A Little More Web Kipple
Sorting through an old box of crap, I accidentally came across my ancient DVD of ‘28 Days Later’.
Ever-happy to put aside something I should actually be doing and procrastinate, I popped it on and spent the next two hours (ish) rewatching a film I’d not seen since I first bought the DVD back in autumn 2003 – some 16 long years ago.
Continue reading “16 Years Later: An (almost) review of ’28 Days Later’”A trailer for the new DOOM dropped at E3 yesterday and I have to say that I’m rather looking forward to it. I’ve played DOOM – in it’s various incarnations – since the mid-late 90s and, in a world where stories seem to be ever more complex, the simplicity of DOOM is a refreshing change.
It’s mindless escapism with black and white antagonists which, given my ever more limited gaming time, manages to strike a deeply appealing note to me.
Mac Open Web is an interesting little link for Apple users out there; it’s a curated web directory (remember those!) of open source and small developer software targeting the open/indie web with nothing from the big players and the major corporations.
I do hope that, as we push into the early 2020s, the slash-and-burn axis of facebook-twitter-reddit-google starts to weaken.
I have now managed to screw my Amazon Advertising Profile up so much I now receive adverts for ISDN Splitters!
ISDN? ISDN was old when I took my first job (a worryingly long time ago). It was, along with some older vampire tapped BNC, one of the first things I tore out and replaced with a more civilised solution.
I mean, I could understand someone with some new old stock and a huge warehouse quietly listing it in the hope that someone might buy it and that they wouldn’t end up paying for recycling, but to actively advertise ISDN kit? That takes both commitment and an up front cash payment.
Madness!
I’ve given in and installed Seti@Home again, this time dialled back to the point where it is — effectively — indistinguishable from my computers background cpu noise. The Intel GPU instance gave me terrible performance issues on my older MacBook Pro but that can be disabled via the website.
If we have another long hot summer I suspect that I’ll have to suspend running it until temperatures return to normal.
It’s been so long that since I’ve had to burn real, physical media that I’ve completely forgotten how to do it – especially on MacOS.
Anyway, it turns out all you have to do is right click on the iso and select burn.
And, just like that, I’m now an owner of a Kubuntu 19.04 install CD.
In other good news, it appears that my external blu ray reader/writer still works!
The internet of my youth continues to bitrot into nothingness. This time it’s the (presumed) death of lspace.org – a site that was once the premier Discworld location on the web. I must have spent hours working through the annotated Pratchett files when I should have been studying for my GCSEs.
Now all it returns is…
DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAINIt’s hardly an auspicious end.
Well this is hideous.
And remember: friends don’t let friends bling up their cases with LEDs.
Apparently Virgin Media has upgraded the upload on the link that this little site sits behind from 20Mb/s to 35Mb/s. That means that all none of you who actually read these entries should be able to access things a little quicker.
The rumour mill also suggests that my download will be bumped to 500Mb/s some time next week – which in theory is nice but, unlike the upload, I very rarely manage to hit the current top speed even with a wired connection.
I have a long history with Mario Kart; after Super Mario World, it was the second computer game – on any platform – that I bought. A cutting edge title, it used the Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 to scale and rotate 2D graphics to generate a sudo-3D play area. It was – to my pre-teen eyes – a visually stunning game combined with fantastic gameplay.
Returning to it years later I have to wonder what I was thinking. The game play remains fun – it’s fast and furious (though not as tricky as I remember) – but the landscape visuals rapidly descend into a flickering, distorted mess as soon as you try and play it.
Fortunately there is a solution: the latest version of BSNES contains a new scaling and rotation algorithm. Instead of performing the rotation with the original sprite (as performed on the original SNES), it upscales the image, rotates and then reduces it back to the original size – and looses far less detail in the process as it does so.
And the results look fantastic:
Pilotwings, a game I got towards the end of my SNES ownership and long after I had started sliding into the darkside that that was PC gaming, also benefits from the Mode 7 cleanup work. Just look at the quality of the airfield in this footage.
Now all I need to do is to find the time to go back and replay these games in their new 2019 glory!