All posts by Andrew Armstrong
Interesting Old Bookmarks #2
Late Resolution to Update Site
Yeah, I’ve not done too well this January. I have a few drafts, but need to really finish them (screenshots are involved, which take a while). I’ll have to nail down a good schedule for posting new things – certainly recommending things I like is something I’ll continue to do (I rewatched some of Haruhi Suzumiya today, go watch it! 😉 ), but I want to do some more technical posts, not just on my technical problems, and certainly some programming ones. Finally, I do want to do more on videogames – old ones (which I need to do more on!), new ones, thoughts on them and so forth.
I think two main posts a week is a good idea. No real pressure with this kind of vagueness, and also, I intend to do more miniposts (which appear as normal posts in the RSS feed though), such as Interesting Old Bookmarks I find, and other odd things I come across. Call me out if I’m really doing a load of crap, although this is honestly all for my own amusement and a nice journal of what I’m up to – my own little piece of history for my own enjoyment (since my memory is a sieve sometimes, this is also useful!)
I don’t have any other resolutions really. I don’t aim to not have any, I just am pretty happy with what I’m already doing (although I must admit I should go swimming much more often…). I wonder if anyone else is the same, saying “Well, it’s a new year, why do I have to change just this month? why not other months?” 🙂
Interesting Old Bookmark #1
Nice New iAudio Battery
My iAudio battery was giving up on me. It is now 4 or possibly 5 years old (I got it one Christmas), and so, I thought, “I’ll replace it!”. No doubt you can do this for most MP3 players, especially those years out of warranty like mine 😉
I found some handy instructions and site pointing on the iAudiophile forums. Megacapacity had the ticket, a suitable fitting battery. Presto chango, I got one in the post (from Hong Kong so took a few days).
Yesterday I did the operation. I managed to open my MP3 player pretty easily. Got a soldering iron off my Dad to get the old one out and new one in – doing this I also got rid of one wire since it just wouldn’t reattach (after I knocked one end off) despite me trying for a while. It isn’t a necessary wire at least, connecting to an unused bottom connector (well, at least I hope so, I can still hear it playing at least 🙂 ).
The finished work. Note extra wire and old battery.
I tried out the battery today (on a trip to the NMOC). Previously, it honestly had only a 50/50 chance of turning off after immediately taking it off the mains power (sometimes I had to keep it plugged in to initially boot it). It was worse with the original firmware, I now have RockBox on which is good (apart from lacking a “Normalise” function, the only downside of the firmware). Originally it then lost its charge fast, and leaving it for a few hours even if you don’t use it lead it into “Cannot start low battery” mode.
Now however it held it’s charge, after listening to 3.25 hours of podcasts, probably isn’t even 25% down (it’s really hard to tell on the screen). Not sure how long it’s back up to run-time wise, I’ll have to try it out on a long haul (perhaps a trip next week), and hope that it keeps going for a while longer. I can’t afford a new MP3 player yet, although it’d not be bad if I could get a larger then 20GB one next time 😉 – this is a good money saving tip if your battery does die too. Cost me £16.79, which is much more affordable then an entirely new player 🙂
PFN_LIST_CORRUPT. Fun with BSODs!
Okay, so annoyingly I was “taken offline” (well, by my own devices) by installing some new RAM. New RAM that should have run fine at the EPP settings, although they don’t automatically activate with my motherboard (Asus PB5-Deluxe), setting it manually makes my system rather unstable:
Downtime number 1…my first bit of debug info
I also installed some new nVidia drivers at a similar time (180.40), and these in fact caused a problem when I didn’t uninstall and remove the old ones, but seemingly had nothing to do with this error. However it did BSOD separately with an nVidia driver error in Fallout 3, so I reverted to the old drivers for now. This is separate but equally frustrating, and I need a fresh XP install to really install the new drivers I guess.
Therefore, this error was my RAM doing something wonky – according to Google anyway. I at the moment have given up on overclocking it to the recommended and slightly faster settings, since I’d prefer a stable system. I can’t even seem to get this tester tool running for more then a few minutes – my CPU gets to 70 degrees celcius after a few minutes out of the hour test. Annoying!
I reseated the RAM, but I suspect it’s some setting or other in the BIOS, since it did it again (and a third unrecorded time):
Downtime number 2 (of many more)
I’ll have to get back to this error later. It could also be to do with my paging file being corrupted or somesuch by my motherboards software RAID, but since I turned off the overclocking I haven’t had the same problems, thus it really rules that out. The RAM is also dandy – ran Memtest a few times on separate occasions just fine, and I overclocked my previous RAM to a similar set of standards. We’ll see if I can get it working when I reinstall, and do things a bit more rigorously. With a lot of rubbish on my XP install, and me wanting to get my RAID sorted out better, it’d be good to test on a clean working install. I also could just avoid the whole issue and, you know, ignore the fact I can’t get the better timings and go for the slightly higher but more stable ones 😉
Also a shame I can’t run the /PAE flag on Windows, it simply can’t recognise more then the 4GB total address space (which, with my audio card and 640MB nVidia card, totals at 2.93GB of space available). Might try disabling a few more non-needed bits from my motherboard, but the extra RAM is welcome, especially since I intend to install a second OS in the form of Vista x64, which will make use of the extra RAM.
At least my PC will keep going for a while longer. Fallout 3 runs nicely on High, and I could probably up some of the settings if I liked – although the amount of times it just crashes is getting exceedingly high to the point of frustration now, with me not knowing why (since it boots back into the game just fine right after a crash…).
Paprika and Appleseed
Hmm, while I still have a few games to post about, there were two Japanese anime films I watched today (not in ideal situations, but there we go). Might as well report on them 🙂
The first, Paprika, was a very fun film to watch. A wonderful look at dreams, and how they reflect or act on reality. A little muddled in the story department because you’re never quite sure if the entire thing is a dream at one moment or the next (that’s no spoiler, this happens in the first few minutes of it starting), so highly entertaining – the characters themselves, and their dreams, are equally both amazing and sometimes more then a little confusing 🙂
I’d recommend seeing this, since it is both polished and an amazing experience to take on board – much deeper then most films to be honest in many ways. This is the intro which hosts one damn catchy song which I have no idea what it is saying showing off the titular character, I’ll say no more. It gives you a good general idea about the films theme without going into some of the spoiler scenes I saw when I watched the trailer.
[youtube width=”320″ height=”264″]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xqg3Sw3s9Wg[/youtube]
The second was Appleseed, a sci-fi action film. Yeah, that’s about it to be honest. You are best to usually ignore the bits which don’t make sense (unexplained things abound, and serious troubles getting me excited about a climax due to a keyboard fault) and go along for the ride. One unique thing is that rather then traditional flat animation, it’s 3d cell shaded animation. It’s a bit unnerving (no uncanny valley, but everything is quite shiny).
The action throughout is good, if a little random and pretty atypical of many action tropes. This, with a story where you’ll likely see the ending a mile off. I’d say give it a shot only if you like sci-fi action and have some time to spare.
Possibly I’m giving Appleseed a bad rap, but I’ve seen good conversions of books and comics to films, and this suffers (possibly a lot was left out, certainly a lot of the explaining if anything!). It does have a sequel, and is defiantly more of a “series” film, so if it does interest you I guess the sequel would be interesting too.
I watched both with subtitles, since that’s what I had available, and I suspect for Paprika it fits a lot better too, to be honest (Appleseed I doubt it matters as long as the dub is reasonable).
No Son of Mine Plays Oregon Trail Like That
Brilliant McSweeney. I still need to play the game, never played it back in school myself, but it resonates regardless.
(Via. Buttonmashing)