I thought my camera was charging over USB. Boy was I wrong. It complained with a ‘battery low‘ message yesterday. The previous camera had a different power supply (out to the recycling for it, then). It’s a really squat charger, without a cable which makes it a pain for recessed plugs (not many of which were found in the good old US-of-A).
Ah well…
Busybox… It’s not soul destroying… mostly
Busybox is pretty much essential if you’re using a small, embedded linux. It’s small footprint and complete replication of most of coreutils (and a bunch of other packages) makes it great. All you end up with are a bunch of symlinks.
The problem is, though, that pretty much all the commands are ‘slightly different‘. They don’t take long options. Help is not helpful (I’ve regularly had to look at the source to tell what’s the problem).
The real problem comes when you decide you want to rip it out of your system. All those minor things that had to be changed to work under the busybox system now have to be re-checked under coreutils and family.
Fun for all the family.
Mass effect on the PC… 3 installs ever???????
Oh my god. That is completely and utterly insane. Apparently you can only install/activate Mass Effect three times on a machine before you need to contact EA to get more of them. Typically, I’m not a big installer/reinstaller, but this is in-f***ing sane.
Oooooooh, and don’t point at the EULA and say ‘Haha!‘. Nobody reads them, and there’s a very good chance that it’s not enforcable due to the fact that it’s not been signed and witnessed. Computers do not witnesses make. You can fake everything.
First week into the use of Firefox3
It’s great. simply prettier and a lot more usable than Firefox 2. The awesome bar (the address bar) kicks ass. Much easier to use than the previous one. Bookmark management has been improved. The look and feel is nicer. I even ‘kind of‘ prefer the subtle dialog box improvement which turns up at the top of the form, which is like a wide series of websites that perform the same thing themselves.
This definitely has replaced my web browsers in Windows and Linux. There’s a very high chance that it will replace Safari on the Mac. The only niggle I have is that it doesn’t store your passwords in the Mac keychain, which I still feel is the better place to have them.
Damn the electric fence…
Getting back into the game
Defeating the laughing octopus this time round was significantly easier, simply due to knowing all the patterns already. I do like the leaking the color out of the scene effect that is used at certain sections. Very artsy and very well done.
Then I played for at least an hour after that and remembered to save.
Why can’t these folks auto-save upon zone transitions (like half-life 2). I was saving every time I could simply to be on the safe side.
gravatar URIs
Short and simple: http://en.gravatar.com/avatar/<md5 hash of email address>?.
e.g. echo -e ‘bob@email.com’ | md5sum gives: c961431faea38ed65bfd982cf2e31bd0.
Optional add-ons are size (s=<Number of pixels>), content rating (r=<g, pg, r, or x>), and default (d=<escape encoded URI of an image or one of identicon, monsterid or wavatar>).
great place to do something akin to the ‘imitate a lotus notes password entry trick’.
Back to the laughing octopus
Two nights ago I got past the Laughing Octopus boss battle in MGS4. Last night I fired up the game and guess what? It had me right at the start of the battle again.
Aargh! That’s just infuriating. I gave up on the game for the night at that. Just not in the mood. Maybe on Sunday when I return from the Kingdom.
Kojima seems to have a big on for the Octopus ๐
I really want to follow it, but the pricing is crazy
I like my cartoons. I especially like my Japanese cartoons (anime). The problem I have is the bloody price that’s charged for the individual discs. Last time I was in HMV they were charging in excess of €35 for a single disk containing two episodes of a series (can’t remember the name; all I remember is nearly gagging at the price).
When I was in the States I picked up a few Anime series for about $40 each. Reasonable price considering that they were oldish (big fan of the cheaper when older thing).
Tower are better for pricing individual series, but they are still a tax on a person’s wallet. Most 26 episode seasons are > €100 for the entire collection. And that’s for the Australian imports (which they claim are region 2 but it’s all a lie).
which brings me to ใทใดใใ(shigofumi). It was picked up really early on in the airing in Japan, which means that to be fair, I should be picking them up. The problem is that it’s $30 per disc. They are, of course, not available in Region 2. Picking up the original Japanese is a bit of bother (my language skills are not that good; and they generally don’t have any subtitles). Decisions, decisions.
Why no flash for the iPhone
I’m just wondering why there’s this aversion to flash from Apple. Is it that developers of flash applications depend on mouseover events that simply are not suitable for a non-mouse environment?
Possibly? Probably? I don’t know.
Well the cut-scene to action ratio has improved
And when you get to the end of the first act there’s another 3 minute hard-drive install while the game chastises you for staying up too late. Nice of it to do that.