robohara.com

Last night, Susan and I watched a television show on Nickelodeon called “Middle School Unplugged”, in which three young teens (seventh and eighth graders) had “technology” taken away from them for a full week. After the show Susan and I joked about doing it, and before long we had talked each other into doing it.

Then we told Mason, who cried for at least ten minutes.

Once it was agreed upon, the battle lines were drawn. When we say technology, we’re talking about entertainment devices: computers, iPods and iPhones, video game systems, televisions and radios. We’re still going to answer our phones (both home and cell), but our calls will be limited to five minutes in length, and we won’t be texting. Susan and I of course have to use computers at work during the day, but we’re going to try to limit it to work-use only (no checking home e-mail or surfing news sites).

The hardest thing for me will be, well, everything. I am pretty much using or being exposed to electronic devices all day long. I check e-mail in the morning before hopping in the shower, and I fall asleep at night with the TV on. I know I’m on Twitter and Facebook too much; staying away from that for a few days is a real challenge. Many of my closest friends I only communicate with online. The thought of not checking in on forums, even my own, is already making me sad.

Susan is online less than I am, although she likes her phone when she’s bored and she likes her laptop time late at night after the kids have gone to bed. Occasionally she likes marathon phone calls as well, but I’m sure she can wait on those until Saturday. I suspect she’ll have the easiest time of all of us adjusting.

Mason is bombarded with electronic entertainment almost as much as I am. He takes either his Nintendo DS or his iPod Touch to daycare every day. At night he’s on the computer playing games or watching television.

Morgan is too young to have many gadgets yet, but she does enjoy Nickelodeon just like her brother. The two of them are constantly watching SpongeBob, iCarly, and other shows. I don’t know if she is old enough to understand what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, but I’m sure she won’t like it.

I wrote this post last night around 11:00pm. As of last night at midnight until Friday night at midnight, consider me “offline” — that means no Facebook, no Twitter, no e-mail … nothing. Through Saturday morning, if you need to contact us, call or stop by.

I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say on Saturday … see you then!

Happy Birthday (a day early), Morgan!

About fifty more pictures here.

Meet Tessie, Morgan’s early birthday present. Tessie is a one and a half year old beagle and miniature pinscher (a “min pin”) mix — at least that’s what the people at Pets and People in Yukon told us.

The good news is, the dog came trained. She sits, stays, fetches, sleeps in a little doggie cage, and most importantly, is house broken. The bad news is, it’s a chewer. Yesterday Tessie spent the day in the backyard and we came home to find pretty much every pool toy we own(ed) spread out across the yard in tiny bite-sized pieces.

Morgan likes Tessie, Tessie likes Morgan, and Don Piano is on the fence right now but the two of them are managing to co-exist at the moment. Watching the dog and cat interact is like having a Garfield comic strip continually unfold in real life.

I am, as the kids like to say, “old school”. I like old technology, I like old video games, I like old arcade games, and I particularly like old computers. When I say “old computers”, I am mostly referring to 8-bit machines from the 1980s: the Commodore 64, the Apple II, the TRS-80, and so on.

In the spirit of Jeopardy, if the preceding paragraph was the answer, the question would be, “What kind of person would be interested in purchasing (or would even have a use for) an FC5025?”

The FC5025 is a custom USB drive controller for 5 1/4″ floppy drives. That, in a nutshell, should tell you right away if the FC5025 is something you need in your life. Some of you are excited. Some of you are scratching your heads. The rest of you probably just quit reading, which is my sign to crank the “geek dial” up to 11. Brace yourselves.

For my generation, the 5 1/4″ floppy represented computers. Back before we had 3 1/2″ disks — hell, back before we had hard drives — we just had floppies. Our family didn’t own a hard drive for our PC until the late 1980s. For almost a decade, my house was Floppy City.

As I’ve stated multiple times on my blog, I still own a lot of floppy disks from that era. And even though I still own a lot of those diskettes, what has disappeared are the disk drives needed to read them. It’s getting tougher these days to find a machine with an internal 3 1/2″ floppy drive, much less a 5 1/4″. Multiple manufactures have created external USB 3 1/2″ drive solutions, but unfortunately none of those are compatible with 5 1/4″ drives.

That’s where the FC5025 comes in. The board itself is tiny, and despite the fact that it’s USB, it’s designed to be mounted inside your PC. Why they built it that way, I’m not sure. Everybody I know who owns one of these boards (okay, all 3 of us) immediately mounted them in external drive caddies. Installed as intended, a person would mount a 5 1/4″ drive internally inside their PC, connect a power cable from their PC’s power supply to the back of the floppy drive, and connect the FC5025′s USB port to an internal USB port inside your computer (to power the card). An external solution requires mounting a 5 1/4″ floppy inside some sort of external drive caddy for power and running a USB cable from the caddy to an external USB port on your computer. The latter solution makes much more sense to me, personally.

To break up all this text, here is a picture of the card itself. I put Luke in the picture for scale but then I decided people might not know how tall Luke is so I put a quarter in there too.

The FC5025 costs $55.25, which does not include a floppy drive. I thought for sure I had saved one or two old 5 1/4″ floppy drives out in the garage, but I had not. An acquaintance of mine (“Aardvark”) kindly mailed me an old floppy drive — and when I couldn’t get that one to work, he mailed me another one. Not only does the guy have access to 5 1/4″ drives — he has 5 1/4″ drives to spare. Aardvark is cooler than you. In between those two arriving, I began searching thrift stores for a working drive. I bought this beast for $5, and although the computer itself worked, the drive was still giving me fits.

The software that comes with the FC5025 claims to be able to back up Apple, Atari, Commodore, MS-DOS, North Star, and TI-99/4A diskettes. This is the unit’s main (really only) selling point. The only reason someone would want to own an FC5025 is if they intended on backing up/archiving old floppy disks (the unit is read only and does not support writing disks of any kind). And yet, despite my efforts and no matter how many different floppy drives I tried, I could not get the unit to read the back side of any of my old floppy disks.

To give you an idea of how many different floppy drives I tried, the top of my computer looks like this right now:

Yeah. So after a bit of investigating (ie: reading the directions), I learned that the FC5025 is basically currently incapable of reading the back side of old diskettes. Old disks that you “flipped” over are referred to as “flippy” disks, and due to a difference in manufacturing techniques, PC floppy drives cannot read the back side of old flippy disks. Apparently they can be modified to do so (see here and here), but it ain’t easy.

In my defense, this is what the website says:

“The FC5025 may be unable to read the second side of “flippy” disks, depending on the drive it is attached to.”

(I saw the word “may”. I thought I had a chance.)

“Many drives won’t read from the disk unless they can see the index hole. If you have one of these drives, the FC5025 will be able to read from the first side of the disk only. When you flip the disk over to read the other side, the drive will not send any data to the FC5025, and the FC5025 will not be able to read that side.”

(Again, I saw “many drives won’t”. That made it sound like “some will”.)

“The FC5025 … has been tested to work well with the TEAC FD-55GFR drive and should also work with most other 5.25″ drives.”

I guess I read between the lines a bit too much. Based on the above information, I assumed that TEAC FD-55GFR drives would, in fact, read the second side of a “flippy disk”. I can tell you that, unmodified, they will not. The top two drives on my pile are TEAC FD-55GFR drives.

The reason I am putting so much emphasis on this one particular “flaw” is that, besides that, the FC5025 is incredible. With my computer case open and cables strung out across my desk, it took me about a minute to connect the card, a drive, and install the included drivers and software. The included transfer program gets right to the point. Pick a disk format, a location and a file name, and you’re on your way. The FC5025 is faster than you would imagine; disks transfer in well under 30 seconds. There are PC, Mac, and Linux versions of the software included.

Although every Commodore 64 diskette I transferred using the FC5025 reported multiple read errors, every one of them worked. Perhaps the read errors were on parts of the disk that didn’t contain data, I’m not sure. Bottom line though, in under 30 seconds I was able to transfer a 25-year-old Commodore floppy disk to a .D64 disk image, double-click the file, and play an old game in using WinVice on my modern PC. That’s pretty impressive. I had similar luck with the Apple II floppies I tried.

And yet, I can’t help but feel a little bummed. For how great this device performed, for most real world collectors, it’s essentially worthless. I don’t know a single old school computer guy who didn’t save files and programs onto the back of any diskette he could get his hands on. Yes, the FC5025 works great — for the half of my collection that sits on the front side of flippy disks. I suppose if one wanted to archive IBM PC diskettes, the FC5025 would work grand. For anyone wanting to archive old C64, Apple, or Atari diskette collections, unless you’re willing and able to heavily modify an old floppy drive, you’ll be disappointed.

The reason I named this article “Part I” is because I am hoping someday there will be a Part II. I will write Part II when I have either modified a floppy drive to read flippy disks, or some update to the software/firmware allows me to do it on a stock drive. Until then, the FC5025 (in its custom-but-unfinished Commodore 1541 case) will probably go up on a shelf, sitting alongside all the other gadgets I’ve bought that were “almost” perfect.

The day started off with breakfast with dad at Baluu’s at the corner of NW10th and Council — no shortage of food there! After spending some time with Dad, the family and I went to the animal shelter to pick up a dog for Morgan (more on that tomorrow). Then we all dove into the swimming pool, where the kids had fun and I got a sunburn. There were a few naps in there somewhere, too. Morgan made me a coffee mug, Mason got me some more magnetic Star Wars Lego figures, and Susan got me a pair of Dr. De Beats headphones (they’re super expensive, and sound fantastic). The kids spent the rest of the day fighting over who got to pet the dog more or something. I really couldn’t hear them because the headphones also have a noise cancelling feature that works great. I just got back from the post office, and now it’s time to sit back and enjoy the last couple of hours of Father’s Day.

I hope all the other fathers out there had as great of a Father’s Day as I did!

An acquaintance of mine (Ianoid from the Digital Press forums) has created, and is now selling, box protectors for old video games. The boxes are 6.75″ x 9.063″ x 1.125″ and are perfect for displaying (and protecting) old video games. According to Ianoid, these are perfect for displaying boxed games for systems such as “Vectrex, Intellivision, VIC-20, C64, Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, and lots of other systems.” The boxes are a buck each, which is a pretty cheap investment for displaying classic games.

Links to more examples can be found here. For more information, check out this page, and to order you can contact ianoid directly at his gmail.com e-mail address. If you end up ordering some, tell him Flack sent you!

Yesterday the kids had an outdoor lunch/fundraiser that I was able to attend for a few minutes. One of the things they were offering was face painting. Morgan went with her old stand by, the lady bug.

Mason, however, surprised me with a mustache and goatee.

Soon all the kids were getting mustaches, even Mason’s friend Avery.

Before I left, I was able to get Mason and a couple of his buddies together for a group photo. “Lookin’ good,” I said to Mason.

“I’m not Mason,” he replied. “I’m Tom the Cop. We’re all cops.” No idea where that came from.

When it comes to gaming, I’m not one of those guys (nor have I ever been) who is particularly loyal to any one single manufacturer. I buy what I like, regardless of who makes it. You could say in regards to specific gaming brands, I’m “gaming agnostic” — I own a PlayStation 3, an Xbox 360, and a Nintendo Wii. This is the disclaimer one has to give if a person plans on saying anything for or against a gaming company — and even then, most public responses will quickly spiral into a pile of fanboy mudslinging.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 is a powerful piece of hardware. In fact, despite belonging to the same generation of consoles, it could be as much as 10x as powerful as the Nintendo Wii. The PS3 plays Blu-Ray movies, has better graphics, and more online games than the Wii, but what it doesn’t have is that silly little Wiimote, the controller that launched a thousand “waggily” mini-games (and broke almost as many flat screen televisions …) To date, the Nintendo Wii (which originally sold for $249 and now sells for $199) has outsold the PS3 in the US two to one (I originally paid $599 for mine).

So what’s a console maker who is being outsold by the Wii to do? The answer is, imitate the Wii.

This week Sony introduced the “PlayStation Move”, their answer to the Wii. For gamers such as myself who already own a PlayStation 3, getting “Moving” will cost you/us. At a minimum you’ll need a PlayStation Eye Camera ($39.99) and a Move controller ($49.99). Realistically you’ll also need the PlayStation Move Navigation Controller ($29.99), Sony’s answer to the Wiichuck.

That’s $120 without a game. Sony plans to offer a bundle that contains one Move controller, the PlayStation Eye, and a game (Sports Champions, which sounds a lot like Wii Sports) for $99.99. You’ll still need to drop another $30 for the Navigation controller, which puts the total back up to $140.

Keep in mind this is all for one player. If you wanted to go nuts and get four sets of controllers (the maximum the console supports), you’re looking at $320 in controllers and another $40 for the camera. Note that you wouldn’t be able to charge all those devices at once via the PS3′s 2 or 4 (depending on the model) USB ports. Fortunately Sony also plans on offering a charging station — another $30 (or $120 in our four controller scenario).

Or, you know, you could just go buy a Nintendo Wii …

My main computer downstairs (the one in my office) is a piece of crap Dell Dimension 3000 that I got off of Craigslist a couple of years ago for $200. It’s not the fastest machine in the house by far, but for surfing the web, reading e-mail, and performing basic audio/video/graphic editing, it works well enough.

Last year I splurged and bought myself a 28″ widescreen monitor. When I hooked it up, I discovered that the Dell Dimension’s integrated video card doesn’t support widescreen resolutions. Worse yet, the Dimension 3000 has a grand total of 3 PCI slots — no AGP, and certainly no PCI-e. Basically what that means is, the machine won’t support the current generation of video cards, or even the generation before that.

On Monday I received an e-mail from NewEgg with a list of their weekly specials. One of this week’s sale items was a GeForce 8400 GS video card. It’s PCI so it’ll work in my machine, and it was $30 so the price was right. Since I was going to make an order anyway I went ahead and picked up a couple of other items I’ve been wanting to get. The DVD burner in this machine works, but it’s old and slow. I was able to upgrade from a 4x DVD Burner to a 22x DVD Burner for another $30. I keep a list on my computer of things I want to buy via mail order, and once the list gets up to 3 or 4 things, I’ll place an order.

Shipping for both of those items plus 200 blank DVDs was around $8, and like most online stores, there was no sales tax. I placed my order on Monday, picked the cheapest/slowest shipping method they offered, and got my items today.

I just finished installing the video card and the burner, and am now burning a disc to try everything out. The video card works great, and I’m finally able to actually run my widescreen monitor in a widescreen ratio — woo hoo! In the time I typed this post up, I was also able to burn a dual-layer DVD — double woo hoo! It looks like I was able to breathe some new life into this old machine with just a few minor upgrades.

(Triple woo hoo!)

When I left for work Monday morning, it wasn’t even raining in Yukon. By the time the kids and I got to work, it was pouring down. By the time I went to lunch, the roads leading out of work looked like this:

On Monday, we got around 9″ of rain, which is usually what we get for the entire month of June. Roads were closed, businesses and houses were flooded, and people were rescued. Fortunately, none of that seemed to happen in my area. I drove to work, got out for lunch, and drove home with no problems, other than having to take it slow through a couple of spots of deep water.

It rained Monday night too, but in true Oklahoma fashion, the sun was out in full force yesterday. Today we get the best of both worlds; a high of 92 (with a heat index of over 100) and a 20% chance of rain.