Hello, and welcome back to The 8-Bit Guy.
I get a lot of requests.
People want to know updates on some of the older projects that I haven’t talked about
in a while.
And so, that’s what I’m going to talk about in this episode.
The first thing I want to talk about is I want to go back 2 years and talk about the
cat tower.
Once or twice a year I try to create some sort of video that is somewhat of a break
from the usual content.
Back in January of 2016 I did this video on my idea for the ultimate cat tree, which I
called the Kitty Rocket Tower.
I built the thing, and the cats seemed to love it.
If you haven’t seen that video, I recommend you go back and check it out.
I will mention that I used to have 3 cats, but the Noid passed away just a few months
after building this tower.
She was the oldest at 16 years old, and so she had a good life.
Fast Forward 2 years and 3 months.
OK, since over two years have passed, I think I can give you a proper update on the cat
tower and tell you what aspects of the design have been successful and what aspects, not
so great.
Let’s start with the top.
The cats actually do love getting up here on the top.
This is one of their favorite places to get.
And they do scratch up here, and sometimes they even climb all the way to the very top.
These two rooms here, on the other hand, they just pretty much don’t ever use them.
I think its.
It’s not that they can’t get in here, it’s just too inconvenient for them to get
in here.
So, these have been more or less a waste.
And so, one of the things I’m going to change as I rebuild this thing a little bit, is I’m
going to remove this wall here.
And make this kind of an open balcony.
And then I’m going to.
There’s a divider in here which I’m going to cut a hole, which will allow them to pass
into this room here.
So, hopefully that will make it more convenient for the cats to use this particular level
here.
Now, the dining level, now the whole purpose behind this level was, of course, so that
the cats would have a place to eat and you know keep their bowls of food without the
dog being able to reach it.
And that has actually worked out really well.
The cats have no problem getting up here and and they know exactly where their food is.
And they use this every day to eat on.
As for the road here, you can see they have definitely shredded this.
And this is definitely something that I’m going to be replacing here.
And it has served it’s purpose well, because obviously every bit of shredding they’ve
done here has been shredding they didn’t do somewhere else around the house.
So, that’s always good news.
This particular room here has also been well used.
In fact Pig Bunny sleeps in here almost every night.
She doesn’t have to climb in there, she can pretty much just jump straight from the
ground up.
The bottom level does get used quite a bit by both cats.
They sleep on there sometimes.
So, overall I’d say that the only major design flaw is of course these two rooms here.
And I’m also going to be replacing this with some carpet in all of these sections.
I think the carpet will work out better.
So anyway, let’s get started!
The first thing to do is remove these pads.
I’ve never been very happy with these because they don’t have anything holding them in
place and sometimes they get stuck to the cat’s claws and I’m always having to reposition
them.
Pig Bunny wanted to give this bit of rope one last good scratching.
Unfortunately, I lost an entire days worth of footage on this remodel, so we’ll skip
ahead to the carpet selection.
I needed something to hold this carpet flat while the glue dried.
So I found a good use for all of my old vintage laptops.
And a few Mac mini G4s.
OK, time for customer testing.
She doesn’t seem to want to go in there.
And after just a few seconds she decided she wanted nothing to do with it.
Let’s try customer #2.
Well, she doesn’t seem to interested either.
These cats fail to realize all of the hard work I put into this, and they also fail to
realize they aren’t performing very well for my video!
Oh wait, I forgot cats are totally selfish.
ahaha.
Well, at least she will use the little door I made.
And right back down.
Well, she’ll probably get used to it after a while.
All right, so the next thing I want to talk about is the Armatron.
So a lot of people ask me if I ever got this thing fixed.
Well, the answer is no.
I actually bought another one exactly like it on eBay and it had the exact same gear
broken.
Now, I must have gotten a thousand emails and comments of people telling me I should
just 3D print the gear.
But the reality is, I don’t think most people could tell in the video exactly how small
those gears were, particularly the little teeth on there.
And I don’t think.
You know I’ve actually got a home-based 3D printer and there’s just no way it can
print teeth that small.
It doesn’t have the resolution for it, and even if it did, I’m not sure that it would
be strong enough to hold up in the environment that this thing has.
In fact, I think it is a flawed design because these little clamps here that’s actually
what that gear controls.
The design is bad because there’s nothing to relieve the pressure on that gear once
the clamp is completely closed.
And so what happens is that the teeth on the gear just start jumping.
And I think it’s a design flaw and I would imagine most of them probably have the same
problem.
But, someday, hopefully, I’ll get a working one.
So, a lot of people have also asked about the LCD project.
I had two episodes that I did and I had promised a 3rd episode where I was going to connect
it up to the cartridge port on a Commodore 64.
And show how it would work directly communicating with a microprocessor.
Well, I never could get it to work.
I got it partially working but I never could get it to work entirely correctly.
And so I actually got some help from an electrical engineer who’s helped me before on some
of my projects here and he actually created for me, a really neat little cartridge that’s
actually professionally manufactured and it has the LCD on it and it plugs right into
the cartridge port on the Commodore 64.
And it works.
I’m not going to talk a whole lot about this because I’m actually going to be completing
part 3 of that LCD episode really soon, so just stick around for that.
Next, let’s talk about the Osborne.
So, a lot of people wanted to know, did I ever get the case fixed and did I ever get
the handle fixed.
Well, here’s the problem.
I got a lot of offers from people that claimed to be leather experts that said they would
be happy to re-leather that handle for me that got damaged by the peroxide.
So, I went ahead and sent off this entire piece, which because the handle is riveted
onto the plastic, to one of the guys that offered that, and he did say he got it, but
I never heard back from him again.
I’ve emailed him a dozen times asking if he’d just please ship it back under any
condition and he won’t answer my emails so now not only do I have to try to fix the
plastics, but I’ve got to find a new handle.
Which, I think I may have found one, but I do plan on still trying to better restore
the plastics on this so you’ll probably be seeing it again, eventually.
One of the other things I wanted to talk about, speaking of retrobrite projects, is this Apple
IIc.
Now it’s not the computer specifically that I wanted to show.
But a lot of people are always asking me Well, does retrobrite last?
You know, does the plastic re-yellow over time?
Well, it’s been over 2 years since I’ve retrobritbed this one, now it has, admittedly
turned ever so slightly yellow in this area here.
I don’t even know if it will show up on camera or not.
It’s not a very noticeable yellow.
And all you’ve got to do is look at the original pictures showing what it looked like
before and you can see this was a particularly badly yellowed product.
So, considering what it looked like before, it still looks really nice.
And so, anyway, it will interesting to maybe revisit it again in another 2 years and see
what it looks like, but for now I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out.
And there were two other things I wanted to talk about.
So a lot of people ask if I ever got the space-bar fixed on the Commodore PET that I restored.
Well, I didn’t, however I let my brother borrow the PET for a while and he took it
upon himself as a challenge to repair that space bar, and he did a whole video on his
youtube channel about fixing that spacebar.
And so there is a link to that video down in the description field if you want to go
watch it and see how he fixed that up.
A lot of people have also asked about the custom computer desk I designed and built
myself a few years ago.
By the way, I’m putting links to all of these videos in the description in case there
are some of these you haven’t seen.
Anyway, I’m still using that desk today and it has actually held up really well.
At the moment this Tandy 1000 has taken up residence as I’m using it for testing the
CGA and Tandy version of Planet X3.
So it will be staying there a few more months.
And this is the computer I use for all of my editing, which I’m editing this very
video right now, along with stuff I use for shipping products, such as the label printer
and scale.
And over here I keep a Commodore 64 setup most of the time so I can make new copies
of Planet X2 as needed, although I don’t have the disk drives connected at the moment.
The only problem I’ve had with the desk is that a few of these tiny pieces of tile
like this little triangle have come unglued.
So I just cleaned the glue off and used some epoxy to put them back down and haven’t
had a problem since.
And then the last thing I’m going to talk about is a lot of people ask if I still have
my 2017 Chevrolet Volt.
And the answer is yes, and my wife is also still driving the BMW i3 and we both still
love both of those cars and they’ve worked out really well for us.
And even though both cars do have range extending gas engines that we can use if we run out
of, you know, electricity in the battery, the truth is we rarely use them.
I probably haven’t bought more than just a few gallons of gas in the last 2 years.
So those cars do work out relatively well as an electric vehicle.
So, I’m still very pleased with them.
People often ask me if I still recommend those cars to people, and the answer is yes, yes
I do.
So, anyway that about wraps it up for now.
If there’s any other projects you want to know any updates on, just send me an email
and I’ll maybe include that in another episode sometime.
So, anyway, thanks for watching!