. If you have a multigig connection none of your other ethernet clients can connect at full speed. And for a router that supports so many segmented networks it unfortunately only has four ethernet ports on its switch and only 3 if using the 2.5 port for connecting to an ISP. I’m sure cost factored into this decision but it’s a shame its performance potential is hindered by a lack of connectivity options.

Another issue is that Synology doesn’t offer much in the way of meshing options other than buying a second RT6600ax and turning it into a mesh access point. Hopefully they release some WiFi 6 mesh points at a lower cost in the future.

But for a small home or office network it’s a good choice. It’s not very complex even when setting up more complex networks.

RTL-SDR on the Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

The RTL-SDR makes an appearance on the History channel’s Secret of Skinwalker Ranch! They are really fun devices for exploring the radio spectrum through software defined radio (SDR for short). This link will take you to my series on the subject which was my “gateway drug” to amateur radio!

The History Channel show is about a ranch in Utah that is connected to the US government’s studies of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). Apparently the government spent quite a bit of money trying to make sense of it all. Visitors and residents of the ranch have experienced quite a bit there: UFOs, poltergeist activity, cattle mutilations, strange creatures, you name it.

A recent book entitled Skinwalkers at the Pentagon details some of the work of those government investigators.

Non-Spoiler Review of Kenobi Series

This 6ish hour series probably could have been done better as a two and a half hour feature film but it was great Star Wars nonetheless. Well worth a watch.

It was great to see Vader on screen again with 91 year old James Earl Jones voicing him. I really liked seeing this transitional Vader that still had movements and elements of the prequel films’ Anakin Skywalker. And of course Ewan McGregor was awesome – he really jumped right back into a role he hasn’t played in almost twenty years.

The series enhanced well established characters and their relationships (especially Vader/Anakin) without ret-conning anything. I’d love a season 2 with Ewan McGregor doing Jedi things without messing up the Skywalker timeline.

New Video: Is Tesla Autopilot Safe?

The media went haywire over a recent government report on crashes involving Level 2 driving technologies like Tesla’s autopilot.

I took a deep dive into the report to see what was (and was not) in it.

The report covered 392 incidents and said Tesla’s vehicles were involved in 273 of them. By comparison there were an estimated 6.7 million car accidents and almost 43,000 highway deaths nationwide during the period of time the report covers.

Having used this technology for the past four years I believe it is safer when used appropriately. Tesla’s own data backs that up.

About half of the report’s narrative is spent telling readers how inclusive the data is. This includes the fact that the only cars that actually report telematics data on crashes are Tesla’s. So for other brands the driver would have to explicitly report that the car was under automated control to a police officer or the government. Tesla is also shipping far more cars with this technology than any other automotive brand.

But that didn’t stop the media from jumping to conclusions as I spell out in my latest Weekly Wrapup video. I also give a short demo of Tesla’s full self driving in action.

Incidentally the same radar cruise and lane keeping technology that Tesla started with was installed in many other cars but those manufacturers dialed it back out of fear of government regulators.

It’s astounding that with only 392 incidents to investigate the government report does not indicate who was at fault in these accidents.

Tesla isn’t guilt-free in this either – as I point out in the video they didn’t counter-message against influencers who were using the system inappropriately beyond what it was designed to do. The name autopilot also suggests a capability that goes beyond what it could actually do. This was especially true with their first generation technology that relied on radars that don’t detect stationary objects at highway speeds.

NATO Official Says Telegram is Insecure

According to the Washington Examiner, a NATO official has stated the obvious when it comes to Telegram’s security:

“Telegram is not really as it used to be,” Janis Sarts, the director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, told the Washington Examiner. “I do have reasons to believe that there is not full integrity. … Certainly, I would not see it as a secure platform.”

I covered this topic a few months ago when I did a deep dive into the popular messaging and social media platform. I suspect that it’s insecure by design – governments won’t need to ask for user data when they can very easily pluck it off the wire.

Contacted a Packet Radio BBS!

My amateur radio adventure continues. This evening I finally managed to get my gear connected to a packet radio BBS! These are simple bulletin board systems that have been around since the 80’s.

What’s cool about packet BBSes is that they do not require any type of communications infrastructure other than the radios on both ends.

The Week Ahead for June 20, 2022

Another week is upon us! Today will be the first real video I shoot at 4k so I’m eager to see how it all comes together and where things might fall apart. I got some great feedback from all of you on the visual quality and will be making some adjustments to cut down on the motion blur some of you noticed.

The big issue I see right now are file sizes. My raw 4k files are significantly larger so I may need to upgrade the SSD I use in the production machine for recording. The main clip from Saturday’s video is over 11.48 GB in size yet is only 2 minutes and 45 seconds in length!

I use Vmix’s lossless codec which offers the highest quality for the lowest amount of system resources. It’s pretty crazy how little CPU it uses during the production. At 1080p30 (what I used to record at ) it consumed about 55GB an hour. At 4k30 (my new format) it uses a whopping 175GB an hour!

On tonight’s Weekly Wrapup I’m going to talk about the recent government safety report on self driving cars. The media jumped to some conclusions without actually reading it so we’re going to look at what the report ACTUALLY says.

Later this week I’ll have a review of the new Synology RT6600ax router (affiliate link). This one is (hopefully) my last 1080p video. Following that we’ll have a review of a couple of new mini PCs (one of them fanless) and if I have time I’d like to do a new MoCA explainer based on some feedback I’ve been getting from folks as to how it works.

A little later in the week I’ll be attending a Pepcom event to get a preview from a few major brands on their new releases. If there’s enough to talk about from the show I’ll do a dispatch video too.

Stay Tuned!

Upgrading to 4k!

This weekend I had some time to see if switching to a 4k workflow was feasible. Before doing this I had to upgrade the GPU in my production machine, fix a network problem that you’ll see in another video I uploaded this week, and of course ensure that our editing workflow could handle larger files and resolutions.

Let me know how everything works in today’s video.

As many of you know I shoot my videos the same way livestreamers work in that I shoot everything live to disk vs having to edit everything together later. So while I own cameras that can do 4k, processing and recording multiple 4k streams in realtime with no frame drops needed some additional hardware. I was also reluctant to throw a wrench in a very smooth and efficient workflow – especially one that likely won’t result in increased viewership.

But the stars aligned this weekend – I was ahead on content and had a good runway of opportunity now that all of the hardware upgrades were done to the production machine.

The best part is that because I use the same workflow for live and recorded productions I am now able to livestream in 4k too! Check out what it looks like here on YouTube. Right now I’m sending YouTube a 4k 30fps stream at 30 megabits per second. I will continue to stream to Amazon too but they are limited to 720p at 2.5 megabits per second. Still I think the Amazon stream looks better downscaling from 4k vs. 1080. Check out the Amazon version here.

There is still one 1080p video left in the hopper. I’ll be going 4k from now on provided I don’t have any deal breaking gotchya’s in the week ahead.

New Video: Using Fiber Optic Patch Cables & NICs vs. RJ45 Ethernet

My latest video was initially going to be something for the Extra’s channel but when I put it together it was clear it would do well on the main channel. You all love networking!

Last year I upgraded my network to a 10 gigabit backbone. This was to support the Comcast Gigabit Pro service I had installed at my house which at the time ran at 2 gigabits per second symmetrical but has now been upgraded to 6. The only problem was that me the cheapskate installed only Cat 5e wiring in the studio and throughout my home.

The good news is that I’ve found my 5e runs are relatively short and can support multigigabit speeds reliably. The only problem I’ve had so far is with my main Vmix production machine that on rare occasions errors out and locks up my entire network when I’m pushing large volumes of data in or out of it. I initially thought it was a problem with NDI video and my Unifi switches but it also recently triggered itself when I was running an Internet speed test.

I am not known for my cable management or wiring skills but the run to my production machine is very short to my equipment closet and there’s also a drop ceiling. This made it really easy to wire up a new connection. Rather than stay on copper I instead ran a short fiber run and purchased a new networking card with an SFP+ connector vs. RJ45.

It was a very simple installation and so far (knock on wood) everything is working great.

The problem could have been due to the inexpensive non-Intel based 10 gig NIC I was using but I didn’t want to bother troubleshooting more ethernet solutions when I am not using the recommended cabling.

You can see the parts I used in the video here!

Interesting Nugget from the NHTSA Report on Automated Driving

The National Highway Transportation Safety Agency (NHTSA) put out a much talked about study on crashes involving cars equipped with driver assist and self driving automation technologies. One of the reports shows that an Apple vehicle was involved with an accident over the time period the report looked at:

Apple has long been rumored to be developing a vehicle of its own. Surprising that nobody seems to be talking about this item in the NHTSA report.