I love a gadget. I think I get this from my father, a locally famous gadgetman who filled my K-12 bedroom with his hand-me-down computer equipment and old televisions. I find it very satisfying to take something that is (or looks) slightly away from its time, and shoehorning something new into its vocabulary. A new (but kind of old looking) thing that I have recently been very into is the TidByt. For those that aren’t familiar with it, the TidByt is a little box that you put on your desk that displays micro-messages and images in a style that my children would describe as “block old timey art like your basement Nintendo”. It looks very cool! And, you can write your own programs for it. I made an app that shows me when the next bus was going to show up in front of my house. Could I just look out the window and see? Maybe! I’m not going to risk eye contact with a passerby though. With my transit problems solved, I decided to make something that would show me the three most recent pinball machines added near by house. How did I do it, you may have wondered? Maybe you didn’t wonder before, but are starting to wonder if maybe you do wonder? I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t have control over that side of the conversation.

This past weekend we were privileged to present a seminar at Pinball Expo 2023. We’d like to thank Rob Berk for inviting us, and all the other organizers and staff for putting it on. We’d also like to thank David Marston for his great introduction to our seminar. It was a very fun event.

This app update took an extensive amount of work over the past couple of months. And now, in this post, we will explain why.

For the past few months we have been posting a monthly blog post on Kineticist highlighting new and notable locations that have been added to Pinball Map.

While the regional maps on this site allow operators to quickly look up all their locations, the global map does not. Since this type of search is somewhat niche (only needed by operators) instead of cluttering up the search form on that map, we instead made a separate map that does one thing: allows you to search by operator.