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Dr Pepper Clock

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We just got a really great Dr Pepper restaurant clock, as featured in the arcade scene of Wargames. We think it's meant to be modular and can be attached to lighted menu-boards. It's got a pass-through 110V plug so you can daisy chain stuff off of it, and the side trim is easily removable to clip in a sigh board on each side.

However, while it is beautiful, it doesn't need to be on all the time, so I added a switch. The wiring is very simple with just a couple of wire nuts tying the inbound power to the AC plug and fluorescent light. I found some suitably retro-ey looking switches on Amazon at 6 for $9.

We decided to put the switch on the bottom just in case I cracked the plastic or something similarly horrible happened. All in all, very straight forward, but one pro-tip was in drilling the hole. I started with a small drill bit and worked my way up, but when I got to the larger drill bits I ran the drill in reverse to just use friction to make the hole rather than trying to hog out a hole in very thin and brittle material with a way-too-big bit. This worked /great/, thanks Dave.

Wiring before:

Switch:

Wiring After:

Switch external:

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Sharp Boombox Repair

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Tom Petty - Freefallin'

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Go Mighty Corolla

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WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? Stay tuned and wait. for. it.

Ok, so I had just gotten off of 128, and I wasn't going a thousand miles an hour, and there was no Stop 'n Shop, but there was a Wegman's. I threw RoadRunner on, because it's the very best song to finally break the 300,000 mile barrier on this rustbucket. Aaaaand, it didn't do it. Why yes, I am a sysadmin, why do you ask?

Just a bit further toward home though, I found a real Plymouth RoadRunner Superbird in a parking lot:

Natalie and I think it's this one right here.

So yeah apparently the odometer thing's A Thing with Toyotas from the mid-2000s. And they don't see it as a "design flaw" that every inspected car becomes illegal at 299,999 miles. It's like $500 to fix, apparently, which means it's still worth it to keep it on the road, but it is the second-costliest and absolutely the most pervasive and 100% predictable non-recall inspection-failing repair in this car's 14 year history.

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Lindstrom, Minnesota

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We're currently on a week-long road trip between Milwaukee and Minneapolis. Before we left, we mentioned our trip to Kari Lindstrom, proprietor of our favorite vintage and antique shop The Melamine Cup in Jaffrey, NH, and she mentioned there was a Lindstrom, Minnesota, so we decided we'd head up and see what's what.

So it was that at the end of a long day of Paisley Park, then the World's Largest Ball of Twine (as built by one man), we made our way for Little Sweden and made up there by around 4:00. Even still, we found a great antique store and got some fantastic handmade raised sugar and raspberry jelly donuts that took me straight back to when I was 4-5 years old getting donuts with my parents from a local bakery.

I did try really hard to get to The Sweet Swede to get something sweet for the sweetest Swede we know, but apparently it's not really a thing anymore. Fudge.

Natalie got some great pictures of this adorable vacation town:











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Stereo Slide Viewer Hack Proof of Concept

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Peaches - The Inch

Wherein there's some history, and a major pet project.

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Roadside America

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Natalie and I are on a kind of meta-road trip. We're not actually going to see The Thing, but we're seeing the roadside attractions which have sprung up around The Thing to amuse and draw in visitors.

Today we went to Roadside America, which is a massive O gauge model railroad layout. 6000 feet, assembled over 60 years of one Laurence Gieringer's life, from when he was 9 until he died.

Natalie took tons of photos, but I put up 3 short videos covering about 15% or so, along one short edge:

Mine, mountains, farms:

The zoo:

Midcentury Downtown:

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Geoguessr World Tour - Albino Reindeer?

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It's still the holiday week, so here's one I found today, if you want to see it yourself, it's right here. I don't know if white reindeer are a thing, but this one actually does look albino, it's pretty pink:







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Geoguessr World Tour - The Blurry Faced Man

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I'm with you, blurry faced man of Bloomsbury Square:

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Ice Cream of Route 3 - Fisher Cats Game

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As my first in a series of posts about ice cream places on NH Route 3, I'm deciding to count stuff which really wouldn't be super obvious, as well as all the multi-generational institutions we all know. Located a block off of Elm St in Manchester, Northeast Delta Dental Stadium counts, because I said it did.

We've been going to sport-thing games since last fall, when we decided we needed a release valve on the wall-to-wall presidential election nonsense and started going to Manchester Monarchs games. Since that nonsense continued straight past the election, we've been going to more and more games, including three Fisher Cats games this summer. The Fisher Cats finished up their season this weekend, so I wanted to make sure and head out there and get some ice cream and put it on the list.

The stadium serves Hood ice cream, soft-serve only from what we've seen, as well as novelties like ice cream sandwiches. This week Natalie and I each got a hot fudge sundae, vanilla & chocolate twist, with everything they'll put on a sundae, which boils down to whipped cream, jimmies and a cherry, I guess it's just easier for them not to even try to have a walnut in the building than to deal with the inevitable nut allergies.

You can get these in mini-helmets, of course. We got a regular cup this time because we did the helmet thing earlier in the season.

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Ice Cream of Route 3

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This summer while we were out driving somewhere I decided that there should be a page for all the ice cream places on NH Route 3. Route 3 runs the entire length of the state from the Canadian border north of Pittsburg to the Massachusetts border at Nashua/Tyngsborough. The road runs through all of the larger cities in the state, and lots of pretty smaller towns. There's a lot of ice cream to be had here. I remember some of these spots from when I was a little kid, usually failing to get my mom to stop. Places like King Kone in Merrimack, and the Brick House in Hooksett.

This is going to take a good deal of time, and there's not really much summer left this year, but I'll be posting them as we can get to them.

So since the idea here is to visit these local institutions which have served generations of kids in this state, of course I'm going to kick it off with the biggest and newest one.

  • Northeast Delta Dental Stadium, home of the New Hampshire Fisher Cats.
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