My Elite Coffee Shop Battlestation

 

Getting things done, on a small scale. 

     About a month ago I had to attend a promo out of market, at a Publix Pours location in Wellington Florida, in West Palm. I'm from there, so signed up right away to visit my old stomping ground. After about a 4 hour drive, I arrived and found myself in quite the situation- I had to park about 2 miles away, and the place I was going, they don't exactly let people with backpacks with laptops in. I ended up in my car for about an hour with my laptop perched on the steering wheel, uncomfortable, power cables running all over the interior of my truck. It was a small stressor, but it had me thinking how I could get ahead of it.

It's as good as you think it is. 

    After getting home I found a very large 10,000mAh battery pack that is solar, waterproof, and has the ports I need on it, with a stand. Charge 3 devices at once! What a coincidence, I happen to daily two phones and a smart watch, so this comes in clutch. The second piece of kit I added is something I've seen on reddit- a foldable pocket keyboard and touchpad that syncs to bluetooth. Leather wrapped, thin and sleek with a surprisingly large keyboard with full Num-pad, this foldable was far better than it should be for the price, and I rarely charge it. The touchpad is large and works well, and there is nothing needed to install- the phone picks up on it right away and the cursor appears. I added this to my already bad-fucking-ass Z Fold 6 with it's screen with built in stand and stylus holder, and we're off to the races.

Power stack.

     I live in a major metropolitan area, where I often have to park my car, pay like $20-$50 to do so, and walk or take my electric scooter to my destination. Typically this is in downtown Tampa, Ybor City, or Clearwater Beach. Recently during game days, this has been pretty common in the St. Pete Area. I finally had a real world application where I would not be able to have my whole backpack of tech with me, and I had work to do in St. Pete two weeks ago. I put my stack of 3 devices in my left pocket, hopped on my scooter and took off down to Fergs when they were just opening about 5 blocks away. I had about two hours until my event started, so I used this chance to open my cool micro-battlestation and hammered out several emails, designed a facebook post, and edited several spreadsheets. After about 30 minutes, it felt like any other laptop, just small in stature. I got more than my share of strange looks, and even a waitress who asked me what that hell is going on and was very fascinated. All in all, I love my little cheap portable setup and will be using it several times a month to increase productivity going forward. 

Del XPS 15 9510 Laptop review - TLDR; I like it.

 

I'm not a laptop guy. Well, maybe I am now. 

     Recently I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Dell XPX 15, 9510. A 15 inch laptop with a 4k OLED screen, an i9 11900k, RTX 3060ti, 32gb of decent ram, and a 1tb hard drive complete with charger and docking system for the low low price of $225 from a place called OCM Recycling in Oldsmar Florida. I've always wanted one of these laptops after meeting with someone at a tradeshow who had one, and how well made it was. Literally a wolf in sleek sheep's clothing of business class PC's. How did I get such a good deal you ask? Keep reading.

This is how it was waiting for me. Dirty. Tempting.

     Short version, I know someone who works there and he gave me a deal. OCM Recycling has multiple warehouses full of decommissioned medical and office equipment, and I happen to be there on a day when they were processing 200 + laptops. The man that was going through them, said, "Can you believe someone would want to throw out an i9?!" I was like, how much that? Name your price. Out the door for $225. It came with a fresh install of Windows 11, a charger, and a WD19TBS Dell Performance Dock which adds a ton of functionality to the 3x thunderbolt 4 ports. The 3060ti on board is more than enough to push 4k out to the new 3 video ports added with the dock.

I've actually always wanted one of these. 

Initial thoughts:

• Build quality is amazing. Feels very very solid, has a good weight to it. Macbook feel is the best description I can come up with. 
• Touch pad is huge. Again, more like the size of the Macbook pro. Not finicky. Zero issues and I actually like using it. My daily driver work mouse is an MX Master 4, and I found myself not using it as much and enjoying the touchpad. 
• Keyboard is gently lighted from below, and has a really premium feel to it. Soft touch keys. I find myself altering my typing style over the right, which is mildly infuriating. The capslock key is huge for no reason, moving everything over to the right. I wrote this blog post on the laptop to just get acclimated to the new position of the keys, then emailed it to myself.
• The monitor is the best screen I've seen on a laptop. Refresh rate is low at 60fps, but for what I'm going to use this for, that's not a deal breaker. I'm using this for work.
• Audio is crazy. 4 Speakers total, two tweeters and two woofers give it a little thump and it's plenty loud. Speakers are on the sides of the keyboard. 
• Performance in desktop tasks is great, better than my other laptop with the same specs I've reviewed previously. That laptop went to my wife, and has been her daily driver for over 2 years without any issues. MSI makes a great quality product at the high end, but this is on a different level. The price for that aforementioned laptop was almost $3000 USD. 
• The only game I played was Overwatch, and It easily maxed everything out on Epic settings at 60hz, when hooked up to an external monitor 2k at 120hz was available at high settings, with everything turned up. Overall, color me impressed.
• Heat-wise, the thermals are.. meh. The dock is louder than the laptop with two fans in it, so that's positive. I never experienced thermal throttling, (close!) but the keyboard area warms up quite a bit. My hands are always cold, so maybe this is a blessing. The laptop does have some internal heat piping that is impressive, but a hot chip like the 11900k, there is only so much you can do to cool it off under load. 
• Charging is adequate, but you can't use a 90 watt charger to the thunderbolt port without warnings of slow charging. You need at least a 130 watt charger, or the dock to keep you topped off while working. I noticed if you plug the dock and the charger in at the same time, neither will charge, but you will have the functions of the laptop while it steadily decreases in power. I had no idea the dock charged the PC, so that's my fault, and I corrected that. I did order a new charger, as the one at the recycling center was 90 watt. It's worth mentioning the WD19tb docking station delivers over 200 watts of power delivery, so no extra charger needed. 
• Battery life is really good if you keep the settings optimized for longer use. I just attended a meeting where I was using a large screen as a second monitor to give a presentation for about 45 minutes, then a one hour zoom. Still had 2.5 hours of battery left. Not sure what all the reviews talking about terrible battery life were talking about.
• I had to disable the on-board Intel Iris graphics to get the RTX video card to stay on for Overwatch, then strangely, I had to enable it again when framerate dropped. When the onboard video is disabled in favor of the 3060ti, both disappear from the control panel as a selectable device. The sweet spot is to touch nothing and just hope for the best.

Look at this fucking thing. 

     I've only had this PC about a week, and I'm phasing out my old laptop currently, which an HP Walmart special with an 11th gen i7, on board graphics, and 16gb ram that has been sat on in key West, run over, and generally just treated like total shit for 4 years of loyal service. For a $500 laptop I could not really ask for more, except now I know I can definitely ask for more. Life is too short to not have a premium laptop that feels like oiled machinery when opening, has the durability of solid steel, and looks like a modern device from a sci-fi movie. As mentioned previously, this is my dream laptop. I don't want a 17 inch, I want this one specifically with these exact specs, and it does not hurt that it is like new and was so damn cheap. The dock was this insane added bonus that would normally be $179.99 at best buy, and I use multiple monitors at work, so this is perfect for me. Mileage may vary obviously. 

8.7/10

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen - Full movie!

 

This movie is 100% 1980's rental store elite. Total nightmare fuel and flew under the radar with it's inclusion of strange violence, nudity, and Robin Williams in space. Must watch; no bullshit. 

Armitage III - Full OST (1996)

 

Back in the mid 90's, when Japan was obsessed with early cyberpunk fiction, and the idea that there was something more to humanity than being "human", Armitage III shined above most other OST's of the time as a great example of the genre. 

The Miller Collection - Huge Arcade Picture Treasure Trove Discovered

Large detailed collection of mid 70's Arcade photos found

     I'll be clear: In no way did I discover this, it was uploaded by u/doodlebuuggg on reddit from the r/DHExchange community. The blog post on how these photos was discovered is located here. For those not familiar, this is a data hording sub that is very interesting and making sure things don't disappear. All the pictures are scans of candids from an employee of the company, and have the look and the feel of someone just snapping pictures that is hanging out. Nothing professional, just lifestyle pics of someone who seems like or work in arcades. 

TLDR;

• 1024 High resolution photos and negatives were found
• Contain pictures of Time Out, Station Break, and other related arcade chains
• Includes concept sketches
• Pictures of all known locations storefronts
• Arcade images- tons of little known machines
• Pictures of people working, playing, hanging out at the arcades
• Documented signage, logos, etc
• ...and so much more.

I'll post a few of the pics below I thought were interesting or different, but if you want to download the whole archive from Dropbox in HD TIFF files, or JPEG, click those links. I'm attempting to archive them on other platforms so they don't just vanish. Here is a google drive link, Imgur link, and Google Photos link, just in case. 

Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (Full Series!)

It's better than you think.

     Obscure 90's and 2000's cartoons is where it's at. Sherlock Holmes and the 22nd Century existed right in between Mummies Alive and Princess Guinevere and the Jewel Riders in order of relative obscurity. Mummies Alive being the better show, but only marginally. Mighty Max was another show that is not talked about enough, but saw a little more airtime and had a superior intro rock soundtrack that still blows most 35 year old men's vasectomies off, even today. 

A modern whodunnit. 

   Sherlock Holmes, preserved in honey for 200 years is brought back to life, and is joined by a cast of characters to include a fully android Watson who is OP and can hack the planet. The soundtrack was a banger, and animation was better than average for the time. I watched this at 5am when getting ready for high school, waiting for the bus to arrive. This was the only time you could catch these unknown cartoons in Florida, so I would wake up early just for that. 

Click here to watch the full series now!

My first REAL Gaming Rig - Playing Wow in 2005

 

This was a beast back then, and I'll explain why.

     In 2005 I was already over a year into playing World of Warcraft with my wife. I use to own a small but well known PC Repair Business, which I sold my controlling stake to a friend, so I had no shortage of old and aging PC parts, monitors, keyboards, etc. Really common in the business sector at the time was Pentium 3 Coppermine gateway computers, so I had tons of them laying around. There was a well known FAQ how to get an extra 200-300mhz out of them, and really get them screaming for zero dollars spent. I had an entire box of used Geforce 2-4 video cards, so this was the PC's we rocked at the time for many, many years:

• Gateway Moo-moo box
• Pentium 3 Coppermine T, Overclocked to the tits
• Geforce 4 MMX (or shittier 2/3)
• 512mb ram
• Random sound card
• Random junk monitor

This would be an exact example of what my wife and I gamed on for a loooong time

     We had just moved into our first real house, and we wanted a baby, so money was super tight. I started taking computer jobs again out of the house. Replacing broken modems, selling parts, replacing hard drivers, easy stuff. Our Pentium 3's just screaming away in the office room in the front of the house, still playing WoW on 17 inch monitors. A big job got dumped in my lap from someone I use to get a lot of work from, these huge Dell Dimension Business Class PC's from 2005, brand new, four of them total. They needed to be set up, office installed.. nothing crazy. He dropped the PC's off to me, then came back to grab them about a week later, but with no payment. He promised to pay me in a month, next week, you name it. Needed it right now, and how important it was. We talked over a beer, and next thing you know, in lieu of payment, he offered me one of these brand new PC's. The specs:

• Dell Dimension Business E500 series?
• Pentium D (early Dual Core!) 3ghz
• 1.5GB Ram
• Dual AMD 1900XT Video Cards (why!?)
• Two hard drives
• Random Tape backup drive under DVD rom

    Insane luck. I needed the money, but I wanted this so much more. Instantly went from everything on Low settings and taking minutes to boot, to having the best of everything. This PC got me all the way to playing Skyrim in 2011, and beyond. A friend hooked me up with an old viewsonic 21 inch CRT as he was going the LCD route, and I took it in trade for some work. I was all of a sudden a high-end gamer, and it forever changed my outlook on having a high end gaming PC. For it's day, I did not know many people that even had performance video cards, the market was so small. PC gamers were the huge minority, and many games were just not available, or hard to get. I would later sell this PC, and use a free Core 2 Quad, which I bought two of from the State Library Auction, but that's a story for another day. 

Note: Before you say a Pentium 3 was not good enough, here is a picture from the original manual. We played on dialup by the way!

Vampire Hunter D - Full Movie!

 

Watch it for free on youtube now!

     Vampire Hunter D was on of those movies that I heard about in middle school, in the early 90's. "Hey, have you seen that crazy R Rated japan cartoon with the Vampires?" Suncoast Motion Picture Company had the goods, but holy hell did you have to pay. $39.99 for a VHS tape on the worst quality that you would pass around to all your friends, watch at sleepovers, and introduce tons of other people to the genre. I lump this movie up with Wicked City and Ninja Scroll- I watched them around the same time and felt like this was the more tame of the three. I was really into Vampire shit at the time, reading tons of Anne Rice, so this was icing on the cake.

NEC PC Engine LT - An interesting and very rare console way ahead of its time.

 

It's expensive and rare so I don't own one.

The NEC PC Engine LT was released in 1991, and it was an expensive Japanese only release then, so did not do well. For less money you could get the Turbo Express which had a way to connect to an external monitor and used batteries, where the LT needs an AC adapter to fully work. The trade off? Better quality backlit screen and compatibility with all your old gadgets and gizmos that hook up to the PC engine already. This console fits the same cradle as the Core Grafx, so could slot the Super CD Rom adapter, audio enhancer, different card readers for the three different kinds of CD roms you need, and the myriad of other add-ons that you don't really need, but want.

Interface unit! Super CDRom2! It's like a transformer. 

     Long before the release of the Gameboy Advance SP, you could play 16 bit (well, not quite) games on a backlit screen, play modern titles available on the SNES, and look much cooler doing it. 

People need to stop being so hard on the Sega Tower of Power.

     Sega did not have an original idea with adding more consoles and adds on to current systems, it was being done for a while. While NEC and Sega were building higher and more elaborate, Nintendo was adding full blown RISC processors, math co-processors, ram, DMA, flash memory, and custom sound chips to it's game carts and wrapping it up in the price of the game, as opposed to making cheap add ons as a requirement to play games. No surprise, if the game is more accessible, more people will purchase it, and so Nintendo won this war in a big way. Not to be outdone, it got way worse than just the tower of power; they even made a Laserdisc console system, PC computer combo units.. the list goes on and on and on. Even if you had your NEC Turbo DUO-R SuperGrafx with an Arcade Card, you would not be able to play any of the Fatal Fury games, or any of the rare titles, because they require the Arcade Card PRO. Don't forget a special controller that does not come with the console as well. You see where I'm going here. 

     I could go on forever about this, and I just might in another post. For now, enjoy more pictures of this unique handheld that inspired a whole marketing angle years later. 

r/bindingofisaac - We're taking over.

Hold R and pray. 

    I noticed a fun trend on r/bindingofisaac where people took increasingly shitty pictures of what was happening on the screen, and then asking a question of the community on how to solve said question. People are breaking out the worst possible flip phones and digital cameras from 20 years ago.. so I decided to grab some of my son's camera equipment that is already set up, and take a few pictures:

     Nothing is shittier and more deserving than actual VHS camcorder from JCPenny in the early 1980's. Beat that Isaac fans!

PS: I actually still play Isaac very often, and I'm a huge fan. 

Aeon Flux - Full Series & Notes

 

Ahead of it's time. Click the Tape to watch now!

     Aeon Flux, part of MTV's late night experiment, starting airing after midnight on the Liquid Television's late night block. If you were lucky enough to have MTV (A paid channel then!) and stayed up, then you were one of the few that got to be amazed. Totally rated R, full violence and gore, and the main character died in some strange way each episode, and seems to be aware that she is prone to dying over and over as evidence in the end of the second short.. Other than music and sound effects, there is no real voice acting going on. This is the first example of dystopian spy fiction that I can think of. Lots of feet licking (tons of licking in general across the series) fet-life worthy porn store vibes in the first episode that aired, which is worth noting I suppose. 

Concept Artwork was rad. 

     Peter Chung worked on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, and was fully involved in the creation and design of C.O.P.S., where you can really seen the design similarities. Rugrats was his design, and has that same gritty art style, but lacks the overall attention to detail and quality of Flux, showing how much he really wanted this to succeed as a passion project. I still have my original DVD compilation I paid over $100 at suncoast motion picture company all those years ago!

Labyrinth (1986) - Full movie.. and extras!

 

Not sure how long this will stay up. Click the titles above to watch now!

     I know I talk about Legend a ton, but Labyrinth was equally as important to me growing up as a child in the 80's. My son took a liking to it when he was young, and it was really a mind-fuck watching it with an adult set of eyes later on. Did you know David Bowie is always watching the main character throughout the movie?

Amazing, and also a little creepy.

     The soundtrack was equally as good. Very memorable, cool musical parts with muppet choreography by Gates Mcfadden of Beveraly Crusher fame.  You remind me of the babe. What babe?

Nearly as good as the movie itself.

     Amazingly, there was a feature length movie made about the making of Labyrinth that was very common on VHS back in the day, and even included on some versions of the tape: Inside the Labyrinth. Really cool look behind the scenes with the cast, Jim Henson, Steve Spielberg, and George Lucas even making appearances. Watch it for free here!

     One last oddity: Think Labyrinth by Walter Pullen.

Strange and amazing.. really.

     There is a fansite that has been up for 20+ years, made by a fan of the movie, and mazes in general. They once had the record for worlds largest maze, both hand drawn and computer generated. A real deep interesting rabbit hole of the time with custom maze generating software, pictures from magazines and news papers, and a very early look into some of the labyrinth marketing from the movie that people have no idea exist. 

Taco Bell.. Bring Back the Sante Fe Gordita.

Nothing has more urgency than this.

    I made a post on Reddit about it, and I created the petition in question. Taco Bell - Bring back the fucking Sante Fe and Baja menu again. Give us a reason to visit outside of the Luxe box options. Not even a new flavor of Baja Blast will bring me and my money back faster. 

• Reddit post
• Sign the Petition