Re: Monthly chat December 2018
Hello all!
I hope everybody had a wonderful time spending Christmas with friends, family, and loved ones. I sure did. I went out of state to visit some family on Christmas Eve, in which we did lots of activities.
Before that I had a really awesome time on Discord talking to some of my friends. I talked with them on voice chat about various things like music, video games, and everything in between, one of them even wanted to stream our conversation and stream it to her Twitch channel!
As for presents, I received a few things.
Ever since I got my Raspberry Pi last year to set up and play classic retro games using RetroPie, I wanted to take it a bit further on the aesthetic side of things. I wanted to make the outside of the device look like a true retro console, since the starter kit I bought, which was the CanaKit 32 GB Raspberry Pi 3 B starter kit, came with just a generic plastic case. It worked well for a while, but the generic plastic cases aren't my favorite. There were a ton of cases that satisfied my wants, but some of them were a bit too pricey, especially for shipping, and I didn't want to wait a couple of days for them to ship to the States, even when we have Amazon Prime. So, I ended up buying a case called the Super Kuma 9000, made by a company called Kintaro. It's another Raspberry Pi case that makes it look like the North American Super Nintendo on the outside. The best part is that the case has a PCB board on the top of it, and it has built-in connections to the Pi's GPIO pins. When that's connected to the pins, it enables you to have real working power and reset buttons that work safely. They use a shutdown script that you install in order to make the buttons functional, so it mimics the behavior of a real console. One of the things I like about it, and it's a big selling point for it, was that it included a massive and beautiful large aluminum heatsink that goes over the entire board, and it covers the CPU and the Ethernet chip, and it kept the Pi really nice and cool during my time using it, even when overclocked. Best part is I didn't have to wait a long time for it to ship to my house, since we have Amazon Prime.
The second thing I bought is a USB controller. It's made by a company called RetroFlag, who are known for their NesPi case, which is another case that makes it look like an NES, complete with working power and reset buttons. They made a couple of USB controllers to go along with another case that came out this year, the SuperPi Case, which is another SNES case, but unlike the Super Kuma 9000, it has USB ports on the front where the controller ports were on the original SNES. The controller and case came in 2 variants, the North American SNES design, and the Japanese Super Famicom and European SNES design. I ended up picking the North American design, just because it looked perfect with my setup. The controller itself feels really nice in the hand, and the buttons feel equally as great, they aren't mushy like some other USB controllers I've seen, and it works well on my PC and on my Pi.
Last thing I bought was a 5 volt 3 amp power supply for my Raspberry Pi, made by a company called NorthPada, because I was constantly getting undervoltage warnings with my CanaKit 2.5A power supply all of a sudden, especially when doing some heavy transfering or when scraping my games through SSH or the command line, which is when I get metadata for a game like publisher, developer, game title, and screenshots, and optionally, a video preview that plays when that game is highlighted in the game selection screen. This new power supply has worked really great when I was using it, and I haven't had any warnings ever since I received it.
Last thing I received were some Bluetooth headphones made by SOHO, and in my little time using them, they've been working really well. Of course I had difficulty figuring out which buttons did what at first, but so far I have no trouble at all.
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