Ryan Collins

🕹ī¸ Do Something Great! 😄

Category: Geek

  • Three movies in the theater in three days

    Three movies in the theater in three days

    Through some sort of amazing alignment of the stars, I was able to see three movies in the theater in three days. Some may say that excessive, but how else am I suppose to stay on top of pop culture?

    The First Purge

    Rating: ?

    I’m not a big horror fan, unless it is what I call smart horror. A few examples include Cabin in the Woods and the Purge movies. While there are no big surprises in The First Purge, it is still a worthy addition to the Purge movie franchise.

    The First Purge does include spoilers for the previous Purge movies, so at least watch The Purge: Anarchy before watching The First Purge.

    There are two after credits scenes.

    The Ant-man and the Wasp

    Rating: ?

    If you liked the first Ant-man movie, you’ll like this one. In the humor department it’s not as good as Thor: Ragnarok, but it is still a good addition to the Marvel universe.

    There are two after credits scenes.

    Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

    Rating: ?

    We were on vacation, so we didn’t get a chance to see this until now. It’s an OK movie, with a neat little plot twist, but if you don’t get a chance to see it you’re not going to really miss anything.

    There is one after credits scene.

  • Resurrect your Tamagotchi!

    Resurrect your Tamagotchi!

    The Internet Archive has put a bunch of the old lcd handheld games online, including the Tamagotchi, Merlin, and Simon. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it includes the Mattel sport games or Coleco’s Football.

  • Here’s a cheap fitness watch with notifications

    Here’s a cheap fitness watch with notifications

    At the beginning of February I read about an Apple Watch look-alike with a 45 day battery life that was available for $99. When I checked Amazon, it was $89, so I figured it was fate and I bought it.

    My experiences with smart watches is limited. In high school I had a calculator watch that also played games and could be an electronic piano, but once I started carrying a cellphone I stopped wearing a watch. Several years ago I had a Best Buy gift card and bought my first smart watch, a Pebble.

     

    It was weird wearing a watch again, but two things stuck out. I enjoyed being able to quickly see what time it was and getting notifications was pretty nice. The Pebble is limited on interactions, I could answer the phone but not talk. Nor could I reply to messages. The most interacting I did with the watch was to use the Swarm app to check in on Foursquare.

    What I wanted next in a smart watch was a heart rate monitor. After I read the article, I thought this could be a nice watch to use while running, and I get a heart rate monitor to boot.

    In usage, it does pretty much what I expected it to do. It keeps time and tracks fitness. The steps seem to be a little off from what my Fitbit counts, but its close enough. It has GPS tracking, but I haven’t had a chance to tryy that yet. The best feature is the battery life. It has been ten days since I last charged the watch and the battery is at 75%. Using the GPS will affect this.

    There are two minor issues that I can’t seem to solve. One, every watchface is in 24hr time, and two, the distances measured on in kilometers. No big deal, just a little annoying.

  • Embrace your inner Worf and learn Klingon

    Embrace your inner Worf and learn Klingon

    Are you afraid you’ve become too normal?

    Do you want to make yourself a better trekkie?

    Are you trying to forget Into Darkness?

    Do you have 5 minutes a day?

     

    Then learn Klingon with Duolingo

  • Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76

    Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76

    It’s weird writing about the death Stephen Hawking, but I felt like I need to, just to honor his life and work. This is a man who at the age of 21 was given the prognosis of only two more years of life. With that proclamation, Dr. Hawking went on to live over 50 more years, changing our understanding of the universe.

    I loved hearing stories of his humor and wit, one of my favorite scenes in The Theory of Everything when he is in his wheelchair pretending to be a Dalek and “shouting” EXTERMINATE as he chases one of his kids.

    Dr. Hawking not only ruled academia, but he also had several roles in TV shows and movies.

    In the past few years, he had several guest spots on The Big Bang Theory. My favorite scene is when Sheldon drunk dials Dr. Hawking.

    And The Simpsons.

    Godspeed Dr. Hawking.

  • I’m glad to live in a world where this exists

    I’m glad to live in a world where this exists

    I’m glad to live in a world where this exists:

  • Why is Cuphead so addicting?

    Why is Cuphead so addicting?

    cuphead
    I’ve had the game for almost two weeks now, and have only beaten one level and two bosses. It’s hard, but I still keep coming back for more punishment. The game is a deadly combination of addiction and me being a glutton for punishment.

  • SCSI2SD with my Macintosh SE/30

    As I was working on my SE/30, I knew I didn’t want to go with a SCSI hard drive. I started looking online and came across the SCSI2SD. I purchased mine with a 256MB SD card from Inertial Computing on eBay. Now that it is up and running, I’m very happy with it.

    When using with an older Macintosh, you may have an issue when it comes to initializing and using a non-Apple drive. The first time, Apple HD SC Setup wouldn’t find the drive. I then found this forum post. I followed dougg3’s directions when setting up the SCSI2SD.

    • Set the vendor to the string ” SEAGATE” (yes, there is a single space in front of SEAGATE for a total of 8 characters)
    • Set the product ID to the string ” ST225N” (10 spaces in front for a total of 16 characters)
    • Set the revision to the string “1.0 ” (with a space after, for a total of 4 characters)

    Apple HD SC Setup then saw the drive. The other thing I had to do was re-partition the drive after it set it up, since Apple HD SC Setup only create a 16MB partition and left the rest of the drive unpartitioned. I deleted that partition and then created a 256MB partition.

  • The Macintosh SE/30 lives

    Tonight, after just a little bit of tinkering, was a good night for my Macintosh SE/30. After I swapped the 2GB SD card in the SCSI2SD drive with a 256MB SD card, I was able to initialize the drive correctly. At first it only set up a 16MB partition, so I did have to re-partition the drive, but after that, the installation of System 6.0.7 was a breeze. And even though this thing only has 2MB of RAM, it is quick! I don’t know if it’s the SCSI2SD device or the fact that System 6 doesn’t require a whole lot, but Microsoft Word 4.0 loads almost instantly. I’ll have to measure the boot time when I get a chance.

    The Macintosh SE/30

    I’m writing this blog post in Microsoft Word on the SE/30. The worst part is the fact that the keyboard needs a good cleaning. I’m not too impressed with the Apple Extended Keyboard II, although I’ve heard people rave about it. I think I have an IIgs compact keyboard around here somewhere to replace it. The smaller size fits better with the SE/30 anyway.

  • Bringing my Apple Macintosh SE/30 back to life

    Several months ago an Apple Macintosh SE/30 came across eBay at a price I was willing to pay. It had a dead hard drive in it, but that wasn’t a big deal to me. I had already been looking at the SCSI2SD devices so the plan was to use one for the drive. Old hard drives are way too loud anyway. 🙂

    Last night I finally unwrapped the beast. The Apple Extended Keyboard II appears to have sustained some damage in shipment, but I think it still works. I cracked open the case and put the SCSI2SD device in place, but after Apple HD Setup chewed on the drive for 20 minutes, it said initialization failed. Ugh. Searching the Internet brought up something called Lido, so that’s what I’m going to try next. Unfortunately, I don’t know how I’m going to do it on the SE/30 because I only System 6 on a floppy, so I’m going to attempt to set it up from my 20th Anniversary Mac.