Raiders of the Game Boy Four Player Adapter

The Game Boy can be connected in pairs for 2-player games, and it can do 4-player if you have this hub-like gadget:

I’ve never played 4-player on any of the dozen or so games that support it. I’ve never used the gadget, but I do have one, and I got around to wondering how it works.

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TypeScript: You Can Read It

TypeScript is billed as JavaScript with types, which is great and high tech and useful and all, but I really like that you can just write code that describes a class rather than writing code that meticulously constructs a class-like contraption.

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Custom Aftermarket Blinkenlights

Have you ever thought, “My computer needs way more flashing lights.”?

Me too!

Now, I’m not talking about meaningless, gaudy special effects. I’m talking about proper blinkenlights.

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How to Speak NeoPixel

Adafruit calls them NeoPixels, but their real name is WS2812 or SK6812. They’re handy little RGB LEDs with built-in controllers.

They use a single-wire anisochronous self-clocking signal, so controlling them requires some precise timing. There’s an easy-to-use Arduino library available, but I wanted to use a PIC16F1455, so I had to get into the protocol.

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Spooky nulls in an ArrayList

I had a crash reported for one of my Android applications. Thankfully that includes a stack trace, because I would never have found this bug without it. I learned something new about concurrently accessing an ArrayList.

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