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Month: October 2023

  • Pinball Expo Day Three

    Got to play Elton John right away in the morning when the line was the shortest. Shoots wonderfully. Steve Ritchie is back, baby! I put up over 200M and got on the board. Four multiballs started and Joe Katz started calling shots for me. What a blast!

    Played some more Pulp Fiction. Also shoots nice and the single-level layout is very cool. Excited to have this on location soon.

    Also got to play Big Lebowski. Gorgeous pin with great theme integration. Also played a game of the bowling-only mode in the sub-playfield.

  • Pinball Expo Day Two

    Played all the Atari pins I could find. Five of them (including Hercules but I didn’t play the one they had there because we have one at right brain).

    Galactic Tank Force is cool. I really love the theme and was fully convinced it was a real show at some point. We went to the panel with the cast and got some more stories of how it was made.

    Star Wars home pin is silly. The screen is so small.

  • Pinball Expo Day One

    Some photos and notes from day 1 of expo:

    Started out with the Stern factory tour. They recently moved into a new, bigger factory building. It’s Huge.

    I liked seeing the process from individual parts to a finished pin, but the vibes were off. I don’t think a single factory worker was white. I don’t recall seeing a designer/programmer/etc that wasn’t white. Let alone the crowds being led through the building gawking at the whole process.

    The Jersey Jack tour last year wasn’t much better for this dynamic, but the scale was quite a big smaller.

    Got to play Pulp Fiction and even met Mark Ritchie in the line to play it. Played Labyrinth after chatting with Bowen Kerins. I learned that pinball isn’t even his full-time job!

    Tons of cool homebrews on the floor and even a transparent cabinet build for an EM.

    Saw a couple talks including a panel of some folks that built Pulp Fiction. It’s been in the works for over a decade. Quentin Tarantino is as strange as suspected.

    There was a screening of the Pinball film including a lovely intro by Roger Sharpe and Michael Gottlieb. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it!

  • Pinball Expo Day 1 (zero?)

    Drove down to pinball expo today. Disappointed with the communication on the pre-expo tournament. I ended up on the waitlist and didn’t know it started at 4pm!

    Played some silly arcade games and a round or two on galactic tank force.

    Also signed up for the mains tournament and played my first couple qualifying games. Terrible scores but I have plenty of submissions left.

  • tilde.team subdomains as bluesky handles

    This is a quick tutorial on using your tilde.team subdomain as a handle on bluesky. Domain verification on bluesky can be done with a DNS challenge or by serving a text file from .well-known in your webroot.

    Since adjusting the Content-Type for plaintext files with no extension isn’t possible without changing global nginx configs, the quickest way is to use a tiny php script.

    <?php header("Content-Type: text/plain");
echo "did:plc:v7tbr6qxk6xanxzn6hjmbk7o";

    Make sure that the following directory exists ~/public_html/.well-known/atproto-did and put the above script in there as index.php, replacing the did with your own.

    Then go to Settings > Change Handle on bsky.app, pick “I have my own domain”, then pick the No DNS Panel tab. Enter your subdomain and hit Verify Text File.

    You can use any of the domains that are hooked up to your ~/public_html. See the list on the tilde.team wiki.

    Here’s the source for mine on tildegit.

  • We took the ferry

    We went to Milwaukee for a wedding this weekend and decided to take the ferry instead of driving all the way around Lake Michigan.

    Definitely worth it, saved us a ton of driving and we didn’t have to deal with parking the car and all that nonsense.

    The trip takes 2h30 across the narrow point of lake Michigan (80 miles). The return trip took a bit longer due to the high seas.

    The lake was quite angry given that it’s already fall. Waves were over 6 feet and the boat was rocking heavily back and forth. The crew was handing out dramamine and ginger chews for the folks that were having some seasickness.

  • WordPress block theme fragment offset

    I just solved a slight visual bug on a wordpress site (tcpinball.org) with id permalinks.

    I recently added made the site header sticky on there, which started covering the heading you jumped to when clicking a fragment id.

    Here’s the solution:

    [id] {
    scroll-margin-top: 80px;
}

    You can add this CSS snippet in the block editor with the “Additional CSS” option in the global styles panel.

    Easy fix without editing any theme or plugin files!

  • VFW Pinball 2023

    I just got home from vfw. It’s a pinball museum outside Ann Arbor in a former VFW that houses the private collection of Clay Harrell. Over 500 pins across 3 different buildings. The true pinball mecca!

    Here’s a selection of the photos I took over the weekend. Click to view larger and see descriptions.