There's more to Oz than the Yellow Brick Road

 Overall, good news to report this week. 

I finally found the perfect gaming spot in San Diego. Ever since Young Hickory shut down, The ideal spot is a place that is open late, has inexpensive food (or just coffee) and is only 1 bus away. The game store downtown is inexpensive if you're just getting snacks, is only one bus away, but isn't always open late. Tea N More, where the Meetup holds most of their meetings, has inexpensive meal options and is open late, but it's a hassle to get to.

A friend of mine used to run a game at a place called Lestat's, which was inexpensive, open late, and only slightly more than 1 bus away. The downside there is that it was loud. Not raucous loud. Just everyone having their own conversation so you have to listen closely to yours sort of loud. I then found out that their location on University Avenue was one of 3 locations, which I had been meaning to check out.

Well, that chance came last Wednesday.  One of the Metup memebers was running a game at the Lestat's on Adams Ave. A short walk from the bus stop and off the beaten path enough that it didn't have the steady murmur of conversation that threatened to drown out  your own. It very strongly reminded me of Old Town Coffee and Chocolates, where I enjoyed some casual gaing in my hometown before I moved to San Diego,

Which means I now have one less excuse as to why I'm not gaming very much.

Another positive update: I am writing this from my lunchbox laptop.

It's been a long time since I've done anything serious with it. I might have posted something on this blog at some point from this lunchbox, but it's been in a holding pattern for a while. The main issue is that I have a "real" laptop as well, which is a more powerful computer and uses a more popular operating system, so circumstances where the lunchbox is more useful tend to be rare. It's mostly a novelty, and I'm okay with that.

The other issue was power output. While other people who deal with Raspberry Pi single board computers have all kinds of other skills, I really don't. Rather than kitbash and solder hings together, I prefer to use standard  cable connections to assemble my projects (There's an amusing story about a project where I substituted a hammer for delicate soldering work, but that was not lunchbox related). So my power source for the lunchbox laptop has been those cell-phone charger battery packs

Which worked great when the core computer was a Raspberry Pi Zero, but once I upgraded to a Model 3B, it wasn't delivering enough power to make it happy. It would boot up and run what I wanted to, but there was a constant "low power" notification. 

So I've kept my eyes open for when power technology was going to get to the point that a battery pack would be able to deliver that much juice without breaking the bank and it finally happened.  I got rid of the "low power" notifications and am now considering what I need to do to make it a properly "finished" project. Right now that means trying to get the interior of the lunchbox organized. For a long time, the lunchbox was very much just a container for all of the various parts, which just sort of hung out inside.