Yesterware

A Handmade JBC T245 Compatible Soldering Controller lashed to my desoldering station with a chain of red cable management straps.  The screen is a little difficult to read in the image because of a camera sync disagreement, but in person it looks great.  Also pictured is the official JBC T245-A handle resting awkwardly in my Radio Shack soldering iron stand. After recently performing a DCHDMI install, prepping for a couple of Wii Dual installs and watching citrus300psi's install videos , I noticed the soldering iron Dan Kunz was using was very different from the irons I've used pretty much the entire time I've been doing soldering projects.  The grip was much closer to the tip allowing better precision of movement, the heat seemed to be better spread throughout the iron etc... So I reached out to him and asked him about his equipment. His iron and station were made by a company called JBC .  They make quite a lot of professional grade soldering equipment....

Anyone who plays video games and hangs around me long enough will eventually stumble across the conversation wherein I try, often inexpertly, to explain my immutable position against Digital Distribution (DD), Down-Load Content (DLC), Digital Rights Management (DRM), game patching within closed systems (i.e. on consoles) and similar mechanisms which either expressly or coincidentally erode a player's ownership and ultimately control of their own gaming experiences. " Internet Gating " is how I have decided to refer to the cadre of mechanisms which exist to force video game players to connect on the Internet to some "gatekeeper" to acquire permission to access or use the software they have paid for.  Discussing the Right Things I often find people are only prepared to sympathize with anti-Internet Gating notions on behalf of those with bandwidth limitations - people in rural areas, with suffocating bandwidth caps, or soldiers overseas with no Internet acc...

"But do you have a Vectrex?" When someone learns that I'm a retro game enthusiast and have meticulously collected nearly every post- crash video game console released in the United States, more often than not someone carrying around a nugget of trivia that Vectrex is a rare console, despite the fact that they often don't even know what it is, will ask me about it and I'll have to admit, that no, I don't have a Vectrex.  It doesn't matter that Vectrex is pre-crash and I don't really collect pre-crash - I also don't have Pong, an Odyssey, a Commodore 64, an Atari 5200, or an Atari 7800 either, but those never come up.  What always comes up is the Vectrex. Twenty years ago, I had the opportunity to buy a Vectrex from a now-defunct local used game retailer for around $100.  At the time I didn't know anything about the Vectrex and the awful buzzing noise the entire time it was switched on made me think something was seriously wrong with it...

Story Time Half a lifetime ago I was at school.  It was the 10th grade and I noticed something unusual about the digital watch the kid sitting next to me in shop class was wearing.  Below the display was an indentation with a round aluminum disc.  Being a total digital watch geek I had to ask him about it.  That's when I learned that the aluminum circle on the face was a temperature sensor.  It has been so long that I honestly cannot remember the particulars but I ended up trading something with him to get that watch. At some point in my 20's the watch stopped working and I took it apart to try to fix it - what I thought I could accomplish is beyond me.  Predictably I wasn't successful in my attempts to get it working.  Rather than put it back together, I placed all of its pieces into an empty margarine tub and promptly lost track of it for nearly 20 years. Fast-forward to last week when my wife was clearing out one of our many catchalls (you k...