Archives for April 2008
Added a message board
21 April 2008 | Random | No Responses
Once upon a time, this Web site was JumpStation.org and it had a forum. It, and its forum, got assassinated. Since then, there has not been a good forum on the Internet — at least not one I looked forward to reading.
While I can hardly hope to recover the great group of people that forum had in 2002 - 2004, I have started a new forum on this site. You can get to it from the “Board” link in the blue bar at the top of each page: that is five clicks right of the big graphic for my illiterate readers.
It is a very simple one powered by bbPress. You have to make an account to post, and you have to make a Gravatar account if you want to have an avatar.
Right now there is only a General forum, because two accounts are hardly enough to spawn a second one. In the future I may add a forum to offer tech support for some of my old programs or translations. I may also re-route post comments to the forum.
Want to buy my translations?
21 April 2008 | Random | No Responses
Apparently the good people at PlayGeneration have taken it upon themselves to help with distributing Sonic Eraser. They are also selling the King Colossus, Pulseman and Battle Mania 2 translations by MIJET, as well as Neverending (NE) Soft Team’s Shuihu Fengyun Zhuan (水浒风云传).
While I am flattered my translation of such a shitty game would ever appear on cart, a complimentary copy would have been nice.
It would be a real shame if someone were to e-mail SEGA of Japan about two of pirate versions of its games being sold at most likely what appears to be without license.
The best music in the universe
17 April 2008 | Memory | 2 Responses
Those who have been stalking me might remember Manufactured the “album” byuu and I made back in the earlier part of this decade. After six years of being unavailable on the Internet in any form, I have decided to re-release our monstrosity.
Last year when the Der Langrisser translation project drew to a close, byuu and I talked about revisiting the concept and doing better songs. At the time, we were really just screwing around. The album is incredibly unbalanced, and you can figure out precisely how we learned to put this together if you listen from the first track to the last.
At the moment, the script we used to generate the songs is missing in action, but I will try to explain what we did below.
New lens is a Sigma
14 April 2008 | Photography | 3 Responses
After considerable trials, I finally have a new lens for my Nikon. This gets me past the limits of the Nikkor 18-55mm kit lens it came with and puts me up to the 210mm range, meaning it almost equals the 10x optical zoom of my old Sony Mavica CD-1000.
The Mavica’s optical zoom was near legendary as point-and-shoot cameras go, and I’m glad to have something that can get me into that range again since I enjoy dabbling in macro photography.
Endless thanks go out to scorpio5361, the best Taobao seller ever and a really good guy in general. It’s hard to imagine a seller going to the lengths this guy did to make us happy.
Howto: Use EeePC XP in VirtualBox
10 April 2008 | Ubuntu | 2 Responses
If you have been watching the torrent sites, you may have seen a “Windows XP for Asus EEE PC” floating around. Its first edition came out in January, but a new “2.0″ was released this week. For those reluctant to sail over to a certain bay of pirates, I will summarize.
The “EeeXP” carries a 45MB RAM footprint one booted and requires only 289MB of disk space, bringing it into the range of Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. Not only that, but it promises boot times so fast that the XP splash screen can only scroll its blue loading bar once before displaying the desktop.
Seeking to reinstall my cluttered Windows XP virtual disk that was up to a whopping 5GB, I decided to give this one a whirl using innotek’s VirtualBox on my clunky old Gateway laptop. The results are staggering.
Retiring the old Mavica
10 April 2008 | Photography | No Responses
I retired my Sony Mavica CD-1000 this month — just in case I had not told you already. The Mavica was my camera from 2000 to early this year, and it was really showing its age.
While it did take some great pictures over the years, it was very limited. Manual focus did not really work, and auto-focus always chose the wrong subject for every image. My first three years with the camera were spent learning how to trick it into doing what it should have been smart enough to do.
Still, it had some incredible mileage. I filled more than 40 CDs with its images, and still have a spindle of an extra 30 Mavica CDs left over. Unfortunately, since the advent of SD and CF cards, those CDs are increasingly difficult to find, and lugging around a camera with a built-in CD burner just shows what a relic the device was.