Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on September 28th, 2016 in Main, Star Wars, Star Wednesday 
I showed this picture to a coworker once and he replied, “That looks like your kind of store!” Then I had to tell him that this was not a store, but rather inside my house. I couldn’t tell if he was impressed by this or simply thought I was insane. Probably a little of both. In the mid-90s, after having been dormant for over a decade, the Star Wars machinery began to turn once again. Return of the Jedi, the final film of the original trilogy, was released in 1983 just as I was wrapping up fourth grade. By 1995,… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on September 26th, 2016 in Main 
I recently read that most adult males keep pairs of underwear for, on average, seven years. When I look at the underwear in my drawers it’s hard to remember how long I’ve owned them. Unlike larger purchases like houses and cars, I don’t think most people — or at least I don’t — have a good frame of reference as to when any particular pair was purchased. They don’t change models each year. I didn’t keep the receipt. I’m pretty sure all the underwear I currently own I also owned in our previous house. Some of them I owned in… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on September 19th, 2016 in Articles, Console Video Games, Raspberry PiBig Lots is already consolidating their Halloween shelves to make room for incoming Christmas-themed items. (Yes, in September.) One hot item for retrogamers this holiday season will be Nintendo’s official NES Classic Edition, a miniature version of the classic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) that comes with 30 games built-in and goes on sale on November 11, 2016.. If the last video game system you owned was an original NES, you may not be familiar with all the ways you can play those old NES games, which vary greatly in both quality and price. In this post I’ll be discussing all… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on September 14th, 2016 in Main 
In high school, Jeff was my only classmate who knew how to solder. What little I know today about soldering I learned from looking over his shoulder, and talking to my dad, who used to do electronic repair in the Air Force. I cut my soldering teeth while attaching modchips to PlayStations back in the late 90s. The earliest modchips only required four wires to be soldered to the console’s motherboard, and the contact points were large and isolated from other components. I can’t imagine anything easier to work on. By the time the PlayStation 2 was released, modchips required… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on September 12th, 2016 in Stargardt Disease“Let me ask you an odd question. Is there any chance your parents are blood relatives?” Last week, I visited the Dean McGee Eye Institute again, this time to meet with a geneticist. I don’t claim to know anything about genetic testing or genetics in general (other than the fact that teachers would always get upset with me when we filled out those charts in school showing dominant and recessive genes and mine had one brown eye and one green eye…), but here’s what I understand. There’s currently no treatment for Stargardt’s Disease, but by doing genetic testing now, I… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on September 7th, 2016 in Star Wars, Star Wednesday 
The first electronic version of Chess I ever saw was Video Chess, released for the Atari 2600 in 1979. It still amazes me that the code to Video Chess program was 4 kilobytes in size — that’s less characters than this post contains, and that includes all the graphics and eight difficulty levels contained within the cartridge. On the easiest setting, the console was limited to ten seconds of thinking between moves. On the most difficult level, the Atari could spend up to ten hours between moves. You could almost smell the smoke at that point. As computers began invading… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on September 2nd, 2016 in Stargardt Disease 
After my annual eye checkup at the Dean McGee Eye Institute last week (nothing’s changed), my doctor recommended I see a geneticist for further testing. Because Stargardt’s Disease is just one of many similar vision conditions, they can’t definitively diagnose it without performing genetic testing. Part of me thinks that because there’s no cure or treatment there’s not much point in having the test performed, but if or when a treatment is ever developed, a person would need to have already had genetic testing performed. In terms of how this may eventually help my prognosis, I put it up there… (read more)
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