Welcome to
User Friendly 2.0 with host Bill Sikkens.
Technology architect.
And this is User Friendly 2.0!
I am your host Bill Sikkens.
Joining me Bill, Gretchen.
Welcome to this week's show. Hello there.
So we've got to start out with some sad news.
I'm afraid today because we've lost two of the greats and entertainment.
And both passed away at the age of 80.
First one is the legendary Dolly Parton.
Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80.
She died Tuesday in Nashville,
following what her representatives described as a brief battle with cancer.
Born in rural Tennessee in 1946, Dolly Parton rose from a childhood of poverty
in the Smoky Mountains to become one of the most
recognizable entertainers in the world.
And while we think of her as a
country music legend, country star really just doesn't begin to cover it.
She wrote classics including Jolene, Code of Many Colors, 9 to 5,
and I Will Always Love You.
She became a successful actress, appearing in films including 9 to 5,
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Steel.
She was also a remarkably successful business
woman whose name became synonymous with Dollywood.
But one of Dolly Parton's greatest legacies
may have happened away from the stage.
Her Imagination Library has provided books to millions of children,
and she quietly put enormous amounts of her wealth and influence behind
literacy, education, disaster relief, and medical research.
Dolly also possessed a rare ability in modern American culture.
People from widely different backgrounds seem to agree that they liked her.
She could poke fun at herself, never seemed embarrassed
by where she came from, and built an extraordinarily career
largely by being unmistakably Dolly Parton.
And sadly, we've also learned today
of the death of Tim Curry, also at the age of 80.
For generations of movie fans, Curry will be forever.
Doctor Frankfurter and The Rocky
Horror Picture Show one of the great cult film performances of all time.
But Tim Curry has one of those careers where almost everybody remembers him
for something different.
Maybe he's Wadsworth and Clue.
Maybe he's the terrifying Pennywise in the 1990
television adaptation of Stephen King's It.
Maybe you remember him from legend, The Three Musketeers or Home Alone two,
and an entire younger generation knew him unmistakably voiced through animation,
particularly in Nigel Thornberry in The Wild Thornberrys.
And yeah, he was a voice actor.
A very good one, too. Agreed.
Corey was a Curry.
Rather was also an accomplished stage performer, earning the three
Tony Award nominations, including recognition for Amadeus,
My Favorite Year and Spamalot.
His career changed dramatically after he suffered a major stroke in 2012,
which affected his mobility and left him using a wheelchair,
but he continued working,
making appearances and maintaining a wonderfully warm relationship
with the fans who had followed him or his work over the decades.
There's something particularly striking about
losing Dolly Parton and Tim Curry so close together.
One gave us Jolene, the other gave us Frankfurter
and Pennywise, and somehow both became fixtures of popular culture,
whose work Cross generations Dolly Parton and Tim Curry both gone at 80
and both leaving behind the kind of work that isn't going anywhere.
And they are two legends that will be missed.
All right.
What do we have in the news?
Oh, well, Dish Network is in bankruptcy,
so this is actually not a new topic.
This has happened back in June when this was officially filed.
But we've had a lot of questions coming in about this, wanting to know
what is actually going on here, because there's a lot of different
stories, let's just say, that are floating out out there.
And one of them is, is Dish Network going to stop broadcasting and a company
that they own called sling, which you may have heard of, sling
TV is obviously a very well known over the top
provider of television channels and other content.
So what's actually happened here is they filed chapter 11 bankruptcy,
and that's the kind of bankruptcy that is restructuring.
It doesn't mean they're suddenly shutting down and locking their doors there
with creditors and some
other things that are required to try to get their company back on track.
So yeah, it does mean that sling TV is bankrupt too,
because they're part of the filings, but neither is shutting down.
What the problem really here is, is that
people aren't using linear television like they used to.
So Dish Network is, of course a competitor for cable television.
Satellite based has been around for a long time.
And at the end of the day,
just with churn and cord cutting and everything else,
they are starting to have problems and need to restructure.
So I don't see them shutting down.
I don't think we're going in that direction.
Certainly not sling TV, but we are seeing in the general
overall linear television things that a lot of channels are shutting down.
More and more people are using on demand services.
You know, the idea in 2026 of having to wait for a certain time
for a show to air is just not something we're used to anymore.
You know,
you watch what you want on demand and that type of a thing. So
but just to give an idea of where this is going
at the end of June, which is when they filed this TV
had 4.684 million subscribers,
1.7 million sling TV subscribers.
So it's a total of 6.391 million combined.
And in the second quarter,
they lost 161,000 subscribers, while sling lost about 80,000.
Now it's a little unusual for sling because people are still going with that.
I think they'll be able to turn that one around.
But again, linear television is something that's
definitely from the last decade, if not before.
So it's going to be interesting to see, you know, how
they end up doing with this and what should go on before the moment.
If you have dish TV, you are not at risk of losing your channels.
The one little thing that I have noticed across the board on
this is blackouts of channels, especially local channels.
They seem to be a lot less interested in renegotiating some of this stuff
at this point, I think probably because of the money.
And so, you know, we could start to see some stuff like that.
All right.
Robots can outrun humans, but can they plug in a cable?
That's a very good question.
It's a strange question, but the strange question and there's this competition.
So Reuters is reporting this.
Reuters. Reuters.
Anyway, it's one of those two ways anyway.
But Reuters.
Reuters I knew I was saying it wrong Reuters.
So they have these competition and these have been going on for a while.
The latest one was held August 23rd in Beijing, where humanoid robots
are put in competition with each other over things.
They have proven that they can run quicker than the fastest humans.
The fine motor control and that type of thing is getting a lot better.
But one of the next things coming up is the ability to compete in more.
What you would find in the office stuff.
Can they plug in a network cable, as the headline says?
Can they do some of these different type of things now?
About a year ago, a competition like this was held and it didn't go well,
but it seemed like it was more the AI is running.
The robots got bored and just decided not to do it.
So we'll see what happens this time around.
All right.
Yeah, I think I'd get bored of doing the same task over and over.
Looks like broadcaster is fighting to retrieve
70 years of footage after its storage provider disappeared.
Tell us about that.
So this is in reference to PBS and what?
This is where these things become important to have backups.
This been like a major thing of it, but it's the same idea.
Okay.
So you have your memory card from your,
you know, camera back when we had those are your phone now these type of things
and something gets stolen lost damage that kind of a thing.
You would be out those photos or whatever the case may be.
Modern equipment
like your phone providers, usually back up to the cloud automatically.
And for the bigger companies like PBS and other broadcasters,
they use cloud based services as well for archival
and running different things that are in aspect of being a broadcaster.
And what's happened here is it would be kind of like
if you had everything backed up on your phone or other device,
and the company that was doing the backups for you
suddenly went away and you couldn't get access to your your information
anymore at all times, at times a little bit.
And you have 70 years of footage that seem to have disappeared
and that they can no longer get access to at EBS.
And that's what's going on here.
It's a problem.
It's about 50TB of footage.
Again, a 70 year archive includes things like their coverage
of the Great Flood of 1993, the Covid 19 pandemic, irreplaceable stuff, and so on.
So, you know, it's
one of those things that they have to be careful.
I am working with a client right now where we're trying to figure
out or not trying to figure out, but we put into place a backup situation.
Well, it's not 70 years of stuff.
It would cost them their business to something like this happen.
So we have both their online normal cloud backups,
the online cloud system that runs their things.
We are also putting into place a storage array
that they have control over that automatically
back up once a month from the stuff that's out on the main system.
It's a little bit of money to do that, but it saves the data.
And then they're going to another step where
once a month they rotate in basically an offline hard drive,
which backs that up, and then it's physically disconnected from the network.
Because remember, if you're losing your data
because the hackers got in, they know you have backups
and they know they're online, that's not going to do you a lot of good.
You need the offline backups too.
But you still want cloud backups
because if your office burns down or there's a catastrophic problem.
Bill in Reno,
I know you guys have just been dealing with that with the fire right now.
These things happen and can be completely unexpected.
Then you want the cloud backup, so it's just the best way of covering it.
These in space.
Yeah.
And I was thinking trying to remember why this would make me think of the Muppets.
And then I was like a pigs in space.
So over the years, NASA has been putting up different animals
to see how they react to things, bees being no exception to this.
And it's actually worked out quite well.
They've been able to build their hive and do all the different things
they would on Earth.
And you know,
some of these experiments are actually becoming more and more important now
because of the fact that we are starting to talk about
having life in space, establishing, you know, places to live.
Mars has been talked about.
The moon, I think will be more likely first,
but at the end of the day, we're going to need
food, we're going to need animals and all of these type of things.
We need to know how they work.
And well,
I think it's kind of cool about these experiments
is it's not something where it injures the animal either.
It's just, you know, they do the experiment and then bring them back.
So yeah, but it's
kind of interesting to see it just it didn't seem like a bug them a whole lot.
The colony was in a contained environment
and they were able to go about their normal business.
Cool.
Which is interesting considering Zero-G.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a big reason why they wanted to conduct an experiment
like this.
Because again, you know, you can do stuff in the lab
and try to figure things out, but you really don't know what it is.
Some backups or some backups, some background information of this is
this is not the first time insects have been sent to space.
This experiment actually started to be conducted a while ago, back in 1984.
But the first time they did this was with Fruit Flies in Space
in 1947, which were the first animals sent to space.
All right.
Thinking of stuff that makes us think about space.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is about to open.
So thinking about space, this would be Lucas
of the George Lucas of Star Wars, among other things. Yes.
And you should see the building they're building or they built.
It looks like a spaceship, in my opinion.
Kind of, you know, it's cool.
Scheduled to open September 22nd.
So here in a couple of weeks, Exposition Park in Los Angeles.
So if you're down there, certainly worth checking out.
I can imagine how Opening Day is going to be.
You guys, we should go drive down on the 22nd.
Want to go?
I want to see this. Let's see if maybe we can make that happen.
But let's see.
The museum is founded by George Lucas and his wife, Melody and.
Ariel Investments, believe is the company that they're doing it under.
But it's not just about space.
No, it's about, you know, narrative art.
You know, it's visual. It's.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, a thing like that, I you know, what they're talking about,
including in this is illustration, comic books, movie concept art,
photography, children's
books, illustrations, posters and other forms of visual storytelling
and share space with paintings and other traditional artworks.
This sounds absolutely incredible.
There's more than 40,000 works, so it's a fairly large museum,
and it's going to feature over 1200 objects in over 30 galleries.
So yeah, that's going to be a day or two to see all that, I think.
Yeah, I was about to say we'd need
at least two days because it looks like there's a garden of grounds
that looks like it would be amazing to walk through as well.
So and, and for anybody asking, is there going to be Star Wars here.
Yes there is, Bill. Go ahead.
I would say I mean, other than the fact that it's in LA, I would
I would do some serious things to be a curator at that museum.
Yeah.
So, you know, I mean, maybe make it worthwhile.
Not that we're anti LA.
There's a lot of good people in Los Angeles, but I too big of a city for me.
But yeah it's too stressful. Yeah.
But again there's going to be Star Wars.
And if there wasn't that would be really weird.
So they're going to be featuring props, costumes, artwork and other materials
from Lucasfilm's going back more than four decades.
And that will include material from the first six Star Wars movies, the first four
Indiana Jones films, plus Willow, Red tails, Howard the Duck and others.
And one of the initial expositions is appropriate called Star Wars in Motion.
Yeah, so we're going to have to find out
more about this and see what's going to be there.
Among the announced pieces are the Luke Skywalker's land speeder
and the first physical build of General Grievous wheel bike.
Oh, nice.
Our transparent solar panels.
Real? Yeah.
I can't remember if this was a listener question or where this actually came from.
Me might have been Gretchen.
So this was a Instagram
video, which always is like, okay, we should probably double check that.
There's a lot of real material on Instagram
and there's a lot of absolutely fake stuff on Instagram, and it's up in the middle.
So it's sometimes, you know, creates a situation where it's like, okay,
at least I can count on the gravity stuff being real.
This is true.
Yeah.
And gravity unfortunately has to try to convince people that sometimes.
But gravity is real.
You know, I both flown the pack. It's real.
But the idea of a transparent solar panel, yes, it is actually real.
It's a thing that's been out for a while.
And there's several universities have been testing this out.
It's something that does create power.
The thing of it is it's a little bit
where you don't maybe see this mainstream yet is the fact that they produce
less power than a standard solar panel, because a standard solar panel is able to
more closely contain
the light, whereas a clear solar panel that flows through it.
However, some of the applications that are being considered
for this or the glass on the side of skyscrapers
or it doesn't matter really, because whatever you have up
there is going to produce energy where it doesn't now.
And even though it might be less than a standard
solar panel, it's still going to be a lot of power
and could certainly help to contribute to the power requirements of the building.
I've also seen a work up where they're talking about
using this type of technology for a data center,
and actually encapsulating the whole building in a glass.
It's kind of a cool concept if you look at the artwork,
because you'd walk into what is basically a glass building.
So it's all full of natural light and that kind of thing.
But all of that glass is producing a good portion of the electricity
that's running the data center underneath.
So I think, I think I saw a work up two of like a building
like the MGM Grand in Vegas, you know, or was it the Luxor?
The pyramid?
The pyramid is the Luxor, okay.
The Luxor,
where they were using that same technology to because it's mostly glass, right?
Yeah. And absolutely.
So, you know,
and that was the biggest negative I could even find on it
because I was trying to look for both sides of this as well.
It doesn't produce as much power because it's transparent.
Well, so what right now the glass in your window probably produces no power.
So. Yeah, exactly. You know,
and they aren't that much more difficult to manufacture
and actually don't cost that more than much more
when you're looking at it from the concept of like a skyscraper,
if you were to redo your home windows with it, it would be a little bit more money.
But even though it's still in the range of affordable.
So let's say you were going to do energy store on your home.
So you're doing low glass replacement, which is something
I'm thinking about doing.
I might actually look into this technology and see if it'd be worth it.
I don't know if I have enough glass coverage to where it would be worth
all the back end equipment, but it'd be kind of something interesting.
At least find out about, hey, you can do it on my house.
What else would you.
The color in the wires, wouldn't it?
Yeah. Well, you and you're going to have installation like that.
You have cable runs, but you also have equipment that has to
go somewhere that receives the power and does something with it.
Usually charging a battery is the way that works.
Yeah. You know, so so there's some investment in there.
So would the amount of glass space on a residential home
be enough to accommodate that on its own?
Probably not.
What I'm thinking is, is adding it to an existing solar
panel installation, though, and then conceivably using the same back
end equipment that's already running the solar panels
and just adding that as an input, then it might make it make sense to do it.
So we'll see.
All right.
And here's another unusual thing.
World's first hands free umbrella.
Yeah again an Instagram.
Now this is a funny one too
because the video I saw on Instagram is clearly AI generated.
Okay, I wasn't sure it looked a little off,
but I was thinking, oh, that's a cool idea.
But the engineer and the idea of this is actually real.
And there are some real videos of him showing this off with what
he actually has, but which is one of those things too,
because you look at it in the first thing is, oh, this is AI generated.
It's fake.
Well, the video was definitely AI generated,
but the thing is not fake.
There's a few things about it, though that are going to be a little time for.
I think you're going to see this at target.
And number one.
So basically what it is, is
it's essentially a quadcopter with a Raspberry Pi in it.
It's able to track the user.
So he walks under it and this thing flies over his head.
And it's really kind of cool. And it does work.
The proof of concept is absolutely out there,
and I think of other ideas that could be used for that'd be cool.
Like a little floating, like a Grogu pod
that, you know, you can carry stuff with.
And yeah, I mean, you know, you can look at a lot of different things.
The engineer is John.
I apologize for
pronouncing his last name, but he actually did build this thing.
It does work.
The drone is constructed using 3D
printed carbon fiber reinforced nylon.
So it's going to be strong enough to actually work.
But the thing of it is, is there's still some things that need to be worked out.
First of all, the flight time is only about 15 minutes.
Wind is a problem because it'll rotor down, wash, can push the water around.
We have all of that kind of a thing.
And then there is the possibility of a safety issue of having four rapidly
spinning drone propellers hovering around people's heads.
So, you know, but I think the idea of it's kind of cool.
And I think this is where you start.
And I could just, you know, as part of the futuristic thing, in addition to me
having my, you know, jetpack that I'm flying around
and having an umbrella hover over my head would be kind of cool.
I mean, it works with one of those.
Hands free umbrella.
So tell us about your hands free and roll. How does it work?
It was a hat.
Oh, well, yeah, I think you're gonna say that.
It was just a hat and an umbrella on it
that.
Well, in different news, OpenAI halts
AI training on advanced model as it detects dark signs emerging.
Well, that doesn't sound good.
No. Is it going grok? No.
From what I understand.
No, no.
We're clear that now, I did ask AI about this, and I was told
there's absolutely nothing to worry about. So we're good.
We're safe.
Okay,
so what happened is, is this is a true story.
OpenAI has slowed
portions of its development program because two separate things happened.
We actually talked about this earlier in the year,
but an earlier OpenAI model testing incident involving hugging face,
which is another AI where an AI system managed to reach systems outside
of his intended environment and decide to hack them.
So that was considered a problem.
And what they're looking at here is a situation
where these kind of things, they want to know what's going on.
It doesn't mean that
AI has become evil all of a sudden, you know, or anything like that.
It just means that it is doing things that are unexpected,
and it's time to take a step back and figure out why and what's going on.
And could this become a problem?
Because one of the things is, is it's not always the good guys that use AI.
And at the end of the day, if this is possible,
we actually do want to know about it, you know,
because it's something that has to be planned against.
We talked earlier in the year about actual full
AI defense and strategies that businesses are starting to put into place,
using AI to defend against AI and having AI run it.
If you haven't heard that episode, go to User Friendly Dot show
because it's there and it's a very interesting conversation
of kind of, you know, welcome to the future.
Oh yeah.
So, you know, at the end of the day, this is a new technology.
It's developing and a lot of interesting things are going to happen.
This is user friendly 2.0.
We'll be back after the break.
He's from the future.
He's got a really big computer
and he uses it uses it every day.
And he uses it uses it in every way.
What you use it for, you know, I'm not that sure because he hears it here.
Welcome back.
This is user friendly two point out.
Check out our website at User Friendly.
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All right guys, well, you know, we program a lot on our listener questions.
And we've been having a lot more interest like a lot more interest
in the last six months or so in retro technology.
So we've been covering some of that.
And I'm having a lot of fun doing it because it is actually an area of
interest of mine, and
it's something that is a lot of fun
and is a for example,
we've got some projects we're working on that I got a Sega mega drive,
which North American is known as a Genesis, but mine is actually
a mega drive to work in North America and run the games for both systems.
Actually all three. It runs the Japanese ones too.
It was a little bit of a process to make that function,
but that's the kind of stuff I like to mess with
in retro tech and is, I think most people that have listened for a while know that
we like to work with the old video game cabinets and systems and old computers
and radios and all the rest of this stuff, which is kind of cool. And
along those lines, we get a lot of questions
coming in about, you know, how to deal with all of this stuff.
And we're going to talk about some horror stories that we've dealt with here.
Gretchen, in your case, like Merlin and now the baby laptop.
Oh my goodness. Oh yeah. The baby laptop.
So, you know, and some other things.
But, you know, one of the interesting things about retro
technology is that we've reached a point where
keeping it running is no longer simply using old equipment.
It's preservation and it really is.
So when you think about these things, something like a Commodore 64
is more than 40 years old,
an original Nintendo Entertainment System is around 40.
Even something we might not instinctively consider retro, such as an original Xbox
or Windows XP computer, is now more than two decades old.
Bill, isn't it, where to think of an Xbox as retro?
Yeah, it is, it is.
You know, the thing about it is, is electronics don't age
quite the same way that furniture or books do.
So you can put a book on a shelf for 30 years and assuming
the environment is reasonable, pull it down and read it.
You can put a computer on the shelf
for 30 years, pull it down, plug it in, and, well, not quite so much.
You're.
Yeah, yeah.
And trust me, the baby laptop was not stored in a barn.
It was not stored in out in the,
you know, in the yard or in the heat.
It was in a climate controlled location.
So what Gretchen is referring to by the baby laptop is an IBM ThinkPad T30.
It's the one with the butterfly keyboard.
Now, if there are a lot of people in the community
that collect retro laptops, that is a very sought after one.
And the way that we ended up getting it is I've been in technology
since, what, 1998 I think is when we started leaving
sooner than that, I think you, you yeah, you were working on the computer stuff
in the early 90s, like 94 somewhere around there, right?
In any event, it was in the 90s.
I'm getting old, you know, I'm a retro electronics now, I think.
But we started out with a store in a mall
in Reno, Nevada, and this store is gone.
The mall is gone.
Reno, Nevada, fortunately, after the fires is not gone.
But the point being that this is how these things have changed,
and some of the stuff that we were selling in that store is now very much retro.
Well, during that time, because we were a startup, didn't have a lot of money.
I had a client that was a bank, and we did the computers for the bank,
for the state of Nevada for a long time, and one day got a call
because we would take old equipment, fix it back up and recycle it
and give it back to the schools
or other people that could use it and that type of thing.
And in line with that would get these donations.
And one day it's like, well, the president of the bank,
we're merging with another bank.
So his office is being cleaned out.
So we paid some money and got everything in the office.
It was that kind of a sale.
And if it was this little T30 ThinkPad laptop,
which I used for a long time afterwards, I mean, in 1995 96, whenever
it would have had to have been 95, 96 because it was running windows 95.
Yeah, I remember the windows 95. Yeah.
And having a color 640 by 480
laptop in that era was a really big deal.
I mean, you know, hard drive in the whole bit.
You look at it now, it's like, okay, but no, it was not something you could afford.
These things were in the
thousands of dollars, like 4 or $5000 to buy some of this equipment.
And, and didn't it have also ports in it to like the walking station,
which also was kind of a big deal.
It was what we probably call a sub notebook these days.
But at that time I don't think that term had been coined yet. No.
And so this is one where I was talking to a friend who's a YouTube content
creator that used to work for Microsoft, and we were talking about it.
He was like, oh, you have this, it's got a time bomb in it.
And so, Gretchen, you pulled it out.
And what do we find, a time bomb?
Oh my God, I felt so bad
because I'd take I had taken really good care of it.
I stored it nicely.
It was in its case, it was not in a hot or
super cold area or or moist area.
I thought it was fine.
I didn't know that the battery was going to vomit acid all over it.
So that is getting to the point of anything like this.
Even modern electronics take the batteries out
if you're not using them.
So you know, there's some basic maintenance stuff.
You have a generator that's gasoline powered, drain
the fuel out of it when you're gonna put it in storage,
or your carburetor will become unhappy with you.
Same kind of an idea applies to these type of things.
You leave batteries in something they will leak.
I'm still looking for my blip.
Yeah, well, we had that.
We had a little Walkman that we unpacked from one of your boxes.
The battery compartment looked like it had a disease.
It is definitely, you know, these type of things.
And the problem of it is,
is that the acid, the alkaline that comes out of the batteries
will corrode everything in your piece of equipment and destroy it.
And these this, this is something that can absolutely make it to a point
where it's not even a feasibility issue at some points anymore.
It's just it's the end of the end of the line.
And in the case of the ThinkPad, the baby laptop, we had a situation
where the battery started leaking both of them.
Also, the internal Bios battery started leaking the Ram battery,
and it kind of exploded and the capacitor started leaking.
And all this stuff put together looks like it exploded or something.
I don't know how to describe that. Yeah.
And the one thing that we're a little bit lucky on this and we are going to restore
it is the video components of it,
which were the big deal with the keyboard on that.
We're in a metal can and in the upper part of it.
So that part is still working and the case itself is still okay.
We're going to have to replace the motherboard and some stuff like that.
But that's item number one.
Take your batteries out if you're going to store it for any more than a little bit.
And again, it's not even just retro tech.
We use pocket recorders here at User Friendly, and we're constantly having it
when a season ends and the next season starts, the 2 or 3 of them get destroyed
because the batteries were left in over the winter.
And oh, it's a problem.
Yes, that's why there's been numerous emails about that.
But anyway, you want to check this out.
And this isn't again, related to just alkaline batteries.
It's basically anything.
If you're going to store your device, it has a battery, pull the battery out of it.
We just did that with your game, boys, Gretchen.
And the batteries looked fine. But it's not that.
It's because they can kind of be fine one day and not the next.
Second rule is if you have something
that you haven't used in a while, don't immediately plug it in.
This is a
common thing to do, but it is something that
you want to really check things through a little bit before you do that.
It can be the difference between having something
that will work again and something that will never work again.
You want to give it an inspection, so there's some things you look for
inside, and we're going to get into this in a little more detail here.
But first of all is swollen or leaking capacitors.
Pastor plague is a thing.
We're going to talk about that in a little bit here.
But these are little round canned devices that are in pretty much everything.
There's different versions of it.
If you're, say, a collector of retro Macintosh stuff, there's surface
mount capacitors that seem to be going bad and eating through everything.
Older stuff might be through hole.
Look online for pictures of these things, but if they're leaking,
if they're swollen, that kind of a thing that can be a problem.
And if you can catch it before they get real bad and replace them,
or at least remove them, you'll save yourself a lot of grief.
So I have a question, because I'm assuming not everybody is a
retro
device enthusiast and understands these things.
What about where do you take this stuff?
What the like? Have someone fix it?
Yeah, or to open it up and look for you if you don't know.
Okay.
The best way to handle something like that.
There. Really?
I'm sure there's still some out there, but like the idea of a television repair
shop or something, or computer repair shop,
these things don't exist like they used to.
And there's
I know there's still a few computer stores
around in things, but even there, if you went in
with something that was 40 years
old, I don't know that they're going to really be able to help you much with it.
The best way is to go online.
There's groups on Facebook and Discord and other places of communities.
There's a lot of enthusiasts and retro technology and specific kinds
where you can usually go online, ask the question, send pictures.
And that's the best way to get advice on these things.
And one of the positives is, is a lot of these groups are starting to manufacture
their own replacements for parts that are long
since out of production and things, so it usually is possible to fix.
But that's where you would go.
And Gretchen, it's also a valid question because in a lot of things you're dealing
with mains voltages. Capacitors hold power.
So you do want to be careful if you don't know what you're doing
or don't know how to do it safely, get some help from somebody that does
and the help is available out there.
There's a lot of people that do different things that do that.
Corroded batteries is something to look for that we just talked about.
Another one is rust and another one that I've run into.
A little bit of a surprise the first time with the arcade cabinets is rodents.
They seem to love to make their nests inside things
like Gaelic games.
And I know when we restored the Wizard of War, there weren't rodents.
But I think there must have been more spiders in that thing than a colony.
It was definitely, you know, stuff you want to look at and deal with.
And the problem with these things is animals get in and will eat wires
and that kind of stuff.
And if you just plug it in, what can happen here is you have a short
and it starts burning stuff up.
If you find the damage and can fix the wiring problem beforehand,
then you won't have that type of a thing.
Other stuff like broken wires and burn components or things to look for.
And one of the other
things that I think it's very important on this is dealing with power supplies.
Now we're getting to an area here where you do
have a little bit of technical expertise to be able to figure this out,
but Commodore 64 computers really suffer from this,
and a lot of other things do where the power supplies, usually
linear power supplies, are two main types of power supplies linear and switching.
Switching are the modern ones.
The older stuff doesn't necessarily have that.
And what will happen is, is when the power supply fails, it'll do 1 or 2 things.
It'll stop working altogether, which is kind of what you hope
it'll start delivering more voltage than it's supposed to.
And that can cause catastrophic failures in whatever your device might be.
And there's actually a really good, in my opinion, content creator
called the eight bit guy on YouTube that had this happen on one of his episodes,
he was showing off a voice system on his Commodore 64,
and all of a sudden
the whole thing stopped working and he was on a regular power supply
and it burned out the cartridge, the computer,
the voice synthesizer module, which was kind of unique, and everything
else that was connected to it because it went from delivering,
I think, nine volts to 40 in the space of about ten minutes. So
it is worth the investment to replace some of these things.
Now, on the things like the
Atari computers and the Sega consoles and some of these other things,
they actually do run off five volts.
So there's some kits out there you can get to convert them over to USB.
So you no longer even need the power bricks, which is really kind of nice.
You know, I have an Atari XJS eight bit computer,
which was a video game console based on their original eight bit line
that came out in the late 80s, that I just have a converter
and I plug it into USB,
and the original power brick was this big, huge, heavy thing.
The USB is regulated, you know, and all of that type of thing.
So it saved having to buy what would have been an $80 power
supply replacement, and it's safer to use it that way.
So it's an option.
Not everything you can do that way, but that is definitely something
that's the case.
And then the other thing of it is, is to see
if someone else has been in there before you previous repairs. I
commend the community and you've got to learn somewhere,
and there's nothing wrong with that.
But a lot of retro equipment you get now might be someone else's project
that they've given up on, so you want to make sure that they didn't
do something that is going to cause problems, you know, that kind of a thing.
And if they did repair something that's done correctly,
my experience with that is most of the time it is.
But there are times I've run into some really weird things.
A lot can happen in 40 years, you know?
Yeah.
So again, your power source is batteries and your
power supplies are a big deal.
There was another thing that you would bring up when we're trying
to open something that is like 40 or 30 years old, that some of the plastic
can get kind of brittle and you have to be really careful.
Otherwise you might actually break it, like
I kind of did on my Merlin brittle plastic.
Yes. Yeah.
And I think it's a good point to remember this equipment was not made
from the concept of somebody's going to be using it 40 years from now.
Yeah.
The only reason arcade cabinets are built
as well as they are, because they were in an environment
where they were going to be abused and in arcade.
So that helps.
But again, the idea is not that we're making something that you can use,
you know, on down the road.
So yes, the plastics are a big deal.
Things break.
Now, Gretchen,
you're talking about a merlin, which is a late 70s little handheld game.
Tell us a little bit about it.
Oh, it was it kind of looked like a telephone.
And there were a variety of, like, sound and memory games
that you could play with it and it
you would just play these different games.
And it had was batteries that you would use
and yeah, you had me
checking it to make sure the batteries didn't do something bad.
And they did.
But when I was trying to open it and I wasn't rough with it, I,
I broke the back door. Yeah.
And you had to have someone do a special repair for me.
Replacement for it. So. Yeah.
So Gretchen's 1978 in box Merlin
with the instructions, with the instructions
and the original carton and in perfect cosmetic condition
after we hired an armored car
to bring it from her house to my lab, we got it out to take a look at it.
And the the battery cover had just broken.
And again, nothing you did wrong.
It just broke because of the age.
Yeah.
And yeah, the batteries had leaked in that one quite badly.
We actually had to change the keypad on it because it had gotten into the contacts,
the battery acid.
And, you know, again, fortunately, there's
enough of a community that you're able to get the parts.
You got to find the blip.
I got to find the blip and the
and the other little game that looks like you're playing baseball.
It was really popular during the mid 70s.
These little hand.
There was football, baseball and basketball, and I had the baseball one
and a little red dot would, you know, go around to the bases.
I'm sure anybody my age would go,
oh yeah, I remember somebody who had one series of games like that.
They are mechanical.
And that's the other thing you want to think about
is you don't want to just throw batteries in them, because little motor
sees up over time and stuff.
And in a lot of cases, if you go through and lubricate the thing
and you'll get it back and running, but if you put power to it
and the motor can't work, it'll just burn it out.
And that can be unobtainable to try to replace those.
So, you know
again I think all right.
So let's talk capacitors a little bit
because we kind of talked about this in the beginning of this segment.
And this is something I get a lot of questions on.
And again if you are somebody that's just getting into this or just curious,
there's a lot of places to go online and watch videos about capacitors.
Even look at pictures to see what they are.
They come in a lot of different styles and designs.
A little too much of a deep dive to get into here,
except for one style which is called an electrolytic
capacitors, which seems to cause a lot of problems.
And what happens is they start leaking and the solution
in that stuff starts leaking and it will get into everything else.
I've seen pinball machines where capacitors
and batteries have leaked, and it actually starts
going over the wiring from one board to the other. Somehow.
I do not know how that works.
I'm sure somebody in the chemistry could describe it, but it is.
It's like getting cancer in it
and trying to get rid of it can be a huge, huge mess.
But the YouTube community seems to have this idea
that the first thing you should do is replace all the capacitors.
And this is also not true.
Not every capacitor is a bad capacitor, and you have to look at some different
things and decide what's going on from that.
These have gone through phases.
So in the 90s there was a bad capacitor time.
And you were talking about in the 2000 this happened to I think, yeah, around
2007, 2008, at least it happened in Dell.
Yeah. I'll just be honest.
It was a double computer problem and it was one system
and they got a bad running capacitors.
And I probably swapped out 100 motherboards.
So you were actually involved in the in the repair of that at that time.
Because I know there's a lot of accusations
that Dell wasn't completely coming clean on what was going on either.
And it was a situation
where Inspiron I think wasn't an Inspiron that were experiencing spirit.
Yeah, yeah, it was it was a it was a business computer.
Yeah.
It's the kind of dark gray black box that everyone had.
And it believe it or not.
Those are retro and somewhat collectible now.
And and what Bill is talking about is they got bad capacitors.
The story on this and I haven't been able to verify it,
is that the company that was manufacturing the capacitors originally, Dale
went to another company to source them cheaper, and it was like
some sort of an industrial espionage thing that the original engineer
that was making them for the company that originally manufactured
and moved to this other company, but wasn't given the whole formula.
So what he started doing based on their original thing,
created a capacitor that was good for a year or two
and then would start leaking because it was missing stuff.
I'm sure there's a better way to explain that, but
wow. And that sense, you know,
that's what we were dealing with, which means you have a period in there
where your computer, if you don't change the caps, it's probably already too late.
And if you're lucky enough
and want one of those, they're becoming collectible
because there's not that many of them still out there.
The other one that we talked about was the early Macs.
So this would be like your Mac classic, your tools that era
the onboard capacitors, especially on the logic board.
The analog board fared a little better, but they can have their problems too.
But the logic board, the surface mount caps start leaking.
And then if you have your pyramid battery blow up on top of that,
you have a toxic wasteland inside of that thing
that is going to be very difficult to repair.
And it's gone to an extent
now that in the retro Mac community, they actually have people
that have designed new, better boards, some of the chips you can't get any more.
So what you do is you actually have the company like PCB way
or something, manufacture the motherboard, you get it back
and then you transplant
the chips that you can't get to the new one, replace
all the other components and repair it that way.
And that's a lot of work.
Oh yeah.
So YouTube creator this does not compute.
Actually did a whole thing on that.
And he actually had some boards made and then had a little problem.
These are some of the other things you have to look for
is that the boards that were made, they put the wrong kind of diodes on it,
so they couldn't get them up and running until they figured it out.
It was a factory error, I think.
So then they had to go through and they had like 50 boards made,
and then they were having to go through and hand replace something like
ten diodes that were surface mount components on each of these boards.
That would be a lot of work to.
But it's, you know, it's part of it.
So if you can save all this by avoiding it,
by changing your capacitors or having somebody do it for you
in the event that it's actually needed, then it will save you some things.
I think batteries are far worse than capacitors though.
And again, it depends on the era I was working on in television,
which is an early game console of the Atari era, early
80s, full of capacitors, and they're all fine.
It's 40 years old, but there's if I replaced them,
what I'm putting in there probably wouldn't
last as long as these would if I leave them alone.
So you do have to consider that as well, you know?
But again, saving this stuff is a matter now of maintenance.
And as time goes by, it's becoming a little bit more and more important.
The other thing that's interesting too, is that I found in some cases
simply removing capacitors in certain situations,
if you're going to store it is actually just fine,
because not having the capacitor in there does not necessarily mean it won't work.
A lot of them are for filtering other things for like line noise and stuff.
Sometimes, if the best way you can tell, usually if you have an issue like this,
if you have a device that is working and it starts to intermittently stop working.
I'm having this right now with one of my weather displays
with a backlight is starting to act up, and it's probably capacitors going out.
It'll light up and sometimes it's dim and that kind of a thing.
These are things to look for that would definitely look at that
kind of a thing as being a problem. So yeah.
Definitely different things
that take about and this is a topic that we could go on for a long time.
I don't know, Bill, have you had any horror stories?
You've run into this?
I know you talked about Dell.
That was the big one.
I mean, I've had a few pieces of other retro tech that I've opened up
that have had bad caps that have popped.
But honestly, my horror
story was a lot wrapped wires.
Oh, oh, tell us.
We've got a few seconds here left.
Tell us about that.
Well, in older electronics, I used to use a lot of cloth wrapped ones
and the cloth would just disintegrate, leaving a completely bare wire.
Oh, okay.
And that can have, you know, what could possibly go wrong there?
You know, like the old Christmas lights.
Really old ones. Well, if you have anything. Yeah.
They use cloth for have wires in the walls at 1.2
I think, you know, it's that was the thing.
The one thing I've run into is I have a really old radio from the 30s I'm
restoring that has asbestos wrapped wires, which is breaking down.
So that's the problem.
Like I'm sending it to a professional to clean that for me,
that knows how to do it properly and dispose of the waste from it,
the way that's safe
and all the rest of it, because that's a little beyond
my capability or anything I'd be comfortable with.
So, you know, definitely things to think about, but do some research online.
If this is something that you're interested in.
There is a huge community of people that are very happy to help and
are absolutely wonderful resources to get this stuff out.
And most of the time, the problem you're having is something
that somebody else has already experienced and found a solution to.
And till next week.
This is user friendly 2.0 keeping you safe on the cutting edge.
User friendly 2.0.
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