In today's episode of "But will it run Zork?" a chap named Ulysses got the vintage game to run on a TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) -- a project he built to show off at the Bay Area Maker Fairelast weekend. In a move we truly respect, he hunted down a rotary phone lifted straight out of the era when Zork was conceived (that would be the late '70s / early '80s). Then, he modified a modem so that the acoustically coupled TDD could be interfaced -- transmitting at a slow 45.5 baud to make it easy for even ponderous readers to keep up, one line at a time on the TDD's narrow display. Once this was sorted, things weren't exactly smooth sailing when Ulysses started fitting the compressed Zork story file into the system. At first, he tried using an Arduino Pro and an Arduino Mega, but found that neither had enough memory to accommodate the compressed Zork story file. Ultimately, he took a different tack and settled on an embeddable FitPC. We'd love nothing more than to see this thing in action, but in lieu of a video we highly suggest carving out a few minutes and perusing Ulysses' photo blog at the source link.
Pentax's Optio WG-1 GPS point-and-shoot satisfied geotaggers out of the box, but owners of its K-5, K-r and 645D DSLRs have had to make do with third-party taggers like the PhotoTrackr or Eye-Fi. The new hotshoe-mounted O-GPS1 module fixes that oversight by recording latitude, longitude, altitude, Coordinated Universal Time and shooting angle. Everyday snappers might find an extra hotshoe attachment cumbersome, but astro-photography enthusiasts could well be enticed by the device's interesting "ASTROTRACER" function. This helps you take clearer photos of celestial bodies by using the in-built sensors to calculate a star's movement and then employing the camera's shake reduction system to compensate. Sounds clever, but be advised: this module is only for Pentax DSLRs -- and only for very specific models at that. You'll get full functionality with the K-5 and K-r cameras, and geotagging (no ASTROTRACER) with the 645D. Oh, and you'll need to make sure yo
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