Author: James R. Twine
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SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 and how a Little Knowledge is Dangerous
So I got into a unnecessary discussion with someone about the correct usage of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 – they were using them interchangeably (and actually also confused COVID-19 and the earlier virus name of 2019-nCoV) and also using them to refer to things that were prior to when the official names were coined by the…
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Spies Cross Reference List
There is an old cross reference list archived on Spies and replicated by a few arcade-related sites. I took this list and reformatted it, removed empty entries and made some items clickable for easy searching.
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Covidiot BINGO!
I have long since observed a predictable and rather consistent set of behaviors with the anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-whateverbullshittheycomeupwith crowd that keeps popping up during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Lemme know if you spot anything familiar: They misspell vaccine as jab or poke They claim the vaccine is poison They claim there will be long-term effects of…
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Idiot Republican/Rightist BINGO!
First off, do not get me wrong… …not all right-leaning or self-describing republicans are idiots, But recently there seems to be in influx of them that are making their presence known on Social Media sites, even though I do not recall anyone really asking for them. Combine that with a MAGA hat, which they often…
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Family and Arcade Versions of Pandora’s Boxes
So recently there have been these different versions of PBs becoming available that are very popular with those little self-contained panels that house a two-player setup with a game board and a speaker inside the panel. These used to come with the “real” PBs that used a JAMMA connector: But now they use these newer…
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Telemetry and Telecommand for Modern Pinballs
I just sent a message to Stern Pinball asking about the possibility of adding some kind of WiFi support to their pins. Not for player-related things, but for maintenance and servicing. For example, I think it would be a good idea for a connected pin to be able to asynchronously notify you if something goes…
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Machine Pin Sockets – What Are They REALLY Good For?
So another debate about machine pin sockets vs. standard (dual-wipe) sockets came up on one of the arcade repair-related groups I am a member of. And it, like just about every other older discussion about them, centered around not knowing our understanding what they are really supposed to be used for, and without fail, someone…
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Can you “Bulletproof” an Atari AR-II Power Supply? I Think I Can…
Well, like the title initially asks, can you really “bulletproof” an Atari AR-II board? From what I have found on the Internet, and older material like Star Tech Journals, the answer really is no. Pretty much all sources that mention “bulletproof” and “AR-II” on the same page are only taking about performing the Sense mods,…
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WG6100 w/Tempest Showing a Tangled Mess in the Bottom Right Quadrant
So this is basically the second part of a previous post about a tempest that lost deflection. After running for a while that Tempest’s display changed into something that can only be described as a tangled mess: That is something that I never had seen before. The owner turned the game off and back on…