I'm celebrating four decades of existence. That's kind of hard to believe!

Outside of a little hum sneaking through the filter capacitors, this 1986 Telecaption II closed caption decoder still works well! (It's nice to see that the LG/Zenith DTT-901's firmware designers thought enough to pass or "remake" the line 21 caption data.)

Let's really mix things up across several generations of technology...NTSC analog video from a DTV converter box, a1986 era closed caption decoder playing into a 2001 Zenith console TV and a 5th generation iPad mini picking out and performing OCR on the generated text.

The hand of Murphy is hard to thwart. I ordered power cable adapter/extensions knowing I'd need them and they were too short because my life is a comedy. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

Have a Murray Chrysler and a Hyundai New Year! (Or whatever you may celebrate around this time of year.) Yes, I love playing around with the language.🙂 (I thought about using "Nubira" instead of "New Year", but that was a Daewoo model that about three people remember.)

I'm glad the days are getting longer. I'm not sure how much longer I could have handled the increasingly idiotic headlight design in modern vehicles, nor the clowns who install stadium lamps in their pavement queen.

Snappy answers to stupid questions...🤣

Late Saturday morning, I rescued an "Ultrx RD C21" cassette deck from a local junk shop. Ultrx was a short lived higher end audio equipment brand from Sanyo. I tested, cleaned and tested it again. Amazingly, the original rubber parts seem OK. Then I made a mixtape!

I remain unqualified for adulthood: last night, my mother and I were talking when suddenly a rather large bat *rocketed* through the kitchen and back out to the inner porch. Both of us nearly jumped out of our skin and I'd hate to think what my heart rate and blood pressure did.

It probably means something that a nearly 40 year old Ultrx RD C21 cassette deck running on all of its original parts is running closer to the correct speed (1 kHz > 985-990 Hz) than two Panasonic RX-D55 boomboxes (935-965 Hz). By comparison, a Sony CFD-S70 is dead on correct.

This is one of Naughty Truck's factory-installed spark plugs after 248,500 miles of driving. (Please accept my apologies for the iPhone's continued belief that proper focus happens only to pictures from other cameras.)

Just a few more mixtapes...looking forward to playing them on the drive home, as I often don't hear what I want from the radio as of late. (I had to redo the one from 5/13 due to "technical issues." Yes, the inside of the J-card is fully filled out on both.)

I finally got around to undoing the awful hacked in hardwired power adapter modification on my Casio SK-1 keyboard. Now it runs from batteries like it should.

After that, I gave the SK-1 a good cleaning. The speaker grille in particular was pretty gross. While not perfect, it is a million times better than it was.

This Panasonic radio really wasn't built with repair in mind. Getting the circuit board out was difficult. I tell you this mainly because I was intrigued by the use of a spring to keep the speaker in place. Unlike adhesive, it'd never fail and it probably damps some resonance.

It's been fun, but with all the changes here and for other reasons, I've decided that it is time to move on. In that vein and after a few false starts, I've started a blog. uxwbill.blogspot.com Let me know what you think.