Category: Uncategorised

Go Faster Stripes

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.

Towards A Cleaner Mario Kart

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!

Watchers on the Web

So as part of the generally good HTML5 spec, the authors have added an absolutely awful un-feature called ‘hyperlink auditing’.

So what is this? Well a classic HTML link looks a little like this…

<a href="https://www.chrisrcook.com/">Go!</a>

This will create a simple link with the text ‘Go!’ that, when clicked, will take you to a location – in this case ‘https://www.chrisrcook.com/’.

The HTML working group have added the option of a second attribute value called ‘ping’. This allows links like this…

<a href="https://www.chrisrcook.com/" ping="http://spying-gits.com/our_tracker">Go!</a>

So what happens here? Well, as before, clicking on the ‘Go!’ link will take you to ‘https://www.chrisrcook.com’. It will also open a second connection to the ‘http://spying-gits.com/our_tracker’ – and so allow hidden third party auditing of your browsing activity and will do so in a way that will not be disabled by classic tracker and ad blockers.

Firefox have taken the sensible route and disabled this functionality by default. Chrome, being the offensive arm of the Google Ad Empire, sends the tracking mark back by default. Apple, in spite of their public commitments to privacy, have implemented it as of Safari 12.1.

Which is a terrible mistake.

See more

An Alien short for the 40th anniversary of the first film

Alien turns 40 this year and, to me, remains the pinnacle of horror movies and ranks amongst the top tiers of the science fiction pantheon.

Dirty, claustrophobic, unrelenting; it was the complete opposite of another great personal favourite – 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gone was the shining white heat of Kubrick and Clarke’s future, where a top tier crew pushes the boundaries of man’s knowledge with not a mote of dust to be seen. Instead our A Team is replaced with tired industrial workers, each one vested in little more than getting safely back home with their pay packet in their pockets. It was a grimy, tired future, one created by people worn out by the end of the post war dream and who were looking to see a future that reflected a present that refused to change.

Interestingly enough though, both crews get screwed over by a remote governance structure that doesn’t trust them and an artificial intelligence that acts as their local agent. Apparently some fears never change.

As part of this 40th anniversary celebration, a set of Alien themed shorts has been commissioned. The first, below, is a nicely compact piece that manages reflect the fear and claustrophobia of the original film whilst ignoring the pseudo-philosophical tripe that tainted recent efforts. I look forward to the release of the remaining shorts over the next month or so.

RSS Feed

It’s just dawned on me that, after my discussion about NetNewsWire last week, I have yet to enable a feed for this site.

Well now I have – at the bottom of every blog page there should now be a link to this site’s RSS feed.

NetNewsWire

Huzzah! NetNewsWire – the first RSS reader that I ever really used in anger – is back as a modernised and updated open source project! A lack of external sync services marks it out as still quite far from a usable initial release, but, as soon as some of these are added I shall look at moving away from the moribund Reeder and back to NNW as my desktop RSS reader of choice.

Now all we need is for Google to retask the now defunct Google+ team to resurrecting Google Reader and we can all start RSS’ing like it’s 2007 again! After all, without Google+ (or a similar replacement), there is no need for Google to try and kill off the open web in favour of their own walled garden.

(And for anyone searching; the new NetNewsWire agent string is “NetNewsWire (RSS Reader; https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)”)

Clarus the Dogcow

A 512 Pixels article (and video) on Clarus the Dogcow; Apple’s unofficial mascot from back when computers were still fun and not just second cousin to your fridge.

512 pixels also does us the favour of covering the history of the Dogcow in actual human readable text – each character lovingly rendered in quickly skimable prose. After all, sometimes you’d rather just deal with the topic on hand than listening to someone else speak.