Monday 12-29-25 Pinball Projects, Diamond Painting & More

 

 

We had just another manic Monday. Our 80 degrees days have stopped for a few days. It felt more like a December day. The low was 38 degrees and the high was 44 degrees. It was cloudy all day with a wind so it was chilly.

Larry started the day out by cleaning his workroom by putting his tools away. He decided to put home assistant on the shelf for a little while. He got it to work but it's very complex to setup and while they now have a voice assistant it is not very good and even more difficult to get working. Almost everyone on YouTube and the various forums agree the average person couldn't make it work. Larry loves figuring stuff out but when he can't he will watch videos and find a Reddit group to ask questions. He used videos to setup home assistant but some of the videos are outdated and don't work anymore. To make it work most people still have to use devices such as Alexa, Google and Apple. He boxed up the Echo hub and put it on a shelf. He'll probably play with it again in six months or a year. Maybe by then it will be better.   

Larry did a couple of pinball projects on the mini cabinet. First was getting rid of the speakers rattling. These speakers are actually called exciters, they provide both sound and a small bit of of vibrating feedback, when the ball bounces on a bumper in the front left corner the feedback goes to the front left corner exciter. The same is true for all four corners, each corner has an exciter. He had to adjust the mounting a bit on each of them to stop the rattling. 

 When Larry built the cabinet he installed a shaker which makes the cabinet shake when you do an activity in a game. Example is while playing Attack from Mars when you destroy a Martian spaceship the cabinet will shake all over. This noise makes the game more exciting. The shaker was not working, he found that somehow the adjuster had gotten turned down, it might have happened when he took the machine apart to fix the power supply.

While he was working on it he also backed it up and updated the software. Then he played a couple of games to make sure everything worked on in the cabinet. He played seven different games of pinball. They were Attack From Mars, James Bond 60th Anniversary, Fish Tales, World Joker Poker, Batman Forever, Road Show and Cirqus Voltaire. Larry got on the board while playing Batman Forever and James Bond 60th Anniversary. He had fun playing pinball.

Mini cabinet

  

Later on I played the same games on the mini cabinet. While playing James Bond 60th Anniversary I became high score #2, Batman Forever I became high score #4 and Cirqus Voltaire I joined the cirqus. I didn't play any games on the big cabinet. This was the first time I played Batman Forever because it's not on the big cabinet.

 

Attack From Mars

 

Batman Forever

 

Cirqus Voltaire

 

Fish Tales

 

James Bond 60th Anniversary

 

Red & Ted's Road Show

 

World Joker Poker

I played Daily Challenges of Solitaire and Mahjong. The event was Event: World Tour Mini of 10 games. It took me 59 minutes and 35 seconds, which put me in 29th place in my group. I played Angry Birds Friends and Angry Birds 2.

I worked out for a half hour with the Synth Riders. Today I did three songs twice, which were Never Gonna Die, New Comedown and hard To Love. I didn't get any Outstanding scores or new high scores. They were tough songs to work with but I had fun.

 

Hard To Love

 

Never Gonna Die

 

New Comedown

I played one game of Asteroid Outpost on the Bounce Arcade program. I earned a gold trophy. I played four multiballs and mined five times and was successful three times. I started all the ships modules and started the engine. It was a great game.

 

Asteroid Outpost

I worked on Dog in Hammock diamond painting. I finished doing the dog part of it. 

 

Dog in Hammock

In the evening we watched Ava on Prime. It was good, certainly could have been better. It was about a female hit woman. When Larry went to bed I watched Star Wars Episode III- Revenge of the Sith. I ended up doing 2,000 steps.