Illuminee

I’ve recently been adding a bit to my video games collection, and yesterday a package arrived in my mailbox. I only had one of the Super Mario Advance games on my shelf, so when an eBay seller offered all four in a conveniently affordable package I decided to place a bid. Apparently, this wasn’t a particularly good idea. For a collector, the genuine article is worth infinitely more than a bootleg, which is what asia-xpress appears to be selling. Yes, I know, the name and the location (Hong Kong) should have been warning enough, but once in a while you have to give them a chance.

 So how do I know these cartridges are bootlegs? Well, for one, like I said, I have a genuine Super Mario Advance 2 cartridge to compare with. The colour of the sky on the label of the bootleg is slightly darker than on the real one, almost purplish. Something like that might be due to fading though, or a just bad batch at the printer’s, but there are other clues. If you look closely at the Nintendo logos on both real and fake cartridges, you’ll see that they are slightly different. It’s hard to explain, but the font looks a little, eh, fatter on the fake. And yes, all the real ones are identical, and all the fake ones are identical, so this probably due to differences in the mould. A more apparent difference is that the cartridges are ever so slightly larger, that is, taller. This won’t work if you’re using a DS or DS Lite, but if you have an original GBA or a GBA SP, you’ll notice that a genuine Nintendo cartridge is perfectly flush with the hardware. The counterfeit cartridges, however, protrude a couple of millimetres. Then there’s the circuit board. This is a bit tricky to do, and requires good lighting, but if you look up past the connectors underneath the cartridge, you’ll notice a date (well, year), the word Nintendo, as well as some other information printed on the board. The bootlegs do not have this.

Finally, there’s the fact that when booting up Super Mario Advance 4 (that’s Super Mario Bros. 3), the Game Boy Player logo shows up for some reason, followed by an error message. Then the game starts up normally. The other three don’t seem to display any kind of irregular behaviour, they all play fine. Now, you might argue that if the games work, what is the problem? Well, for one there’s the appeal of owning the genuine article; for a collector this is important. Secondly, if only the game mattered and I didn’t mind setting the legal aspects aside, I’d simply get a ROM myself, rather than supporting these parasites. Thirdly, people who manufacture and sell these things are ruining the market for the rest of us. Not only are they making it harder to find the real deal, but they are also driving the prices down, devaluing items people have paid for. They also waste my time by having me email back and forth with both them and with eBay customer service. When I contacted asia-xpress, the immediately offered me a refund if I returned the games, but I’m not going to do that. I want this person out of eBay. I guess I’ll have to wait and see what customer service will do about it.

Decided not to quit just yet.

This is a bit of a continuation of a post I made over two years ago. I recently moved house, and I now actually have room for all the games and accessories I’ve accumulated over the years. I light of that I decided to unpack, put together and finish painting a few of the Warhammer 40,000 armies I have lying around. The last time I was actively painting and gaming was back in 2008, and before losing interest I had bough quite a few boxes of Tau Empire units, as well as small collection of Orks. One problem I’ve always had, which I’m sure many if not most miniature games will recognise, is the habit of buying stuff without painting or even assembling it. I had a complete Necron army, slightly north of 1,000 points, lying around for over a decade (more on that later).

During the months of gaming in the spring of 2008 I only painted a couple of units of Fire Warriors and battlesuits, and only one single ork. Anyway, when deciding to pick up the brush again I figured I’d start lightly, and got to work on my Gorkamorka models, many of which I’d owned since 1998 and never painted. I figured I could always use them in my planned ork army in the future. I’ve finished two mobs so far, and I thought I’d share some pictures of them.

Ork Mob

You kind of have to have an ork mob if you want to play Gorkamorka. The game is centered around them, both in terms of background and rules. It is only natural then, that I decided to start with a a small group of these larger greenskins.

Firstly, here’s my truck, as well as two nobz and three boyz, including the driver (a grot also managed to sneak into the picture). I should probably add a gunner and a weapon to the vehicle; leaning towards a rokkit launcha. All of these are original Gorkamorka models. I was considering using the current ork models as well, but they are much larger, and don’t fit very well in the truck. I think it is probably better to either stick to the older models, or replace the mob with new models entirely.

Here are some grots, as well as a slaver and a wartrak. I always enjoyed using grots in my mobs due to the fact that they shoot just as well as the orks, and cost a lot less.

Mutie Raiding Party

When I first got into Gorkamorka, the Digganob supplement was already out, and most of the other players had ork mobs. There were also a couple planning to pick up Rebel Grot and Digga mobs, which left the muties unaccounted for, so I naturally decided to try them out. Playing muties in Gorkamorka can be hugely satisfying in that even the lowliest mutie is vastly superior to anything less than a nob, both in terms of skill and equipment. You get few of them, sure, but when each one is so powerful, and able to work independently of the rest of the group, you can easily hold your own against groups of orks, grots and diggas. It is a bit like playing Space Marines, I suppose.

These were a bit tricky to paint, since there really is no 40k (or even Fantasy) equivalent to base them on. I’m not entirely happy with the result, but it’ll do. The mutie riders pictured here are the only six Games Workshop ever released, making this the most easily acquired complete Citadel miniatures possible.

Rebel Grot mob

Now, I don’t own any of the original Rebel Grot models. I’ve been looking for them on eBay, especially the vehicles, but they appear to be fairly expensive at the moment. Collectors items, apparently. At the moment, having no opponents, I’m not willing to spend all that much money on this project, so I will probably put this mob on hold for a while. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t made an effort. I picked up the current runtherd and grots plastic kit, and here’s what I’ve done with it:

The one in front left is supposed to be the head honcho. I’ve basically added a few Space Marine bits (a bolter, a sword and a scout shoulder pad) to make him look a little more well off than his mobmates. The banna waver carries a Space Marine standard (stolen from a sergeant), and I think the pole (shoddy work, I know) is a Warhammer Fantasy Ungor spear. I plan on putting together some vehicles in the future, when I can figure out how to do it cheaply enough. I think I should be able to pillage a sail from a Dark Eldar Raider for my cutta, and perhaps the Snotling Pump Wagon could make for a decent big lugga? I guess we’ll see.

After finishing these models I felt that painting orks could be quite rewarding, so I got to work on the 40k orks I had. So far I’ve finished around 1,000 points worth, and I’m currently working on a unit of ard boyz and a looted chimera. I’ll make a post about this later, I think.

Apparently I have very little to say. Kind of wondering if should try to pick this up, or perhaps take it down altogether.

It is, perhaps, not the most exciting of updates, but I came across this while reading the comments of an Ars Technica article, and thought it worthwhile to save the link.

I’m not going to go into detail on the subject of creationism (the slogan “Teach the controversy” is derived from the offshot Intelligent Design movement); AronRa does this much better than I ever could in his Youtube channel, especially in his “Fundamental Falsehoods of Creationism” videos. However, I am thinking of picking up one of those T-shirts, if I could only decide which one.  The UFOs and pyramids one perhaps?

Taken in Berlin Zoo summer 2009. This is a test, mostly. Seems I passed.

Just a bit of a heads up: This post is not meant as a guide. It’s more my personal experiences trying to put together an HTPC, and this account will be somewhat jumbled and messy. It’s more for my own reference than anything else. I might clean it up later, but for now it is what it is.

I had been thinking of getting a PC for video playback and emulators for a while, but I’ve put it off mostly due to cost and space issues. As a sort of temporary solution I bought a WDTV, but although it mostly did what it was supposed to do, it was very slow and had no network access; everything had to be stored on USB disks. That’s fine for smaller collections, but at the moment I have around 500 GB worth of films and a little less than that of TV shows, and on top of that I still have a fairly large collection of DVDs yet to be ripped and encoded. Adding to these issues were obviously the lack of emulators, no option to skip chapters in MKVs, and also slightly dubiuos subtitle support.

Due to the advent of the Intel Atom processor and NVidia’s Ion GPU, the issues I mentioned above have mostly disappeared, so I decided to try to put together a proper HTPC. I initially looked a tiny little thing from Sapphire, as well as the Eee Box and the Asrock, before I decided to go for the ASUS S1-AT5NM10E (awful name, henceforth referred to as the S1). Slightly bigger than the alternatives, but it came with a DVD drive and a very low price, so it seemed like the most sensible option. Also, room for a 3,5″ would allow me to store files locally, rather than having to set up a separate file server.

It’s not the most beautiful thing in the world, nor the smallest, but it is fairly inconspicuous, and shouldn’t look too out of place in most TV tables. One disadvantage with this box you might need to be aware of is that it lacks any kind of SPDIF out; if you want digital you’ll have to go with HDMI. Unfortantely, my receiver (an Arcam AVR-200) is a few years old, and doesn’t have any digital inputs beside (a precious few) optical and coaxial ones. Luckily, an eBay search for “ASUS SPDIF” and $8 were enough to get me the necessary connector. Not the prettiest of solutions, as right now I’ve pulled the thing through a file-expanded Kensington-port, but at least it works.

As for software, I’ve installed Ubuntu 10.10 and XBMC on it, as well as several emulators. Not all of them work perfectly (I imagine it is partly because they were originally designed for Windows, and later ported), but especially ZSNES and Mupen64 are highly recommended. I will try to find emulators for NES and PS that I can live with later; right now I should probably concentrate on getting hold of a decent controller. The keyboard is definitely not suited for Super Mario 64.

So far, despite a few initial hurdles, everything works beautifully. I will put up (or link to) a few guides later, it might be useful to keep around for when I change something and have to reinstall everything.

I suppose asking for an extension in the first place should have been telling; I couldn’t finish that course. Going to have to retake it later. It’s not a huge problem though, at least know I have some idea of what it’s about, am being prepared should let me put some more effort into the assignments.

At one point I promised myself I wouldn’t use this blog as a diary, but I suppose that occasionally it can’t be helped. Need to sum up a bit. I do have some new games to discuss though; I’ll try to post something on those soon. There’s a Magic prerelease this week too, might be worth mentioning. I should also make a few notes regarding various Linux issues (I’ve already updated the Spotify post) and Android applications.

Well, I got an extension. Didn’t ask for one, I just said I couldn’t finish in time. The teacher asked me about my project, and I made no apologies for not having done it earlier. Explained the problems I’d run into, and outlined the project again, explaining that it essentially went nowhere. She said she wanted me to finish anyway, and gave me until Monday to hand in my paper. Now it’s Sunday night, and I’m still not done; did much less on Thursday and Friday than I should have. I’ll get it done though, just a little bit later than I’d like.

I’m sitting here with my term paper in corpus linguistics, which is due today, and there is absolutely no way I’ll be able to finish it. I badly mismanaged my time and resources, and today, when I was editing the data I had gathered from the various corpora, I ran into unforeseen problems with the (admittedly awful) software. What ideally should have taken about half an hour has taken all day. Of course, I should have finished this days or even weeks ago, so the situation is no one’s fault but my own.

I have (as have most normal students, I suspect), been in similar situation before, and my usual response was to run and hide, essentially. That meant avoiding both teachers and classmates, and potentially also later courses taught by or attended by the same people. That is, of course, a pretty irrational and even childish way of dealing with a problem, so today I’m going to prove to myself that I’m a better person than I was back then, and actually show up for class. I’m going to apologize to the teacher and thank her for allowing me to participate in the class, and let her know I’ll be back next year and do a better job of it then. Probably the only responsible way to handle it, I think.

I’m sitting here trying to gather my thoughts, writing a somewhat messy semantics paper, and I thought I might procrastinate a little. Haven’t updated this blog in ages, and I should probably either start posting, or kill it altogether. I think I’ll at least let it limp a little bit further, so here’s my attempt at resuscitation.

So, what’s new? Not all that much. I never got around to painting up those GorkaMorka gangs. Too little time, to few friends willing to give it a try. Maybe later. I bought a few more board games instead, namely Runebound and Descent. Both are entertaining enough, but again, I don’t get to play them all that often, people never seem to have time. We used to play games all the time a couple of years ago, I wonder what happened. Grew up, I suppose. Got old. Maybe I should just stick to Magic: the Gathering, at least competitive, organized games like that can be counted on to attract players.

Speaking of something completely different, I’ve noticed that there are far too few pictures here. I suppose I haven’t been all that productive when it comes to photography lately, partly because I’ve had very little inspiration, and partly because I’ve been too lazy to lug the heavy DSLR around. I recently bought a Canon S95 though, which I’m actually very happy with, so hopefully I’ll be able to update here a little more often in the future. Here’s one definitely not taken by me:

While I doubt I’ll be swimming with any lions, I’ll hopefully be able to capture the occasional slightly interesting moment.

Well, I should get back to my assignment. It’s essentially a recapitulation of a chapter in the textbook, so it shouldn’t be all that difficult, I just need to get around to actually doing it. Hope I don’t have to stay up all night.