Morning Coffee 103: April 1st

Good morning. It’s been an eventful three-day weekend for the family. Building an arcade cabinet (sketching and cutting out the frame, and curating the retro games). Setting up a chicken coop. Running bridges. Rearranging Rose’s room for her new kitchen set. Church. Easter egg hunt. Pizza party. Fish fry. Feeling very fulfilled and thankful. Today is the start of the second quarter. I’ll be very focused and intentional through this next season (More on that in the coming weeks). As always, I hope this letter finds you well.

Table of Contents

1. Arcade Cabinet
2. Building Blocks

Arcade Cabinet

• Scrap plywood
• Computer monitor
• Raspberry Pi 400
• 8BitDo Arcade Stick
• Nintendo logo
• SD card
• Batocera
• ROMs

I’ll share the finished product soon (getting close to being done), but these are all the parts that were used to make the arcade cabinet. Seeing Batocera on the Pi and then finding the arcade stick were the lightbulb moments to make this a reality. We’re also building the cabinet with the plans to recreate and sell a few. More than anything though, it’s been a fun project for the family.

Building Blocks

I’ve been thinking about how we’re able to condense moments, memories, and ideas into building blocks, simply by turning them into a single paragraph, like this one. The goal for that block is to be unique, concise, and dense with information. If it’s too wordy, it’s mostly fluff. If it’s too short, it wasn’t that important. That’s what these little sections in the newsletters have been (just building blocks), but I never looked at them from this perspective until now. Going forward, they’ll be referred to as blocks, and I encourage you to make your own.

This is Morning Coffee: a weekly newsletter that arrives in your inbox every Monday morning. I write about productivity, technology, and cool things I find on the internet. My wife wants this to be my only job, so pay what you want, purchase my books on Amazon, or join my Music Program.