Monthly Archives: January 2013

Propellerpowered Pocket Mini Computer: Level 2

I’m really enjoying my Propellerpowered Pocket Mini Computer – it seems in perfect alignment with many of my current interests: retro/homebrew electronic music production, retroputing, and the Parallax Propeller microcontroller. I’m working through the official Propeller book, but some very interesting diversions from those more formal projects can be found in Propellerpowered’s Instructables – including a new “Creating Animation and Games” series.

The first “Chapter” gives an introduction to SLUG, the Simple Low-res Utility code for Gaming, using the PMC or any other Propeller board with VGA or TV output. The second installment introduces MIGS, the Multi-Interface Game-control Standard, which facilitates the use of a range of controllers, from keyboard to NES to Wii, with Propeller-based video games.

Another great Instructable from Propellerpowered is TV Out for the Pocket Mini Computer, which I also completed along with the Creating Animation and Games chapters, since they cover the tweaks needed to use TV Out vs. VGA. There’s something great about seeing those low-res graphics on an old-school CRT that you just don’t get from a crisp modern LCD! I’m not sure what Read More…

Solved: Evernote for iPad “Could not sync note” Synchronization Error

I made the switch from OneNote to Evernote several years ago due to the latter’s superior app availability for the plethora of devices that I use. Despite comparatively feeble editing capabilities, Evernote’s device agnosticism gave it the edge for me. In the past few months, however, it had become barely usable on my iPad due to a “Could not sync note: The content is invalid” error that would pop up continually while I was trying to work. After finding no solutions initially, I pretty much gave up and resorted to brief read-only sessions only when using the iPad. But I decided to give it another shot today and while perusing a very long thread documenting others’ experience with the issue, found one post that mentioned finding the offending notes in the Trash. Frankly, I’d never even noticed the Trash on the iPad app, but managed to locate it eventually under Notebooks, and then sorted by Title to find and eliminate all notes titled “Untitled note” – there were a fair number, but I eventually made it down to one from several months ago which still had the little blue “pending sync” arrow next to it, and deleting that note immediately silenced the pop-ups. I vaguely recall that when this started I had accidentally created multiple notes with a few errant taps, and must have deleted the duplicates faster than it could sync or perhaps during, which seemed to be the cause of this issue. I’m very pleased to have Evernote back to normal on my iPad, not popping up an error message continually and making the app unusable!

Papilio FPGA RetroCade MegaWing Synth

The RetroCade Synth began as a Kickstarter project by self-taught OSHW designer Jack Gassett. I was one of its very first backers, having learned about the project from Jack during an extremely positive customer service experience with my Papilio Arcade order last spring, which was my first foray into FPGA. Since my interest was based on modeling retro hardware, and due to the obvious overlaps with my music production interests, the RetroCade seemed to be a giant shortcut toward much of what I was attempting to do anyway, and I leapt at the opportunity to back as well as promote the project in any way I could. The Kickstarter experience was one of the best I have had, with excellent communication and transparency from Jack, and even a very generous upgrade when it proved that the Papilio Pro would be required for full functionality, with the 500K (which I was intending to use) only supporting a “Lite” version.

My RetroCade MegaWing arrived on New Year’s Eve, and I was anxious to get it running, but ran into trouble attempting to load the firmware. I posted my problems to the RetroCade Synth Forums, and got a reply from Jack within a day, and an updated bitfile for use with the 500K after just one more day. I still intend to upgrade to the Pro in order to take full advantage of the hardware, Read More…

Propellerpowered Pocket Mini Computer

I was bored last night, so I soldered together a fully-functional computer from discrete components…! This is not entirely true – what I really did was assemble a Propellerpowered Pocket Mini Computer, which consists of a Parallax Quickstart CPU Board, VGAplus Board, and Universal MicroSD adapter kit. Assembly is easy, even the SMD microSD socket, thanks to the helpful assembly video for that component.
A mere hour and a half or so later (and I was assembling at a leisurely pace!), I was up and running with a computer that I had assembled much of myself, and from there proceeded through the accompanying Getting Started Instructable. I had purchased the pre-loaded microSD card, which includes PMC Basic, various non-BASIC binary Propeller apps, and a collection of SID DMP files. One of the coolest Read More…

Dakar 2013

With Christmas and New Year’s out of the way, it’s time for the 2013 Dakar Rally!  This year’s rally takes place from the 5th to the 20th of January 2013, and spans Peru, Argentina and Chile.  Get ready for the off-road action with the official promo video:

and keep up with it using the official Android and iOS apps!

2013 US TV coverage is provided by NBC Sports – you can tell how big of a priority Motorsports is to NBC by the site’s navigation – it’s under “More” – just below “Dog Show” – a worrying sign, since NBC has wrangled 2013 US F1 TV coverage away from SPEED - and is being called by Leigh Diffey – perhaps as a warm-up for his upcoming F1 duties…?

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