Jimijamflimflam

@Jimijamflimflam@mstdn.social
517 Followers
567 Following
2.5K Posts

I’m Jimi.

I quietly contemplate these days. I enjoy reading about and infrequently discussing #SciFi, #Fantasy, #Horror, #Science, #USPolitics and #Noir. I’ve been #TentCamping over half my life. #CozyGroveCampSpirit

#StarTrek🖖rocks.
I love all #Tolkien.
#MST3K is hilarious.
Michael Myers🔪the 1st shape.
#Ghibli storytelling is *gorgeous*
#Svengoolie rules!
Han shot first.p

Early Gen X feral latchkey kid. Married. Mostly harmless. I block AI & jagbags.

We call them gym shoes round here.

HumanNot Immortal. Really.
LocationIn far Northern Illinois. Previously Braga, Pt., Funchal, Pt., Barrie, Ontario. Far Northern Illinois before all that.
Banner ImageFall is the season on the lakefront in Barrie, Ontario. A photographer in a yellow jacket sits under a reddish dynamic sculpture. New construction is visible in the background. Blue sky with scattered white clouds. The lake is reflecting the blue sky.
TootsToots disappear like tears in the rain. However it takes a while. So I got that going for me at least.

Astounding vol. 48, no. 1 (September 1951)

The day of the moron, you say? Is the story set in the far-off year of 2025 by any chance?

Original magazine: https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v48n01_1951-09_Sam_Hall

#Magazine #MagazineCover #PulpMagazine #PulpFiction #ScienceFiction #Fantasy #Horror #Art #Illustration

I’ve missed a lot of news this week as I’ve been working in that flood ravaged orchard in the Motueka Valley that was featured on TV last weekend. I’ve been clearing flood debris from the fruit trees.
Note that I’ve caught up a little one item “amused” me, and that’s the campaign by Federated Farmers to get the public to donate a fence post to them to go to farmers for restoration of their properties. The thought that one of the worst organisations for dodging the responsibility of its industry for its part in causing climate change is now looking for charity to help repair the damage of climate change is a bit rich.

Free the Spokane 9.

"The arrests in #Spokane — not the first time in recent weeks that the government has aggressively gone after anyone involved in resisting the ICE raids — are a window into how this police state plans to operate."

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-protesters-arrested-spokane-20250717.html

The Trump regime is arresting protesters now. This was the plan all along.

Federal felony charges against nine ICE protesters in Spokane, Wash., reveal how Trump's secret police are expanding their web.

The Philadelphia Inquirer
I’m pretty sure that the ladies there made me blush too.😂

Indeed! I like the way you put that. 😊

@grobi

Weiner Circle in Chicago. Used to go there after hitting up the Laugh Factory or Kingston Mines. Back in the fricking mid-90’s. I’m talking with my spouse’s (younger) cousin, an Oak Park native who is all like, wait, wtf, way back then? I’m like yup, used to drive down there from the Aragon brawl room after shows occasionally too. I can’t remember most of the joints we used to stop at in the late 80’s after shows. As I was a far-West suburban kid, the names didn’t stick.

#Chicago #hotdogs

@Jimijamflimflam

This is the true lifestyle, isn't it? I also love and enjoy such moments mostly on kayak/canoe hiking tours in the club. You can't buy true luxury for money, you just have to know how to enjoy it ..
👍

Taught some pinball repair classes a few times. During tournaments we'd bring in techs from all over, but we RAN OUT AND HAD TO GROW OUR OWN, so I started off with coils and power supplies and how-the-hell-do-an-electron-go, y'know, the fundamentals.

Did a quick bit on bridge rectifiers and smoothing caps and coil drive transistors and then held up one of these lads and said right let's fix one of these and everyone, all these pinball teching newbies, took this Indrawn Breath because HOLY SHIT JUST LOOK AT IT, you mean we gotta UNDERSTAND that?

I said don't worry. The biggest, most complicated, most intimidating system you can think of, is made out of smaller, simpler systems, and then those systems are themselves made out of even smaller, simpler systems, until you get right down to stuff that's very understandable and very fixable by the average person, and if all the little easy bits work then the big complicated thing has no choice but to work.

I'm posting this now because someone just called that post "philosophy" and it's not philosophy it's just literally how pinball machines work lol

Head's up, the "you must confirm your profile" scam is proliferating on the Fediverse. I wonder if they are trying to gather driver's licenses and credit card numbers? It's a scam.

#scam #MastoAdmin #cybersecurity

Today is the birthday of Terence Michael Joseph "Geezer" Butler of Black Sabbath (bassist and writer). So here is a sketch page that may or may not be related to that fact.
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Taught some pinball repair classes a few times. During tournaments we'd bring in techs from all over, but we RAN OUT AND HAD TO GROW OUR OWN, so I started off with coils and power supplies and how-the-hell-do-an-electron-go, y'know, the fundamentals.

Did a quick bit on bridge rectifiers and smoothing caps and coil drive transistors and then held up one of these lads and said right let's fix one of these and everyone, all these pinball teching newbies, took this Indrawn Breath because HOLY SHIT JUST LOOK AT IT, you mean we gotta UNDERSTAND that?

I said don't worry. The biggest, most complicated, most intimidating system you can think of, is made out of smaller, simpler systems, and then those systems are themselves made out of even smaller, simpler systems, until you get right down to stuff that's very understandable and very fixable by the average person, and if all the little easy bits work then the big complicated thing has no choice but to work.

I'm posting this now because someone just called that post "philosophy" and it's not philosophy it's just literally how pinball machines work lol

oh shit wait that's not a WPC driver board, it's a WPC-95

You can all go home lol, I clearly have no idea what I'm going on about

(it's had a time of it and all, check out the bottom-left)

The most immediately noticeable difference between WPC and WPC-95 driver boards is that Williams separated out the one-big-square-chunk bridge rectifiers into four discrete big ol' diodes. A bridge rectifier converts AC to pulsed DC and it's made out of four diodes. So Williams just took the diodes out of the packaging so you could see, understand, test and repair them more easily.

...

...

...*Alexei Sayle voice* which I suppose makes them radical leftist revolutionaries

@ifixcoinops

I had to re-read, and then re-read that again because I'm so used to businesses changing electronics to make later things less serviceable and so they can stick the words "NEW AND IMPROVED" (or similar) on the packaging.

@barcode @ifixcoinops WMS went out of business before enshittification really took over, but don't worry, Stern and Jersey Jack have integrated everything into a DRM-locked unrepairable surface-mount board that spies on you.
@ieure @barcode these days I do the odd day here and there at a local arcade full of new Sterns, all with the Insider Connected thing, all connected to the internet. One of these days someone's gonna walk in, straight past the counter and the change machine, put their phone on the glass, and it'll start right up. The owner will get an email telling him he's got 75 cents in his new SternCash account. The player will bitch at him about the price per play going up to a buck fifty. My job will become writing pirate code for post-2020 pinball machines.
@ifixcoinops @barcode I know several people at Scorbit, which directly competes with Insider Connected, and what they have to do in order to make their stuff work / the quiet arms race between Stern locking them out and them finding a new way in is.... really something.
@ifixcoinops this is how our Sim Racing Venue Management System already works when it's running in Kiosk mode 😀
@ifixcoinops
Thanks for the Alexei Sayle shout out. I’ve only seen ONE bit from him (way back in the ‘80s), but it was memorable.
@kelvin0mql check out his recent radio show Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar. It's on Dimsdale

@ifixcoinops
Alexei, walking in a pub, holding a pint: "My friends sometimes ask me, 'Alexei, why are you drunk all the time?' And I tell them, 'Simple; I can afford to be.'"

I don't know what a Dimsdale is. But I'll do some searching on the apps/services I know about.

@kelvin0mql dimsdale.co.uk, it's like BBC podcasts before the BBC fucked themselves up with that Sounds app
@ifixcoinops Eeek! That's been a bit warm. And probably let some magic smoke out.
@ifixcoinops
WPC is a strict subset of WPC-95 (it's the first 3 letters!) so you're all good. ;-)
@ifixcoinops Zen and the Art of Pinball Maintenance

@ifixcoinops it can be philosophy too!

It's basically what Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance spends 300 odd pages waffling on about

@reb @ifixcoinops wait a minute... there's no small engine repair information at all in here!
@tezoatlipoca @ifixcoinops oh but there is! Using the information in the book you can diagnose any machine, and small engines are within the class of machines!
@reb @tezoatlipoca counterpoint, I'm bloody shite with small engines
@ifixcoinops @tezoatlipoca are you? Or is every small engine from the last 40 years engineered to have just enough life to last long enough to keep the original owner happy?
@reb @tezoatlipoca 🐹 I TOLD YOU THE PROBLEM WAS CAPITALISM
@ifixcoinops @tezoatlipoca ah but communism would have just as much incentive to keep factories churning out temporary engines to ensure work for the workers
@reb @ifixcoinops look, guys all I want to do is adjust my valve timing.
@tezoatlipoca @ifixcoinops shim it with a section of beer can and have a dream about being trapped behind soundproof glass? I don't know!
@reb @tezoatlipoca the valves will adjust themselves comrade, just wait for the revolution
@ifixcoinops @tezoatlipoca my preference for adjusting valves is to tip three bottles of redex in the tank and give it an Italian tune up, and by italian tune up I mean redline it until it either settles down or fires a valve through the head
@ifixcoinops @reb well, will the revolution be done by 4, I have to buy groceries.
@tezoatlipoca @ifixcoinops sorry, after the revolution you'll have to grow your own food because agriculture is a tool of the oppressor

@reb @ifixcoinops oh man. Again!?

Sorry kids, its earthworms and small rocks again. Lillibet, go pluck this dead pigeon I found on the road and give it to mama for the pot. Bread is a weapon of the bourgeoisie.

@reb @ifixcoinops

<skeptical face> I can't tell if you're joking or not. Or whether the motorcycles were us all along.

@ifixcoinops that person is a bad philosopher because what you're describing is clearly praxis. More directly: hell yeah! None of us can fix everything, but all of us can fix *something* to make the world a slightly better place. You teaching others how to do repairs means planting the seeds for a crop of new repair folks.
@ifixcoinops looking at all those transistors in radio-brain-mode, going 'final.final.final.final...'

@ifixcoinops yes, but very few systems are like that. You have 4 types of components, and they behave not only consistently, but simply. But we cannot explain our brains' capacity from the neurons that compose them, and many complex system behave at a macro level erratically unless well constrained on what they can do or their speed, including humans, groups of humans, companies, societies, worlds (ok, only one), etc.

1/

@ifixcoinops

I wish we could get to the point where we can explain everything from first principles, but see quantum physics and the amount of power we spend just to get a stochastic parrot, and not even a fly yet.

/end

@ifixcoinops Do they use FETs for the coil drivers?
@lopta aye, with a lil predrive
@ifixcoinops Is that just a bipolar transistor?