September 2008 Archives

My latest review for the A.V. Club is up. It’s a look at Air Traffic Chaos for Nintendo DS, a peculiar game for the American market. In Japan, the game is called I am an Air Traffic Controller! (hence the box-art word balloon) and is a fairly successful franchise. Check out the review, and feel free to add your favorite Airplane quote or Sbarro joke to the entertaining comment thread.

A few GONY readers have taken an interesting approach to yesterday’s unexpected dust-up with David Pogue by sending along tips that do his original, perfectly serviceable tip one better. In case you’ve forgotten, Pogue’s original tip was that there’s this site Google that can locate stuff on the Internet—OH GOD NO WAIT—I mean, his original tip was that Google serves as an easy alternative to website’s dedicated search fields, and that you can often get better results by Googling for, say, “amazon futurama” than by typing “futurama” into Amazon’s search.

A couple people have noted that employing the site operator is a slightly better way to achieve this end. That is, instead of typing “amazon futurama” you instead type “site:amazon.com futurama.” That tells Google to only search its index of, you guessed it, amazon.com.

Many of the commenters on Pogue’s blog have advocated this approach, too. The site operator is one of the first lessons in Google-fu, but it is just a touch more complicated than Pogue’s approach, so I can see why he kept it simple for the layperson.

Susan Schweitzer writes in to argue that Pogue really should have talked about search shortcuts:

If Pogue wanted to reveal a really overlooked search feature, he would tell his readers about this:

- Use Firefox.
- Go to a page with a search box.
- Right-click in that search box, and from the resulting pop-up menu, choose “add a Keyword for this search.”
- In the resulting bookmarks menu, type the name of the site, and then a really short keyword (one letter is great); hit enter.
- Put the cursor in the location bar and type the keyword followed by whatever you want to search for.

For example, I could go to wikipedia, right click in their main search box, and use “w” as a keyword. Now, when I want to search Wikipedia, I just type “Command-L” [Alt-D on Windows] to get to the location bar, then type “w david pogue” and I get taken directly to his Wikipedia page.

I use this for so many websites, and in fact when I’m not on my own computer I end up semi-consciously attempting to do this and it pisses me off that other people haven’t set things up this way.

Ding ding ding, Susan wins. I use basically the same approach on Safari with Saft.

You can combine a search shortcut with Google’s site operator to create the search tip to end all search tips. At least, I hope it’s the search tip to end all search tips because I am tired of talking about this.

“He’s dead, Jim.”

Geek Out

Pay your respects. To dead batteries, that is. The beautiful sculpture above is Michael de Broin’s Dead Star. It’s part of Eyebeam’s “Untethered” exhibition that opened yesterday at Eyebeam Atelier (540 W. 21st St.). The exhibition of objects “deprogrammed of their original function” also features a photocopier that takes in the night sky and a “piano that plays the Internet,” whatever that means. I’m eager to see the battery sculpture in person because I’m guessing that a photograph doesn’t fully convey the sense of scale. We all know how big a AA cell is, but with so many of them in one place, the overall size is tough to conceive. In the meantime, I can’t stop looking at this photograph—gorgeous.

Geek In

Self-serving plug time. Keepin’ it in the family this weekend. For knitters, Mochimochi Land recently released two geek-oriented patterns, Resisty the Resistor and Captain Capacitor. Best of all, they’re free. GONY had a hand in the concept for these patterns, being married to the site proprietor and all. Mochimochi Land has a bunch of free patterns and some even cooler ones for five bucks a pop.

And finally, when you’re not angering popular technology journalists this weekend, feel free to watch and rewatch the Keyboard Napoleons video, and tell all your friends about it. I’m shooting for 1,000,000 pageviews by midnight Sunday. Realistic, no?

This is pretty awesome. Put aside the silly tone of the previous post; this update is 100% true. David Pogue has responded by email to my post about his enigmatic nature. Because he complains about the lack of comments on this site¹, I assume Pogue meant for his views to be represented in public. He writes:

John, since you don’t permit comments (why?), I’ll have to answer your blog by email.

The problem is, you completely missed the point of my tip (or you’re deliberately ignoring it to make me look stupid).

The tip is this: Use Google INSTEAD of the sites’ internal Search boxes.

This is not something that’s obvious, as you can see by the 80 comments for that post. ” You are SO right… Not only is this tip both so obvious and so overlooked, but it works like a charm,” says one.

I imagine that most people, when they want to search Amazon, NYTimes, Facebook, eBay, or whatever, go to that site FIRST and use ITS search box.

My point is that you can save time and get better results by NOT doing that.

In your post, you totally mischaracterized the point of my tip.

Dp

In two subsequent emails, which arrived before I could reply to the first one, Pogue sent along links to blogs that he says accurately captured the spirit of his tip (in contrast to GONY’s reckless tomfoolery, I gather). I pass those links on without comment:

• “om musing: The Mother of All Search Functions”
• “Eolake Stobblehouse Blog: Search Tip”

Pogue is absolutely right. I exaggerated the tenor of his tip, thus misrepresenting it, for the sake of a joke. I wasn’t trying to “make him look stupid,” per se, but the joke was at his expense, so he’s likely not interested in how I parse it. Fair enough!

Pogue says his Google tip isn’t obvious, but of course it is, and even his cut-and-pasted comment says so. I think Pogue’s real point is that just because a tip is obvious doesn’t mean it is intuitive. Indeed, it is an excellent tip, a simple search technique that’s often overlooked. Its excellence and funniness are not mutually exclusive.

For the record, although I did everything short of erecting a shrine to David Pogue in the previous post, let it be restated that I think Pogue is a top-tier technology writer, and have thought so for a good long time.

I don’t know if Pogue actually thought I misinterpreted the thrust of his tip or if he just didn’t like that I made a joke out of his uncanny ability to write for eggheads and rank novices with equal zeal. In any case, the record shall now stand corrected: The lead tech critic for the greatest news organization in the world did not post “to let us know that he’d found this site Google that can locate stuff on the Internet,” as I wrote.

As an olive branch, here is a more flattering photograph of Pogue than the one I used in the previous post.

I now await the inevitable email blast from Walt Mossberg, who probably didn’t like that hyperbaric chamber nonsense.²

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1. To answer Pogue’s question about why there are no comments on GONY, it’s because I am, at various times, too busy or too lazy to moderate comments, and I think moderation is essential to maintaining a quality site. (So does Pogue.) I very much enjoy and welcome the comments I receive by email, though, and I post the smartest ones, as I’ve done here. ↑

2. Note that Pogue didn’t jump to Walt’s defense! ↑

A friend recently said to me that Chicago was the center of American media criticism, a remark he made because he is a stuck-up middle-American reverse elitist, and also because it is true. I was thrown for a moment, both because I’m the regular kind of elitist and because I’m so interested in technology, where New Yorkers Walt Mossberg and David Pogue stand at the epicenter of their field.

Mossberg is your standard tech reviewer. He lives in a hyperbaric chamber, from which he dictates his columns to his robot assistant “K-T.” He recently had a camera installed in the chamber so that he could make web videos, which I find annoying because he pronounces the word “program” as “pro-gruhm,” and he says that word a lot.¹ Mossberg also says that he appears on TV, on the Fox Business Network, a channel nobody has ever watched, so it is impossible to verify his claims. Once a year he undergoes an arduous decompression process to hold heartwarming reunions at a conference called “D.” Last year he brought together Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; this year Mossberg reunited the cast of Family Matters. He is ¼ bird. All in all, a pretty normal guy.

That brings us to the other half of this titanic duo, David Pogue. In contrast to Mossberg, and in all seriousness, Pogue is an enigma. I find Pogue to be the superior reviewer both in print and on video, where he crafts silly mini-movies to explain new products. Silly is good. Pogue is good. My question is, how much does he actually know about technology? Is he closer to the brainy engineer Woz end of the spectrum or the big-picture Jobs end?

I ask because after years of reading Pogue’s email newsletter and then his New York Times blog, I still cannot gauge the depth of his technical acumen. Pogue seems to alternate between postings that reveal a penetrating insight into technology and posts that would prompt my mother to yell “newb”!² My attempts to understand what makes Pogue tick have become a fun, long-running puzzle.

Every time I think I have him nailed, he surprises me. When he put together a cogent survey of the first Android phone mere hours after its release, rattling off cellular network stats with ease, I concluded, case closed, the guy knows his stuff.

Then, today, Pogue posted to let us know that he’d found this site Google that can locate stuff on the Internet. Pogue discovered that if you type “amazon freakonomics” into Google, it will take you to the Freakonomics page on Amazon. He felt it necessary to alert his readers immediately. Here is the closing line of the essay:

Google may or may not be evil, but wow, is it getting good at search.

Gee, you don’t say.

How is it possible that a guy with extensive knowledge of electronics and the Internet is suddenly awestruck by the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button? Who is the true Pogue?

The question doesn’t matter in any material sense. I’m not coming at this from some puerile perspective of “geek cred.” The guy is great at his job, so who cares if he could debug a video card driver or not? All I can say is that as a longtime admirer of Pogue (even since his early Macworld days), I have to know. I have to know what he knows. And I fear I never will.

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1. This isn’t technically a non-standard pronunciation, I know. It’s still weird. I think it would bother me less if it were part of an overall accent, but this is the only word Mossberg says that’s a little “off.” It reminds me of a film-history professor I had in college who spoke normally except that she pronounced the word “theater” as “thee-AY-ter.” As you can imagine, this word came up an awful lot, and it drove me nuts. ↑

2. I’m sure my mother has no idea what the word “newb” means, but I guess that makes the point. ↑

Most of us have a passing familiarity with the Press Your Lucks and $25,000 Pyramids of game-show history, but there are countless other gems that, for whatever reason, have faded from memory.

Since the game show is TV’s most ephemeral genre, its fans have an especially active community on YouTube. The uploaders—a mix of hardcore tape traders and casual fans who happened upon an old VHS trove—have brought back to light shows that, in some cases, haven’t aired anywhere for decades. In this series, I’ll take a look at a few forgotten would-be classics that I think hold up well.

Split Second

Host: Tom Kennedy

Originally aired: 1972-1975. (A later version, hosted by Monty Hall, was syndicated in the mid ’80s.)

Forgotten because: Most episodes were, as far as anybody knows, destroyed because ABC recycled the master tapes. Its 1980s remake was underwhelming.

What makes it great: Speed. The “lightning round” is a game-show cliché, yet not many shows have used it to full effect like Split Second did. The show acts like one long lightning round, with a format that practically guarantees an exciting finish. Each question has three correct answers, and the value of a correct answer goes up if your opponents miss. The money is secondary, though, as players are just jockeying for position in the final showdown.

It's a so-so idea with flawless execution. The questions are creatively written, and the direction is really tight. That quick pan from Kennedy to the board, used throughout, is the type of camerawork that gives the show some juice. You don’t see it much on modern game shows, perhaps because it can get over-the-top and cheap-looking, but Split Second’s director nails it.

Kennedy is an interesting case. I'd say he's easily one of the top five emcees ever, but he’s remembered much less than contemporaries like Dick Clark, Bill Cullen, etc. One major reason is that his signature show, Name That Tune, never sees new life in reruns because of music licensing issues.

Split Second’s Achilles heel was its bonus round. The trouble with such an exciting main game is that it’s a tough act to follow. Creators Stefan Hatos and Monty Hall punted with a “here’s a key, now pick a car and see if it starts!” round. Lame.

Further viewing:

• The conclusion of the show posted above. The sound and video sync is way off, which always drives me nuts, and it’s especially galling on a quick show like this. Try the poor man’s A/V synchronizer: Open a second copy of the video in another tab and turn the sound all the way down. Play them both, watching the silent one. When the video gets ahead of the audio, pause it for a second until the audio catches up.
  
  This is an exciting episode; the champion on the left is going for a guaranteed car after losing the bonus round four days in a row, but he runs into some trouble by some upstart named, no kidding, Valiant. Even Kennedy gets caught up in the action and has to calm himself down. Split Second at its best.
• An earlier episode, in black and white and mighty blurry, but the audio’s in good shape, so you get a better feel for the pace:
  Here are parts two and three.

Arr, this pirate-talk business be gettin’ mighty old, mateys! Somebody kill this holiday now. Mateys. Arr.

Geek Out

Ring-a-ding-ding. I feel a little let down when I see the words “false color image” below spectacular space imagery. I understand why they have to juice the pictures, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing to learn that space isn’t always a technicolor wonderland. The images of Saturn sent back to Earth by the Cassini-Huygens mission, on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History (CPW & 79th St.), are special because they show off the planet’s true colors. We know Saturn as a tannish-orange planet, but it also has a striking steel blue that gets obscured from our distant vantage point. Yes, there are some false-color shots in the AMNH exhibit, too. Still, it’s nice to meet a planet that’s willing to dispense with the airbrushing.

Geek In

Discover your inner gamer. I typically eschew the “What character from Gossip Girl are YOU?”-type quizzes, for obvious reasons, but quiz site GamerDNA is actually a clever idea. The site offers a battery of tests to determine what kind of RPG player you are and then not only recommends games but also tries to connect you with like-minded gamers. I’ve never been too much of an MMORPG sort because I never wanted to bother with the social networking aspect. I do enough social networking in the real world. GamerDNA has the potential to take a lot of the drudgery out of the process.

The site recently got publicity for having completed its 500,000th test, and its fragile Rails framework is not handling the traffic too well. Things have calmed since this afternoon, though, so if you can get through, the Bartle Test of Gamer Pscyhology is the most essential one. I was skeptical at first—the test has a whiff of Myers-Briggs pseudoscience about it—but it categorized me pretty well, pegging me as an “Explorer” who avoids unnecessary violence. Make love, not Warcraft.

You’ve probably read countless articles about guys like Digg founder Kevin Rose or YouTube CEO Chad Hurley. These guys get showered with praise for creating online communities that facilitate “conversation,” the watchword of Web 2.0. How unfair. The bigwigs collect the accolades while we ignore the people who really drive the conversation.

I’m talking about the trolls, the flamebaiters, the illiterate “fanboys” and the malcontents who call them out. The Internet would feel so empty without them. These humble warriors wake up every morning to unload their rage on the Internet in the form of withering comments. Sure, they seem cruel, but they want to make the world better for themselves and their children. Mostly for themselves.

In the debut of “Keyboard Napoleons,” I document the career of Eric Twillman, the original “This isn’t news” guy. You’ve probably met Eric, or one of his many acolytes, around the web. Whenever Eric believes that a blogger is drifting off topic or suffering a lapse in quality, Eric steps in to comment, “This isn’t news” (or, if he’s feeling rhetorical, “How is this news?”). It’s Eric’s gentle reminder that the people of the Internet are there to inform and entertain him.

In his career, Eric has deemed more than 3 million articles to be “not news,” and he shows no signs of stopping.

I welcome comments, especially from followers of the Twillman Way, on the video’s YouTube page.

Most of us have a passing familiarity with the Press Your Lucks and $25,000 Pyramids of game-show history, but there are countless other gems that, for whatever reason, have faded from memory.

Since the game show is TV’s most ephemeral genre, its fans have an especially active community on YouTube. The uploaders—a mix of hardcore tape traders and casual fans who happened upon an old VHS trove—have brought back to light shows that, in some cases, haven’t aired anywhere for decades. In this series, I’ll take a look at a few forgotten would-be classics that I think hold up well.

Trump Card

Host: Jimmy Cefalo

Originally aired: 1990-91 season, in syndication.

Forgotten because: It was a straight Q&A that, despite surprisingly good production values, couldn’t last in an era when both Q&A shows and the Donald Trump brand were at an ebb.

What makes it great: Its unapologetic Trump-ness. In 1990, the ego of casino/real-estate mogul Donald Trump hadn’t yet grown to the point where he fancied himself a game show host, but in every other respect, Trump literally placed his imprimatur on this show. Every set element was cast in solid gold (accent color: gold), and like every 26th episode of Sesame Street, Trump Card was sponsored by the letter “T.” The podium is a masterpiece of self-idolatry.

A few game shows have been recorded at casinos over the decades, and the resulting feel is usually seediness—the mid-1970s Las Vegas episodes of Let’s Make a Deal, for instance, lost a lot of the show’s homey charm. Trump Card was pretty well made, so it avoids the “tip your waitresses!” vibe for the most part, but there are exceptions, like the moment when Jimmy Cefalo reminds the studio audience to mark their bingo cards as the game goes on. Otherwise the aesthetic is more gaudy than cheap.

And then there’s Cefalo himself, in a tux for every episode because it’s so much classier that way. Cefalo was (and is) an accomplished sportscaster, but the game show is a different beast. There’s a nice swagger about Cefalo, and he’s far from the worst host a national game show has seen. In fact, he’s almost perfect until he has to read off those cards, those precious cards that he grips so tight, as if they are the last branch keeping him from falling off into the oblivion of this career choice he wishes he never made.

In the clip above, Cefalo’s troubles start early. I count 75 stumbles (give or take) in the contestant interview alone. He wasn’t helped by a writing staff that apparently hated him: The second round’s “In Other Words” category seems designed to torture the cotton-mouthed emcee. And watch at 7:48 when Cefalo picks up a question and stares in horror, for almost three seconds of dead air, at the words “Friedrich Nietzsche.” I can picture the gleeful writers coming up with that question at the end of a long night. “Ooh! Ooh! I know! Let’s make the pretty-boy say ‘Nietzsche’!” “Yes! And we’ll make the answer ‘Zarathustra’!”

My second favorite thing about the clip: After Cefalo talks up the “Art of the Deal” category (“Our famous ‘deal’ category”), the contestants proceed to avoid it entirely. Swing and a miss, Trump.

Further viewing:

• The conclusion of the episode featured above, featuring an excellent contestant:
• Clips of Bob’s Full House, the British show on which Trump Card was based. It’s essentially Trump Card as envisioned by a clinically insane 7-year-old:
  “Legs Eleven? Well blown!” Yeah, I could not be more confused.

What a delightful review of The Last Guy for PS3 at The Onion A.V. Club! That new young man they have over there certainly is charming and handsome and me.

Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson, “Howell Verdict: RIAA wins $40,850 P2P judgment”:

Howell is ordered to pay $350 in court costs — an incredible bargain when set against a whopping $40,500 in statutory damages. In addition, he will pay 2.12 percent interest on the unpaid balance until the entire amount is paid off; in essence, Howell has just taken out a pricey new car loan, except that instead of a car, he gets a big pile of nothing to park in his driveway.

I like this one. The jist of it is: “This thing over here is kind of like a car, except unlike it in every meaningful way.” It’s the self-effacing car analogy.

Also, be on the lookout for car analogies in the Spore DRM conflagration. Nothing, and I mean nothing, brings out the automotive analogists like DRM. This comment on a 1UP story about the controversy is a strong example:

If you had to call Ford every time you got an oil change to reactivate your car, nobody would buy Ford cars. So, why is this ok?

For some reason, when a make of car is mentioned in a blog commenter’s car analogy, 90 percent of the time it’s Ford. Why don’t any tech commentators ever make clumsy comparisons to a Saab, or a Pontiac? This must drive the GM marketing people CRAZY.

“I have an existential map. It has ‘You are here’ written all over it.”¹

It’s the triumphant return of Do Something This Weekend! What have you done the last two weekends? Locked yourself in a closet and waited for me to come back, no doubt. There, there. The bad times are over.

Geek Out

Locate Ukraine on a map. I admit that I don’t often find myself at the city’s Ukraine Museum (222 E. 6th St.), and in fact didn’t know it existed before today, but they have a nifty exhibit going right now. “The Mapping of Ukraine: European Cartography and Maps of Early Modern Ukraine, 1550-1799” looks at a part of the world where your mental map is probably a little fuzzy. I like maps, and tracking the evolution of maps over time, watching how the evolution of science and politics shape the picture, is endlessly fascinating.

I think it’s impossible not to enjoy a good map. In college, I really wanted a big, beautiful map of the world to put on my dorm room wall, but I could never find just the right one. One night, I went to my girlfriend’s room to have a tough conversation; I wanted to break up. You know how in sitcoms, whenever somebody has something difficult to say, the other party always interrupts, “Wait, before you say anything, let me tell you something that makes your plight so much worse! In a wacky, situationally comedic manner!” Just as I was launching into breakup mode, my girlfriend stopped everything to present me with an early birthday present, unfurling a gorgeous, PERFECT map of our fine planet. “Happy birthday! Now, what were you saying?”

Don’t worry, I did the honest thing and went through with the agonizing deed, but I could hear the laughtrack in the background. (I also pictured myself as Charlie Sheen because that guy is just a cut-up!)

Hold on, this post is supposed to be about weekend activities? What? Where the hell am I? Sorry, I’m still re-learning the ropes.

Geek In

Welcome to the world of TOMORROW! I was talking to a self-proclaimed “nerd” this week who was unaware that new Futurama was available for sale to starving audiences. I was aghast. Consider this a public service announcement: If you have not purchased the Futurama features on DVD, Bender’s Big Score (which is good) and The Beast with a Billion Backs (which is even better), do so immediately. They should tide you over until House premieres on Tuesday.

Don’t tell me you’ve never seen House… [Situationally comedic forehead slap here]

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1. According to Steven Wright, who has a ton of classic map jokes. Another favorite: “I have a map of the United States. It’s original size. It says ‘one mile equals one mile.’” ↑

Most of us have a passing familiarity with the Press Your Lucks and $25,000 Pyramids of game-show history, but there are countless other gems that, for whatever reason, have faded from memory.

Since the game show is TV’s most ephemeral genre, its fans have an especially active community on YouTube. The uploaders—a mix of hardcore tape traders and casual fans who happened upon an old VHS trove—have brought back to light shows that, in some cases, haven’t aired anywhere for decades. In this series, I’ll take a look at a few forgotten would-be classics that I think hold up well.

Double Dare (Alex Trebek)

Originally aired: Dec. 1976 to April 1977.

Forgotten because: It didn’t last very long, and both the host and the title are better known for other shows.

What makes it great: One way to identify a dedicated observer of game shows is to start talking about Double Dare. If he stops you to ask, “Which Double Dare, Summers or Trebek?” then you have an aficionado on your hands. Marc Summers’ sloppy Nickelodeon classic is beloved by children of the 1980s, but it shouldn’t overshadow Trebek’s early emcee gig on this completely different show.

In the main game, contestants tried to guess a given person, place, or thing with as few clues as possible, gaining the opportunity to “dare” and “double dare” their opponents if they answered correctly. Whoever won the game went on to stump the Spoilers—a bunch of eggheads who tried to guess an answer based on the clues the contestant chose for them.

It’s a fairly good concept made better by inspired production decisions. From the “every day is Christmas!” color scheme to the warbling isolation booths to the shifty-eyed PhDs in the “SPOILERS” box (the contestants were usually oddballs as well), this was a show that knew how to have fun. Most only know Trebek from his longtime gig on Jeopardy! and thus peg him as something of a stiff, but that’s misleading. Trebek is the master of adjusting his style to suit the show, so while he effects an erudite air for Jeopardy!, on Double Dare he settled into a mix of serious and silly that matched a quirky format.

Double Dare was never remade, but it was thoroughly recycled. As mentioned, the host and title saw plenty of exposure in later years. The theme song and intro sequence, right down to the flashy-four-square “special effects,” were used on the ultimately more successful Card Sharks starting in 1978. Even the brrrrrrup! sound of opening isolation booth shutters had an illustrious post-DD career: It became the distinctive sound of the Penny Ante game on The Price is Right.

Further viewing: Double Dare airs on GSN every Sunday night (Monday morning) at 1:00 and 1:30 a.m. Eastern time. Set your DVR.

On YouTube:

• A couple of good spoiler rounds.
• A main game round that uses all ten clues.

When I was in my late teens, I spent much of one summer saving up for a Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine. The guys who unloaded the freight truck were bemused to find a 17-year-old kid signing the delivery slip. One of them said, “When I was your age, I was saving to buy a car!” Well, I already had a car, and also I was a humongous nerd.

I thought it would be fun to have the machine because it was a blast to play and a great collector’s item. Then, a week after it arrived, the machine stopped spitting out balls, making play somewhat difficult. I called the place where I bought the pin, and they dispatched a service guy. He replaced a fuse in the backboard and charged me $40. “Hell, I could’ve done that myself,” I said to the repairman, just a few minutes after he left.

The upshot was my discovery that maintaining a pinball machine is the real joy of owning one. I tapped into a vibrant online pinball community and learned how to fix a weak flipper or a broken optical switch. My dad noted that the machine was, as it turned out, a lot like the good old-fashioned American teenager’s first car, given that I spent so much time under the hood tweaking the machine like a beloved hot-rod. Of course, there are differences. For one, it’s tougher to pick up dames with a Star Trek pinball machine.

A pinball owner is always fighting the fact that these machines were not designed for long-term use. The inner workings were made as reliable as possible to a point, but the manufacturers wanted bars and arcades to trade the tables in for new models, which was unlikely to happen if the old rig was still collecting quarters. The factories also had to keep costs down, which meant that Williams, Gottlieb, et al., often used cheaper, less durable components than their engineers might have liked.

Over a decade of ownership, the problems with my ST:TNG mounted to the point where they couldn’t be ignored. The machine would, for example, turn off and reboot itself if you happened to hit both flippers at the same time (a common problem on mid-1990s Williams machines). So this summer, I decided to give it a complete overhaul. The machine is still at my family’s New Hampshire home—lack of square footage puts a damper on so many pinball collectors’ dreams—so for about one weekend a month I headed up to solder, sand, replace, rewire, etc.

After all this, I put everything back together, and I was reminded why the D.I.Y. movement embodied by publications like Make and Instructables is so exciting. After working with your own hands on a complicated project, nothing beats the thrill of that Frankenstein moment when you flip the switch and awaken the beast. “Holy crap, it works!”

I highly recommend pinball as a project for the technically inclined if you have the time, space, and money. (It doesn’t have to be a wallet-busting hobby, but it’s not cheap, either.) Pinball maintenance hones a broad-based skill set. It combines mechanical and electronic tinkering, and there’s a bit of art to boot—most pinball tables have amazingly detailed visuals. Here’s a set of bookmarks to get you started, and expect more pinball coverage on Geek Out New York in the near future.

Step 1: Find a machine. The Mr. Pinball classifieds are a good place to start your search, along with Craigslist. As you browse the offerings, cross-check them on the Internet Pinball Database to get an idea of what the machine looks like. Most classified listings have only fuzzy pictures, if any. Pinball machines are hard to photograph. The IPDB is also a fun way to browse for games you might like to track down for your collection.

In New York, pinball dealer Crazy Levi has a great reputation, but he only sells fully restored machines, which in my view takes away half the fun. (If you just want a machine to play rather than fix up, though, Levi’s your man.)

Step 2: Fix it up. I often reference the bogglingly thorough technical information (for machines of all eras) at pinrepair.com. The guys behind pinrepair.com have also made a series of videos called This Old Pinball that are not just educational but also pleasingly goofy and weird. Even though the production values aren’t Lucasfilm-esque, as the trailer for TOP #7 below shows, they offer a huge amount of information in between the gags. Video may be mildly NSFW, especially if your boss hates pinball.

Step 3: Play it. If you’re not nudging the machine when you play (i.e., “Body English”), you’re a novice. If you always hit both flippers at the same time, you’re a sucker. The IPDB’s primer on pinball skills will probably surprise most pinball beginners with the range and depth of playing techniques you can use to conquer a game. Here’s a textbook demonstration of one such technique, the difficult but handy bangback:

My favorite part of the bangback video is that the player appears to be wearing padding on his hand for the sole purpose of executing this maneuver.

Now defunct, the old Pinball Pasture site had a more extensive range of tutorials, and luckily the Internet Archive preserved a copy.

I’m in jury duty this week for the fine city of New York, or the fine county, or the fine state. I can’t tell. I’m proud to serve some government entity named New York.

All the jury waiting rooms have free wireless internet access. That might seem like a standard perk, but in the court buildings, which have all the modern styling of a ’65 Corvair, it was a surprise nonetheless.

Yet web content downloaded via said Wi-Fi is filtered according to capricious rules. One seemingly forbidden term is “games”: Almost any URL that contains the word “game” or might contain gaming content is redirects you to the New York Court System site without explanation. The Metacritic home page is fine, but click on the “Games” section and you’re right back to CourtHelp. Yesterday, I happened to have an urgent need to look at the video game industry’s release schedules for September, so this limitation proved very frustrating.

The only game-related page I was able to view was the Onion AV Club Games section. I have no idea why this is.

I wonder if this allergy to games is related to the 2006 incident in which Mayor Bloomberg fired a guy for playing solitaire while on the city’s clock. Or maybe employees don’t have any filtering at all, and this is just to keep potential jurors from letting Snood interfere with their important duties of sitting and waiting.

Also blocked for some reason: Daily Motion, and any embedded videos hosted by that site. Not blocked: every other video site on earth. New York Court System filtering goblin, is there any method to your madness?

Today’s cartoony presentation of the new Google Chrome browser was a smorgasbord of automotive analogies. Graphical analogies, no less! It was not hard to choose the strangest one.

Old virtual machines = Volkswagen bug. Understood. Then the other shoe drops.

All right, I get that the guy in the middle is supposed to be email. Then the guy to the mailman’s right is apparently some sort of nerd. A little broad, but OK. I’m still with you, kind of.

What about the guy on the left, though, with the big hair? My best guess is that he’s some fatcat executive. First question: What does he have to do with JavaScript? I’m thinking maybe he’s the embodiment of Google Docs, but that’s a stretch. He breaks the metaphor even more than the nerd.

Second, more pressing question: WHAT IN TARNATION IS HE DOING BACK THERE? At least Anthropomorphized Email Guy and Central Casting Nerd are taking the close quarters with a quiet dignity. Aqua Velva CEO seems to be downright enjoying himself, furthering the dismay of his colleagues.

The longer I look at this bizarre image, the more I am convinced that my crusade against car analogies is just.