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WinAmp's humble beginnings from this bloggers perspective.

The news of WinAmp has been sending shockwaves with their announcement of finally shutting down the program and closing the doors after 14 years on December 20th, 2013 along with all sister media servers associated with it.  Throughout most of the older internet community and since we haven't posted a blog update in a while we thought that we should give our views and insights about WinAmp since in a very strange way we had WinAmp even BEFORE we had a PC.

We had a version of WinAmp Called "AmiAmp" for the Commodore Amiga computer which possessed a 68020 processor or better the first MP3 we ever got was on some french server on Lyon that had lots of anime p0rn, but for some reason, they also had "The Cranberries - Salvation" in MP3 format on there. It was the only song on that FTP site. If anyone from the Cranberries is reading this

Relax. We did get the CD a few years later. -S

My Amiga 3000 with a 25Mhz 68030 processor was not strong enough to play the mp3 at 128kps stereo, I could only play it in mono with %100 CPU power.  When we eventually stopped drinking the kool-aid and left the Amiga scene and got a PC we of course got Winamp right away.

Read on to continue our diatribes of old software.

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Raspberry Pi with CGMiner making the bitcoins.

My Raspberry Pi runs almost 24/7 with some of the projects that we've done in the past such as OpenSIM and installing Airplay onto it so that we can send music to the amplifier to my living room and even running some P2P programs to get my latest Linux distros faster. Because it runs on a 24/7 basis that means that I'm pissing 3 watts of power non-stop. We decided to out my Pi to work on getting me bitcoin currency.

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Ouya Review gaming console - What does it do? How well does it do it?

This is a mirror of a review I did for Industrial Strength Gaming back in July. Part two will be available there shorty.

It's important to start off the Ouya review with the two greatest questions the military asks of anyone or anything that appears in front their their eyes. Which to answer this call, we will discuss in a two part review. For those who want the TL:DR abridged version of the review I’ll give it to you straight up for this section.

"Pretty console, won’t turn off, crap OS, requires a credit card. But at least they kept their word. And it's cheap. Part two coming soon! - S"

Chapter 2 of 2 is available to read on Industrial Strength Gaming. Check it out!

Read Below cut to get into gruesome detail.

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Wacom - Getting a piece of history working.

One of the things that I used to paint textures as well as art is a very ancient Wacom GD-0912-R pad that I have been using ever since I had a 486. It's a great pad really! I paid about $400 back in the '90s for it. 17 inches of space to draw on making coloring super easy!

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IBM Bad Capacitor love!

Bad Caps can plague almost any system. However, IBM in their later years especially right after y2k was really bad about it. Everything from their IBM servers to even their POS client machines used Nippon KZG capacitors which even if you have a unit sitting around in a warehouse for a certain length of time.

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Capacitor issues galore.

This weekend I serviced one more Samsung 205BW monitor dealing with a very infamous capacitor issue. One which has caused some attention and lawsuits similar to dell and other companies dealing with. A crappy Chinese capacitor company "CapXon" handing out a bunch of mid-range low-temperature caps inside of a confined space where there can be up to 4 or more high voltage back-lights going resulting in the insides of your monitor cooking and respectfully your capacitors overheating as well.

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Well my dealings with eBay would eventually go sour and have a rip-off.

It's just funny that it happened on such a crap product. I wanted to get a battery for my Palm Pre' because surprisingly I actually use it for work for closing out work orders. the battery that's in it works but the charge only lasts for maybe 20 minutes before it powers down. I wanted to get a new battery for it. I've already hacked it bypassing the activation screen so we can at least use the wi-fi and web-browsing capabilities of it.

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Ouya controller price jump. Why?!?

Well, I decided to get the gaming console that sounds like having sex with a crazed Canadian girl from the U.P. and reserved Ouya at the local Gamestop because my friend works there and it helps out with his numbers (If you guys know anyone at a GameStop and you want to make their jobs easier , reserve an odd-ball system like an Ouya).