A "new" variant of cheap walkman-esque cassette player has appeared on the AliExpress pages, and I've ordered one. The interesting new angle here is that this one supports recording, where the mechanisms in most of them currently only have play heads and are very stripped down - even though they often have USB audio controllers in there that show up as both input and output devices.

Anyway, when it gets here I'll give it a good test and if it actually works then a bunch of you may get mixtapes for Christmas haha

I have Performed A Task that was overdue and the grass on the nature strip is at a much more sensible level now. I've flattened both battery packs for the mower though, so I'm now on an enforced break.

I really should get a couple more of those.

I guess I need a PS2 component video cable now, I seem to only have composite kicking around. I suppose I've only ever used HDMI on the PS3s so I never needed one.

Turns out my Playstation 2 actually can read discs, just needed some cleaning and encouragement. It seems to take a while to recognise anything, but once it starts it keeps working.

This is great, it suggests there's nothing actually wrong with the hardware, the issues are probably just down to calibration.

I did, after all, find this Playstation by the side of the road after it'd been rained on at least once.

Anyway, using my standard test DVD to run it in a bit. It's a Region 0 disc so it works in everything (theoretically).

Mike, do you really want to disassemble a decade-old laptop and build and install custom firmware for it just to replace the splash screen it shows for a few seconds on startup with a custom image of your choosing?

Yes.

Well, do you think you're going to be able to make time for this somehow by displacing a lot of actually important things you need to be doing?

Probably also yes.