Well, the plans to run AdvanceMame under Linux on my arcade game are now out the window. It just seems too complex for what I’m wanting to do.
I’m now going to try it with FreeDOS for sake of simplicity.
If things go according to plan, I’ll have the whole thing (nearly silently) running off of a CF card by this time next month. (Waiting for parts…)
Oh wow… The x0xb0x is going to be back in stock on the 15th. It’s $315, but it’d be *so* much fun to have / make…
Hrm… Should I?
Gur. I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to get anything working under Linux. I want to install one silly app and the requirements become a strawman diagram. :\
Well, since Kompressor has taken his site down, I have mirrored it here.
I also just finished upgrading the hardware in my MAME cabinet. The Slackware 10.2 discs are coming down via BitTorrent right now, then I’ll get to work on redoing the software. I’ll also try and get some good photos of it once it is done, too.
Crap. The sound card in my MAME cabinet just died.
I’ve got plan to replace the innards of the machine, but I was hoping things would hold out through tonight.
Ah well, no MAME cab for a few days…
I think that most of my clocks, and most assuredly all the clocks that matter (car, computer, phone, etc) will automatically compensate for the leap second tomorrow.
This is a good thing.
The other clocks (microwave, stove, bathrooms, etc) aren’t accurate enough to matter.
I like the whole clock-set-via-GPS-and-WWVB thing. Now, if only the VCR in my office would actually automatically be set correctly. Today it is three minutes off. Last week it was hours off. I think Comcast can’t send a proper time signal.
[Cross posted to
Yesterday when poking picking up some groceries at Trader Joe’s I noticed some rather interesting bottles labeled ‘Trader Joe’s’ but with a distinctly Unibroue bit of text below the label priced at $4.99. Looking at the cap and the back of the bottle shows that yes indeed, Unibroue makes it. Based on this I picked up a bottle, but I still haven’t given it a try yet.
So I have to ask, have any of you happened to try this rather interesting private label bottling by one of Quebec’s finest breweries?
I should also note that the metal cap covering the top of the cork is identical to the one on a bottle of Unibroue’s 2005, but the bottle is (obviously) different.
On a related note, I added a bunch more photos to the beer section of my photo gallery (photo gallery retired). I’ll point to some of the more notable ones here:
· New Holland Brewing Company’s Dragon’s Milk Ale
· Each of the beers in Bell’s Wheat Project: Wheat Two, Wheat Four, Wheat Six, Wheat Eight, and Wheat Love
· Dogfish Head’s Pangaea
· Lindemans Framboise Lambic
Oh, and there should be a bottle of Dogfish Head‘s Fort in there soon, to hopefully be opened on NYE. I received a call earlier this evening from my favorite local beer shop The Red Wagon Wine Shoppe that it had come in. Woo!
Problem with my laptop fixed.
First I had to edit the userinit line per KB Q249321 using the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, then I logged in, got a blank screen, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, fired up Task Manager, used that to launch regedt32, followed 223188 to change the boot volume back to C:, rebooted, and all was good.
The problem was caused by C: somehow changing to E: (WTF?). Yeah, I’ve got no idea how, but the problem is solved.
The error which was received is as follows:
Your system has no paging file or the paging file is too small.
This was received on my Windows XP SP2 laptop after logging into the machine with any username, then the machine would slowly return to the login screen. If one tried to log in via safe mode, they would immediately be returned to the login window.
Well, hopefully this will help someone somewhere down the line…
Actually, that’s not completely accurate. The Nikon 5005 would simply be outmoded, although I will definitely be hanging on to it. I’m supposed to be getting some film processing equipment soon, so I may use it to play with B&W, even though the lens is kinda crap.
But, yeah. It finally got here… Yay! Now to get a better understanding of it. Last night when I took the photos which were mentioned in the post titled New Camera I made a number of mistakes, least of which was specifying the image’s size as 640×480 instead of the actual 640×427. Whoops… I also left the ISO waaaaaay too high (1600) which with the low light in the kitchen all conspires for a nicely (and unnecessarily) noisy image. I may try to re-shoot it again tonight. If anything, I could use the practice. I must say, the 5Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro lens seems really nice thus far. My only complaint about it is my not realizing how narrow (comparitively) a 50mm macro lens is, and it made taking this photo of the Bell’s Wheat Two, Sparkling Ale, and Wheat Six a bit tight. It seems like it’ll be *great* for real macro work, though. And I can always use the 17-85 for these kinds of photos.
I only briefly played with the Canon EF-S 17-85MM f4-5.6 IS USM zoom lens last night, but it too seems pretty great.
Oh, one other thing… I have to strongly recommend picking up a remote shutter release. I’ve wanted one for a few years, but they were prohibitively expensive for lots of Nikon gear. It seems that on the EOS series of cameras Canon just uses a simple three pin interface. One is ground, the other is a half-press of the shutter, and the other is a full press. If one could get the connector themselves it would be trivial to make a shutter release, but I instead grabbed an ADIDT M1 off of eBay. It was only for US$14.25 shipped (as opposed to ~US$50 for the Canon RS-80N3). The cable doesn’t lock into the connector the way the Canon one does, and it does feel a bit cheap, but it also works.
Oh, one last thing? B&H seems to be a pretty good place to order camera stuff from. The order went smoothly, I had no problem changing the order when I needed to, and everything shipped promptly. My only complaint was that everything shipped in a giant box which barely fit in my car. It was packed quite well, though.
There was also an interesting bit of fraud check which B&H pulled when I called to change my order. I was transfered to someone who’s job it was to “confirm my order” who went over everything with me, then asked me some questions about data available in various public resources to see if I was who I said I was, if the phone number on my order matched the one on ‘record’, etc. It was interesting, and clearly understandable seeing that cameras are one of the items most commonly ordered with stolen credit cards.
Anyway, yeah. Can you tell I’m bored here today? I’m the only person at work from my group, and the only person within 100′ of my current location. That should make taking a decent lunch all right, though. I think I’ll run over to Camera Mart Inc. and look into picking up a grey card so that I can get the white balance dead on when I’m in someplace weird. I want one of Digital Gray Cards because they are plastic and the whole slab of plastic is appropriately colored, but I don’t have time to wait for it right now.
Yep, I’ll stop babbling about cameras now.
Oh wow… Check out the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo lens. It’s a 1x – 5x of which examples of photos of ants and other tiny beings are shown. Photos like this. Mmm… Pair it with a ring flash and one could look at all sorts of interesting things which the human eye normally never sees.
There are some nifty reviews of it here.
