Over the Horizon

Over the edge of the horizon, there's always something new! As I sat in "the chair" last night and looked around the office that's was looking suspiciously free of clutter, I started to project. Project what project(s) were or might be over the horizon. 

I do know that the old ThinkPad network for my wife isn't done yet. Of course there's the two A31s that I'm waiting on, and choosing a printer to service it as well. However, there are other issues to be dealt with though. Such as; should I use an access point and create an actual small private network, or should I just have the machines set up a Peer-to-Peer one instead? Should I made a file server, have one of the machines fulfill that function, or just have the same files on every computer? 

Then, there's the cassette tape conversions looming over my head. Since, I've now proven that I am fully capable of taking analog cassette tapes and converting them to digital files, my wife has pulled her old high school choir performance tapes for me to archive! Can you say: "Oh my achin' back".....oh, I mean this will be hours of fun!

Then, there's the MAME box. For those who haven't played with this software, MAME stands for multiple arcade machine emulator which basically is just a piece of software that will run the ROMs from old arcade games. Apparently, people who have ROM readers have been able to pull down the code from the old arcade games of our youth and put them in a small software package. Most anything halfway modern ranging from Pentiums to Smartphones are able to run these things. If this sounds interesting, by all means; Google it! What I'm interested in doing is to build some sort of a box holding the guts from an old IBM P4 which I have on-hand. I'm not at all sure that I want to build it "all-in-one" like the one pictured, but I think the kids will love it! 

It's actually part of my evil plan to replace our "old" TV, It's an older Sony (about 8 years) 40" LCD projection TV. Yes, you read that right: I did in fact say, "40 inch LCD Projection TV"! It was a nice set at the time and all that we cold afford at around $1000, but technology has moved on and not only are actual LCD TVs of this size cheaper, but they have a higher resolution (mine isn't full HD), but to top it off, Sony has managed to put 42" in the same sized (width) cabinet as the old 40" ones like ours! Plus they are half the price that we paid for the current one in 2005 dollars! Which of course means that the 40 incher will need to move to the bedroom to replace the 37" LCD of much lower resolution which can become part of the whole MAME box extravaganza!