| Young and hungry to impress a chain of restaurants: Pandora just launched. I was installing a CCTV system at the first restaurant location. Wanted to show the owner something cool, launched pandora on the PC I just installed for him. "That's awesome, can we hear it in the restaurant?". The amp was about 50' from the office, I had pre made camera cables with BNC and found enough adapters to make it to the AMP. Now he was REALLY impressed. He then asked if he could make announcements over the restaurant speakers from the PC. Sure as shit, I'm going all the way. Fire up VB6 and search google for "Volume Mixer VB6". Made a little tray app to mute the wave out and unmute the Mic. It works! Then he asks: "We want to make the announcement from the guest check out counter". To get this done, I took some phone cable, soldered 2 wires to a paperclip i broke apart, then jammed the paper clip ends into the LPT port and searched google "VB6 LPT READ". Found a nice one liner that returned a different value when the wires were shorted and then adjusted the volume mixer for the announcement. I didn't have a push button switch for remote control but had an extra IBM PS2 mouse, so I soldered the phone cord directly to the microswitch on the left mouse button clicker and jammed a sheetrock screw to mount the mouse directly to the wall. Now he can press the button and talk to all his customers. This was crap I had sitting in my 1990 Buick Rivera. I think I was charging $40.00/hr. back then. |