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Falk Hammer

You may remember the Falk Corporation (they were a “good name industry” and part of what made Milwaukee the “machine shop of the world” many years ago.) My father (and my grandfather) also worked there. Anyway, I’ve got this hammer, see…

I must have got this from my dad’s old workshop after he passed away, and it was sitting in my basement in a state of disrepair for many years. Sometimes it’s just difficult to deal with old things, but we can’t just dispose of them, because of sentiment and feelings and memories…

So the handle and head sat around for years untouched, until I decided to do something. I took the head and polished it up on the buffing wheel (which also once belonged to my father) and then I sanded the handle down to bare wood and coated it in shellac to give it a nice surface and shine.

Finally, I cut a wedge of wood and used the band saw (also one of my dad’s old tools to clear out the old wedge so I could pound in the new one. With that, the hammer was cleaned up, repaired, and ready for use.

And it’s sort of beautiful, but not too beautiful to use. It’s a tool, and tools should be used. I honestly don’t know if my father ever used it, though I imagine it did see some use years ago. It’s probably 40 years old or more… maybe 50? I don’t know. Tools well care for can last a long time.

I hope one of my children keeps this hammer after I’m gone. They could use it, or display it, or just leave it in the basement for years, untouched…

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Gallery 69 – A Free Little Art Gallery

Gallery 69 is open! It’s a Free Little Art Gallery which is sort of like a Little Free Library, but instead of books, we give away art. And if you’ve got art you want to give away we’d love to help out with that, just leave it in the gallery for someone else to enjoy. They can either take it home with them, or just admire it while it’s in the gallery.

There are a bunch of these FLAGs all over the place, not as many as libraries (yet) but you can search for one near you using freelittleartgalleries.art. (There’s also a great Smithsonian Magazine article explaining things in more detail.)

I first encountered a Free Little Art Gallery in the summer of 2022. I was out on a walk one morning and came across a large cabinet on 65th street in Wauwatosa, just north of Clarke street with a note inside explaining that it was an art gallery and would soon feature free art. I checked in on it every few days and eventually art showed up, along with a note about the opening night party! I did stop by that night and met Robin who set up the gallery. She was awesome and we talked about it a bit. I then made it a habit to visit at least once a week, and started dropping off my own art there. It was awesome.

So in 2023, I decided that for my birthday I wanted to build my own gallery. I am a thrifty midwesterner, so I gathered up the scrap wood I had lying around, found some nice shelves on the curb a few blocks away one morning (and hauled it home, which was not fun!) and while I did not finish the gallery in two days as originally planned, I did finish it in two months. Yay me.

Alright! Now we need some art! While I can certainly drop prints into the gallery when needed, I’ve already reached out to some artists I know about supplying some fine (little) art to keep it filled up.

Here’s a neat little leaf I got from another nearby gallery, located on 87th street, just south of Locust in the Cooper Park neighborhood. (Find it on Instagram.) Just like with my practice of moving books between Little Free Libraries I can see moving art between little galleries.

More random things… a print (which are actually gift tags) and some painted rocks from a free rock garden down on 69th street just north of North avenue.

Another one from the 87th street gallery, a flower card. People like flowers, right?

Here’s a print I made from a laser-etched plate I made from a photo I took of some power lines one morning. I plan to keep making more prints so come and get them if you like them!

A few more rocks from the free rock garden down on 69th street along with a small plastic piece that seems like a Shrinky Dink thing which I got from… I don’t remember! Anyway, it’s art, it’s free, and you can come and get it if you like it. Gallery 69 is located on 69th street just north of Locust street in the Enderis Park neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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More Folders for More Games

Time for more adventures with the Anbernic RG35XX running GarlicOS! After I got a large set of games, I thought to myself “Maybe I’ll have two SD cards, one with my favorites, and one with everything. Well, I didn’t have to do that, because I discovered you can just make your own folders, and put whatever ROMs you want into them. So here’s a look at my current setup.

Those “FAV” folders show up with text labels because there is not a corresponding image file to display. (Which is a handy trick as well!) I may make some images at some point, or not…

To get this to work you have to edit the coremapping.json file. You can just duplicate the original line and make a new folder name. Here I’ve added GBA-FAV right under GBA. Note that the folders are displays in alphabetical order in GarlicOS. But also note, you can name the folders anything you want. So you could order them manually using naming conventions with letters or numbers.

Also note, you can’t mix ROMs, so putting Game Boy and Game Gear ROMs in the same folder will not work. Each folder’s ROMs will run using the specific library listed in the line of the file. Still, this can go a long way towards organizing things.

You can find the coremapping.json file in the CFW folder. (If you have two SD cards it will be on the first one… Mine is on the MISC partition. (If you screw up the file the UI will display blanks, so make a backup file first if needed.)

I do know you can mark games as Favorites in GarlicOS, and I still use that feature (in my own way) but I found that it was too easy for me to “unmark” a favorite and then have it disappear from the list (and my mind) so this lets me have my curated folder of favorites along with the folder of “everything else”.

One more tip! If I want to move ROMs between the FAV folder and “regular” folder I can do it on a computer but it’s also very easy to do it using Dingux Commander running directly on the RG35XX.

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Fix Corrupt PICO-8 Save Data on Anbernic RG35XX

I’m still loving the Anbernic RG35XX but sometimes thing go wrong and I need to pop the SD card into a computer to delete a file to get some things working again. The OS saves the game state when you close a game, and occasionally with PICO-8 games the save file gets corrupted and you can’t launch the game again until you delete the bad file…

Since there’s a terminal application you could go into that and cd to the correct directory and delete the file, but they keyboard is… well, it’s like a TV remote. Arrow around a keyboard and enter keys one at a time, so there has to be a better way… so I wrote a script.

I just launch SimpleTerminal, and to save keystrokes the script lives right in that directory…

So I type ./fixp8.sh (Or actually just ./fi and then the tab key to autocomplete…

…And then the script runs, and shows some instructions. It also shows the most recently modified file so you can choose to fix it, skip it, or quit the script.

If that file doesn’t belong to the game causing issues, I skip it, and it moves on to the next most recently modified file…

The script only accepts f, s, or q for input. When you are done (hopefully after fixing the bad file) you can quit.

Note that the script doesn’t delete any files, just renames them, in case you “fix” the wrong file. (You can un-fix it easily on a computer by renaming it back. We just add a ~ after the file name.)

I think (and should confirm) that the way the system works, if you launch a game by selecting it and pressing the A button it should try to reload the last saved state, but if you press the Start button, it should start fresh ignoring the save file. It seemed like this didn’t always work… maybe just with PICO-8 games? If you find out, let me know.

In the meantime it’s been really interesting (and a little fun!?) learning how to write and run scripts on this device. I mean, it’s basically Linux. You can even run scripts at startup, and I think I saw that you can get cron installed, which is pretty wild but also not really, because Linux.

(Note: Since I wrote this I found another use case for fixing files, and I’ll follow up with that in another post.)

Here’s the script! 

#!/bin/sh

# where the directory is located
# mms for first card, SDCARD for second card
SAVEDIR="/mnt/SDCARD/Saves/CurrentProfile/saves/fake-08/cdata/"

cd "$SAVEDIR"

# we need a way to get only txt files not txt~ files
FILES=`ls -t *txt | head -n 50`

echo ""
echo "This will fix bad P8 save files."
echo "Fix a file, skip it, or quit."
echo "Fix [F], Skip [S], Quit [Q]."
echo ""

for f in $FILES
do
	while true; do
	    read -p "Fix $f? " fsq
	    case $fsq in
	        [Ff]* ) echo "Fixing $f"; echo ""; mv "$f" "$f~"; break;;
	        [Ss]* ) echo "Skipping $f"; echo""; break;;
	        [Qq]* ) echo "Quitting"; echo""; exit;;
	        * ) echo "Please answer F, S, or Q.";;
	    esac
	done
done
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PICO-8 Favorite Games

I’m going to start off saying I have very little history as a “gamer” when it comes to knowing what the classics are, what came before, and what things are based on. (I don’t even know all the genres.) In many cases I didn’t even read up on these games, I just grabbed the carts and started playing.

All of these games can be found at the PICO-8 web site. I’ve provided links to each below. I play them on an Anbernic RG35XX handheld console, but you can play them on the desktop or in a browser.

A Hat on Time
This game is a blast. It’s a platformer, of which there are many in the PICO-8 world. This is one where you don’t die, or… you do die, over and over again. Unlimited lives! I love that. You need to jump (and swing) over pits and around ash clouds(?) and it’s got simple graphics and minimal colors and it all just works. There are times in this game I get stick and think there’s no way I will go further, but then I figure it out! (Or try 50 times… unlimited lives, remember?)
I give it 8 out of 8 bits!

Barp the Balldragon
First of all, I’m still on the first level! I’m pretty bad at this one, but it’s so damn cute. Barp has some platform work to do, but besides running and jumping be “barps” (burps?) balls at the little creatures who are blocking his way. I’ll keep going on this one or give up. I’m not sure yet.
I give it 5 out of 8 bits!

Captain Neat-O in the Time Nexus
Hey, another platfomer! This one is a rich world with a lot of ground to cover. It’s a tough one, with a lot of creatures and obstacles to get in your way. I’ve put in a good amount of time on this one and more than once I’ve gotten stuck and a little frustrated. It is a fun one though, so I’ll probably keep going.
I give it 5 out of 8 bits!

Feed The Ducks
Okay, this game is wild. You are a cat (bonus points there) and it’s called “Feed The Ducks” so I guess you need to feed some ducks. This one did confuse me a little but I eventually got it. It’s a weird one, but also unique, so it’s a lot of fun. I’m still a little confused by it even after I “won” so I am sure I’ll do it again.
I give it 7 out of 8 bits!

ISOL8: Build & Isolate
Supposedly ISOL8 is an original arcade game inspired by old-school games like *Jezzball* and *Qix*. I have no clue so I’ll believe that. You press the two buttons to make vertical or horizontal lines dividing the screen or sections of the screen based on the lines you’ve made. You need to isolate all the bouncing balls. This is a timing and puzzle(?) game, and it’s a fun low-stakes play.
I give it 7 out of 8 bits!

Murder, Death, Chill
I asm typically not a fan of shooting games, but this one is just so simple and (well, short when I’m playing it) I fire this one up pretty often. You basically move left and right a bit and have to keep shooting (either left or right) when the bad guys come at you. It sounds so simple, and it is! Sometimes simple shooting is all it takes for a good game. Super fun shooting effects dress up the otherwise simple background. (Note: My screenshot is terrible, but the game is not.)
I give it 5 out of 8 bits!

Upward
All you can do is jump. Straight up. You can’t even move left or right (on your own). The graphics are simple, the concept is simple, but it just works. This is another game where timing is critical, and you need to map out your moves before you make them. Oh, besides jumping straight up you can also suicide yourself to start over on a level, which I’ve done many, many times. It gets progressively more difficult, so it’s a great challenge with such a minimal game.
I give it 6 out of 8 bits!

Thanks for reading! This was a fun list to make. The goods news is, I have a lot more games I really like! That means there will be a part two coming soon!