The Hot Setup

Seems to me that it is an affliction primarily of men, though I know of exceptions.

It is the compulsion to take any object, machine, or device, and somehow “improve” it. I know of no man who does not suffer from this — and suffer is indeed the word — and if there is any I’m not interested in knowing him. We compulsive improvers make the world a more interesting if less efficient place.

A fine example is my old friend Jerry Ward. We met on the first day of ninth grade, in Mrs. Parmalee’s “Introduction to Art” class. There is a book to be written about that class, but we’ll not begin it here. Jerry is a fine fellow who in ninth grade dressed a bit like a clown, as was common in the late 1960s, wearing, for instance, brown plaid pants and a yellow shirt with blue polka dots. He was also an excellent artist. What caused me to listen to him was that over the course of that year he taught me what “funny” is, a debt I’ll never be able to repay.

He could recap a Road Runner cartoon that had drawn barely a smile from me, but after his retelling of it, I was laughing so hard that tears streamed down my face. We became friends, which made life a laff riot for me, and in that I was a photographer and had interesting mechanical devices, Jerry was interested in what I was up to.

In high school, though he owned the Austin America automobile of which he’d dreamt in junior high, he became fascinated with bicycles, or at least a bicycle. I remember it being at first a Peugeot PX-10 and then a Raleigh Super Track, but searching now I see that there was never such a bicycle so it must have been a Raleigh Super Course. He worked and saved, talked endlessly to all of us about it — none of us was interested — and in due course had it to show off. (During junior high, he made the five-minute ride from his house to school on a Schwinn Sting-Ray, which he had customized so that it was, in possibly his favorite phrase, a “hot setup.”) When the Raleigh arrived there was little time to admire it, even if we had wanted to, because it was soon all in pieces, most of its parts about to be replaced. The frame was sandblasted and repainted, lustrously and luxuriously. Where the down tube had once said “Raleigh” it now said, “Hot Setup.” The rims were replaced with ones that involved balsa wood. The spokes were trick spokes of some sort. The hubs, gears, chain, derailleur, pedals, and everything else were exchanged for reputedly better ones — certainly expensive ones.

He wore a silly bicycle hat, with the dinky brim turned up. (This was before bicycle helmets.) He may have had straps to keep the cuffs of his pants getting entangled in the machinery, but he had burned out on absurd clothing in junior high school, so he never got one of those ridiculous bicycle suits that cause the wearer to resemble a colorfully stuffed sausage.

Then it was done. The proof of concept complete, he moved his passion on to something else.

That is an important aspect of the hot setup: most of the pleasure comes in bringing it into existence. Actually using it is a lesser thing. I mean, he did ride it, but the pride was in his having built it. (I think he was aware of this. He was overly fond of double-stick tape, which is excellent for display items. But for durability a person would have chosen, you know, glue.) And I believe he worked for a time at Walt’s Bike Shop, though whether he ever achieved a net profit — earning more than he spent there — is unknown.

It seems a little comical, perhaps a touch pitiful, but we cannot allow ourselves such thoughts. Because I think we all do it to a greater or lesser degree.

Guys dive in, tricking out their cars or motorcycles or shortwave radios or stereo systems, skateboards, even ping-pong paddles. Bicycles.

For me it has been mostly cameras and computers, though I’ve backed and veered into carpentry, mechanics, and gadget improvement (or at least gadget alteration and sometimes gadget destruction. I’ve had discussions with friends on the subject of perfectly good things we have ruined in efforts to make them into something else).

I have occasionally fallen victim to alterations made by others: From Jerry I got a “high bike,” a bad and dangerous machine that was made by turning the frame of an innocent bicycle over so that the sprocket and pedals were where the seat used to be, then the tubes for handlebars and seat were extended, moving those items and therefore the rider high into the air. It wasn’t as tall as the one pictured in the link, but the principle was the same, and it was tall enough.

I was actually pretty good at riding it, until August 29, 1969, when on the way home from a baseball game I decided that it was time to learn to do a wheelie. Suffice it to say that my record of arriving at the first day of school with newly acquired stitches and/or a cast remained intact that year. (And the next year as well; by coincidence Jerry was driving behind me when again on the Friday before Labor Day I learned I could ride my motorcycle no-hands, though not as far as I thought. It was Jerry and the Austin America that got me to the hospital. But the bike, an Italian-made Harley-Davidson Sprint SS350, was entirely stock, so it wasn’t a hot setup.) Anyway, the cast caused by the high bike experiment was off within a couple months, though my right foot never again pointed exactly forward, from that day to this one. Hot setups have their risks.

I got the high bike through a trade; my part of the transaction was a Fujica Drive, wind-up-motorized 35mm half-frame camera. Jerry was pretty sure he could improve it in some way, but his explorations came to an end with a loud, cartoonish “sprooinnnng!” and pieces of camera flying everywhere.

In my defense I’ll say that I’ve had decent luck in fashioning pieces of camera equipment. I cobbled together a process lens, a bellows, and a Nikon body to produce a contraption that could focus from so close it would almost detail dust on the lens to infinity. This appealed to me for some reason, and I still have it and, in keeping with the rules of the hot setup, have rarely used it. But when it is what you need, nothing else will do.

Another of the rules is that the project begin with “You know what you could do . . .” or, if you are alone, “I bet I could . . .” Defeat is never conceded, though I have around the house a number of “I’ll get back to it one of these days” projects, which is as close to an admission of failure as hot setups ever come.

What brought all this to mind was last week’s announcement of a potential hot setup from the Raspberry Pi company, the maker of very good, relatively inexpensive, SBCs — single-board computers. These are really a monetization of the hot setup. While they have side commercial use now, they were originally the home of experimenters and hobbyists. Robot builders, that sort of thing — there are a lot of impressive projects cobbled together using Raspberry Pi SBCs. Hot setups all.

While I own a few old ancient name-brand computers, I’ve not actually used a desktop machine I hadn’t built myself since about 1990.

That’s because when you build your own computer you can put together your ultimate hot setup machine: You choose the case you want, based on what you intend to use the machine for. You select a power supply capable of reliably and cleanly providing all the power you’re ever likely to need plus a little more. You pick out a video card. (This can take a little work, because today’s high-end video cards have capacity you’ll never come close to needing unless you’re a gamer, a modern term meaning well-heeled ne’er-do-well. It is easy to over-spend by a lot.) You pick the motherboard, processor, hard drive, and memory you like and need. If you do this intelligently, eschewing faddish nonsense such as LEDs that light up your machine like the Las Vegas strip and put the money instead on good chip- and case-cooling, you’ll be out of the cycle of replacing your machine every few years: I put together the computer on which I’m writing this 11 years ago. Its motherboard is still sold, for almost twice what I paid for it. I’ve never encountered a task that my cheap video card, a Nvidia GeForce GT 1030, couldn’t perform. Except that I’ve used it all this time instead of putting it on the shelf after I spent about an hour building it (it’s really easy), it would be a seriously hot setup.

Likewise the two Raspberry Pi 5 SBCs I used to build my two television sets. They work as full-tilt computers, too. They are reliable and inexpensive. The result is televisions that let me see channels from all over the world, for free; the reduction in subscription costs has more than paid for the whole project. And because they’re connected through my Proton VPN, they’re private, at least to the extent that no television packager can sell off my information. That’s a successful project.

I mentioned a new Raspberry Pi device that is a potential hot setup, and I hear it calling to me. I keep saying I won’t do it, but my resolve weakens.

Last week, Raspberry Pi introduced the Raspberry Pi 500+. This is the same SBC I have in my televisions, so it is unlikely to come with surprises. Ah, but it is different: the 500+ comes built in to a good quality, clicky keyboard. It includes (also inside the keyboard) a 256-gig, very fast, solid-state hard drive and 16 gigs of RAM. It was not all that long ago that the drive or the memory alone would cost as much as the whole computer, which retails for $200. And the drive is easily replaceable, in case 256 gigs isn’t enough, though it probably will be. It has everything else you’d expect from a modern computer — good video, wirelessness, and so on. (It also lights up and flashes brightly, all different colors, if that appeals to you, but that part can be turned off once puberty arrives.)

It is an entire computer built into a keyboard, the way hobbyist and home computers were a generation or two ago. I wrote about them not long ago. The new Raspberry Pi 500+ is the Commodore 64 brought into the modern era. The C64 retailed in 1982 for $595, which would with inflation be almost $2000 today. The 500+ is orders of magnitude more powerful than the C64 ever was.

As I also wrote about, there is an operating system that includes all kinds of C64 games, plus a computer’s worth of modern, efficient real-world applications, called Commodore OS 3.0 Vision, a hot setup version of Linux. It is currently offered — for free — for X86 machines, which is to say standard Intel architecture. The Raspberry Pi runs on a more efficient ARM64 chip. Unless one wanted to do a whole lot of recompiling, which I don’t, that would be a fatal flaw.

Ah, but there has been talk for nearly a year of porting Commodore OS to ARM64. I’d say it is extremely likely to exist before long. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the Commodore people were eventually to offer branding stickers and the like for the 500+, because embracing the new Raspberry Pi would give them much that they want. Perhaps they could even offer pre-loads — I’ve found the Commodore Linux to be cranky to install.)

It would be a real hot setup. It meets all the requirements: it would be really cool, it would accomplish things that go beyond what has been achieved with any of its components alone, and my interest in it extends only to building it and making it work. I have no particular need or even use for it.

I’ll let you know how it works out. Unless you beat me to it, in which case, you let me know how it works out.