Welcome to the News Page. Or more often, the ranting page, because nothing seems to make any logical sense. This is where I whinge about Sony, one of the banes of my life, (although not so much these days,) mobile ’phones, fizzing FaceBook, automatic software updates and Windows, the OSs I still need that were put together by the work experience kid. (And Windows 10 seems like it was done by the work experience kid of the 1st work experience kid. ) Plus anything else that frustrates and ticks me off, which is a lot these days, as well as providing news about cool gaming related stuff that I’m interested in and willing to share with everyone. :-D There’s also other boring news about what I’ve been up to on certain days. I try to keep it trimmed to the last 2 years, except for a few minor things I want to preserve. If you get your butt down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find a table of my 5 most recently played games also. So strap yourself in, grab a pinch of salt, and be prepared for me letting off steam! Toot!

Monday, 1st Of June, 2015
Today’s current mood:
• HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? Or more importantly, do you know who he is? This chap is an “extra” in various TV shows and movies, and mostly always from Britain. He’s appeared in Harry Potter twice, Die Another Day, Hustle twice, Poirot: Elephants Can Remember (as the Crime Author Of The Year announcer), possibly in One Chance, Love Actually, Marple: The Blue Geranium, and maybe Bridget Jones’ Diary. I even enquired at ITV, but they didn’t know, and told me to try IMDb. Yeah well, like I wouldn’t have tried that already. He’s never credited for the shows he’s in, so it’s almost impossible to find out. I even scoured a casting website for extra actors once, trying to spot him. One site suggested he may be Edward Wills IV, but I don’t have any other proof that that’s true. So, if you know, write to me and let me know.
• Someone reckoned it might snow today, but it hasn’t. At least not where I am.

Tuesday, 12th Of July, 2016
Today’s current mood:
• Did anybody notice that if you re-arrange the letters of Bill Gates, you can get “labels git?” Makes you wonder about those Windows stickers!

Saturday, 1st of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (12:47) Yesterday, I was reading a little bit about the Japanese trio, Perfume. Apparently they’ve been going for about 20 years, and if so, that would make their youngest member, A-Chan, only 13 years old at the time. Personally, I think most of their music’s quite weird, but I do like their presentation. They always seem to have proper looking music videos & not some half-@r$€d amateur looking thing around somebody’s bedroom. I also like how they have closely matching clothes, and you can almost always pick who’s who from their hair as well. They always seem to have the same hair styles. I like their outfits in Time Warp, so check that out if you have time.

Monday, 3rd of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (21:59) While I’m focussed on dealing with electronic things and transformers, I decided to have a snoop inside another one I’ve had for years. My grandparents gave it to me along with an old View Master dealie. (If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically a gizmo you look into to see stereoscopic images on film, which are mounted in a circular carboard disc.) The transformer just provides 6 V for the light bulb. But on opening its base, what else did I find? Multiple connections suggesting it came out of some old valve based appliance. It had a connection marked “C” for common, then 4 V & 6 V. Next up were 3 connections for 2 out of phase 385 V… uh connections. (D’oh. I said connections twice.) So that winding would’ve been 770 V from end to end, but with the central “tap.” You usually see that with valve equipment, with the 2 ends of the winding going to a rectifier, and the single output from the (rectifier) valve being the positive, with the negative connections in the circuit going to the chassis and central point of this high voltage transformer winding. Anyway, it also seemed to have 3 primary winding connections for variations in voltage, and another 2 at the end which looked like they said 5 V and 2A, which seemed a bit odd. But yeah; I have no idea what it came out of. It’s pretty large as well, but it’s mounted on a block of wood.
If I’m correct about the one above being the Philips one I think it is, it probably would’ve had a winding for 45 V as well, because the valves for the audio output had heaters that ran on this voltage, rather than 6.3 V. UL84 is the type they most likely would’ve been. (Based on a similar model I have the schematic diagram for.)

Sunday, 9th of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (13:28) I got a good shock in Oblivion last night. I went back to the Shivering Isles to get some more Withering Moon for Reflect Spell potions, and ended up staying longer than I thought, while I looked around the Dementia side of the land. I went down to Vitharn way, and Xiditte, and then headed further west. As I went along, a map icon popped up on the compass in the light beige colour. I thought: “Holey beep! A place I haven’t found?!” And I think I’d just been thinking that it’d be nice to find some joint I’d never been to. Well then I did! Corpserot Passage! The funny thing is, I’d been pretty close by it before, but obviously not close enough to the map marker. It turns out to be one of the prisons for the Shivering Isles. Unfortunately, you can’t explore it all, because roots block your path. Well, unless you get sent there. I got some good loot from it though. Wow the grummites were being a pain last night. They seemed to be everywhere. They’re like the goblins from Cyrodiil. Just painfully hard to kill off. They seem to be excellent at blocking and knowing exactly when to strike and overwhelm you with hits.

Monday, 10th of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (12:51) All right! Last night, I was playing Oblivion again, and I got myself a new Perfect Madness Bow made from Cutter, since I picked up a matrix In Corpserot Prison. It’s better than my Bow Of Storms, or whatever it was called. The Daedric one. So I’ve put that into retirement on top of a wardrobe. Then, back on Nirn, I went to sell some stuff, and got my Illusion skill up a notch when I charmed the person. But more importantly, I finally reached Master level of Mercantile! Woooo! It took long enough. So now, anyone you can trade with, has an extra 500 gold pieces, on top of any investments you made as well. So that’s like 1000 extra gold for them. I presume you can still do investments now too. I’d have to check on that.
I’m ¹/₅ of the way to going up to level 43. Only my Blunt & Hand To Hand skills can be increased further from my major skills.

Wednesday, 12th of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (13:10) Dang. I think my secondary hard drive for my main PC really is having issues. I put my usual music on, and I got an error message pop up from the FLAC decoder. That made my heart sink. I had problems like this before, and thought it was related to an unlocking program I got called “ThisIsMyFile,” but I haven’t used that in ages. So I got my backup hard drive out, and yep, the file had changed. I ran it by a hex editor program, and it showed the 1st mismatch. So I ordered a new ~1 TB “surveillance” hard drive off eBay. These ones are supposed to have a high reliability for writing actions. I got a Western Digital Blue one again, which is the same as the one I have now, apart from the “surveillance” designation. *Sigh.* I’ll have to copy the older one to it somehow as well. I might put the new drive into my 2018 PC and plug the caddy into that as well, and just do it that way. Then swap the new one over with the one that’s in my caddy now. So long as it isn’t the caddy that’s got issues. The weird thing is, no other files seem to be corrupt. Maybe I play the same music too often. There haven’t been any errors reported to Windows though. Usually if a drive had bad sectors / blocks, you’d get a red error message in the event viewer. I’ve got them for improperly inserted SD cards and a dodgy DVD I had, so you’d think it would show for this. I dunno. The other thing is, you can’t check its S.M.A.(A.)R.T. status, because seemingly that can only be done if it’s connected directly to the motherboard. Anyway, I think it’s about 7½ years old, so it’s probably due for replacement.

Sunday, 16th of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (16:27) No hard drive yet. It’ll probably be this week.
• Tomorrow I should start on the soldering of my new L.E.D. “sequencer” circuit. Yesterday, which was my birthday, I set it up on my little bread board, and it ran fine, although the start position was offset by 4 L.E.D.s. So it was just as well I noticed that. I could change the inputs to the ULN2803APG I.C., but I can just leave it and make the L.E.D.s connect to the right pins anyway. That’ll save me changing my printed schematic diagram, and causing confusion. So L.E.D.s for #1 will connect to pin 14, then 2 = 13, 3 = 12, 4 = 11, 5 = 18 and so on until 8 = 15. I know what I’m doing anyway. I printed out a “grid” of dots at actual size for the circuit board, so I know what co-ordinates all the L.E.D.s have to go to, and how I’m positioning the 3 I.C.s as well.
• I found out about a show from 5 years ago called Babylon Berlin, which is a German TV show. It sounds rather intriguing. It’s set back in the 1920s and early 1930s from what I gather. I don’t understand German though, so it’d have to have English subtitles, and I think it’s on some pay TV station overseas, so my chances of seeing it are probably slim. Unless they do DVDs of it with subtitles.

Monday, 17th of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (20:27) I got a bit of soldering done today. Up until my eyes wore out. On the left is a sample of how the thing will animate. But you’ll be able to adjust the speed.
My new hard drive hasn’t turned up yet, but I have a feeling it might be tomorrow, so more soldering may have to wait until Wednesday. At least I won’t be doing much in the way of drilling this time. There’s only one socket, and it’ll be on the end of some long wires. No switches, big potentiometers or LED holders to deal with either.

Thursday, 20th of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (18:57) Today was my 4th day of soldering for my happy face doodad. It’s taking much longer than I expected. I’m still waiting on my replacement hard drive to rock up, so I may or may not get more soldering done tomorrow. It’s mostly just lengths of wire to measure out, cut and solder in now. Most of which are on the back of the board to keep the central area looking neat.

Saturday, 22nd of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (23:25) My new hard drive turned up today, (— yes, on Saturday —) so I spent most of my time copying my other one to it. Then this evening there were storms, so I had to stop a couple of times. While the storms were happening, I got a bit more soldering in, so tomorrow will make 7 days of it. Just a few more wires to go, and it’ll be done. I just have to finish connecting the L.E.D.s in parallel horizontally, and then the cathodes vertically on just one side for the matching ones that come on together from top to bottom.

Monday, 24th of October, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (22:05) Hooray! I finally finished my L.E.D. sequencer thingo. With the perspex front, and protective cardboard rear. That’s to protect the wall when I hang it up. What’s mildly interesting, is that the purple L.E.D.s on the upper level (3rd row from the bottom), are slightly more red. I can only assume it’s a variation in the current limiting resistor over the one for the lower pair, and that has something to do with the colouring. In fact the yellow ones will go quite orange on a low amount of juice. Anyway, it worked pretty close to perfectly when I 1st tried it, except for the upper blue L.E.D.s not coming on. (5th row up from the bottom.) It turned out a blob of solder, I thought was a complete blob, actually had a microscopic gap in it. After a re-melt with the soldering iron, it was fine. The white L.E.D.s, as I think I said before, are connected in series. 4 groups of 3 in series, making the total 12, allowing for 3 V each off the 9 V supply. Although they’ll go up to 3.4 V each. Because I reduced the brightness of the other L.E.D.s to match the intensity of the purple ones, the white ones really stand out.
• (22:53) The 12 white L.E.D.s only draw about 26 mA or so of current. I just did a test with my multi-meter in the exact same way they’re connected on the circuit board. So that’s not too bad. I dunno how much the whole thing uses.

Tuesday, 1st of November, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (13:32) I’ve just completed another house plug-in for Oblivion. This time it’s called: Ayleid Mansion. It’s located on the Orange Road, south-west of Bruma, and there’s even an entertainer who juggles and dances. Plus a cleaning woman, and 2 other shop keepers. It’ll cost you 39 grand, but you get a pretty impressive joint, with lots of display space in the Grand Gallery, and there’s also a transportation room too. I’ll upload it soon-ish, so keep your eyes peeled on the main page for when I announce it.
• I’m also thinking of doing a mesh fix pack, which will allow for some corrections to the meshes in the game. Stuff I can fix that is. There’s that weird one in the forts with the bits that are transparent, some of the Ayleid metal work could use higher level thresholds on the alpha channels, and there was something else too, but I can’t remember what! Anyway, as this won’t need plug-in files to work, I can update it at any time, and you can choose what meshes you want, and don’t want. Somebody else might’ve done a similar thing, but you can always choose from mine or theirs.

Wednesday, 9th of November, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (13:51) I knew things were going to be weird today. I had a whole heap of trouble with eBay. 2 or 3 local printing supply shops have just up and gone from where I live, so I resorted to the Internet to get a new yellow toner cartridge. You had to send a message to the seller on eBay about which colour you wanted, but the sodding send “button” (if you could call it that) didn’t work! So I logged out, and went to try Firefox 93 in Tiny Core Linux, and nothing! The site didn’t even load! Every other site I tried did. So I tried Pale Moon in Windows 7, and the same thing! It said it couldn’t establish a connection to eBay. All the other sites I tried worked. And this was all prior to logging back in of course. So I dunno what’s figged up with them. I had to find the ’phone number for the shop (outside of using eBay), and call them. Although I got the wrong number at 1st, and found somebody else with the same name. Anyway, I got it sorted out in the end. Plus, eBay seems to have their dates back to front. They had some offer that was supposed to expire on the 11th day of the 13th month this year. I don’t think so.
• (23:46) I found a song from Armenia tonight, and the “video” was just a still picture. But it had an interesting looking church. So I thought, all right — let’s see if I can find it. And it was no worry! A few minutes later I knew its name, and then found it on the map, and when it was built. The place is Marmashen Monastery, which is not far from the border of Turkey. It was built between 986 to 1029.
• Here’s a video I found of somebody playing Inu No Osanpo, that NAOMI dog walking game. If there was a Dreamcast version, I wonder if it would’ve been possible to play it with something like the fishing rod…

Friday, 11th of November, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (19:14) I figured out what was up with my 2018 PC not loading eBay from Pale Moon or in Firefox 93 under Linux. It was Microsoft’s fault! LOL. Basically, if it wasn’t for all the sneaky back door accessing of sites on the ’net when you run Oblivion, I wouldn’t need to block I.P. addresses in the firewall program thing. Apparently eBay must’ve somehow fallen into one of the ranges of addresses I specified. The send button ended up working again today anyway.
I decided to pull my finger out today & decide on what stuff I want for this transformer project I’m going to do after Christmas. It’s going to be a pretty loaded power supply! (Not that kind of loaded, or overloaded!) I found a seller on eBay with a good range of (panel mounted) volt meters, and then I just need one for amps. I also need a small circuit board, 7809 voltage regulator + a heat sink, maybe something like a 4700 µF capacitor, and the box. I have pretty much everything else. It’d be nice to light up the meters with L.E.D.s, but they might be hard to mount. I was going to have 2 L.E.D.s lighting up the transformer itself, just to be flash, but I don’t want the thing glowing like Las Vegas. It should be subtle.

Saturday, 12th of November, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (16:37) I took my old transformer out of its wooden box today at last. It only needed to have the primary winding wires de-soldered, and the rest was in terminal strips. (So, out with the screw driver.) Wow it felt heavy to lift out with just my thumbs and index fingers by the bolts. I put it on the scales, and it came to 2.8 kg. If you threw that at somebody’s head, you’d probably crack their skull. It’s just a big chunk of metal. Anyway, it’s probably a touch smaller than my initial measurements in the box it was in, so it should fit fine in a new one I spotted on eBay. There’s no brand written on it anywhere. But it looks pretty similar to another one in a New Zealand Philips radio & record player combo thing, so I’d say it is the one from my Nanna’s old audio system from the 1950s. The primary winding wires are a little short, so I’m going to solder on some new, longer ones, cover them with heat-shrink tubing, and run the new ones to a terminal strip, which’ll be bolted to the case. That will prevent any damage to the transformer if the cord gets pulled on. But I will be using 2 plastic cable clamps in a “S-bend” of the cord, so it’s nicely held in. The whole project will probably cost around $80, so a real labour of love for something you could buy from the shops for much less, and in a much smaller box for a lot less weight!
I also tested the primary winding resistance. It’s only about 200 & something ohms, but then a new transformer I have is only about 1 kΩ. Plus I had it running recently, so I know it’s working fine.
This picture is the side that was facing the bottom of the box, which you didn’t see on the 23rd of September. It’s pretty plain and to the point. It’s been sprayed with some kind of silvery looking paint. The metal’s iron, I’d say, since it has patches of rust. The part around the windings is like a thick paper.

Wednesday, 16th of November, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (22:42) I was watching One Foot In The Grave — The Affair Of The Hollow Lady, which is episode 3 of series 5. In the credits they had the woman in the hospital as Edna Monterel, but it’s just Doreen Mantle’s name, with the letters rearranged. They even have a page for her at IMDb.

Thursday, 17th of November, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (15:38) I just tried another couple of MVs — one from France & one from South Korea. Nope. Both cr@p. I never have any luck with French music anyway. I shouldn’t’ve bothered with the Korean one, especially after last year’s mediocre line up from there. This year’s album of the year is definitely shaping up to be 33 from Heesey, I reckon. Nothing else really pulled me in that much to see what the rest of the tracks were like, and the fact that I liked the majority of the album too, makes it the winner for me. That said, it was only this year that I found out about QU4RTZ, and I really liked a lot of their cheery, cute, upbeat songs. Very much what I’ve been looking for! It’s a pity they didn’t have any official MVs. It was only because of an unofficial one that I found out about them. What is it? The Love Live series or something? Some computer game? I have no idea.
But the year isn’t over yet, so I guess something else impressive could still be coming too! On the whole, this year’s had quite a lot of great songs. I’ve mostly been focussing on Japan, but I have found stuff from a few other places too. If you haven’t had a squizz, pop on over to my list of music videos for this year.
• The box for the transformer above turned up like yesterday, or Tuesday, or some time. It’s going to be a bit more of a squeeze than I thought, but it should be fine. The voltage regulators and capacitors turned up today as well. If I do a L.E.D. for the meter, I might have to glue it in place, or use a terminal strip to hold it.

Friday, 18th of November, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (14:57) I’ve got 2 MP4 files being converted from the same source, in the same manner, on my MacBook and my iMac G5. Even with my MacBook running at half speed (since the battery’s stuffed), the iMac G5 is only about 86.6% as fast. So at 2.1 GHz, it still can’t beat the Intel Core 2 Duo at 1 GHz it seems. (The iMac G5 has a single core PowerPC G5 CPU, in case you missed that elsewhere on my site and had no clue to begin with.) The RAM might be slower too in the iMac. I dunno. I wish my Power Mac G5 was working properly. It’d beat them both in the MacBook’s current state. I’ll have to save up for a 2nd hand Mac Pro, and put that to use. As long as it lasts for several years.

Sunday, 27th of November, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (14:41) If you want to see something impressive, check out these chain reaction videos! The Blue Marble and Magnets & Marbles. These are at 50 Hz too, so they’re nice and smooth.

Sunday, 4th of December, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (12:32) Here’s a car you don’t see much. (Unless you own one.) The Pagani Zonda C12. Hasn’t Horacio Pagani been spotted in Monaco? That’s where this is, back in May, 1999 — the year the car 1st appeared. I can’t say it IS his car, but it’s certainly one of the 1st Pagani Zondas. These are from a video my Dad got when he was there that year, near that snazzy casino.
I was watching a video last night by this chap called Doug DeMuro, about the Pagani Zonda S Roadster. The guy went into every brain numbing detail about it, but it was interesting to learn a few aspects I wasn’t aware of. He said the one he reviewed was only one of very few in America, and the 1st one he’d seen for real. I’ve only ever seen one at the Sydney Motor Show. That was a S rendition of it, in yellow.
There was a black Jaguar XJ-220 at Monaco that night as well, and that car is pretty rare too. If you have Need For Speed 2, you’ll know it. I actually found out about that Doug chap while looking up about quirky cars, I think, in 2018. And I spotted his one about that Yugo from Yugoslavia. Then the other day I watched one about the BMW Isetta.
• (15:15) Actually, after looking at a video of the Motor Show from 2008, the Pagani Zonda S that was there, was the Roadster one as well. It had the open top, and it looked like it said Roadster above the radio. I dunno how much it was worth here in Australia.

Monday, 12th of December, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (14:19) Yeah, this year’s been pretty great, music wise, if my page of best MVs for this year is anything to go by. At least up until maybe August. I felt things kind of dwindled down in the stuff I liked though. It’s been a bit like 2019 with the Korean music. There seemed to be a big gap after July (that year), and I was wondering if I’d ever hear anything good again. And it isn’t just from Japan either, this year. I’ve been looking at music from other countries as well, but I mustn’t be picking the right stuff. That said, I was glad to find out about Heesey (this year), as well as QU4RTZ.
• I’ve started decorating the Christmas tree, but I don’t usually do it all in 1 day. The old lights are still working, thank goodness, which are older than my Mum. So they might be about 80 or so.

Saturday, 17th of December, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (15:26) Ooh! Almost Christmas! Just 8 days to go! For anybody who’s feeling generous, (such as rich readers from Dubai,) here are some pressie ideas you can send me!
• QU4RTZ CDs from Japan
• A flamingo neon lamp thingy
• An Aurora plasma ball from Canada
• A 8 GB or 16 GB SD card
• Some 500-ish GB flash memory units
• 33 from Heesey
• Some new regular (non noise cancelling) headphones from Sennheiser

Yep, those items would be good.
• (16:24) As for what I said on the 3rd of October about my Nanna’s old Philips record player & radio combo thing having UL84 valves, that’s probably not true after all. It would seem that the models here may have used an Australian only valve; the 6BH5. But it says it’s a RF / IF amplifier, so that might not be right either as far as powering the speakers. And this one has a 6.3 V heater.
• (18:12) Actually, after further reading, it’s the 6M5 valve, which was used for the output on similar audio systems, and it’s apparently equivalent to the EL80. So this should explain why my transformer seemingly has no 45 V winding, which I was inclined to think, based on the similar New Zealand models. Philips must’ve made a lot of circuit variations for similar models. This Grand 177A is the closest model I’ve seen to my Nanna’s record player + radio. What you can’t see though, since it’s shown from the left, is the volume knob embedded in the right side of the cabinet.
• (19:26) I’ve been looking through more Philips RadioPlayers, as the company seemed to call them, and found the Beethoven 178A, which looks even closer to my Nanna’s one, I think. Especially since this has a magic eye valve. Plus, if you go to the 7th image, you can see the side mounted volume knob. Holey moley! It’s been nigh on 40 years since I saw the real thing. This one has the correct record player — the AG1000 — but I’m not sure about that central knob. This was a pretty expensive piece of equipment at £204.75 in Aussie money back in 1955! My Grandpa always bought my Nanna the best stuff though. If it was this model. But something very similar, if not.

Wednesday, 21st of December, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (19:00) Yesterday I completed a 3D rendition of the Philips Beethoven 178A, and you can check that out @ DeviantArt. It took about 3 days to get it done! But my computer only took 37 seconds to render it.
• It’ll be my Nanna’s birthday on the 23rd. If she was still around, she’d be 120. Kashiyuka from Perfume has her birthday then as well. Except she’s 86 years younger.
• There’s a shed load of pressies under our Christmas tree this year, so it looks to be a good one. I ordered some heat sinks for my transformer project back in November, but they never turned up! I got my money back, and the 2nd lot I ordered (from somebody else) turned up yesterday, so that was good. Just in time to make it under the tree.
• I haven’t found any more decent songs lately. Maybe something good’ll turn up @ the start of next year. Maybe too many performers’ve gone on holiday.

Thursday, 22nd of December, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (22:54) I think I’ll call it quits for hoping for any more decent music videos this year. All the good stuff’s probably being held back for next year. It’s also everyone cashing in on Christmas now too. I like some traditional Chrissy tunes, but like my Mum says, after Christmas, you don’t fancy hearing them again.
• As usual, I won’t be doing anything on the ’net on Christmas Day. No checking e-mail or anything.

Tuesday, 27th of December, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (16:13) I soldered in the main components for my new power supply today, to a mini PCB, as you can see to the left. I’m going to get the transformer in the box first, before I put this in there with it. Anyway, I did test this circuit to the left, and it was pretty good! I had my plasma ball transformer, which has a 15 V AC output, so I tested it with that. The multi-meter said 8.92 V, so pretty close to the 9 V rating of the regulator. The diode on the right is there, just in case. It’s to suppress any remaining charge from inductive components, like relays or motors that I may run on it. They may not affect the voltage regulator, but I wasn’t too sure. It’s obviously connected with its anode to negative, or it would just virtually make a short circuit.
So, for those of you who don’t know, from left to right, we have the bridge rectifier, filter capacitor, 7809 voltage regulator, a small value ceramic disc capacitor, and the power diode. I’ll also be adding resitors for internal lighting with L.E.D.s. I was going to have one for the meter, but light doesn’t go through it from the back, sadly.
• Click on the picture on the right to see the circuit diagram of the completed dealie. It’s got more bits than the one on the Electronics Circuits Page too. It’s supposed to use a 0.1 µF capacitor on the output side of the voltage regulator, but I didn’t have any, and 0.022 µF was the next best thing. It still seems to be functioning correctly.

Friday, 30th of December, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (20:09) I’ve been doing electrical and electronic related things all day, just about. I just put a new plug on the soldering iron. The old one’d cracked, and if you weren’t careful, you could touch the prongs from inside the power board, so I didn’t want to risk that. Before that, I tested a rocker switch with a neon, which was fine, fixed my headphones again, and earlier I was drilling holes in my new box for my power supply project. Plus enough filing to last a lifetime.
Anyway, I tested my cable clamps, and I think I can get the cord to hold fine without any S-bend shape. I’m going to run it from the front left corner, to the front right corner for the 1st clamp, then have a 2nd @ the back. Then it’ll connect to a terminal strip, from which I’ll run the other wires to the switch. I should have some pictures when it’s done.

Saturday, 31st of December, 2022
Today’s current mood:
• (19:17) Day 3 of the box drilling. So, this is the box I got off eBay. Like nearly all the sellers on there, they’re pretty much these water resistant things, ’cos they must think everybody wants to mount them outside for some reason. Another thing I can’t figure out is all the strange attachment points in the bottom, and what they were intended for. Especially the ones on the left and right, which have brass pieces for bolts. I had to use a mini, spinning, cutting tool to slice the left one off. The holes you see in the base are for the transformer bolts. The square hole is for the window I wanted, the rectangle one at the top of the picture is for the power switch, the messy one on the right is for the meter, and the oval one near the hinge, is for the fuse holder. Other ones in the bottom are for the circuit board, terminal strip & cable clamps. I also put some air holes on the sides. But I won’t be running it all day long. Just a bit in the evenings, probably.
Yeah, so I was drilling, cutting, filing and even melting this thing to get the holes I wanted. I need some kind of LASER cutting gizmo, I reckon. As for the L.E.D.s, I’ll just be having an internal one, in ice blue. That was a real shame that the meter didn’t let light through it. It would’ve been really nice with one of my turquoise L.E.D.s.
On the whole, I probably should’ve got a better box, like some small PC case. This wasn’t really the masterpiece I visualised. It’s more practical than anything.
Tomorrow: Soldering, and attaching the stuff to the case. I’m going to use some string for the circuit board, but most other stuff will use nuts and bolts. The power switch is pressure fitted with sideways clips, the fuse holder has its own nut, the meter has built-in bolts, and supplied nuts too, and there should be some nuts & bolts in the garage for the terminal strip.

Sunday, 1st of January, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (23:45) Happy New Year!
• I spent most of today assembling my power supply. I ran into quite a few hurdles along the way, unfortunately. I still have to put the plug on for the output, but the main part of it’s working. You can check out the interior. Naturally you wouldn’t run it, exposed like this. I’m not happy with the packing tape as extra insulation for the primary winding wires, so I’ll replace that with thicker heat-shrink tubing, when I can get some. I’ll have to desolder the wires to slip it on though. I did use some electrical tape 1st, but it had lost its stickiness, and just half peeled back off. I really wanted to avoid sticky things. I also had to enlarge the hole for the meter. It should’ve been done as a 4.9 cm hole from the get go, and then had the bolt holes drilled next to it. I really did that the hard way. The transformer is resting on 2 pieces of wood, because otherwise the outer winding would be under pressure on the bottom of the case. I used a dentist’s mirror last night to confirm it had a gap.

Monday, 2nd of January, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:34) I won’t be doing a list of best songs for last year on this page, because I’ve already done them on The 2022 Music Videos Page. I still have a bunch of videos to check out from last year, so more may be added to the list at any time. That goes for any other pages in the past, if something crops up which I didn’t know about. Be sure to check the Music Page for tunes without videos as well.
• (18:14) I tested my new power supply with the L.E.D. sequencer which I finished on the 24th of October. It worked perfectly! It used up to about 180 mA with all the L.E.D.s on. You could see the meter’s needle going up & down as they went on and off.
Getting back to the transformer itself, I think it has the two 6 volt windings, because the rectifier in the Philips “Beethoven” 178A had a directly heated cathode. (So the heater was connected on one side, to the high voltage output.) It was a 5V4G. So perhaps it wasn’t suitable to have the light bulbs connected to that as well.
• Well, I have 17 more MVs to check out soon, from various countries, so I’d better get on with that!

Tuesday, 3rd of January, 2023
Today’s current mood: +
• (14:14) Ah, I’ve got so many music video previews to finish up watching from last year. It’s getting a bit tiring and dreadful to have to face them. I’ve got 3 more weeks of stuff to watch from November, 3 more from December, and 7 whole music videos I got today. I just speed up all the preview ones when I find something cr@p. Which is most of the songs anyway.
• I ordered a box / packet / some kind of thing, of 530 pieces of heat shrink tubing yesterday. So I’ll never need to buy that again! No more spending now!
• I’ll add the 2023 music video page to the site when a song that’s great from this year appears. I’ve got a bunch from Vietnam to check out, but I don’t usually have much luck from there. It’s probably going to be mostly Japanese stuff again this year.

Monday, 9th of January, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:19) It’s 60 years ago this year that the compact cassette was 1st revealed. It was invented by Lou Ottens, who I believe died a couple of years or so back. He worked with Philips, and was also behind the creation of the compact disc, which was actually invented in 1972! Can you believe it?! But it took 10 years for them to be something you could buy. It’s hard to believe they go back to just over 40 years in terms of public availability. I wonder if the 1972 invention had them storing 650 MB of data, because that would’ve been humongous for back then. Even in 1982, that would’ve been a lot. Then of course, they went up to 703 MB later on, and that’s pretty much still the standard for blank ones you can buy.
• (15:22) My perspex, heat shrink tubing and a SD card for my Canon camera all turned up in the mail today. So, I was able to complete my power supply project with the window on the front. I also redid the wires for the primary side of the transformer, and got rid of that awful electrical & packing tape. I was hoping to use 4 nuts and bolts from my box of PCB spacers to hold the perspex window on, but they were too short! So I just used some string for now. One of the great and more overlooked items in the electronics industry. In any case, the whole thing isn’t overly visible anyway, because I’ve put it behind my Dreamcast on my shelf of game consoles. Now it’s within reach of my latest L.E.D. sequencer. It was supposed to be a bit artistic and fancy looking, but it ended up rather plain and just functional, as you can see. Ah well. Later, I’ll make up a multi-adaptor, with about 4 plugs and 1 socket, so I can plug more stuff into the power supply. As long as I don’t go beyond that 1 amp limit.

Saturday, 14th of January, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:07) Last night I thought I’d try making up a circuit with a microphone for my main PC. I found 2 electret microphones in my box of left over components, and I still have 2 unused battery holders, so something powered by a couple of my rechargeable AAA size batteries seemed like a good plan! If you want to read more, head on over to the Electronic Circuits Page.

Monday, 16th of January, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:46) I think my ISP’s been wiped out. Or something between them and myself. Apparently there’ve been floods and loads of rain up in Queensland, where they’re based, so maybe that’s the issue. So if you’re reading this, things are back to normal, obviously.
• It was predicted that it might be 24°C today, but I think it’s been hotter, really. I woke up at 8 something o’clock this morning, and was roasting. I had to fling all my bed covers and stuff off. Ah — come back, Winter! I want it more like 8°C.
• In case you missed it, I completed making that microphone circuit, and I recorded a sample sound file, which you can listen to here, if you want to know how well it went. Some web browsers may play this directly, but you can save the link if you prefer. Anyway, I thought it went really well! You could hear everything. My fans running, a little screw I dropped next to it, and other stuff. Although in the sample sound, it’s just me reading a tongue twister and my PC’s fan.
• (18:19) I hope I’m not going to have trouble with my credit union again. I seem to have to keep nagging them to send my quarterly statement, and they can never get their $#!+ together. I suggested that somebody added it to their “to do list.” Now I get some weird e-mail from them, asking to talk to me on the ’phone about it. What is that about ever? This is the reason I gave the Condomless Bank the finger, because they said they could send you a statement whenever, and they never stuck to it.

Wednesday, 18th of January, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:07) I’ve been looking up early CD players tonight. Some interesting ones to check out, are the NEC CD-803 from 1982, the Hitachi / Lo-D DAD-1000 and Philips’ very original CD-100. I also found out about my Nanna’s National Panasonic RF-507 radio. It was a bit older than I thought. 1978, it says. I thought it might’ve been from the 1980s. Another radio I got more information on, is my STC (Rambler) Transistor 7 from around 1960. I got it at a garage sale, next door to my other Nana’s house, back when I was a kid. Mine’s a grey model. It has a different power & volume knob shown to this one though. I think this person’s one’s been replaced. If you go to the ad for it, you can see the gold centre version, which is the original knob.
I’ll have to get my Mum on the case to finding a Stromberg-Carlson radio which my Nanna had as well. And possibly an old (reel to reel) tape recorder my Mum had as well.

Thursday, 19th of January, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (16:11) I’ve had it with that f**king Transport Mutual Credit Union. I’ve told them I’m going to close my accounts with them, apart from my term deposit one. They just will not give me my statement. The stubborn c*nts just want me to use some freaking web site of theirs to do stuff, and I keep telling them I’m not going to do it that way. I already agreed to change to e-mail from the paper statements, and now they want to change things again! They could never get their $#!+ together and automatically send the statements either. I had to remind them every 4 months. So I’m going to change to another credit union and see if they can serve me better. Hopefully without any weird surprises or inconvenient changes that only suit themselves.

Saturday, 28th of January, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:20) I’ve got another plug-in in progress for Oblivion at the moment, which adds more loot to the castles of Cyrodiil, and the Imperial Palace. While there are loads of containers in the castles, a lot of the loot is pretty worthless, and these places should have lots of expensive goodies. So with some level of subtlety, I’ve been adding new containers with more expensive, respawning loot. Not just stuff that comes with the game, but other items I’ve made too. New gems, more booze, ceramic ware, and some expensive metal bars as well. It’s early days yet though. I’m also going to recommend my “A Little More Access” plug-in, which will let you back into the top levels of the Imperial Palace after the Thieves’ Guild main quest is over. Since all the stuff you’ll be acquiring will be stolen, I also aim to add a fence to purchase it, since in Oblivion, traders somehow magically know what your stolen items are, and won’t touch them.

Friday, 3rd of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:17) My Castle Riches plug-in is now available from the Oblivion review page. I completed testing and tweaking it, so it should be good to try out. If you ever fancied more loot in the castles, which is actually worth something, this could be for you! There are close to 50 new objects, including over a dozen new gems, Dwemer artifacts, vases, metal bars, jewelled eggs and 4 new varieties of booze.

Thursday, 9th of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:25) The new software review is uploaded. Although, it’s the multiple small programs this month.
• I was pondering making an intercom for the house. This one looks pretty sensible. I’ve got 3 of those LM386 I.C.s already, and this is a single battery design too. There are some slightly odd circuits out there which need batteries in both ends. Those little 57 mm 8 Ω ¼ watt speakers seem a bit hard to get off eBay in Australia. I’d have to get some from China, I think. Or maybe something a bit stronger. Those LM386 I.C.s are usually for powering 1 W speakers. There’s no buzz feature for this intercom as you can see, (assuming you can understand it,) but that’s not paramount really. Dick Smith’s intercom from Fun Way 2 had what looks like a 2 transistor pre-amplifier and a push-pull amplifier stage for the output, but with 3 transformers as well. (Two 1 kΩ to 8 Ω ones and a 3 kΩ matching one.) This has a buzz feature as well, by making the amplifier work like an oscillator through positive feedback.

Friday, 10th of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:53) I was reading that back in 1990, apparently only 1% of the population of Australia had a mobile ’phone. Now though, it’s around 90%, with some people having MORE than 1 mobile ’phone. (Struth!) It’d be interesting to do a survey to work out why so many people have them now. Plus, do people feel they need one, do people enjoy having one, or not? Have people given in to peer pressure, thinking they should have one? Do you find your ’phone to be a nuisance? Do you find other people who use them to be irritating? Have the ones with included cameras made people lazy about getting a real camera? Do you prefer to use your mobile ’phone rather than a proper, fixed position house telephone? How much money do you spend on your ’phone(s)? What did you pay for it initially? If you want to write in with your thoughts, please feel free! And if you’re from overseas, that’s okay too.
I’ve always found it hard to understand why anybody would actually want to use a mobile ’phone out of any sense of desire. I wouldn’t want people ringing me up and bothering me while I’m out. I can understand if it was for business purposes, like if you were a doctor, or involved with the stock market and stuff like that. The other thing that’s odd, is how palm top computers, like the Palm brand ones, seemed to fade away, yet current ’phones’ve become more like PDAs than anything else. Is it the ’phone feature specifically that’s the primary attraction, or just better company promotions?
Plus if you’re with a mobile ’phone company, would you be willing to pay me $500 000 or more to use one? Send in your responses, people!

Thursday, 16th of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (16:26) I hope there are a few more QU4RTZ songs this year. I’m not keeping an eye on what’s happening with them to really know. But if they’re done, it was great while it lasted.
I finally watched a MV by Nicolae Guta (from Romania). He’s this chap who seems to have new video out every day or 2. He was different from what I expected.
Apart from that, I also watched a bunch of utter cr*p MVs, which were a huge waste of time. Some of the stuff is either so offensive or just completely depressing. I dunno how some of these people ever get their music published. The standards must just be dropping all the time. And they expect the public to pay for the junk! You’ve got to be awesome and amazing for me to buy any CDs these days.

Friday, 17th of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:17) Our Sunbeam AT40 ToasterMatic toaster made it to 50 years old. I’m just having some toast out of it now. So yep — it lasted 50 × longer than its warranty. It might go for another 50 years! And out-live me.
• I had an intense dream this morning about electronic related stuff. My main computer acting up, a cassette recorder I had connected to it, screwing me ’round somehow, and trying to turn off that “Clear Type” font anti-aliasing on an iMac with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Normally you have System Preferences, but it’d been changed to some weird name, like “Bono.” I was really psyched up and a bit angry feeling in the dream too, so when I woke up I was really spaced out.
• (13:37) It’s funny how they told me at Beagle that they were no longer offering the site hosting, and that would be closed down, yet my site @ the old address is still there! Not that I can log in any more & get rid of it. Anyway, it still acts as a notification to the new address here now.
I also re-submitted my site to search engines again yesterday, because I did a search for some stuff that I know only exists here, and it wasn’t showing up. I did all that when I started at the new address, but apparently for some search sites, it still hasn’t sunk in. The Beagle address one is still coming up though.
• (16:24) I was looking through Panasonic radios from 1958 to 1972, and discovered the RF-60 headphones, which had a built-in FM radio. I thought: “Those look like the ones that Philip had in The Towering Inferno.” So I got out the DVD, and yeah, I think they are. I didn’t see anything else on the web about it though. Anyway, they weigh 825 g! Phwoar! A bit of a neck wrecker. Were my PSB headphones that heavy? You could also plug cords in each side and connect them to another amplfier, so you could listen to a record, cassette or whatever. The volume control only had soft, medium and loud, but there was a balance control on one side, which was interesting.

Saturday, 18th of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (19:07) Our Netcomm router thing’s gone tits-up permanently by the looks of it. It’s been playing up for ages. Every time there’s a storm, we turn it off, and then when you turn it back on, it doesn’t work properly. So, it looks like we’ll have to get a new one from the computer shop. Or Harvey Norman, or some place. What a bummer! I had things to do on the Internet too. It’s just as well I didn’t want to transfer stuff to my MacBook using its Airport wotsit, because there’s no “Wi-Fi” transmission from the router. It’s completely stuffed. My PC couldn’t access it by its I.P. address either.

Sunday, 19th of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:07) I found a Radio Master brand radio at an antique kind of shop today. I don’t recall that brand before. One of those big floor model ones, probably from the 1930s or 1940s. It had a huge dial, and it was mostly taken up by the radio station letters. Then at the bottom was a tiny short wave section, which mentioned other countries, but only had the numerical markings in metres, rather than MHz. It has the AM frequency range though, at the top, but in reverse order. You can check out a picture. I had to use my flash, because it was too dark, and I didn’t exactly have room to set up a tripod. I had my camera half stuck in a gramophone trying to fit it all in. I don’t know if that speaker cloth’s original. It looks very odd with the red stripes.
• I also got a photo of a Philips colour TV from probably around… hmm… 1978 to 1982 maybe. But it’s very fuzzy, because I didn’t use the flash, and couldn’t hold the camera steady for better quality.
• No luck at Hardly Normal with the router tooter. They don’t stock any with the VOIP feature! That’s really weird. How are people supposed to use their ’phones? So, tomorrow, we’re going to try at the computer shop. Perhaps they can order one in. NetGear might be a good brand, like our hub, or D-Link, if they’re still around, and making such things. Until then, no Internet access or telephone!
• (20:42) Check out these old mobile ’phone ads from about 30½ years ago. This bit of newspaper’s been folded up in a drawer for close to the same amount of time, so I didn’t give them time to flatten out. They’re both from the Daily Telegraph Mirror on the 25th of August 1992. I couldn’t even tell you if that snooze-paper still exists. I don’t think NEC makes mobile ’phones any more. (Actually, I never realised they did.) All you hear about these days is Apple, and figging Samsung. This one on the right’s from prior to the 8 digit ’phone number change too. 02 was the Sydney area, but now it’s like the whole state. Anyway, check out the price! $5 short of $1600! Fwoooo! Then again some of the ones now are probably about that too. They must’ve rushed this ad, because the capitalisation of the words is all over the shop.
Anyway, these ads were in the small business section. Every Tom, Dick & Harry weren’t obsessed with the things like these days.
• (22:16) I was trying to find my little white pocket sized Sanyo radio. At least I think it’s a Sanyo one. But all I came across were a bunch of other things I’d forgotten about for the last decade or so. And I swear there was a Sanyo RP-5115 radio somewhere too, but I didn’t see any sign of it in the house.
When I was a kid I wanted to do a display of old radios, but more along the lines of valve based ones. I seem to have decent amount of transistor based ones to do such a thing though.

Monday, 20th of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:27) The computer shop chap looked up routers @ Office Works, and found none there either with a VOIP feature. Even he thought that was weird. So now we’re waiting on one from I.I.G., who are going to pre-configure it. So of course when you’re reading this, we’ll be back in action. I’ll be interested to get back to eBay to look up what routers are available and with what features.

Saturday, 25th of February, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (23:55) I was looking up those Little Miss books on eBay — holey moley! They’re worth a fortune now. When I was a kid, the Mr. Men books were about 75¢ each, or less maybe. I guess that was close to 40 years ago. Even the bigger books like Mr. Silly On The Farm were only 60p in English money, which is about $1.05. I still have all the Mr. Men books from prior to Little Miss appearing. So they might be worth a bit more now. I’ve also got Mr. Happy At The Seaside, 2 of The Mr. Men Times Table Books, Mr. Tickle In The Park, Mr. Nosey Follows His Nose, Mr. Greedy Goes Shopping, and as I said, Mr. Silly On The Farm. Let’s see if you can get them on like eBay still…
• Yep! 2 listings of pre-owned books of Mr. Happy At The Seaside. The 1st one is $24.95, & the 2nd is $17.60! Holey figs! I’d better put mine in a safe!

Wednesday, 1st of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:41) It looks like our telephone’s packed it in. I thought something was up regarding the settings in our new router dealie, and got on to I.I.G. about it, but they were seeing no issues, and suggested trying a different ’phone. Well, the only thing I have close, is a (dial up type of) modem, so I thought, let’s try ringing in to that. And yeah, the router was acting more normally on its ’phone indicator then, even though the modem couldn’t answer the call. So it looks like we’ll need to get a new telephone tomorrow.

Thursday, 2nd of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (16:14) I ordered a new ’phone off eBay today for about $37. That should be here by the 10th. So no ’phone calls for a few days. It’ll be like going back to 110 or so years ago. Ah well, people back then survived perfectly well without them. They had heaps of those rotary dial style telephones on eBay as well, but probably with tone dialling now, rather than the old pulse dialling. Plus quite a few vintage ones too. People could use them to make intercoms. If you don’t know about that, you can look it up. It’s possible to connect 2 telephones together with a 9 V battery in series, and possibly a resistor, I think, and you can use them around your house or one in your shed or whatever. Yep. I’ve never tried that though, as I don’t have any old ’phones lying around.
As well as our ’phone dying, the oven started sparking last night too.
• I donated some more pictures to that Radio Museum web site, of a General GC 211 colour TV from about 1985, and my grandfather’s Sharp System-CD550E(GY), so I’ll put links here in case somebody’s interested, once I hear back.

Saturday, 4th of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:19) In case you didn’t notice, I’ve given my Morrowind “sub site” a visual overhaul.

Wednesday, 8th of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:49) The new telephone turned up on Monday. It’s a Y043, apparently by Orrin. Hopefully it’ll last longer than that V-Tech thing. There really are some obscure brands these days. Anyway, it seems to be aimed for Indian users, because the instruction manual mentions 2 area codes in India. Even though the ’phone was made in China. The other thing that’s weird is the “Ocean Blue” L.E.D. they keep going on about, like it was some amazing new thing. It just lights up the LCD on it. Anyway, it even has a calculator and an alarm in case somebody’s listening in on your call. But I don’t think that would work with the router, because the audio’s converted to some kind of data that’d be interpreted by IIG or whatever. Plus it’s got 8 choices of rings, I think. So yeah, rather feature packed for a telephone. Some of those old pulse dialling telephones with the dial you spin ’round probably last a good length of time. They seem to keep showing up on eBay, and I’ve often seen ones in antique shops, so maybe they’re pretty rugged. I saw some of those ones with a magneto the other day too.

Tuesday, 14th of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (19:50) I’m really tempted to get a couple of those QU4RTZ CDs from Japan at the moment, and a 3rd one related to the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club / Love Live! series dealie thing, in a broader sense. Like, whether it includes the QU4RTZ members or not. I’ve been looking at a site which lists all the tunes, and listening to which ones I can find on YouTube. Oh! And I found some QU4RTZ figurines too, which were all sold out. They were reasonably priced as well. I was feeling quite mesmerised and happy earlier! I think there were about 2 songs I didn’t fancy, but most of them are brilliant, and consistently good. I don’t want to spend too much, because getting foreign stuff is pretty expensive as far as music’s concerned. I’d probably get Enjoy It!, maybe Make-Up Session ABC and… ooh boy… how can I limit myself to just 3?!!!! Well, some other one anyway.
• (23:53) Actually, I think Make-Up Session ABC is only part of an album dealie. But Enjoy It! also comes with 4 Seasons, which is also great.

Wednesday, 15th of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (18:07) Oh dear heavens — all the figgin’ mobile ’phone stuff I seemed to run into today. I got a message from the credit union about some program they suggested you have, then a thing on the web, and then when I was on the ’phone with the bank. But 1st, the good news! I ordered 2 of the QU4RTZ CDs from CD Japan! I had a bit more money in the bank than I thought. So: Yay! I got Enjoy It! & Pastel. Ooooh! They have instumental versions too, and yapping from the girls, which I won’t be able to understand. That cost $48.20, or ¥4334. Oh, but I got a discount too, because I had 300 points still. So that was a nice sweetener. Anyway, when I placed the order it did some check with your card provider, and it fouled up with the NAB, saying it couldn’t authenticate me. Whatever THAT means. Then it said please have your mobile ’phone number registered with the bank. Well, I don’t have a f***ing mobile ’phone! It said to ring the number on the back of your card. So I did that, which was a number in Victoria, and after being cut off somehow, and ringing back, and going through all the voice recognition stuff, and 2 humans, the woman asked if she could send me a SMS message. So I said: “Well, you can’t, because I don’t have a mobile ’phone.” Anyway, there turned out to be no restrictions on the card, and it was some cock-up with the store’s choice of verification stuff, or something. So I borrowed an American Express card off somebody else, and did the order all over again from a newer version of Firefox in Tiny Core Linux, and then it worked.
But yeah, don’t go assuming everybody has a mobile ’phone, people! As they said in The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert: “Assumption is the mother of all f*** ups.” Or as Benny Hill put it: “When you assume, you make an ASS out of U & ME.”
• (18:52) Last night I did a web search of: “Is modern music depressing?” And several sites were listed saying that it was. Well, from a majority perspective. They said since the 1990s, music has generally become darker, angrier and written in a lower key. So that’s quite sad really. Plus people have started turning to listening to older music. Well, I really need perky, cheery stuff. There should be more funny songs as well. Not just like Weird Al Yankovic, but ones written initially to be funny. Now, here’s a good one from close to 100 years ago! The Laughing Policeman.
• (23:12) Um… oh yes! Next month for the Software Review Of The Moment, I’ll be having a look at Windows XP, since I’ve been using it for over 16 years now. I wrote it 2 days ago.

Saturday, 18th of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:33) So much for Autumn. It’s was over 30°C yesterday and today. Then tomorrow, it’s supposedly going to be 36°C!!! Holey beepin’ struth! I dread to think how hot it’ll be in Sydney. Probably 46°C or something. But on Monday, it could be down to 18°C, and that’s more like it! Ah, I want to see snow this coming Winter.

Sunday, 19th of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:41) Yep — it’s hot all right.
• I was wondering last night how much time people spend on finding new music. I don’t know if anybody’s done a survey on that. It is quite time consuming to look up the stuff that I check out each day from only a small selection of countries. I did find a couple of web sites which mentioned this, but I think it was more to do with people who were dedicated to finding music from their favourite genres. It’d be interesting to get this information from maybe 10 000 random people.

Tuesday, 21st of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (19:50) I think I got lucky with those QU4RTZ songs. I looked through more of the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club related songs, but in comparison, a large chunk of them were really cr@p. So I think I’ll call it quits for the Love Live! stuff now, and check out some other tunes. I got about 27 good songs though, so that wasn’t too bad, I suppose. Some of the last ones I listened to just seemed to really overuse the electric guitars. They were just too intense. I know the Japanese are big on them in the forefront, but eventually I got sick of hearing them. I thought I might check out some stuff from that Ensemble Stars!! game, but I’m in 2 minds about that.
Anyway, my QU4RTZ CDs are on the way, and those particular songs WILL be excellent.
• The temperature’s more like Autumn now. I’ve got the heater back on. So much for Sunday. It went from 37°C down to about 18°C yesterday.

Wednesday, 22nd of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:17) I was thinking about people having jet lag. Well, if you went somewhere before the invention of jet engines or on a plane with like an external propellor, it’d be more like internal combustion lag. You’d come home and say: “Ooh, I’m so tired after that flight. I must have internal combustion lag.” Although it does sound like something’s going to eventually explode inside your body, but it’s taking its time about it.

Wednesday, 29th of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:39) Hooray! My QU4RTZ CDs arrived today! Enjoy It! and Pastel. I got some photos before I opened the plastic covers too. As usual with Japanese CDs and other optical discs, they have the edge cards (on the side of the box) and there are some bonus goodies inside the covers too. Enjoy It! came with a Rina Tennoji card, which I’m really glad to have got, and Pastel came with a sticker that’s the same as the cover. There were also some other cards with some kind of unique code that you can use on some web site for something. Ha ha! I’m not sure what though, as I can’t read Japanese. Well, very little of it. The edge card of Pastel also mentions the 22nd of May this year. Maybe that’s an end of production date? I don’t know. It says “made” (which I think would be pronounced like mah-deh) after it, which seems to mean “as far as”, or “up to”, according to my dictionary.
Anyway, Enjoy It! runs for 16 minutes with the 4 tracks. I haven’t put Pastel in yet to listen to.
• In other news, I’ve also started on a 3rd Inner Depths plug-in for Oblivion, which is so far entirely based around an Ayleid ruin to the east of Anvil. Construction hit a standstill though when my new CDs turned up.
• (15:03) All right, onto listening to my Pastel CD now. This one has a 5th track called Feeling The Sky, where the girlies talk about stuff, I think. Not that I’ll be able to understand it. It goes for 9 minutes and 58 seconds. Oh yeah! The cover for this has a special plastic looking coating with “holographic” hearts, and as you move it about, they grow and shrink in a rainbow of colours. Inside you get the lyrics as well, but again, you’d have to be able to understand Japanese. Michi No Saki is only written in Japanese too, so it was lucky I already knew what it was called.
Anyway, I’ll update the Music Page with the new goodies some time later today.

Friday, 31st of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:34) I noticed another funny thing in One Foot In The Grave tonight, which I hadn’t spotted before. In series 4, episode 2, when Mr. Swainey’s fixing Victor’s food disposal gizmo under the sink, he’s reading a manual which says Recording & Playback! It’s odd, because that’s the same one when Victor unintentionally gave away his VCRs.

Saturday, 32nd of March, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:01) Keep your pants on for the 1st of April. It seems that due to fluctuations with the sun’s gravity, and the earth’s orbit being a bit slower this year, we’re to have a 32nd of March.
• In other news, it seems that Microsoft’s finally given up on Windows, & IBM are going to jump in to release a new OS while the going’s good. Hopefully this will be the decent operating system we’ve been crying out for.
• I’ll also be making another trip to Siberia at the end of the year to avoid the Summer all together.

Tuesday, 4th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:46) I’m still going with Inner Depths: Oblivion 3. I’ve got the 10 main zones done, plus a shop. I’m going to add more areas yet. I’m falling behind again with what new music’s out though too.
• Obviously there wasn’t really a 32nd of March either.

Wednesday, 5th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (19:32) Today’s progress on Inner Depths: Oblivion 3 was making levelled lists, although I have a lot more to do yet. That’s always pretty dull. I have to make the NPCs too. I might have about 60 or so. I dunno yet. I know that’s less than last time. And the 1st time too.

Thursday, 6th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (19:57) And now for the 19:57 news with your host, John Kahler:
Thank you, Claire. Today in Inner Depths: Oblivion 3, I completed the levelled lists, and got 6 smugglers done. This time there are going to be 4 groups of power levels, with easier, group 1 enemies at the start, and harder, group 4 enemies towards the end. But within each group, it could be a randomly picked bandit, marauder, smuggler or pirate. So this time fights really should break out, unlike how I intended with Inner Depths: Oblivion 2. Well, they could, but they didn’t really happen as often as I wanted. There are also 3 grades of levelled lists for weapons and armour, so the easier enemies will have worse stuff, and harder ones will have any kind of gear, including low quality stuff.

Saturday, 8th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:19) Oh no! Paul Cattermole from S Club 7 died! It was 2 days ago, and apparently the cause is unknown. This is very sad news.
• (19:26) I had a good day doing more stuff for Inner Depths: Oblivion 3. I got containers put in, beds and seats too. Tomorrow I’ll start on the pirates.

Sunday, 9th of April, 2023
Easter
Today’s current mood:
• (12:43) I was fiddling around with a thing for Inner Depths: Oblivion 3 last night and discovered something about meshes for Oblivion. It seems you have to also choose “face normals” in NIFSkope, and as a result, potentially “smooth normals” as well. Otherwise the meshes tend to look a bit odd. So I’m going to go through the meshes I made from scratch for Oblivion, and update my plug-ins. So if you got something for Oblivion from me in the past, you might want to update it. This will not affect your game in any way. Only ESP file changes can stuff things up. Hopefully I will let you know here when this is done.
• I also added another mesh the other day that I corrected, to that mesh fix pack. It was the gas trap from the Ayleid ruins. I added an alpha channel threshold to make it smoother.
• My Software Review Of The Moment has now been changed for this month. It’s Windows XP for the 1st time.
• (13:32) Okay, I’ve updated the meshes for Castle Riches and the window in Ayleid Mansion, although I think that one will be more subtle. If you got either of these plug-ins from me before, you can consider whether you want the mesh updates. You’ll be able to tell which meshes were updated by the more recent file dates.
• (20:22) I did 6 pirates for Inner Depths: Oblivion 3 today, but I spent more time working on a tiled scorpion to put on the floor in one of the zones. In the game, there’s a book called Gelebourne’s Journal which speaks of an Ayleid place somewhere, which has a huge stylised mosaic spider as a trap. This doesn’t actually show up in any of the ruins in the game. So I thought I would do a little scorpion instead, for my joint. It took a while to get it semi-decent. So it, and 2 other glowing scorpions on the walls, now activate certain things.

Wednesday, 12th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (16:48) I’ve got all 80 NPCs done for Inner Depths: Oblivion 3. I did the 20 bandits today. I did 5 new gems which weren’t in my Castle Riches plug-in, but I still want to do 5 or more other new items which could be smuggled. Although I don’t know what. What things would smugglers be interested in? Or pirates? I’ve done crates of skooma.

Friday, 14th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:38) Financial Friday, it’s been. I’ve been organising the closing of an investment I’ve had for about 21 years, which hasn’t been performing too well over the last 6 years. I rang the N.A.B. about 5 times, but nobody seemed to be there to answer the call. It’s more like a bank twig than a branch there. I was also on the ’phone with the investment joint, and I had to print out some PDF files to update my details, since they were still set to the Commonwealth Bank. I then have to wait until I hear back from them about that, and then I can send in the next lot of forms to transfer the money. Then I’ll need to create a new term deposit account at the bank, and transfer the money from my regular account to it. It’d be good if they had a 4 year one or something, with higher interest. Mmm. So I got sod all done of Inner Depths: Oblivion 3 today, or much of anything else. But since Wednesday, I did come up with 3 more smuggled items. Perfume, caviar and silk. The perfume’s using a mesh I made for Morrowind, but I obviously changed its textures to use ones from Oblivion, and I had to add a Havok shape as well, so when you drop it, it tumbles about and all that.

Saturday, 15th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (16:02) I haven’t got back to I.D.: O. 3 yet. Maybe tomorrow. It might be complete by the end of the month.
• Anyway, I did a test to see if my (Cowon) X9 can play M4A files, but nope. It just says: Invalid file. Ah well. It was worth a try. It might’ve been a nice surprise if it could. I’ll have to convert any M4A files I have to either FLAC or Monkey’s Audio instead. They’ll take up more room, but I don’t want to recompress any in a lossy fashion.
• Well, I have some other Love Live! related song links to add to my Music Page, so I shall go and do that now.

Tuesday, 18th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:52) I called the bank on Monday, since my statements for March still haven’t arrived. They said they’d been sent on the 31st (of March), and that maybe Easter had held things up. But that was 9 days ago, and still nothing. That’s 4 letters from them so far that haven’t got to me. So I’m going to see them in person and get them to print them there, or send them again. I dunno if it’s figgin’ Australia Post who’s to blame or what. Probably. Other people have had missing mail lately as well. So I dunno what the f**k they’re doing. I got my QU4RTZ CDs from JAPAN faster than this!
• Then surprisingly, I got a new Visa card from the credit union, on the account I emptied. So perhaps they don’t consider it closed.
• The Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra have a new MV out. Oikoshiteku Hoshi, which translates to something like: Overtaking Stars. It’s done at a (horse) race course, so maybe they’re aiming for some kind of track record.
• I.D.: O. 3 is almost done. I did 2 books for it today, and a 3rd one which might be a bit rude for it. But it is funny.

Wednesday, 19th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (20:30) Oh no! That Underground History site’s gone! Aww. I liked reading about the old abandoned stations on there. What a bummer! I was talking about the Bull & Bush station after dinner this evening.
• I got my statements from the bank in person. The woman said if they don’t turn up again, I can call a ’phone number to see what’s up.

Sunday, 23rd of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:23) Ah, no more Dame Edna! Poor Barry Humphries died yesterday. He’d had hip surgery, apparently, and things went downhill from that. He was 89.
• In case you missed it, I released Inner Depths: Oblivion 3 the other day. Check The Oblivion Review Page dealie.

Friday, 28th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:12) Oh no! Jerry Springer died yesterday. Struth. First it was Barry Humphries, and now him. Who’ll be next ever?
• (23:40) I’m still doing my 2023 MV page, in case anybody had thought it’d come to a standstill. I just haven’t found anything else good enough to put on it.

Sunday, 30th of April, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:55) Here’s something I thought was a bit interesting: Probably about 5 years ago, I saw a bunch of L.E.D.s hanging down at Market City in Sydney, most likely for Christmas time, so I thought I’d get a photo of them. When I checked it on the camera, I couldn’t believe it! They were all off! This then proved that they were flickering @ a very fast speed, and the camera caught them at the exact moment they were off. To your eyes you couldn’t tell though. So I took the picture again, and this time they were on. It’s probably a method for reducing their perceived brightness that reduces the load on the components doing it. You would need one really tough variable resistor that could handle a lot of power otherwise.

Saturday, 6th of May, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:44) Apparently it could be 0°C tomorrow. Brrr! Although it’d be nice to see some snow this year.
• I thought I’d look up the alphabet of Georgia yesterday, but they actually have 3 of them. Although 2 of them aren’t even all that well understood even by the people who live there, supposedly. Anyway, this turned out to be beneficial, because I was able to translate some Georgian text from a bitmap I got off ICQ yonks ago. It was an ad for tours / travel stuff. It’s also 20 years ago that they changed their flag to the one with the red crosses. The central one is to do with Saint George, like the English flag, and the smaller ones are to do with a Jerusalem cross, or something.
I also wrote out a file of Hiragana & Katakana characters from Japan, to try and get them memorised better. Maybe I can read more bits of Japanese more easily then.

Tuesday, 9th of May, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:28) The weirdest thing ever just happened! I turned on the computer at the front of the house where the printer is, to print out something for Mother’s Day, and inexplicably, the printer just decides to print out a picture from The King’s Woman! What the fiddly-f***?! Where the hell did it come from?! I haven’t watched The King’s Woman since last night! And I never took any screen shots of it to print! I just can’t work it out. It was a picture of Gongsun Li saying: “No.” I don’t even have any recent screen shots from the show like that. I am literally stumped as to how that even happened.
• (13:37) After searching my 2ndary hard drive, I did find a picture like that, but how did it randomly print?! It was from 2 years ago as well. It doesn’t make sense. Even if Windows XP has its quirks, I’ve never seen it start randomly choosing images to print.

Thursday, 11th of May, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (20:38) I’m going to start on Story Of Yanxi Palace tonight. Loads of people have said it’s excellent, so fingers crossed they’re right! I heard about it in 2019, or early 2020, back when I started on the other Chinese shows I looked @. It’s got 70 episodes, so: Whew! A real long one. If each one goes for 45 minutes, that’s 52½ hours. There are several sites, where you can watch it officially. I might take the YouTube route this time, but it’s also at Viki, where I saw the other shows. Speaking of which, I just finished my 2nd watch of The King’s Woman the other night. It only took me about 2 years to get around to that! Ha ha. Then last night I watched The Palace again.
• (23:00) I got through the 1st episode of Story Of Yanxi Palace. Phwoar — I had to pause a lot to read the subtitles. Not only that, there were translation notes as well! But I guess that helped you to understand stuff. It was mostly a translation to American, rather than proper English, but I kind of suspected it might be. Just about ALL these things are. Although The King’s Woman was a mixture. Anyway, S.O.Y.P. was kind of interesting to a point. It wasn’t very gripping from the 1st episode. I think it might appeal more to people with a deep interest in the finer details of past Chinese culture. The architecture, clothing & embroidery were very impressive though. That’s my observations from the 1st episode off YouTube anyway. I’m not sure if I feel any great urge to watch any more though.
• I’ve also got 2 hands full of music videos to catch up on, so I wish I could stop my clocks to drag the night out a bit longer.

Saturday, 13th of May, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:20) I decided to watch Legend Of The Phoenix again last night. (My 2nd watch ever.) I got through 2 episodes. That is such a great show if you feel like watching something Chinese. The inside rooms in the palace are really beautiful, and if you’re into clothes, there’s some fancy outfits too. Especially the Empress’s head-ware. It’s got 41 episodes, so it’s not overly long. The music is really good as well, especially the introduction tune, which gives it a really classy feeling. If you’ve watched lots of Chinese shows before, you’ll recognise bits from Hengdian World Studios, which they seem to use for everything over there.

Monday, 15th of May, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:56) I called the bank today and got their statement issue sorted out. For some reason they hadn’t been set to come to me in the mail. There must’ve been a mistake when I set the accounts up. Not by me though. Perhaps they’re too pushy & assumptive about people wanting to use their web based services. Then, like before, the chap asked if he could send me a SMS message, and I said: “No. Because I don’t have a mobile ’phone.” LOL. Holey moley. The mobile telephone infestation on the planet now is just ridiculous. I’m getting sick of seeing them in music videos as well, as if they’re something we should all somehow relate to, or something. You’d think people’d be fed up with them.
• I watched episodes 3 & 4 of Legend Of The Phoenix last night, which was great. They went too quick. No ’phones in there, that’s for sure. It’s probably set over 1000 years ago or something, but it’s all fictional.

Thursday, 18th of May, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (16:11) It’s been 20 years since OutRun 2 came out this year, and 30 years since Virtua Fighter! Holey moley! That was the same year of Cool Spot as well. Next year, it will be 40 years since the 1st Apple Macintosh computer.
• (17:04) My UPS saved 2 of my computers from going off about 16 minutes or so ago. I had my MacBook converting a video, and whoosh! The light just went off, plus my clock. It came back on in about 15 seconds maybe. The power went off this morning for 20 minutes too and several towns got knocked out, so I dunno what snuffed it. Mmm… so without my MacBook’s battery working now, it’s just as well I have been plugging it into my UPS for such events. I got ready to shut down my main PC, but the juice kicked back in before I closed all my programs. I had 45 minutes anyway, but the battery recharge time on the UPS is 8 hours, so you don’t want to drain it completely. Well, as long as the power stays on for dinner now. I remember last year, I was cooking a steak, and it went off. Holey moley. But it came back on maybe a minute later at the most. Our neighbours have a backup generator.

Thursday, 25th of May, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:19) The power company changed our meters today. Well, their meters. They weren’t ours to begin with. So that took about 40-ish minutes. Now it’s apparently just a single meter, instead of the 2 we had previously. They gave us a month’s notice about it, which was good. As long as the new ones survive a jolt from any lightning.
• I watched 3 epsiodes of Legend Of The Phoenix last night. I was really getting into it. Then I looked up about some of the actors, and I couldn’t believe how many of them were younger than me! I’m either getting old, or the new people look older these days than what they really are.

Saturday, 3rd of June, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:42) I spent a lot of yesterday looking up stuff again about the Imperial Mountain Resort in Chengde (which is north-east of Beijing). I’ve got a couple of maps of the entire joint, but finding pictures of the places listed is very difficult. Looking up stuff in Chinese worked a bit better, but I really need some kind of conversion web site that can do Pinyin into Hanzi. If that’s possible. I did find 1, but it didn’t work. It just came up with a bunch of error messages. It was easier getting information on things in Guilin and Shanghai. Probably because they’re more popular with English speaking tourists perhaps. Oh! But one thing I did find of interest, were a collection of old photos from about 1920, of the resort. That was really surprising after looking at stuff from there a couple of years ago, when I 1st found out about it. Seeing how some of the buildings had been so dilapidated, and how the landscape seemed more bare, was quite the eye opener. At the same time, recognising some of the stuff from over 100 years ago was an interesting feeling too.
• I’ve only got 4 episodes of Legend Of The Phoenix to go now! Aww! It was getting so good when I was looking at it last night. It’s on YouTube now as well, with subtitles, which I don’t think it was originally. Or when I saw it 3 years ago anyhow.

Thursday, 8th of June, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:25) It seemed something got a bit loose with my video card again yesterday, in my main PC. I lifted it up to push the glass back to where it should be on the desk, and it must’ve got slightly disconnected or something. So I loosened and re-tightened its bolt, and then when I went to try it again, I’d forgotten to plug the monitor back in. Figgin’ heck.
• There’s nothing new to report from me in regards to Morrowind or Oblivion. I haven’t played poor Morrowind for almost 2 years. And I haven’t played much of Oblivion lately either.
• Tomorrow, if I don’t forget, I’ll be changing the monthly software review back to Cog, MacAmp Lite X & XMPlay.

Sunday, 18th of June, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:23) I’ve got a new game coming out soon, once I’ve done 1 last check for bugs. I had a couple of issues with the compiler which weren’t my fault, and had to work around them. Anyway, it’s called Teddy Maze, and like Teddy & Bunny, you can make your own stages once again. This time though, they’re a lot bigger.
• I’ve got some new Japanese songs to put on my page for 2023 soon too. But I should be going to bed now. I’ve had a lot of late nights recently.

Monday, 19th of June, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (20:21) I was watching season 2 of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, with Mumma Cheri’s joint, and there was a funny bit in the kitchen. He said something about buffalo wings! What the fig are they supposed to be? When has anybody ever seen a flying buffalo? That must be a like a comic name or reference to something, for whatever the food was. It was like one of Gordon’s menus with a loin of tuna. Well tuna fish don’t have legs for starters, to even have loins. So I dunno what he’s on about sometimes.
• I looked up some new Australian flags today. There are some REALLY good designs out there. I was sold straight away on some of them. It’d be exciting to kick out all that foreign British stuff and finally have something that’s purely our own. On the money too. For those of you from overseas, who don’t know, we only had Queen Elizabeth on our coins and $5 note. The other notes have Australian people. The government should’ve made the cut off point at the death of Queen Elizabeth 2. None of that old stuff is relevant any more. I personally think the coins should take inspiration from the Chinese money, and have scenes that are specifically Australian. Uluru, the Great Barrier Reef, maybe pictures of our capital cities, etc. If we had those changes, I would be totally for them. That said, us Aussies SHOULD still be friends with the British, and welcome them if they want to visit, but I think it’s time for these changes.

Thursday, 29th of June, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (17:14) I was contemplating getting some fibre optic “cable” / a strand reel to make up my lotus… thing, that I originally planned to possibly make with L.E.D.s. You can get 50 m for about $14.35 off eBay, from a place in Sydney in 1 mm thickness, which is probably what I would use. I asked the seller if you can melt the ends, because you need them thicker than the rest of the strand, so they don’t pull out of the surface. I haven’t bought any of this stuff since probably 1990 or so. It might be different plastic now. I’m probably going to stuff the other ends into a piece of heat-shrink tubing, over the L.E.D.s themselves, and that should keep them lined up. I have some black stuff, and it’s a bit shiny on the inside, so any extra reflection is welcome to get more light up the cable ends.
This would’ve taken about 225 L.E.D.s, I think it was… Yeah, see the 11th of January, last year, if it’s still there, above what you’re reading now. So that would’ve been quite insane, and it would’ve lit the room up. Plus soldering that many would’ve taken me a week maybe. Plus, it would’ve used a lot of current, I think. So, if I use fibre optic strands, I can have maybe 16 per L.E.D., or something. I’d have to test that. There are 86 green dots for the leaves on this thing, so that would be 6 L.E.D.s, rounded up. (There are 54 white dots, 59 in magenta and 26 in yellow.) The other alternative would be to have a light “box” for each colour with all the fibre optic strands coming out of them, and going to their appropriate locations in the image. But, as this is going on my wall, it needs to be pretty compact. Even if I use 20 L.E.D.s, that’s less than ¹/₁₀ of the original direct L.E.D. count.
Another thing that interests me, is side lit plastic. This would have to be done at a professional etching place though. You have little etched spots on it, which catch the light from below. If you had more than one colour though, you’d have to have a different layer of plastic for each. Although I don’t know how well that would work.

Saturday, 1st of July, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (16:43) I tried engraving / etching my lotus design onto an old CD box cover as an experiment this afternoon. As you can see, it works, but it’s messy. I’m not a master engraver. So perhaps it might be better to do the lines as a bunch of little dots. That way the thing isn’t sliding around. The tip did want to spin off course on several occasions. The other thing is the persective. When you’re looking through to a printed piece of paper that you have to trace, the thickness of the plastic throws you off a bit. So before I go anywhere near my perspex sheets that I bought last year, I’m going to come up with a more consistent way of doing this on bits of scrap plastic.
I just used 4 green L.E.D.s to light this up, but if I do get something good finished, I’ll use the 4 colours you see above, and have them run vertically, rather than etching 4 separate pieces of plastic and trying to align them.

Tuesday, 4th of July, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:53) I got my lotus engraved onto a piece of perspex, but after a lot of woe. I had issues cutting it, and it kept cracking and being a pain. I think you need better tools, like LASERs to cut the stuff. Or a band saw. Anyway, in the end I got the thing done with 3 colours of L.E.D.s, but it doesn’t show up quite so much in the picture. I added a bit more of a tint to it on my computer. If I do any more, I’ll get pre-cut perspex at the size I want, and only do one colour, and have the L.E.D.s at the bottom. Putting them to the side was quite tricky, to get a small enough holder. Mmm. So, it’s not perfect looking, but it’s fairly pretty. As you can see, I did it with dots, which was neater than the the image from the 1st.
I need to make a triple or quadruple adaptor for my transformer now, so I can plug more stuff into it. I’m low on wire though.

Thursday, 6th of July, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:37) Oh no! No no no! CoCo Lee has died! This is terrible news. It never would’ve crossed my mind that she would be dying any time soon. IMDb says it was suicide. I’m really shocked and sad about that.

Friday, 7th of July, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:38) Why is it that so many cars of the recent 5 years or so, are such ugly piles of $#!‡? Not only that, but they all seem look the same, with these strip-like lights on their fronts too. I think this is another example of how my fellow humans are really brain dead sheep who can’t think differently from one another. And customers with no taste obviously keep buying them. Not only that, there seem to be an enormous amount of vehicles of late with malfunctioning head lights, like it was some kind of mass design flaw. I dunno what’s up with that. Is it just in my area? People may be half bothered to fix them, but it’s still illegal to have non-working car lights.
• I passed 15 000 000 Septims in Oblivion the other night! I think I could buy up all of Cyrodiil with that. When you really need the money @ the start of the game, it’s hard to build up, then when you don’t need so much later on, you have too much.
• I actually got a handful of new decent songs over the last few days, which has been surprising. I added 3 or so of them to the MVs page for this year as well. The countries I’m focussing on at the moment are Japan, of course, China, if I’m lucky, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia and Vietnam. If you ask me, the British music has gone right down the sewer since 20 or so years ago. All I seem to see listed these days is $#!‡-head gangsters and other depressing cr@p, so I just avoid anything from there now. It used to be so much better around the turn of the century, and just before, like in 1998.
• (15:30) Oh yeah! That was another thing I was going to rant about — what is it with all these offensive, arrogant jerks in some music videos sticking up their rude fingers? Are they just so cocky that they think customers will buy their B.S. regardless? I made a list of all these little pr*cks so I don’t accidentally get any of their cr*p in the future. There was even one from Australia, sadly. We’re not all like them.

Tuesday, 8th of August, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:52) I tried making a 4 transistor based chaser circuit, based on the 3 transistor one I showed on my Electronics Circuits Page, but all I got was the effect of 2 flip flop circuits. I wasn’t happy with that circuit with the 3 transistors either, so I removed it. This then threw a spanner in the works for a chaser circuit I wanted to make later in the year. I really wanted to do a 4 “channel” one with 3 L.E.D.s on @ a time from each channel. Perhaps output is a better word than channel. I dunno. Anyway, I regard this as a moving gap chaser, or inverted chaser circuit. There are circuit diagrams to do this directly off a 4017 I.C. This is okay for a couple of L.E.D.s, but from that forum discussion I read 3 years ago, I don’t want to risk stressing the I.C. with the likes of 18 super bright L.E.D.s running off it directly at any one time. So I’m still inclined to include one of those ULN2803APG darlington transistor arrays. Or maybe 4 BC639 transistors. Anyway the solution to inverting the L.E.D.s from on to off may be a 4001 NOR gate I.C. This only has 4 outputs, so it would still fit in with what I want to do. This would then connect between the counter and the ULN2803APG I.C. I haven’t seen any examples of people doing this, but I think it will work, based on how I’ve seen it in other circuits. I will include a circuit diagram here when I get one drawn up, and you can comment. If anybody actually sees this.
• After saying about ugly and unoriginal cars the other day, I found out about Tang Hua electric cars from China 2 days ago, and they look quite unique. There’s a strange 4 seat one, which looks like a van, and its front is quite cute.
• (23:59) Okay, the diagram is to the left. I can’t test it though, because I don’t currently have any 4001 I.C.s.

Sunday, 13th of August, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:21) Ooh my goodness. I had to do a simple, but very awkward fix of my main PC today. I’ve pretty much only just turned it on. Well, about 20 minutes ago. Yesterday, I noticed that the power button was acting iffy, and I had to press it in a strange way to get it to turn on. Then today: Nothing! No matter how I pressed the button, it wouldn’t work. The button is part of the case, and screwed in, in a way which would require you to remove a lot of stuff to get to it. So instead, I snipped the wires to it with some scissors, and went about connecting a push button from my box of electronic components left overs. The wires they used to connect to the motherboard though, are those awful silvery looking things that you can barely solder to. I hate that wire. It’s plain copper or nothing for me. So I eventually got my extension wires to stick, after doing most of it left handed, shrunk on some heat shrink tubing, tied my new wire to an unused SATA drive cable with bread ties, and ran a little red push button out of the unused ~14.8 cm drive bay on the top. Very professional I’m sure. So now I can press that, and it will turn on. I’m going to put a plastic cover over it though, I think. I’ve got a tube thing for ear plugs which might be suitable. Mmm, so if I didn’t have a soldering iron, and left over buttons, and all the other handy things, I’d be stuffed, probably. And I’d go to the computer shop, and they’d probably take an age, or say you need a new PC. Maybe.
• (15:33) Yeah, I don’t want to jinx myself, but there are so many things I need to be aware of with my main computer. If I ever did take it to some shop, I’d have to warn them. So there’s the new power button dangling out the front as of today, the blue L.E.D. for the original button doesn’t work most of the time, the USB’s power is iffy, you can only have 1 hard drive internally now (for some reason I don’t understand), you have to enter the BIOS set up section every time you turn it on, and the clock sometimes freezes when it’s running off the button battery. When I say the USB power’s iffy, it means it may drop out unexpectedly. So when I used to have my mouse plugged into it, it would sometimes be seen by Windows XP as being unplugged. So I have to use the PS 2 port, and my hard drive caddy has its own power supply. I do have a USB hub in my monitor, but it’s dead as well!

Monday, 14th of August, 2023
Dad’s 76th birthday
Today’s current mood:
• (14:01) Holey moley! I had trouble with my main PC again today! It seems the power button may not have been at fault after all! When I pressed my new button today, nothing happened! Then one of the wires fell off that mother f***ing silvery wire, so I had to resolder that, and still nothing! One I thing I noticed, which seemed a bit odd, was that the motherboard L.E.D. & mouse L.E.D. were flashing. Now normally I wouldn’t see either, but it did seem odd. When I looked up about that on the web for this motherboard — the ASUS A8V-MX, it was suggested that it could be an error with the RAM, but it said after power was applied. Does that mean when the PSU is turned on, or the actual motherboard from the power button? Because there was no power beyond the PSU coming partially on. So I dunno. I got out a load of dust, and eventually it was working again. Maybe something became a bit conductive in there. So much for my case’s power button, but all symptoms pointed to that yesterday. And the fact that it worked with the new button I put on, proved it in my mind. If the RAM has been at fault, there has been no suggestion of it. Nothing has crashed or frozen in Windows XP. There have been no instances of stuttering audio or anything acting weird. Unless something else is to blame. Let’s see what happens tomorrow, or today.

Tuesday, 15th of August, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:16) More computer woes today. No start up again. The L.E.D.s flashing again. They should actually be “stable” with no flashing, when the PSU is turned on. And by that, I mean the power from the house. Not when you press the power button. Anyway, it’s obviously working at the moment, since I’m typing this. I took out my video capture card though, in case I kill it. I don’t use it much anyway. I took the RAM out, and cleaned it, and put it in the other socket, and that made no difference really, but it was quite dusty, and a bit grubby. I also took the video card out, and tried the built-in video… thing. And that didn’t work. I think it might actually be the big power plug to the motherboard which needs attention. That’s another possibility. I did sort of jiggle it a bit. Then it was working again. The 1st time the motherboard L.E.D. was stably lit, the computer was starting, but not beeping, and there was no image to the monitor. Plus the number lock L.E.D. on the keyboard was flickering a bit. So perhaps power hasn’t been getting through somewhere. I’m not really too sure what I’m going to do if this thing packs it in completely. If Windows didn’t suck so much now, I’d aim for something new perhaps, but since it does, I’d probably have to go for Linux of some description. Or at least something that can run Windows 7. I could probably deal with that. Or move everything to my 2018 PC, so long as it keeps running. My Dad’s computer is even older than mine, and it’s in better condition.

Sunday, 27th of August, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:35) My goodness. The last 12 days! My main PC just refused to turn on in the end, no matter what I tried. All I got was the flashing L.E.D. on the motherboard. So I dunno what that means. Maybe something was up with the power supply. I dunno. Or something else most likely failed. I was in the middle of typing, and the picture just went on the monitor. Although other stuff was still working, like my music playing. So I decided it was probably best to get a replacement computer off eBay. There were a lot of used PCs on there for real cheap, but I thought something new would be the more wise decision for the long term. I found somebody selling a bunch with a small tower case and Windows 7 for $550, brand new. So I thought I would take that route. This one also has one of those static storage drives, to avoid any ambiguity, rather than a motorised hard drive. Although, again, they’re both hard.
The CPU is a 3.7 GHz Intel Core i3 6100, which I think is a quad core type. It shows up in Windows 7 as having 4 cores, but the hardware monitor program I have only shows it as 2 cores, but 4 CPUs. So I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s still faster than my 2.4 GHz single core AMD Athlon 64.
• (15:46) After a quick check on the web, it’s dual core. It’s just hyper threaded like my Core i7 one. So it probably performs like a quad core CPU. Anyway it’s fast enough for my uses. No Sound Blaster card this time. Just the built-in Realtek I.C., and I’ve just got the built-in Intel GPU as well. Although there is a PCI express slot for a better video card. But I’ll save my 2018 P.C. for games.
One thing I wasn’t giving up was Windows XP, despite its quirks. So I installed it in a virtual machine — in this case, Virtual Box. I made up a 30 GB virtual drive, and got it installed. That should be enough, because I’m using shared directories for dealing with my regular files. So I really only need room for programs to be installed. Plus, since some programs don’t get along with Windows 7, this is my other option. Plus for 16 bit programs too.
Now it’s time for the rant about how Microsoft really p!$$€d me off. After I got Windows XP installed, as we nearly all know, you need to activate it. I tried the method over the Internet, and like 2018, when I did my last re-install, it failed. So I thought: “It’s late at night. I’ll ring tomorrow.” So the next day, I went to the ’phone, equipped with that massive number you need to enter. I got onto the activation service, with some simulated woman yapping at high speed. For some weird reason, they wanted me to enter a number on the telephone that was told to me. In this case it was 432. So I entered it in. The simulated voice is like: “That’s not a match!” & it gets me to try again. The same thing happens. I’m like: “What the f**k?!” So I ring back, do a different number, and still nothing. “F**king Microsoft!” I’m thinking. “Their ’phone service is just as cr@p as their operating systems.” So I’m already p!$$€d off at this stage, since I have a short fuse. But it gets worse, of course! So I go back to my new PC, and check the other telephone number, because the 1st one is toll free. So I get that, and head back to the ’phone. (The telephone’s near the kitchen, not in my room with the computers.) Then all I get is a message along the lines of: “This number has been discontinued. Please ring blah blah blah blah instead.”
“F**king hell!” I’m thinking. And she rattles the number off at some insane speed, which you can’t possibly remember, or write down. The stupid, brain dead, mother f**kers! I had to ring this number about 5 times, and have somebody else write it down. I finally get it, and ring the 3rd ’phone number. Then what do I get: “Oh, we’ve discontinued this so that you don’t have to wait in a queue. Just go to help.microsoft.com” And I’m in a RAGE by this stage. I almost smashed the ’phone, and I was swearing about the absolute c*nts at MS for giving me such a run around, and I didn’t even get to speak with anyone! So I said: F**k you! And I found a little 18 KB program that came out early last year, which basically simulates that ’phone activation business. And it worked! So yay to that at least. But what a way to screw over your legitimate customers who PAID for their copy of Windows XP. I’m never buying any more Microsoft $#!+ again. Not even hardware.
Oh yeah — and that web site — it didn’t even load anything. I used Firefox 93 in Tiny Core Linux, since it’s my newest browser from like only 2 years ago, and all I got was a white page of nothing. So yeah. What a crock of utter $#!+ Microsoft truly are. I wanted somebody to execute Bill Gates. BillGates.exe. Run it and execute him!
• Woo! That riled me up again, just thinking about it. Anyway, Windows XP is pretty snappy on this thing, even in the simulated computer. Prior to the new computer arriving though, I had to use my 2018 P.C. to do stuff, and it was amazing that even after 10 years, I still wasn’t aware of how annoying Windows 7 is with Explorer. I had to install Q-Dir to survive, and make more registry tweaks to get consistency in file information. I also used Corel Photo-Paint 11 for some stuff, and it’s a touch buggy too, which I didn’t know. I got memory errors coming up. Although maybe it doesn’t like Windows 7 much. Plus the over scroll is mega slow! Normally when you’re drawing a line in Photo-Paint 8, and go off the edge of the picture, it scrolls along rapidly so you can keep going, but in version 11, it was painfully slow. Anyway, I have version 8 re-installed under Windows XP now, so I’m back to normal. Hopefully.
DivX does not work too well either in that virtual computer environment, nor Power DVD 6. (You see no image, and in DivX compressed video, you get distorted lines.) But it does work fairly well on Windows 7, although the OS says it isn’t really compatible. (PowerDVD 6 that is.) Another thing I didn’t realise, is how VLC seems to have so much tearing in videos. This was pointed out by other people too, and if you’re running it on Windows, it’s an idea to try it with Direct Draw for the output module. I guess when I used it in Windows XP, it wasn’t too bad. I’ll try to mention that on my Computer Page for more tips. Plus about my Pegasus MJPEG codec.
So yeah, it’s taken so long to get things back up and running again. I even had to re-write my text file searcher program, due to some file missing from Visual BASIC. I’m going to update that on the Downloads Page soon.

Sunday, 3rd of September, 2023
(Father’s Day)
Today’s current mood:
• (12:41) I had some partially good AA size Energiser batteries near my TV, and the beeping things leaked, didn’t they? They were supposed to be used by November 2028! 5 & a bit years from now!!! What a crock. I should buy those Chinese EastPower batteries. The ones in my TV’s remote control not only haven’t leaked in 18 years, but they still work! They don’t get a lot of use though. In terms of the 2 most popular brands of batteries, I used to prefer Duracell. I didn’t buy the Energiser ones anyway. They were given to me. So now some of the paint’s come off my TV and game console stand thing from the acid. Damn. Oh… here’s an Ever Ready one by the keyboard. That can fig off into the bin too. (Bang, clonk… Damn! I missed.) Actually, I should change to rechargeable batteries in AA size, because I already have a charger for those nickel metal hyrdride type ones.
• Things are feeling a bit more “homely” with my new PC now. Sort of. I’ve had more issues on this one when it comes to playing audio and video files. Maybe some of my software could use updating here and there. This built in Realtek sound processor thing is a bit of a wuss compared with my Sound Blaster Audigy. It’s so quiet. You really have to crank it with my headphones on. With the SB Audigy, you didn’t need the volume levels anywhere near as high. I could probably use a mini amplifier that will fit under my monitor, with an equaliser on it too. But I can use my Sharp audio system I guess.
My Windows XP installation is up to 3.18 GB now. So that’s not too bad.
• I had to get a new CD ripper (program), because Nero 5 is a special version, which only works with the Lite On drive it came with. It installed fine in Windows 7, and worked, but you can’t choose the new drive to copy stuff from. What a bummer. And that Lite On drive is still in top condition, even after 20 years. But because it’s got a parallel connection, I doubt I could plug it in to this motherboard. Maybe I could find a caddy or something to connect it via the USB.
• Be sure to check out my new review of those media player programs too!

Friday, 8th of September, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (20:56) I thought there was a new-ish TV company called Kogan. I just looked it up. It actually means testicles in Japanese! Yep, 睾丸. They had some big bollocks coming up with such a company.

Saturday, 9th of September, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:22) Brrr! Winter may have ended, but this morning you could freeze the balls off a brass monkey! It’s been colder than the last days of Winter. The monthly changing software review’s been updated, and it’s Winamp again this month.
• (19:52) I was doing one of those word finder puzzles after dinner. One called “In Court.” There were some very funny extra words in there: Bob Hawke Hide Maid Coffin Loft Warm USA. Hmmm! A hidden message about the old prime minister! Then in one called “Full Of Promise,” there was USSR hidden in there too!

Sunday, 17th of September, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:12) Happy birthday to Yuji Naka today. He’s 58 now. Boy, he must’ve only been 26 when he did Sonic The Hedgehog.

Friday, 29th of September, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:10) I was watching series 3 of Some Mothers Do ’ave ’em again. When Frank goes to see about getting a telephone, there’s a poster on the wall for a service called Dial-A-Disc, which you rang on 160. I’d seen it in the past, but I decided to look up what it was tonight. It turns out it was introduced in the 1960s in Britain to let you hear music on your telephone. The quality was understandably bad though. At 1st I thought it might have been like a record hire service, and they’d bring one ’round to your house, but apparently not. I dunno how much of an enjoyable experience it would’ve been. Maybe you could put your ’phone handset near a microphone for an amplifier, and listen to it better in your house. I read in a forum that there was even a service for bed time stories.

Satuday, 30th of September, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:03) I was reading up again to see if Britain’s ridiculous TV licence fee had gone by the board, but it still seems that they’re at it, hiding behind a corrupt portion of their law, and even trying to extend the licence to electronic devices that aren’t even TVs, like computers. According to one video, they recently forked out £20 000 000 to send more thugs ’round to people’s houses for their racketeering, which is to last until 2027. It’s insane that they still expect people to pay for something that they make no effort to prevent. You don’t see Microsoft sending people ’round to various houses looking for valid operating system licences, and then expecting them to pay for them if they had a Mac! It’s exactly the same thing. By their manner of actions, this is self-evident. But it’s not just the British — even the Japanese still have the curse of the NHK demanding money. Apparently people there hide when the TV folks come knocking. You’d think the Japanese with all their experience in electronics could come up with a way to encrypt TV shows to everyone, apart from those who pay. It’s the simplest solution. If you don’t want a service, you don’t pay for it, and you’re prevented from having it. That makes sense, and it’s fair. How can supposedly civilised nations still have this irrelevant bull$#!+ now? It makes no sense, and it reflects badly on them in the eyes of those of us from outside their countries. I think even Germany still has something like this too. At least they did a few years ago. And also Ethiopia — there you could even got to gaol for 5 years! What a crock of $#!+! It’s for a TV! The TV company dictators should be in prison. Not the other way ’round. If this didn’t actually affect people’s lives so much, it’d be laughable. Thank goodness us Aussies ditched this cr*p decades ago. Some people argued that it’s our tax that pays for the likes of the ABC, but we don’t get a bill for it. I don’t pay several hundred dollars a year for anything I don’t use. I haven’t watched the fizzing brainwashing box in 12 years. So I’m with you, the folks being screwed over, from whatever country you’re from. You do have foreign sympathy.

Thursday, 12th of October, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:57) Mother fudge! I was trying out SheepShaver yesterday and today, (to see how Mac OS 9 would run,) and the freaking thing f**ked up the time stamps on several hundred files for my web site! What kind of bug did they overlook for that to happen ever?! It somehow put nearly every file, except for RAR files, 15 hours ahead! WTF?!!! So to anybody who plans to use that, I would be REALLY careful about doing so, and what directories you access from it. For me: Screw it. I’m not going to risk that happening again. Now I have to go through all my files, restore them from backups and manually fix the times that it stuffed. Plus some other directories got messed with too. There wasn’t even any read me file, or any other warning that suggested something like that might be a problem with it. You wouldn’t even imagine such a problem anyway. Then to top it off, when I was restoring files earlier, the freaking power went off! Thank beep for my UPS!

Friday, 20th of October, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (20:16) I’ve got another Oblivion plug-in in progress. One with respawning NPCs who travel about. Like other adventurers, hopefully peddlers and so on. I’ve only done 1 NPC at the moment, and the way it’s going, it’ll be next year before I get it done.

Friday, 27th of October, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (19:29) My Wandering N.P.C.s plug-in for Oblivion is coming along well. I added some peddlers, but it took an age to work out how to get them to actually peddle. While a character is travelling to a destination, they can’t offer services apart from recharging, training and repairing. So the trick was to add another AI package for them to wander on the spot, when you approach. I also worked out how to do a tree house.

Wednesday, 1st of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:14) Wandering N.P.C.s for Oblivion is almost completed. I was hoping to add some more books of poetry, but I’m too stuffed to come up with anything today. I feel like I want to go back to bed. Anyway, since I last wrote about this, I also added a group of 3 “explorers” who go ’round together to 7 different locations. They do a different one each day. You can hang out with them if you feel like barging into a place and taking out all the baddies in a hurry. Or just watch to see if they’ll survive. As for the other 20 adventurers that I started with, if you find all of them, you’ll be added to their faction, which lets you legally get stuff they’ve collected.
• The amount of new songs coming out over the last month really seems to have dwindled. I dunno if it’s related to the web site I go to, to see what there is, or if there really has been a decline. It feels like once October came around, everyone threw the towel in for the year.
• (15:40) Mmm, so I would say that this year’s best finds in terms of music were the big wad of Love Live! songs from Japan, and Dejan Vunjak from Slovenia. They were the most impressive. Hopefully next year I will find somebody else who’s really great as well. Last year it was Heesey, and for 2021 it was Sumika, who are both from Japan.

Thursday, 2nd of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (18:30) I heard on the grape vine, as they say, that Grandpa’s Shed at Fitzroy Falls is having a 20% off sale on everything, so I hope that isn’t an indication that the dude’s finishing the place up. So, if you’re in that area, (in the Southern Highlands region of NSW,) swing on by for some bargains. They have old valve based radios, a really old car radio that I saw the last time I was down that way some months back, a cocktail cabinet style Zig Zag arcade game (which is a knock off of Dig Dug), an old TV, a couple of pianos, I think, various garden tools, a box full of old valves (as in the electronic ones), photography equipment, CDs, DVDs, weights, signs, some model trains, tableware, old magnetos for telephones and goodness knows what else! So if you’re looking for old wares, and are hoping for something interesting, swing on by. I will try to get there next week.
Also, in the area, my Dad tells me that All Aboard, the model shop, is closing after 35 years. They’re now at Bowral, but they used to be at… uh… oh… that town passed Mittagong. Braemar, I think. So if you’re looking for model railway supplies, pop on by there too. They might have some bargains.
• In other news, I found some more Japanese songs last night, so I’m in the process of updating The 2023 Music Videos Page.

Saturday, 4th of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:44) There was some sodding sneaky service for M.S. Internet Explorer running behind the scenes on my main PC, (in Windows 7) that I discovered last night. You’d think that when I removed that “feature” as they call it, it would be disabled as well, but it seems all the junk under the sun still remains. So I was able to find where to turn it off, and I deleted all the files as well, so it’ll never run again now. Something to do with RSS feeds, which I’ve never used in my life, even in any other browser. All that Internet stuff in the Control Panel is pretty much irrelevant outside of Internet Explorer as well. You can actually hide a bunch of Control Panel items that you don’t use, by using the Group Policy Editor. There’s a thing called Hide Specified Control Panel Items under User Configuration Administrative Templates Control Panel. You can just type in the name you see, and that item will be hidden. It makes it much more tidy and easier to find things of relevance. There you go — you can see in my sample image how I’ve trimmed it down. Do a search for Control Panel images on the web, and you can see how much more there is by default.
I trimmed up my Windows XP one just then as well. Speaking of trimming things up in Windows XP, now that I’m running it in VirtualBox, I saved some space by deleting that entire “dllcache” directory as well. (Which is at C:\Windows\System32) It’s only there in case you delete the wrong thing from your system files, but since I have the entire OS installation backed up, there’s no need to worry about it any more. There’s some program I got years ago, which I should crack back out, that does some kind of drive tidy up, so that virtual machine disk “images” are smaller, when you delete stuff from the guest OS too. Although it can’t be too bad, because my VDI file is smaller than what Windows XP is saying I’ve used, so that must be to do with compressed files in there somewhere. Windows XP says I’ve used 4.52 GB of space, but the VDI file is 4.12 GB. So I’m saving 409.6 MB somehow.

Tuesday, 7th of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:59) Well, I went to Grandpa’s Shed. Sadly, it sounds like the chap there’s going to sell up, or close the place anyway. He said he built it 26 years ago. There was some interesting stuff, and I got a photo of an old car radio that looked like it came out of… I dunno… more like a truck or something. It was pretty rugged looking. So yep — pop on in, if you’re in the region of Fitzroy Falls in the Southern Highlands. They’ve got vintage jugs (for heating water), a few (electronic) valves, although some were unmarked, some big lamps, old radios, cameras, records, 2 pianos, those old “Pianola” rolls, or whatever they are, that Zig Zag arcade game, various electrical meters, old coins, old bottles, old fans, old heaters, that old colour TV I mentioned the other day, and even a few pieces of full size railway track. The dude has 20% off everything.
• (19:32) This right here, is the model of radio I saw today.
• (19:50) Here’s my own photo now after all. I think they wanted a bit much for it. Although car radios aren’t really my expertise. Mmm, but no frequencies listed on this. Just the station names for each state. But it was AM only, which is probably to be expected for 1953.
Some of the valves they had there were huge in size. I dunno what they were. Plus what they said was a spotlight, which had a massive light bulb. It was made with brass and stuff too, so I don’t know how old it was.
• I ordered some DVDs for Christmas today — the original Psycho from 1960, and The Poseidon Aventure. Plus One Hour Photo for myself as soon it arrives. I’ve never seen that one, or Psycho. I saw the 1 with Anne Heche though, about 21 years ago.

Wednesday, 8th of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (16:13) I got a message from eBay saying you could now also use your finger print as an extra security measure for your account. But who the heck would even own a finger print scanner anyway? About 0.01% of people? Maybe if you were with the police or something. What else would you even use one for? That was really weird. And how the fig would it even work with your web browser anyway?
• Ugh — off to the dentist tomorrow for a filling, clean up and X-ray imaging. Or whatever you want to call it. That’ll be the highlight of the week.
• I’m still waiting on some replacement ear pads for my noise cancelling headphones that I ordered on the 26th of October. Crikey they’re slow getting here. They only have to come from Punchbowl. They must have a snail delivering them. You could walk to Punchbowl and back quicker than this.
• (19:03) All right! Heesey’s got some kind of new mini album out called Paint It Red. It only seems to have 3 tunes. The songs @ YouTube are dated from just 1 month & 5 days ago. I hope there’ll be a MV of one of the good ones. Anyway, check out Paint It Red, HomeTown and Tango De Cero.

Thursday, 9th of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (18:51) I didn’t do so well @ the dentist’s surgery. He wants me to come back for 3 more 1 hour visits yet, because today’s X-ray imagery showed up areas of decay in a few of my back teeth, including underneath some of my previous fillings. What a bummer. It’s lucky I do clean my teeth so well, & use dental floss, because they could be even worse. So now I need to spend extra time on using the dental floss. I had my 1st injection since I was a kid today too, for the anaesthetic. It wasn’t too bad. My gum’s a bit sore though now. My very 1st filling has to come out as well. It’s one of those amalgam ones with the mercury in it, I think. That’s not the reason though — it’s the decay underneath. So I’ll no doubt be having more injections for all that. That’s not until the 7th, 12th & 19th of December. It’s a bit disheartening when you make all that effort to clean your teeth, and you still end up with problems. But then imagine if I didn’t clean them at all! I’d probably be missing a whole bunch by now. As for the dentist, he didn’t have time to clean my teeth today — my one tooth took nearly an hour for him to fix up.

Wednesday, 15th of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:15) I’ve been going through more Japanese songs written in Japanese, and boy it’s been dragged out. I can only read some of their letters, so it’s super slow. If you are Japanese, or speak the language fluently, you’d be crying with frustration, watching me doing at one letter at a time, going: Hmm — what’s this one? And looking it up on my chart of Hiragana & Katakana characters. Because it’s written in videos, I can’t select the text. I have to work it out for myself. As for the Kanji letters — forget about it. There are thousands of them, so I have to skip them and piece it together & hope for the best with search results. Anyhoo, I’d better get back to it. Keep an eye on my Music Page for new links if I find anything good. Specifically for this year.

Saturday, 18th of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:00) Holey moley — look at this DVD of Downton Abbey. It looks like it came out of a muddy pond after a decade of lying there. I knew we had issues with both series 2 & 3 when we got them, but this one’s got even worse. It’s like the plastic is eroding or something. The look & feel is like it was covered in a layer of spray on glue, then sprinkled over with really fine dusty sand. It won’t wipe off; it seems to get worse if you try it with a moist cloth. It’s like moisture has actually broken down the plastic. It must not’ve been finished properly. Or something went wrong with it. As for the squiggley lines, I can only assume this is where dust was protecting it, but it looks like a worm licked it off. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Luckily we got replacement copies some years ago. The other discs in the series also have what look like corrosion from finger prints, almost like they’ve started to grow mould. These are most likely far beyond saving now. All our DVD players had problems reading them when they were new, let alone like this.
This is in focus, by the way. It’s just that the reflection is causing a doubling effect.

Thursday, 30th of November, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:31) I got my 4th flags pack done, so do check that out on the Downloads Page. It also tells you what you get. You’ll need Art Of Illusion though to open the files. If you want to see previews, check out the images I uploaded @ DeviantArt.

Sunday, 3rd of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:22) Yep. Beepin’ Summer now. Sticky, smelly sweat, storms & humidity. Ugh. I know some people love Summer, but you’re barmy.
• One thing I’ve noticed about Windows 7, since I’m using it more now, is that it’s slower sorting files than Windows XP was. When you go to open files in a program, you can see it adding the files in the directory to the dialogue box. In Windows XP, it would come up close to instantly. At least it doesn’t seem to suffer with that random refresh problem now. Files you selected several hours ago seem to remain selected, which is good if you were looking at files by a certain collection of dates. Windows XP would go: “Oh yeah — I need to refresh that.” And you’d be like: “Ah, you pr**k! Where was I up to?!!” Of course that still happens with it in Virtual Box.
• If you haven’t looked already, be sure to check out the Electronic Circuits Page, for how to make a battery out of some old coins. After doing the thing where you could make about ¼ of a volt with your hands on copper coins & some foil, I figured you could replace your hands with vinegar and get a better result. It turns out other people have tried similar methods too, including using lemon juice. You only need about 5 clean copper coins, some aluminium foil, and some thick paper / thin cardboard / bits of towel soaked in salty vinegar, to get a L.E.D. to light up. Just the thing MacGyver could use in a power failure when he’s out of batteries / candles.
• Off to the dentist on Thursday. I need him to fix the tooth he fixed last time. It isn’t quite right. *Sigh.* Why can’t something good be coming up on the agenda instead? Like frolicking about in the nude with some beautiful women.
• (16:42) Apparently Microsoft nagged some users of Windows XP and Windows 7 with messages that they were dropping “support” for those operating systems. Well, this must’ve only applied if you were using Windows Update, as I’ve never seen them ever. As far as my Windows XP & Windows 7 installations are concerned, they both “know” nothing of any later editions of Windows existing. I don’t think Apple ever used these tactics. Then again, I never used automatic updates on my Macs either. I downloaded what updates I wanted, and I can just add them if I need to re-install Mac OS X. That’s the best way to do it. You don’t have to wait for anything to transfer from the Internet, and you don’t run the risk of Apple pulling the plug on hosting the files.
• (21:07) From what I was reading, the NHK extortionists in Japan sound even worse than the British ones. There’s actually a political party in Japan that aims to protect people from NHK, so that proves that there are decent people with common sense over there. I wonder what their excuse is for not encrypting stuff. And like the Brits, they seem to want money for non-TV products too, like computers. That really is just bull-$#!+, and stepping way over the line. It’s evidence of greed, trying to rob people from stuff they should have no right to do. But these bent laws that these companies abuse & hide behind lets this behaviour continue, rather than saying: “Well, there may be this law, but we won’t treat people like this, just because it exists.”
In terms of computers, it’s probably even easier to make an account based service for Internet provided content. That’s the sensible solution.

Monday, 4th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (23:27) I was reading that people from China were aiming to get a magnetically levitating train up to 1 megametre per hour by using some kind of evacuated tubes. As in a vacuum. That should give the airlines a run for their money for local travel. Yeah, and apparently without the vacuum, the trains could still reach over 600 km per hour. That one in Japan that goes about that speed is just nuts fast. I saw a bit of a dodgy video of it, but the gist of it could be understood. It’s not quite as quiet as I would’ve thought. It still makes a bit of sound, despite not having any motors. There’s supposed to be a huge railway project to link some part of China with Moscow in Russia. Whether they’ll negotiate with the Kazakhs to go through there, or use that gap between there and Mongolia, I have no idea. There’s supposed to be some tunnel between Denmark & Germany being done too. My Dad’s into all this train related stuff. If you’ve read any of the Australian railway related magazines, you’ll probably spot his name somewhere.

Tuesday, 5th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (0:02) Today’s joke for your amusement:
How does a vulcanologist find their way ’round @ night time?
With a lava lamp.
• (14:02) I remember spending an age looking for recording locations from shows in England, like that Normansfield Theatre, Shrub’s Wood in Buckinghamshire, and also the folly at Fawley Court, also in Buckinghamshire, but now I’m trying to track down this place that keeps coming up in Japanese music videos. It’s this location for indoor / outdoor use. It’s got this fake shop that stands out, with a sign that says: “American Gluting (?) Bar: EUDAEMONISM.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean. There’s also a beige looking Citroen 2CV car there. iRis had it in Heart Beat Kyūjōshō, it was just in Heart Diamond by Super*Girls (on the 25th of November), Chou Very Good! used it for Congrazie!, Say-La were there for Seishun Igunoransu, and I’ve seen it come up in other videos too. Write in and tell me if you know where it is. I’m going to try to track it down myself, anyway. I’d still be interested to know that white building with the British stuff inside is, that’s in Korea, too.

Saturday, 9th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (22:00) Phwoar! It was a bit of a hot one today. Not the worst ever, but still more than I’d like. My new PC’s certainly running cooler than my poor old 2006 one. The CPU only got up to about 50°C, and the fan was only running a bit over 1000 R.P.M. The other one got up to about 90°C, or more, in the Summer, with fan speeds close to 6000 R.P.M. It was almost always like that. The AMD Athlon 64 sure was a tough CPU to survive it though. I should’ve written some kind of eulogy for that computer, after all the stuff it achieved for me.
• Well, it’s only 2 weeks & 2 days until Christmas. Where’s the year buzzed off to? It only seems like the other day that the tree got put away.
• I watched Kill Stalin the other night. Well, over 3 nights anyway. That was pretty good too. There are only 8 episodes, which run for about 51 minutes each. Here’s a link to the 1st episode @ YouTube, if you fancy it. It’s based on real events, and it has subtitles, luckily.
• I had another tooth fixed at the dentist on Thursday. That was the one behind the previous 1, so the gap that was there is now closed up more. I got another anaesthetic injection, and boy — my mouth felt so weird later one. Like I had a big blob of plastic jelly in it.

Monday, 11th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:08) I was sorting through stuff on my new PC that I don’t need last night, and came across this whopping big file that was over 800 MB, for Adobe Acrobat Reader. Well, it was nothing to do with the version I have installed, because it only takes up 25.1 MB normally. So it must’ve been from the person that installed the operating system. Plus it was under C:\Program Files\Common Files\ anyway. So that hit the bin super fast. Then I installed some other programs I was in 2 minds about, since I got more than double the space back that was required for it. So it pays to look around your drive for excess stuff.

Wednesday, 13th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:20) Next month, I’m going to have a review of the Corel Draw Graphics Suite 11, which is around 21 years old. It’s hard to believe! I do a lot of comparisons with version 8, and speak about why parts of that are still better. In the meantime, check out my current software review.

Monday, 18th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (21:59) I wonder how many operating systems the average computer owner has installed. I was making a count of my collection just then. I’ve got about 7 copies of Windows (Windows 3.11, Windows ’95, Windows 2000, Windows XP × 2, Windows 7 × 2), React OS, 4 copies of Mac OS X, System 6, Mac OS 9, & Tiny Core Linux. So that’s a lot! Quite a few are in virtual machine status though. Windows 3.11 is in a state of “suspension” though until I re-install DOSBox. That’ll be Free DOS then too. I kind of feel like finding some cool, older programs to run for a bit.

Wednesday, 20th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (13:41) I was just looking for another file searching program for Windows. Boy, some of them are an absolute joke. I got one called MultiFind, which I’m going to use, and see how that goes. XSearch is okay, but it has issues with opening files in some strange manner that some programs don’t understand. And neither do I really! Plus you couldn’t use the normal file context menu to send files to specific programs. But other than that, it was okay. MultiFind seems to run as far back as Windows 2000 as well, so I could even put it on my HP laptop PC. But the search feature in Windows 2000 is pretty good. I mainly needed something new for Windows 7, because its built-in thing is just ridiculously cr*p. How they stuffed that up since Windows XP, I have no idea. I disabled that on my Start Menu from day 1. Now, I’ve put MultiFind on there instead, since Classic Shell lets you modify it pretty easily.
• It’s quite cool today. About 13°C. So that’s better than the 30+°C temperature of yesterday. I dunno how hot it’ll be on Christmas Day. Never mind all this foreign bollocks with snow. Not at this time of year! It’ll only be cool if the air conditioner’s making it so. We probably won’t have any hot food, apart from a bread roll in the oven. It’ll be cold chicken, ham, cheese, and salads. I’ll be off to Harris Farm Markets tomorrow, to get more supplies.

Thursday, 21st of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (15:04) I had a good trip to Harris Farm today, and got to see all the interesting goodies they had for sale. I got some different coconut & something ice cream things, some chips I haven’t tried and other stuff for Christmas.
• In computer news, I decided to disable the error reporting on my new PC in Windows 7, ’cos like Windows XP, it never seems to provide you with any help, and Microsoft aren’t going to provide any more fixes for Windows 7 anyway. Then chances are, if they did, I probably wouldn’t install them. Since 2006, I think the only feedback I ever got, was when GetRight crashed once, and they just said: Get a new version. Yeah, really beneficial. Plus for just about every program crash I’ve had on this computer, it just says: Response: Not available. So f**k that for a joke. I think the error reporting service needs reporting too!
MultiFind is going pretty well, although I did find a bug with it. If you delete its list of files not to search through, they just come straight back again the next time you load it. But you can figure out how to remove them manually from one of its configuration files, or just turn that option off. As for turning things off, I still haven’t worked out how you completely disable the built-in search feature (of Windows 7), or change it, because when you bump F3 from the task bar or at the desktop screen, it still comes up. It’s the stupidest broken thing I’ve ever seen. I just tried it then to look for files called “Belle”, and it’s like Spotlight on Mac OS X. There’s no option to choose where to search, by what date or anything. And what does it do?! It loaded Pale Moon, which tried to open the address of: “http://www.belle.com/” LOL! What the f**king hell?! Seriously; what the fudge did they do to it? How does searching for a file open up some web site address? It’s not even a proper search program. It’s like a tacked on after thought to the Explorer file manager. Why didn’t they keep the one from Windows XP ever? It wasn’t perfect, but at least it worked most of the time. I really don’t get how Microsoft didn’t check all these things from a usability perspective.

Friday, 22nd of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (14:01) The file search feature in Windows 7 is disabled from the “Programs & Features” section of the Control Panel, under Turn Windows Features On / Off. As for how you specify a different program to handle the F3 key “shortcut,” I’m not sure. It says to do it with the default programs thing, but I can’t figure out how.

Sunday, 24th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:25) Ooo~ooh! Christmas Day tomorrow! Wow, it’s come around fast. If I was a little kid, I’d be getting up at 7:00 in the morning, eager to get to the presents under the tree. But I think it’ll be more like 10:00 tomorrow, if we’re lucky.
Anyway, as usual, I won’t be doing anything on the Internet, since I ban myself from that. So I’ll say to have a good day now.

Tuesday, 26th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:20) Yesterday was a bit of a mixed bag. It started out all right, but being Summer, we got another huge storm that went for about 3 hours or more, so I didn’t get to watch my new DVDs until later. Then The Poseidon Adventure turned out to be in NTSC instead of PAL, but it was okay, since I was watching it on my computer. Why they released dozens of shows in a foreign format in Australia, I’ll never know. Anyway, I went on to Psycho after that, but it was too late to watch it all.
The Kingston flash memory units I got have been a real disappointment. They’re as slow as f**k, and they’re supposed to be for USB 3.2 speed. They can’t even do USB 2 speeds! I completely formatted one of them yesterday, and it took close to 3 hours! This was in the hopes of improving the transfer speed. But nup. A big fat, waste of time. I’m not even getting 8 MB per second on one of them. USB 2 should be able to do around 60 MB per second, and USB 3 should be much faster. (Both my main PC & 2018 one can work with USB 3 speed devices.) I should’ve got another portable hard drive instead. And stupid Microsoft think these can be used for that Ready Boost nonsense?! When this came out for Windows Vista, there was no USB 3. And when has a flash memory unit from back then been able to out perform an internally connected hard drive? Never. Even parallel connecting hard drives can probably maintain a faster data transfer rate. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. So I asked the seller at eBay if they can claim from Kingston, and perhaps get me a refund. Although I did add some stickers to indicate the formatted size and contents, but I don’t think that’ll be an issue when it’a faulty manufacturing. Oh yeah — that’s another thing: These were supposed to be 64 GB each. Now I know they always con you out of space, but these didn’t even add up to 64 000 000 000 bytes. It was closer to 61 000 000 000. What a rip-off. They were only 57.8 GB formatted. (64 real GB = 68 719 476 736 bytes.) Plus they initially had an extra 100 MB of unallocated space! What was with that ever? Another thing I didn’t realise, was how Windows 7 wanted you to use a command prompt to partition them. I thought they would’ve dumped those methods years ago. In the end, I used my MacBook to erase and repartition them, then my main PC to format them with the NTFS. (They came formatted as FAT32, which I didn’t think was possible for that size, but because I had to store files beyond 4 GB in size, I had to use a different file system.) I thought they might have internal L.E.D.s as well, since they have transparent plastic ends, but nope! No indication of activity at all.

Friday, 29th of December, 2023
Today’s current mood:
• (12:49) Not much of the year left now! I had to go to the dentist again yesterday, unexpectedly. I was getting pain in one of my recently filled teeth. It just seemed to be a bit high, so the doc’ fixed it up, and now it should be good.
• I got a reply from the eBay seller of those flash memory units, but they said I need to contact Kingston. So I did that, but I haven’t heard back from them just yet. Hopefully they’ll say something like: We’re sorry our product has not given you the performance you expected. Please send your flash memory doodads to such & such an address, and specify if you would like them exchanged or refunded.
Actually, I think the warranty thing says they’ll only refund you when the problems can’t be resolved with replacement products. There’s nothing on the packaging suggesting: This product may suck. It says USB 3.2, so that means it should perform above the previous level. Plus it says that it works with 4 operating systems on the back, including a really old revision of Mac OS X, which probably wouldn’t have USB 3 on the computers it ran on anyway. Although that’s mostly irrelevant, since the speed’s determined by your own computer’s USB. It’s probably more to do with the file system they chose. Anyway, that’s not really a problem, because I’m not having issues with other USB 3 drives. My hard drive caddy for instance, is transferring just above USB 2 speeds. I was getting about 64 MB per second. That might be the limit of the drive I chose to put in there though. Yeah, I thought I was going to see something like 100+ MB per second, but I’m only getting around 7 MB per second. So that’s too slow when you need to transfer 30 GB, or more, of stuff in 1 hit. That would take something like 1 hour & 13 minutes.
• There’s a really annoying bug in Windows 7 that I’m sure will p!$$ me off for years to come. And other people have had this trouble too. For some reason, file lists sometimes truncate file names with a bunch of dots! What the f**k, Microsoft?! How are we supposed to read the file names, if they don’t show the entire thing? This didn’t happen in Windows XP. So now I’ve had to put in blank files with long names, like: WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.txt, to try and keep the longer file names shown. Freakin’ heck. Users having to come up with these kludges is not a good sign of a well thought out O.S. Especially when the problem didn’t exist previously. Anyway, this is my last Microsoft operating system now. If I can’t proceed with Windows 7 on my next, future PC, it’s on to something else. Although I’m not very enthusiastic about Linux these days either.
• Speaking of bugs, something’s gone kooky with the money in Oblivion. I reckon it’s to do with getting into really high values, because it started to act up when I got around 16 000 000 gold pieces. I’m a master of the mercantile skill now, which means I get full value for items that I sell. But now, when I’m selling, I’ve noticed that sometimes the value doesn’t quite add up. Especially on items which can’t be divided evenly by 10. And sometimes for those as well. It might fall 2 Septims short, or you might get extra. So something isn’t as accurate as it should be. In fact, it isn’t just with trading. Last night I got some gold from a chest, and it came out wrong again with the amount I picked up. Maybe you could do a plug-in to allow you to drop off a portion of your money in a chest, and that might cure it, by bringing the amount you carry, down to a lower level. If that’s where the issue lies. You can’t drop gold in Oblivion, like you could in Morrowind, so you’d have to have a script on something to add gold from you, to a container. But then you’d have to have a menu to let you choose how much. Also, I don’t know if there’s a limit on how much you can transfer at once. In Morrowind, transferring something like 32 000 gold pieces in the one hit, caused problems. You had to have scripts break it into separate groups. I saw this with that Mournhold Clock Maker plug-in.

Monday, 1st of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (23:19) Happy new year. I may still have more tunes for my 2023 page of music videos, since there’s bound to be a bit of overlapping with finding out songs I didn’t know about from the end of last year.
• Something’s up with Lavabit at the moment too. I’m not getting any e-mail. It’s like the start of this year triggered some change, or fig up. Anyway, I haven’t heard back from Kingston yet. Everyone’s probably having a break.
• (23:31) Oh yeah — I said about snow on the 20th of December — well it hailed on Christmas Day. I said it was because of: Hail to the new born King. Yeah, and it’s been quite cool the last couple of days.
• R.I.P. to Tom Wilkinson too.

Thursday, 4th of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:34) I’ve been going through more Japanese tunes pretty much all day today. I’ve got one here: Otonarisan by Team Shachi — it sounds almost identical to Hapichoco from Fruits Zipper. If that isn’t the same composer, I’ll turn gay for a month. The person who wrote it was probably knackered one night, sat on the loo with their to do list, and said: Aaaack! I’ve got to write another song for Team Shachi in 2 days time! Eh — let’s just recycle something from earlier in the year. Nobody will ever know. As for my 2024 page of favourite tunes, nothing good’s come along yet.
I’ll be adding another song to the 2022 page in a jiffy anyway.

Wednesday, 10th of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:23) I finally got a reply from Kingston. It came from Taiwan, so maybe the Aussie & New Zealand division’s gone. Anyway, I’m starting to wonder if they even got my 1st 2 messages from Lavabit, because as soon as I changed to my I.I.G. hosted e-mail, which is connected to my web site here, I got a response. Then I sent myself a message to my Lavabit account, and it didn’t turn up. So that’s a bit fishy. Anyway, I think the dude who replied to me, wanted to make sure I had USB 3 capable hardware, because he asked if I could take a photo of my PC’s USB, and for a serial number! Well it doesn’t really say on the case, and as for any serial numbers, I can hardly open the thing up to look for them. That was a bit of an odd request. I just told him what model of motherboard I have on my main computer. But both this one and my one from 2018 have USB 3 capability, and there’s even extra software installed specially for it. In any case, the flash memory units weren’t even hitting the top end of USB 2 speeds, and the guy agreed that 3 hours to format one was a bit too long. As I think I said the other day, I tried that to see if it would improve the speed if they were fully formatted first, but it didn’t. The USB 2 speeds off my SD card reader were faster than these supposed USB 3 flash memory things as well. I was getting about 19 MB per second, vs about 7. If I’m backing up 30 GB of stuff, I’m going to need it done faster than like 1½ hours, or whatever Windows 7 reckoned it would take. Even if it was 50 MB per second, which is just under the top of USB 2 speeds, it would only take just over 10 minutes to transfer that much data, and my hard drives can certainly keep up with that rate.

Thursday, 11th of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:26) I got another reply from Kingston, and they gave me a number to send to the eBay seller to request some kind of return. Hopefully they can deal with that. The chap I got messages from seemed to be a bit confused. He seemed to incorrectly refer to the flash memory units as “the USB,” but that’s the bus that the ports use on the computer! So I dunno what he was thinking there. And then he seemed to think I was suggesting that some part of my PCs’ USBs were slower, when I didn’t. Fig knows. Although his English was pretty good, since he was from Taiwan. Now I just need to wait for a response from the seller. The way things are going, the warranty will run out before I get anywhere.

Friday, 12th of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:18) I was 100% correct about Otonarisan by Team Shachi. It was written by Sho Yamamoto, who did Hapichoco / Happy Chocolate from Fruits Zipper. It doesn’t look like I’ll have to turn gay for a month now! I picked it like a dirty nose. Some composers just have that signature use of notes that you can tell without reading that it was them. Although I have heard some instances of songs that are similar, & yet are by completely different people.
You really need groups who mostly use the same composer, because otherwise they seem inconsistent, and you only end up liking 1 song from them then.
• (14:49) At the Dummies web site, they said: The Windows 7 search feature is a wonder compared to its predecessors. *Snort!* LOL! You’re pulling my plonker there! More like it’s a wonder anybody used it. Or, it’s a head scratching wonder, because you can’t figure it out. I still have no solution for specifying a new search program as the default for Windows 7, when you press F3 from places that have focus, like the Task Bar, or desktop area. Maybe there isn’t one.
• (21:59) I’ve been busting my knob off, trying to find that location I’ve seen in a bunch of Japanese music videos. The joint I mentioned on the 5th of December. Wherever it is, it’s not easy to find. I did however find the Aviral Resort Studio, which was used in some other MVs. It was interesting to see the rental prices. Probably an average of around $200 to $300 per hour, depending on the location. (¥100 is about 95¢ in Aussie money.)

Saturday, 13th of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:15) Huzzah! I FINALLY tracked down that place in Japan that’s been used for at least ½ a dozen MVs that I’ve seen. It’s called Wedding Fantasia, in the Shizuoka Prefecture. I’d have to look that up though, where that is. Phwoar! What a day of trying to hunt that down. I’ve seen so many studios and rental properties. In the end, I found it by the name of that shop in the place, that says “Eudaemonism.” I typed that in for like a studio and a picture came up of it. Alleluia! Thanks to nobody else’s efforts. You can all thank me now for finding it, if you like Japanese music videos and had no clue. Now I need to find the place with the indoor race track, I think it is, (in Japan,) and that white building in Korea.
• (18:08) Another location found! Daikeien — the place with the go-carts. I think it’s in the Chiba prefecture. This was in Miryoku To Wa? by Girlfriend, to name one song. But I didn’t really fancy this tune. So if it crops up again in anything I like, I’ll mention it on the appropriate music videos page.

Sunday, 14th of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:04) I’m onto South Korean places now. I found 1 that I knew from a couple of MVs, including one by Minseo. I haven’t found that white joint though, with the arches & the British stuff inside. Maybe it’s a wedding hire place, rather than a studio.

Monday, 15th of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:18) I found pictures of the place that Paradise used for Fate, but not the name of it. It’s some rental hall. I wasn’t even looking for that one specifically. Aaaaah! This is really frustrating trying to track down places only by what they look like. Especially in a different language. You’d think it would just show up, because I’ve seen it numerous times. Busters used it twice for their 1st 2 MVs, Laboum were there, and somebody else I’ve forgotten. APink was it? Hmm. I dunno.
I got the location of those pillars, from BLACKPINK’s video for As If It’s Your Last. It was at some university. I mentioned it on the 2017 MVs page.

Sunday, 21st of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (21:58) I FINALLY found that white hall in Korea. The one that was in Busters’ MVs, and that one from Laboum. It’s the Namsan Art Wedding Hall. Thank fig! Plus, I also found another popular place in Japan! It’s this outdoor joint with a white roof with square holes in it. Well, it’s the Plaza Of Kanagawa Institute Of Technology. It’s come up in so many MVs now. Phwoar! What a lot of searching. And it finally paid off. So that’s about all the areas I’ve been looking for, tracked down.

Tuesday, 23rd of January, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:45) I’ve added a section of locations to the Music Page of places that have cropped up a few times in various music videos. I’ll be expanding this over time, as I find out what locations are called, and if new MVs use them. If you know any of the locations I don’t have listed, for music videos I do have listed, please let me know.
• (18:44) If a binary digit is a bit, then a “trinary” digit would be a tit!

Friday, 26th of January, 2024
Australia Day
Today’s current mood:
• (12:45) Oh yeah — I got a refund for those 2 flash memory units, so thank you, Clicking Trend at eBay, for your professional handling of this issue. That was a few days back anyway. I’m not sure what route I want to take from now, regarding backing up my virtual machine files.
• I kind of feel like designing another flag for today, being Australia Day & all. I might go and have a fiddle and see what I can come up with, and if I feel like it, I’ll show it here.
• (16:39) All right; how about this design for a flag? Although I’m not 100% sure about the kangaroo, yet I felt it was an important symbol of the nation to include it. I think the large star should have 8 points instead of 7, because we have 8 main states and territories. Western Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. The Southern Cross should stay, because it’s part of the night sky from here. The background blue should be more vibrant as well, like our sky, and of course it needs the green and gold. In this case, it serves a 2nd purpose — to represent the beautiful coastlines, with the land and then the beach. The light blue at the bottom is the sea. I think our surrounding ocean water and that, is another iconic feature. I don’t think the flag should be too complex. Some flags do have a lot of detail, and yet others are exceptionally simple. Send in your thoughts! Lose the kangaroo? Change the positions? Change the size of stuff? Let me know. Would you have this on a flag pole to represent this country? And lastly, who would you submit the idea to?
• (19:17) Here’s another flag idea I had. I like these colours, so I’m sticking with them. They have to have some resemblence to the country anyway. Perhaps in this one, we can have the kangaroo on the reddish, iron rich dirt that’s seen so much in the country. Although, maybe it is a bit like QANTAS. There really are so many possibilities, and I’m sure everybody has their own idea. I tried some other concepts too, but they didn’t really look quite right. It’s got to be sensible looking.

Friday, 2nd of February, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (19:57) I reckon a clock with magenta L.E.D.s would be pretty nifty looking. I don’t know if they make 7 segment displays in that colour though. But I’ll bet you can get rectangle L.E.D.s in that colour, to make your own “8 shape.”
• (20:02) I did an image search, and only really found 7 segment displays with RGB type L.E.D.s., but not any specific magenta ones. You can get magenta rectangle L.E.D.s though, like I figured. I’d probably want extra wide ones for the likes of a clock. Ah well — I have other things to do with my money before I try to make my own clock. Getting the special integrated circuit is a bit awkward too — especially if you want 24 hour time. I’d have to find the correct type and then track it down.
• (20:44) Oh yeah! Check out this video of a Manning-Bowman heater from over in Canada / America / somewhere on that continent. It’s got a magenta element! What the heck is it?! I’ve never seen anything like that before. It looks really good anyway. I think it’s from 1960-something. I saw it 3 days ago.

Sunday, 4th of February, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:10) I did another edge lit bit of perspex with a design of flowers on it today & yesterday. It’s okay, I guess, for hand etching, but I think for a really professional end result you need a LASER etcher. Those things are over $300 though for a good one, so you’d want to be doing a LOT of those kinds of signs, or selling like 10 of them, or more for $30 each to get your money back. And that would be just for the perspex without the L.E.D.s and power supply.fsfs Ah. f**king Dreamweaver. You press Alt + F, then S to save, and sometimes it doesn’t respond to the Alt key. Anyway, it took me an age to hand etch the little dots, and some of them are a bit inconsistent. I saw some American dude in a video, who had a label with pieces cut out, and he sand blasted it instead, which is an interesting alternative. Cutting the paper accurately though would be a problem for me, and I don’t have a sand blaster either. I’ve got 3 Sound Blasters, but they won’t work! For me, doing the L.E.D.s and power supply is the really easy part.
• (20:02) Some time this year I’d like to get my inverted chaser circuit done. To the left is the goal of how it should look. I’m going to use “warm” white L.E.D.s, which are slightly golden, I guess. I’ll only need weak ones for this too, and I bet I’ll still be darkening them up with some higher resistor values than usual. This will have 36 L.E.D.s on simultaneously, which might take 200 mA. I dunno. It depends on how much current I limit with the resistors. I may need 1 watt resistors to handle 12 L.E.D.s on each channel. I’ll have to work it out. I want this to be about the size of an A4 piece of paper, so I’m thinking I’ll probably go with those polarised header socket things. Those KF2510-2P type ones. But I might need to buy more from China. I’ll have to count how many I have. I’d like a big black box to put this in, ideally, but it depends on what I can get. I may just need to settle on some black perspex, or something similar. Firstly I want to get some 4001 I.C.s to test if this will work as expected. The circuit board only needs to be pretty small, but I’ll need to get a few more prototype ones from Phipps (on eBay). They’d probably have the LEDs too, but I’ll shop around for them. You can sometimes get better prices elsewhere. Maybe that place I got my ice blue & turquoise ones. Um… SM Components. I’m also going to use a 4PDT switch as a sensible and effective way of changing the chase direction. That will just connect between the 4001 and ULN2803APG I.C.s. It does only use half of one of them though. I want to get a full size variable resistor and knob as well, for the speed.
Anyway, that might be some time off.

Monday, 5th of February, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:49) Whatever happened to the Windows Picture & Fax Viewer in Windows 7? All those extra functions you got in the Windows XP one have gone out the window. Although now, it’s just called Windows Photo Viewer. Some people might’ve missed all the bonus features, especially for TIFF files. (That’s Windows XP at the top & Windows 7 at the bottom.) The Windows 7 one looks nicer with those fancy central buttons though, but you can’t save as a different image type this time, pictures are no longer smoothed out when you zoom in, and it doesn’t play animated GIF files any more either! That’s a bit of a diddle. You’d think that’d be something to add new features to, not get rid of them, when you get a newer version of something. I don’t see why they couldn’t have just used the previous program again, and made it look nicer.

Sunday, 11th of February, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (19:07) I’ve been getting set up to record some video action from Oblivion this afternoon. I thought that Rhythmyx mixer I have would work for the microphone, but you can only use 2 microphones or have everything in mono. So that’s a bit cr*p. I tried connecting my microphone to my 2018 PC, but those weird Realtek sound processor things seem to want a stereo input for 2 microphones as well! You only get the left channel otherwise. F**k! It was never like this on the Sound Blasters. Plus there seemed to be a delay in the sound coming through. So that’s a bit iffy. So I’m going to use my Sharp audio system again to mix the 2 lots of audio, which is a bit dodgy at times. At least it has a microphone volume control. Then I have my Gefen scaler thing doing the output from my video card, and then this’ll be captured with my Canopus ADVC-110 as usual, and that plugs into my MacBook. I’ll have my headphones plugged into that too, to hear what’s happening. Although there is a slight delay from the Canopus doodad, due to how it does stuff. I can see why some people use special software to capture game videos. Anyway, I have all this expensive equipment, so I should use it.

Thursday, 22nd of February, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:11) Somebody else on the web was asking about whose videos to watch for new Japanese songs. I think I mentioned this before, but at the moment, the best ones I look at from YouTube, are SK4, Akuma Musiik & Relatives Of Del Potro. SK4’s ones are usually pretty short, with a more limited selection. Akuma Musiik does ones at the end of each month, and sometimes has up to 3 of them with their favourite selection, but that said, it’s usually a wide variety. R.O.D.P. does the broadest range, and covers most new releases every Tuesday in chronological order. The only thing is, you’ll need to be able to read a bit of Japanese, or know how to translate it. There’s also RiceCake, whose stuff I haven’t seen for a while, (but they seem to mostly do top 50 charts,) and Japan News Network, but I think they quit doing them. POPNABLE is also worth checking for new songs worldwide, but they only have small percentage from each country. Parents be aware that any of these may contain offensive content, so just take note of that too, if you have young kids watching stuff.
• Here are some sites for translations and conversions also, if you’re interested: This Romaji Converter will put most Japanese text into the Latin alphabet. There’s also this one, which will do Katakana specifically. If you want to translate text, check out this site. If you want to convert Rōmaji (Romanised Japanese words) to Hiragana & Katakana, this is another joint you can try out. It seems to have issues with multiple words though, so you may need to manually add + symbols between the words in the address area of your web browser.
• If you want to go back in time, check out The DX’s line up of the most popular Japanese songs of the 1980s. (January 1980 to December 1989.) This was a bit of an eye opener, and something I never thought I’d see. Take note of how much more mature the women singers’ voices are compared to the more girlie ones these days.

Friday, 23rd of February, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (19:33) If you want to buy more local products, or if you’re from overseas and feel like supporting us Aussies, check out Wallaby Batteries. I spotted these on eBay this evening. (Just so you know, I’m not being paid to mention these.) They might be worth a burl. There are also Nickel Metal Hydride rechargeable ones. Although I didn’t spot any of these beyond AA & AAA size.
After those leaking Energiser ones I had, and some of the steep prices at Coles, I thought I’d see what other options there were. I didn’t see any of those Chinese East Power brand ones on eBay. I’d probably go for the Australian rechargeable AA ones though next time, as I already have a charger for these.

Thursday, 7th of March, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:53) I ordered Toy Story 4 on eBay last week on Wednesday, and I don’t know if the seller’s dead, their computer conked out, or some other disaster happened, because it still hasn’t been posted, nor have they answered my message I sent. So I may have to tell eBay that it hasn’t arrived, or cancel the order, or something, if too much time elapses. I’m in the dark on this one.
• I FINALLY found a Japanese MV I was looking for last month, and yeah… it was cr*p! So, so much for that. Typical! I’ve been catching up today, because I’ve been busy with more important things.
• (23:46) I was looking up the prices of mobile ’phones per month, just out of morbid curiosity. Some of them are over $20 per month! F**k off out of it! Thank goodness I don’t have 1. There were some other deals from some shops with some minimum costs of about $828 a year! Crack my gob! You could get a computer for less than that. I should have shares in Apple & Samsung. It makes me wonder how much money I could save if I became my own ISP, but I’m not sure what risks are involved in doing that. I read that you can do that somehow. The problems with running your own server for your web site, are power failures and storms. If a lightning strike takes it out, you’re going to be down a lot of money to get another one, so in that way, I think renting space from a company is the better option. At least for me.

Saturday, 9th of March, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:01) Still nothing about my Toy Story 4 order. This seller better be sick or dead. (Like that bit in The Shawshank Redemption.) Or waiting on a new computer, because if they’re just lazy and disorganised, then that’s not going to cut it. Then this morning, I get a message from eBay asking me to leave feedback for them! Well they haven’t done anything. I hope they nagged them too, to send the thing. If nothing happens by Tuesday, I’m going to say it hasn’t turned up. This is really trying my patience at the moment.
• The change to my Software Review Of The Moment page has occurred. It’s back to Corel DRAW 8 this month.
• (13:58) Another thing that’s got a bit more cr*p in Windows 7, since Windows XP, is the disk defragmenter. It used to show you a visual representation of where the fragmented areas of the drive were, unmovable files and blank space, but now there isn’t anything like that. Back in the original Windows line, with Windows ’95, you used to see every… uh… block, or whatever they were called.
• What the fudge?! I just found porn related stuff on my computer to do with the getting started with Windows 7 thing. What the heck?! What did the installer have happening on here last year?! I’d better check this out and make sure there isn’t anything weird lurking on my drive.
• (14:41) I found some other suspicious files and a registry entry too, so I hope I haven’t picked up some kind of malware somehow. $#!+ — the Start button’s stopped functioning now. What the fig is going on?

Sunday, 10th of March, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:04) I re-installed RollerCoaster Tycoon today. Has it really been 14 years since I last played that? I couldn’t find any newer files to suggest otherwise, unless some are on my previous main PC’s primary hard drive, which is now in my other 2018 computer. Anyway, it runs okay under Windows 7. You just need to install the Windows XP patch, set it to run in 256 colours, and it’s mostly good. Apart from the introduction bit that slides up. Sometimes it’s in weird colouring. The graphics tear a bit, but not too badly. I don’t remember if it did that before. I copied over all my old save games, so I could quickly complete each park. I did saves on the last day of the goal, and that way you could complete the stages quickly. There is some other tricky way to copy over your old completed files too, but I’d have to look it up on some other web site. I thought it was 1999 that the game was done, but all the files say they’re from the 15th of January, 2000.
It probably is better to be running it on a multi-core CPU as well, because it will hog all the free oomph on a single core one. So my Intel Core i3 CPU just goes up to 25% usage.
• I got my XBOX 360 control pad installed in Windows XP in VirtualBox, so that worked better than back in about 2007-ish when I tried that on my MacBook. The one good thing about Windows 7 is that you don’t need extra software to install that pad, because the O.S. is newer than the console.

Wednesday, 20th of March, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:39) I never heard back about Toy Story 4, and eBay just refunded my money, since there was never a response from the seller. So I ordered another copy, and that turned up today. It was really good, and the graphics were amazing! It’s hard to imagine that they could improve much on the earlier shows, but they did. It was a bit emotional in places, and the ending was rather unexpected, making me wonder if Woody really made the right choice. As for the DVD, I had some issues with it. Toy Story 3 seemed to have these mild stutters, and #4 was worse. It seems to be something odd about how Disney did them, because I have no other DVDs with these issues on my usual DVD programs. PowerDVD “froze” at one point, it was so bad. 2 versions of VLC (on 2 different PCs) were skipping even more, and Light Alloy had trouble too, making the audio skip rather than the video. It did however play properly on my XBOX 360 & Apple’s DVD Player on my iMac G5. I’m not sure if it’s worth it to track down another DVD player program just for a couple of shows. A bit of a disappointment though. It says on the box that it may not be compatible with all systems. You’d think all shows would stick to the DVD specifications so this wouldn’t happen. I also tried doing a backup copy and running it from the hard drive, and it made no difference. It’s something about how the video’s encoded / compressed. But yep — only Disney DVDs seem to do this. Some more than others.
I also watched The Light Between Oceans again — or The LBO for short. That’s how Michael Fassbender & Alicia Vikander got together. Or as I said, if the lighthouse went out: At least you’ve a candle. There were absolutely no issues playing that one. It ran perfectly.

Thursday, 21st of March, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:03) M. Emmet Walsh sadly died on the 19th. I remember him from Frasier & My Best Friend’s Wedding mostly. He missed his 89th birthday by just 3 days. I also saw him in A Time To Kill, which we watched in high school, Early Edition, Home Improvement & Wild Wild West.

Sunday, 24th of March, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:52) If you haven’t noticed on the main page, I’m offering my copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Sega Saturn. I want to try to sell it privately, rather than on eBay, because it’s worth more than the $500 limit they have for 1st time sellers. Due to the prices being asked for it now, of over $1000, I’m willing to do better, and offer it to anybody who’s interested, for $825. But I will put this up in time, as eBay prices rise. I’m not joking — people are asking for close to $1500 for this now! This is a rare title for collectors, and those of you who’d like to experience one of the best RPGs for the Saturn. I’ve owned this copy since 1998, so it’s only had me as the owner. See the new page for details.

Monday, 25th of March, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (23:31) Come on, rich Sega collectors — get off ya bums and buy my copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga. You could be saving over $600!
• I’m in a Toy Story mood of recent days. I just did a rendition of Forky in Art Of Illusion. Well, it actually took all day. I’m not too good with 3D characters, and cutlery’s an awkward shape. It looks a bit like him. There are some tutorials to make your own Forky. I’d have to buy a bunch of arty farty supplies though. And then I’d probably have a bunch left over. I want to get a Jessie action figure. One of the really good ones. There’s the signature collection from 2010, but those ones are worth a lot now. Like several hundred dollars. There are some newer ones too though. I’d probably go up to $100 or so. They’ve got pull strings & everything, but electronic components for the speech. There’s a great looking Bo Peep as well, with the lamp and the Toy Story 4 style sheep. I must be turning into a girl. Maybe it’s because I want to look at girls and not men. LOL. I want to get the Toy Story 2 sound track CD as well, and the Toy Story Of Terror DVD. Hee hee — so buy my video game, so I can get some new toys and stuff.

Friday, 29th of March, 2024
Good Friday
Today’s current mood:
• (19:24) I’ve been reading up about selling stuff on eBay, which has been really tiring. Some people were getting in a flap about providing a password for their bank accounts, for eBay to access as a kind of verification for new sellers, but that is only 1 of 3 choices you have. The one I’ll pick is to provide a picture of a bank statement. Besides, I don’t do any banking on the ’net, so I don’t have a password to give. It’s a bit odd though that eBay doesn’t let you set up payment options prior to listing your 1st item for sale. That would make things a bit easier. I’m going to try selling one of my fountain pens 1st, and see how that goes. I think the whole eBay selling thing is aimed more at people who wanted to do it on a constant basis, rather than now & then, like me. So this mightn’t work out in the long run. If I was a multi-millionaire, I wouldn’t bother with it at all.
Some of the terms they use over there I’ve never heard of. Some service called Sendle — never heard of it. Something about funging, or fudging, or fungus — what the fig was that about? And some other kind of computer I didn’t know about, and this thing called “metrics”, or something. Is that opposite to imperials? LOL. Most of the explanations you can understand though.

Tuesday, 2nd of April, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:24) Well, I got my Montegrappa Espressione 2012 fountain pen listed on eBay. There was nothing asked (so far) about providing a scan of my ID card, or any requests for a bank password, or even the scan of the bank statement. So, they must’ve changed all that malarkey from the time of what other people were saying. It was all just typed in stuff. I got a phone call with the security number to put in. That happened pretty much instantaneously, when I clicked on the button for that. It said they only accepted a driver’s licence or passport information. Well, I just used my I.D. card for the licence, because other people said it’s the same thing, and they’re both issued by the same place. Here is the listing if you want to buy it. Unless it’s sold by the time you read this.
• (14:51) Woah! What the fudge?! I thought you could only sell 10 items when you began selling on eBay, with a limit of $500 total. It says I can sell up to 700 items this month, with a limit of $53 500! How does that work? I’m not on a business account either. Holey beep. Is this some kind of extra promotion, or something to do with bank credit ratings? Wow. I didn’t expect that. Maybe I should list Panzer Dragoon Saga over there soon too then.

Tuesday, 9th of April, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:04) I sold my Pilot / Namiki Custom 74 Demonstrator pen on eBay last night. My 1st sale! I posted that today. I had to update MORE details after the sale that I figured eBay would have. I think they need to overhaul a lot of how they set things up for your selling. Mainly to fill all that stuff in before you sell, to avoid any traps and surprises. Not to mention the hideous appearance of the site too. They seem to have these vague, fat, custom “slide switch” looking controls, which you can’t tell if they’re activated or not. What’s wrong with using a standard tick box? That’s a bit stupid and short-sighted.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a rip off how they charge a percentage of the postage cost as well. That’s a bit greedy. They should just take a percentage of what you’re selling. The postage cost should be a “pass through” kind of thing. I think you need to consider what you want to get for an item, and add on about 30% to cover all your costs, especially if you’re going to offer overseas postage. That is a huge amount for heavy items. Even light weight ones are a bit. They reckoned it was going to cost $10.60¢ to post my pen, but it was $13. So, maybe with eBay’s postage labels. Live and learn, huh? So I should’ve charged about $104 for the pen, rather than $92. I’ll be putting the price a bit higher for my Panzer Dragoon Orta sound track CD in that case. I want about $86 for it, so I’ll charge $110, or so. That’s a little under 30% extra. Then if international postage costs as much as $58, that would mean I’d get about $145 after eBay fees, minus the $58 I’d have to pay to send it, and that would be about $87. So I don’t know how some people offer free postage. They must get huge bulk discounts. Even Jaycar don’t send stuff for free, and they’re a shop.
The nice woman at the Post Office said I could get a discount for a lot of items, but I said I wouldn’t be doing this all the time. It’s more like a clear out of stuff I want money for now. I may not sell anything again next year. Anyhoo, it should be about the 23rd before the money from eBay is released from being on hold, as they explained in the 1st place. Last night it looked like they were going to send some mini deposit to my bank account to check it was correct, but I heard nothing more on that. I might get the bank to print me a statement on Thursday if I need to check for deposits. You might be able to get a mini one at the ATM. Surely that would tell you.
Mmm — so if you’re thinking of selling your old stuff off on eBay, you’d better have a lot of patience, all the identification information under the sun, and be prepared for the percentage you’ll be paying to them as well. I think if you have a place locally, like an antiques store, or Cash Converters, that may actually be comparable and less hassle. Cash Converters only sell popular stuff though, and they put the price on it.
• I’ve got another plug-in for Oblivion in progress @ the moment. It’s like my outposts one for Cyrodiil, but this time it’s for the Shivering Isles. I’ve got 6 locations so far. 3 in Dementia and 3 in Mania. There are a few new items as well, and some neat enchanted goodies to buy. I’ve got 4 guards at each location, with 2 sleeping at about 12 hours out from the other 2. I don’t think you saw Golden Saints & Dark Seducers sleeping and eating, but they can actually do it. Although I don’t know if there’s any game lore that defines this.
• Well, that’s enough of that. I’m off to see what new Japanese songs have come out in the last week! Toodle-oo!

Tuesday, 16th of April, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:37) When a mare’s following you, that’s ’orse trail ya.

Tuesday, 23rd of April, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:11) eBay notified me that my money was paid out from my Pilot pen that I sold. So that was good.
• I’ve got Blue Stinger for sale now as well, for $80. That’s less than another game shop here in Australia wanted for it. They were asking for $129 or so. Mine’s in really good condition too. No box damage, the instructions look like new, and the disc is close to new looking, with 1 small finger print.
• Holey moley! Street Fighter 3: Double Impact — over $200 now! Somebody from America has the PAL version, and they want $323.75 for it. Wow. I’d better take care of my copy. I haven’t played that in a while either. The prices of Dreamcast games have really gone up. I even saw Crazy Taxi for over $100. I also saw one of those drive replacement boards that lets you load games off a memory card, or other type of drive. I almost got one of those some years back for my 2nd Dreamcast, since its motor failed in 2014. You should still own the original games though to make using that legal.
• Ooh! Even Street Fighter Alpha 3 is over $200 now. Somebody from here in Australia wants $220 for it. Unreal! Speaking of which, Unreal Tournament is worth around $100 for the Dreamcast as well. The American copies are cheaper though.
• Let’s look up Skies Of Arcadia again… (WHISTLE!) $325 on a new listing here, from NSW. I’m never parting with my copy. Some of the British sellers are doing it cheaper. I really would pay $200 for that game though. It’s that good. But I already have it. And the GameCube one. Talking of that, check this out! Nigh on $370 for it! Holey fudge! I thought $79.90 was a lot when I got mine 2nd hand. The original music in the Dreamcast game is so much better though. It sounds a bit weird with the GameCube trying to play it.

Wednesday, 24th of April, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:13) Panzer Dragoon Saga is now listed to purchase at eBay. It’s $1100 with free postage, except if you live overseas, in which case it will be $15. This is the best deal on eBay right now for this PAL version, by the looks of it.
• Wow — even the Dreamcast (console) prices have leapt up in the past 10 years. I got my 3rd Dreamcast in August 2014 for $113.80 with postage. ($99.90 base cost.) Now they’re up to around $300 or more. It’s like going back to 1999. Some even come with those SD card drive replacements. That’s a good idea, since the motors weren’t too good. It also saves the hassles of making a CD and optimising it for the motorised drive speed too. I would probably get one of those doodads, but I don’t play my consoles so much now these days. It would be good for my 2nd Dreamcast which had the motor failure. I could put it back into action then.

Thursday, 25th of April, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:37) Ha ha — here it is again in the old 1994 Dick Smith Catalogue — the Team Concepts “Smart Phone.” Under the toys section of course. These days so many grown-ups are playing with their “smart ’phones” too. Well, it does say 3 years & up. This one looks a great deal cheaper than some of the ones you can get now from Apple, Samsung and whoever else. The buttons are much more generous in size too.
• It will also be 30 years ago at Christmas this year, that I’ve had my Mega Drive. I remember Dad getting it at the old Grace Bros store in Sydney, I think, and me looking around for who sold Cool Spot. Oh! I was so excited about getting that. I still like that game, but I don’t play it very often. The Japanese got the Saturn 30 years ago this year as well. Figgin’ beep! Where’s that time gone? Honestly?! It’s hard to believe. I remember the day I got mine in 1996 and running Daytona USA. I was so amazed by that. It would take Daytona USA 2001 to impress me more these days.
• (14:32) I had an eBay user from overseas contact me for more pictures of Panzer Dragoon Saga. Aaaahhhh! I had to unwrap it again to do that. Ah well, if they buy it I’ll be pleased. I didn’t claim it to be in perfect, brand new condition. Maybe they want it more as an investment, rather than to play it. Or both.
Some of the NiGHTS toys on eBay are around the $1000 mark, and some nightopians for over $300. Ooooh! They’re so-o-o-o cuuute! But so expensive. I wonder what my Sega World Sonic toy is worth now. There were no listings of him on eBay. $1000 do you think? I’m not parting with him. He’s too special! I dusted him off a bit and my Knuckles, Tails & Cream toys as well. They really need a good display case. Maybe with tinted glass or something.

Sunday, 28th of April, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:18) All right! Panzer Dragoon Saga sold! It went to somebody overseas. So I’ll be posting that tomorrow. It’ll cost me about $36 for insurance, I think. Because I’ve only sold 1 thing, eBay are going to hold the money again until the end of May. Ah well; they paid out for that pen I sold, so I’ll just have to wait. I still have my Montegrappa Espressione 2012 pen for sale, the Panzer Dragoon Orta sound track CD and Blue Stinger.

Monday, 29th of April, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:28) I sent Panzer Dragoon Saga out to my buyer, so hopefully they’ll get it without any issues. It cost me just over $103 to send it! That’s with the insurance cost too. It’s just as well I’m getting so much for it. Probably $862 or so after eBay’s fee and the postage. Somebody said there were only 30 000 copies of the game. Well, the dude I sent it to said he was looking forward to it, so I think it’s gone to a good home.

Tuesday, 7th of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:38) In sad news, Bernard Hill died 2 days ago, and Brian Wenzel yesterday. I was definitely not expecting Bernard to die @ any time soon. I had a dream once that my family drove over him in my old street. Sorry, Mr. Hill!

Wednesday, 8th of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:19) Holey moley — now Ian Gelder’s died too.
• My Panzer Dragoon Saga buyer is finally getting the parcel… well, tomorrow morning here. I can’t give away where they’re from. It seems they had some issues from their postal service. I thought they’d have it last week.
• I’m watching The Mountain Between us for the 2nd time, tonight. I think I only watched it once before.

Thursday, 9th of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:21) Time for a rant about music videos! Yep — one thing that gets annoying and tiring with a lot of them, is how companies seem to use the same old played out “special effects”, as if they’re all just brain dead zombies using the identical software as everybody else, without picking something different. I’m sick of seeing that f**king reddish-yellow blurry transition thing, and that bloody “old film” looking overlay with the curvy rectangle on the left side. We’ve seen them 1000 times before. Do something different already! It’s not ALL music videos and probably not from all countries, but you get a lot of them in the Japanese videos. In a few of the Indonesian ones I watched, they seemed a bit too transition happy, with some really annoying and eye straining ones. Sometimes it’s better not to use any transition effects. We really need to see some better frame rates too. I can’t understand why everyone and their dog uses that same old cr*p 23.98 Hz one, or whatever the fudge it is, like some mass brain washing where nobody can think any different. It’s worse than the PAL 25 Hz speed. I always regarded that as the lowest acceptable frame rate. They used to use the NTSC speed in Japan, which was much better. They should all be 50 or 60 Hz these days. Not only because it’s more realistic looking at a faster frame rate, but because it’s less stressful on your eyes. They’ve had those speeds since the beginnings of fully electronic televisions, (as opposed to ones that initially used mechanical parts,) so things should improve, not get worse. Some of them use these ridiculously high resolutions and then don’t back it up with a smooth frame rate. There’s no f**king point if it isn’t smooth to begin with! I think I’ve only seen about 3 videos that I can recall, that were actually done at 50 Hz. One from China, and 2 from Germany. All my personal videos that I do now are at 50 Hz. So if I can do that, surely the so-called “professionals” can manage it.
(On a side note to this, if you think I’ve been 2 faced about what I’ve said about NTSC DVDs in Australia, such as on the 26th of December, last year, the reason isn’t to do with their frame rate. It’s obviously better — the problem is compatibility with PAL DVD players, which generally make a mess of it with no conversion. You can end up with a jerky output, and scaling of the interlacing, which looks horrible. It’s probably an issue for NTSC players trying to play PAL DVDs as well.)
Next rant: One reason why I don’t watch Japanese cartoons, apart from not really being interested in the 1st place, is the irritating habit a lot of artists have of drawing people’s eye brows and even eyes, on top of their hair. I pointed this out at DeviantArt a few years back too. I don’t claim to be a better artist than them, but it just doesn’t look right. You can’t really have your eyes or eye brows hovering above your hair.
I think what makes any of these things I mention, annoying, is because of the frequency that they keep on happening. That’s what makes you get irritated and tired more than 1 off events for anything, I suppose.
Well, that’s that off my chest. I have some files to sort out on my main computer now.

Wednesday, 15th of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:01) Hmm — no Relatives Of Del Potro video yet, for the new Japanese songs. This is one that usually comes out every Tuesday, and has the best line up of music for the week. That’ll be a bummer if the person who does them has decided to call it quits, because there are not a lot of other people who do preview videos for new Japanese tunes. There are some others who do top selling lists, but that’s useless to me, because you only see popular music, which doesn’t allow unpopular songs to have a chance. Also, I think that SK4 person has thrown in the towel already. It’ll be down to Akuma Musiik’s favourite picks. If you know of any other people (, using YouTube,) doing music video previews from Japan, preferably with English / Japanese text, let me know!

Thursday, 16th of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:07) Still no sign of that new video of songs. Is there a Japanese web site that lists newly available songs? I looked at that Oricon site, but it just seems to be a top selling chart. I didn’t spot anything about new releases. Although I can’t read much Japanese, so I may’ve missed something. Figged if I know. I don’t know if that’s like Japan’s version of our ARIA. Probably a bit. There’s sod all in English on the web that mentions anything new from over there. I didn’t find anybody else doing videos of new releases either. Only top charts, which are useless, as I said yesterday. That’s only good for excited kiddies to know how well the popular tripe is doing. It doesn’t help the lesser known artists at all.
• (13:24) There is a set of pages of new releases at Oricon’s site by the looks of it. That might have to be my plan B method of finding new stuff. Although the translations & looking to see which songs have MVs is going to be much more time consuming.
It looks like Chō Tokimeki Sendenbu have something new, coming at the end of the month. Saijōkyū Ni Kawaii No!, which means It’s Superlatively Cute!, according to a translation site. Let’s hope it’s a good one. That’s out on the 29th of May. There’s 5 different versions you can get.
• (14:57) Son of a beeping beep! My Cowon X9 has completely died! What a piece of $#!+! I was going out, and went to turn it on, and nothing happened. Later, I tried recharging the battery, and nothing showed up on the screen. I tried plugging it into my iMac, and no drives showed up. So something’s carked it. What a b!+¢h! It hasn’t even been 7 years that I’ve had it. It was the 15th of July, 2017 that it was sent. My S9 is still working though, it seems. I just plugged it in for a battery recharge, and it kicked right in. It’s a pity the headphones socket’s dead though. That’s why I got the X9. I swear it was working about 2 weeks or so ago. I dunno if it’s worth the money to get another one, or to get it fixed. It’d be cheaper to get some rechargeable batteries and use my Philips portable CD player. If I had headphones with a BlueTooth feature I could put my S9 back into use.

Friday, 17th of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:47) That song from Chō Tokimeki Sendenbu, that I mentioned yesterday, is already out. It came out on the 20th of April. (I didn’t fancy it either.) I think some of the stuff listed on that Oricon web site is a bit behind the times. They’ve also got Morning Sun from Exile B Happy as coming out on the 5th of May, but the music video for that was back on the 6th of January. Or is it some kind of re-release? So I dunno. I wonder where else people are finding out new releases from.

Sunday, 19th of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:05) Hooray! The Relatives Of Del Potro video finally came out. Now I won’t feel so left in the dark.
• (14:19) Uh… White Superiors?! Isn’t this group’s name just a bit racist sounding? Especially considering the history & events of World War 2, and the way certain races were treated in the slave trades further back. Maybe they didn’t mean it in that way, but it’s not the best choice. This is the kind of thing that should go on my collection of blacklisted groups with inappropriate names & lyrics.
Somebody else mentioned some group from like Korea, or China, that had some racist lyrics too. I don’t remember what it was though. Something about “you’ll never be this white.” It didn’t really strike the right note.
• Anyway, I’ve been fiddling with another plug-in for Oblivion. It’s a bit of an experimental one in some respects. I saw a nice spot in the Great Forest the other day, and thought: “That’d be a good location for some walkways in the trees, and a tree house too.” So that’s what it’s turned into. There’s also a little garden with some Ayleid related bits & bobs.

Sunday, 26th of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (19:48) I’ve got another plug-in for Oblivion in progress @ the moment. It was on my to do list while I was making the Mystical Garden one. This time, I’m doing a collection of gem mines. You can get 5 varieties of gems in the game, but where they come from is not really known. So now, you can visit such mines. There’s also a bonus gem from one of the other gem families. Anyway, that probably won’t be complete until next month. I’ve only just started on the 5th mine today, but there needs to be a lot more detail. Like the other mines and caves in Cyrodiil, each place will have a selection of enemies. Although I may make one place friendly. We’ll see. Morrowind’s mines were often friendly, with various miners. I don’t think there’s a pick swinging animation for Oblivion, but NPCs can swing maces. It might be possible to implement that, with them attacking the gem deposits for certain times.

Friday, 31st of May, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (17:35) Aww! It’s the last day of May. My favourite month. It went too quick!
• I started on my 9th mine today for my Gem Mines plug-in for Oblivion. This is the 2nd sapphire mine. The 10th one will be the 2nd diamond mine. I had miners swinging their clubs and maces in the earlier mines that I mentioned on Sunday. I just looked at how they did it for the Fighters’ Guild people, and used the same method. I just did goblins for the 8th mine, and for the 9th one I’m going to have marauders. I’m not sure what to have for the 10th one. I’ve done bandits, vampires and conjurers, the undead and various animals.

Saturday, 1st of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:01) Bye, May! Now for Winter. I like Winter though.
• This month it will be Yu Suzuki’s 66th birthday, which is on the 10th. It’s to hard to imagine that he was only 35 when he did Virtua Fighter, back in 1993. Also related to Sega, is Toshihiro Nagoshi, who did Sega Touring Car Championship. He’ll be 59 on the 17th.
And the gorgeous looking Chinese actress, Dilraba Dilmurat will be 32 on the 3rd. And if you don’t know her, click on the link. Woo! She would do for me. Not that that would ever happen. You wouldn’t get me moving to China either.
• As for right now, it’s back to the mines, for my new Oblivion plug-in. That should be out by the middle of the month, I reckon.

Tuesday, 4th of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:56) Fig my crack it’s cold! Brrrr! It should be snowing, I reckon. I’ve got the air conditioner on, and my heater, and it’s still chilly. I’ve got 1 sheet, 4 blankets and 3 quilts on my bed, and it’s only just enough to keep warm. It must’ve been like -3°C last night, outside. It’s like northern Siberia.
• My Gems Mine plug-in for Oblivion is almost done. I’m going through some new Japanese tunes 1st today. There’s a new one from Shuka Saito, but the link isn’t working. Otogibanashi (which means Fairy Tale) from Mei Chan was rather good. Especially all the drawings. Ooh, and U from Morisaki Win is a winner as well. A video for this would’ve been nice. Yotsuba No Kuro-ba- / 4 Leaf Clover was pretty good, from Natural Lag. Make sure you hold out for the final part of the ending.

Thursday, 6th of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:28) Next year marks 100 years since the 1925 Exposition Internationale Des Arts Décoratifs Et Industriels Modernes, which I suppose was like the peak of the original Art Deco period. It was apparently to be held in 1915, but World War 1 threw a spanner in the works. As this is a style that mostly appeals to me, it should be a good reason to celebrate it. And of course my web site has taken inspiration from Art Deco designs too. I think Art Deco should make a bit of a comeback, because there’s been nothing this century to really rival it.

Friday, 7th of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:16) It’s Anna Kournikova’s 43rd birthday today. So she’s almost 8 months younger than I am.

Monday, 10th of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:13) Happy birthday, Yu Suzuki! Crack out your copies of Fighters Megamix and let’s celebrate! Some of the copies of that are worth a bit more now on eBay, than when I got my 2nd hand copy. Almost close to the original shop prices. (Anyway, I paid $12 for it in May, 21 years ago.) I think Virtua Fighter 2 is about 30 years old next year. Holey moley. Where did that time go? I remember playing it at Intencity at Parramatta, and trying to work out why it looked a bit different from the Saturn version. Well, the reason is: A lower resolution, but with texture filtering on the Model 2 board. Plus the 3D backgrounds. I think Dural had some kind of environment mapping too, which wasn’t on the Saturn version. We didn’t see that so much in Saturn games until a few years later. (Like the loading screens in Sonic R.) Somebody said it could do that using the sprite display processor, or something, and even bump mapping through some method with gouraud shading on paletted sprites. There was some long winded explanation.
• (15:28) Ahhh! Yeah, baby. I just had a whirl of Fighters Megamix. Boy I’m out of practice. I think I was trying to throw in a few non-existent moves for Sarah from Virtua Fighter 5 as well. I also played as Pai, who I’m best at, and in my last play, I was Lion, who I did much better with than I thought I would. I also played as the Hornet, but how the fig do you get it to do anything good? Hee hee. Oh well. Also, I think my 2nd Saturn control pad is a bit wonky. The left direction didn’t seem to work a few times, and the buttons in the menus seemed to cock up. I changed over to my other one then, and it was better. I had to clean my backup memory cartridge’s contacts again with methylated spirits, since it’s pretty much been iffy since the beginning. It’s not like these days with USB connections, and only having to worry about 4 things connecting. This thing has contacts galore. Struth, and all the dust that had accumulated over there as well by my TV. It really needs a good clean up. Apart from my GameCube, all my other consoles have towels over them to keep the dust off. In fact, when I got my Saturn, they suggested doing that from Game Keeper.

Tuesday, 11th of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:44) Um… what the fudge is that on my keyboard? Oh, it’s a bit of paper towel. Uh… anyhoo, I was going to say something profound, but I can’t remember what it was now. Oh yes! I remember. I literally had to find a web site today that could do some OCR of Japanese characters. Yeah — I couldn’t read that text to save myself. It was all Kanji. Anyway, it worked pretty well. I just took a screen shot of the writing, saved it as a JPG image, as required by the site, and uploaded it. You got the conversion in about a second or so. I could probably use a program to do that. I have Corel OCR-Trace, but it doesn’t recognise Japanese as far as I know. And I don’t think it supports unicode characters. There’s also a Chinese converter, which actually worked better on the Kanji, because it’s pretty much the same as Hanzi.
• For some reason it smells like glue in my room here. Pew. I haven’t been using glue.

Sunday, 16th of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:54) So much for me whinging about music video frame rates on the 9th of May. I got a couple from Kollárovci (from Slovakia) 4 days ago at 50 Hz, and one from Harp Twins (from America) at 60 Hz last night. So that’s more like it! That was interesting too, although I didn’t really fancy the song. It was called Flower Of Scotland. There really hasn’t been anything else though worthy of going on my list of best songs for this year.

Monday, 17th of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:08) Ondrej Kandráč & Ema Kandráčová, who appears to be his daughter perhaps, have a duet out now, called Chráň Nás, Chráň. It was kind of mild for my tastes, but it wasn’t too bad. I’ll probably be adding Kibōnoreshipi from Miho Okasaki, to my 2023 page of best songs as well. When I could be bothered, I’m going to see what else she has that’s good.

Saturday, 22nd of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:23) In sad news, Donald Sutherland died 2 days ago.
• In personal news about me, there isn’t much to say. I’m going to see the doctor on Tuesday about my bloodshot eyes. Although at the moment they’re not too bad.

Wednesday, 26th of June, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:32) I went to see the doctor yesterday, and he didn’t find anything wrong with my eyes. He couldn’t see any infections. I guess it’s just from using my computers’ monitor. Severe strain of the internal bits of them. If they start bleeding, I’m going to go back and see what he says. My blood pressure was good yesterday as well.
• Rythem are supposed to have a new album out in about 3 days, called Utatabi. (ウタタビ) I don’t know if it’ll be any good though. Red Velvet have a new song out called Cosmic, which was so-so. I only looked at it because of their past reputation for good stuff. It had one of those odd 3:2 aspect ratios. I want to see another cracker of a song from Dejan Vunjak from Slovenia this year. There were only 1 or 2 MVs that he did which I didn’t fancy. The rest were brilliant. Ayumi Hamasaki has another song out already, but the MV made your eyes bleed with the stupid distortion effects, and the song wasn’t much chop after Bye-Bye.
Make sure you check out Ginger by Tomoo from 3 years ago. The video’s quite jerky on the garden scenes, which is a bummer, but the song is brilliant, and I love that piano playing. Check out those pikelet things too, that she cooks. They remind me of my Nana, who use to make them. I mentioned this song on my 2021 page of music videos, but it deserves another mention.

Monday, 1st of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:54) Just as I was saying about Dejan Vunjak on Wednesday, it seems there’s a new MV on the way from him. There’s a link to it, but it isn’t working, so maybe it’s waiting approval or something.
I looked through a bunch more Japanese songs today, but there wasn’t anything worth mentioning. Let’s see what happens tomorrow. There should be a new preview out then.
• July has really reasserted that it’s Winter now. It was a chilly one last night, and it’s pretty cold now as well. I could definitely use a 4th quilt on my bed.

Wednesday, 3rd of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:08) I was wondering what the average amount of spam messages is, that other people get. I didn’t find much on the Web about specific numbers, but one site suggested that some people’s e-mail consisted of 55% junk, which seems quite high. I’ve barely got any spam messages in the last 3 years. I used to get heaps and heaps, but not any more.

Wednesday, 10th of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:04) I remembered to change my Software Review Of The Moment page late last night. It’s back to JES De-Interlacer and Microsoft Works 3 this month.
• I listened to one of the tracks from Rythem’s new album, Utatabi, called Our Children, and it was great! It’s already on my Music Page.
• Yesterday I was looking through videos, and found one with a language I’d never seen before. It turned out to be Amharic from Ethiopia. I got it translated, and it was something about soccer teams in England. I haven’t seen anyone using Egyptian hieroglyphics yet, but I believe there are actually some fonts that support these too. Last year in September I found out about Glagolitic as well, which goes back to about 863. It was created by Saint Cyril from Thessaloniki (in Greece), and his brother, Saint Methodus. I think it was partially used as the basis for the Cyrillic alphabet, which was named after the same Saint Cyril.

Saturday, 13th of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:09) I was trying to pick up some short wave radio stations from overseas, but didn’t have any luck. It’s better at night time anyway. (Because of some radio wave absorbing layer of the ionosphere that’s present in the sunlight, or something. At night, only the upper reflective one is there.) A lot of the Japanese stations are outside of the frequency range of all my radios capable of short wave reception. My best one is in the TV room, and can get between 3.2 MHz and 7.3 MHz, and then 9.5 MHz to 21.85 MHz. You can actually enter the numbers directly into it, or have it scan for stations, rather than using a knob. It really needs an earth connection though. NHK World Radio Japan, at 15.195 MHz, has a power output of 300 KW, so you’d think that’d be meaty enough to pick up. There’s also Radio New Zealand International at 17.675 MHz, which I think I got before, and pretty clearly too. That’s in Rangitaiki. I was looking a lot of stations up on the Web, earlier. As I recalled, there’s a time signal at every 5 MHz. So 5, 10, 15 & 20 MHz all have one. So long as somebody’s transmitting that in your country.
• I’m going to try NHK World Radio @ 9.75 MHz & 11.815 MHz, the other 2 I already mentioned, SOH Xi Wang Zhi Sheng from China @ 17.78 MHz, China National Radio 5 @ 11.935 MHz and KBS World Radio from South Korea @ 9.58 MHz, and see if I have any luck.
• (19:52) I had more luck with the radio this afternoon and this evening. I got Radio New Zealand International much better on 9.7 MHz, although it was still a bit “in & out” compared with how good it was some years ago. But you could hear some dude talking, and he said the time was 2 hours more than here, so I knew it was from there. I also got what might’ve been Radio 567 on 4.97 MHz, but I don’t know what country that’s from. I also JUST got something on 7.275 MHz, which may’ve been from China. There’s a 100 KW transmitter in Ürümqi on that frequency, but that is a long way from here. It’s supposed to be in the Uyghur language, whatever that is. I could hear somebody talking, but you couldn’t make out what they were saying, whatever language it was. It was too distorted. I think I may’ve got something in Japan too, but it was very weak. There was also somebody with an American accent on some other frequency. You’d think some of the South American countries would be easy to get here.
It makes me feel lucky with how easy it is to get a lot of music from overseas from off the Internet. Some of the stuff out there I probably wouldn’t know even existed otherwise.

Monday, 15th of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:32) Unfortunately, Shannen Doherty died 2 days ago. I remember her mostly from Charmed, and I watched that right from the start, up to some year. So yeah, she was 53.

Tuesday, 16th of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:41) All righty! I sold Blue Stinger today, and got that sent off. Hopefully I’ll get good feedback @ eBay. I provided good communication.
• I watched The Princess Diaries again tonight. Wow — I swear the music back then was so much better than a lot of the utter cr@p now. Maybe they just had good taste for the show. There was BWitched, Steps, Mandy Moore of course, and several other great tunes. They made you feel so good. So much stuff now just makes me depressed & want to puke. I watched “Relatives Of Del Potro”’s new video of Japanese MV previews today. Holey fig — what a $#!+€ line up. *Sigh*. Well, most of it. Maybe next week will be better. There won’t be many more songs on my list for this year, the way things are going. I did spot another song off Rythem’s new album: Cross Walk. It’s good, but not as good as Our Children or Hoshikaze.

Sunday, 21st of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:27) I made my 1st audio CD on my new PC today. That went well, after 20 years of using Nero 5 & my old CD Lite-On burner. I used CD Burner XP 4 this time. It’s actually rather good, and the range of supported audio file types is quite impressive. M4A, FLAC & Monkey’s Audio? No trouble. Ogg & AIFF are supported too. Nero only supported WAV & MP3 files, I think. You could also set the gap size per track, or choose a fixed amount when you went to burn the CD.
• (22:34) I was reading about the Philips DCC again earlier. It was 1992 that it came out, and they (and their recorders) were produced up to 1996, apparently. It was also done with co-operation from Matsushita. If you’re a bit young, you mightn’t know about these cassettes. The players were designed to play both your normal analogue style compact cassettes, and the new digital ones. Unfortunately for Philips, they didn’t gain popularity. People probably didn’t want to buy another player, when CDs were already offering superior quality from 10 years previously. Plus there were reasonably priced portable CD players by 1992 as well. (Tandy had one for $249.95.) In the Electronics Australia magazine for March, 1994, they looked at a Philips DCC130 portable system, which was valued at $1000, but was to drop to $699. Still way too much. Dick Smith were offering portable CD players by this stage, for under $200.

A picture from the old EA magazine, from 30 years ago.

Because of the speed of the tape in a cassette, which is about 4.76 cm per second, this wasn’t quite fast enough to get an accurate representation of data, so Philips made the DCCs have 8 slim tracks in parallel, which was then enough for a bit rate of 768 kb(its) per second. However, this also included error correction information, leaving just 384 kbps for the audio. CDs, however, have a bit rate more around the lines of 1.41 Mbps. (If the quality is 16 bits resolution × 44100 Hz frequency × 2 channels, that’s 1 411 200 bits per second.)
To overcome the shortcomings, Philips had a compression system called PASC, which stood for Precision Adaptive Sub-band Coding. This then allowed for an 18 bit sample resolution with a frequency range of 5 Hz to 22 KHz. If I think back though to 1992, and consider that I was recording on normal analogue cassettes for the next 10 years, the DCC would probably have been a pretty good choice for home recordings, if it’d dropped in price. But I was a teenager for most of those years, and I don’t think my family would’ve forked out over $125 or so for a cassette recorder for me. Although I did get my Panasonic portable CD player in 1998 as a present.
The old EA magazine gave a pretty positive review of the portable DCC player, saying they couldn’t tell much of a difference from CD quality, and that it was good for joggers as well. Although of course, by the time I got my CD player, it had anti-shock memory to overcome skipping. Another problem for the DCC system, as I see it, is tape stretch, as well as mangling in the player, and that they’re a type of sequential storage. So you can’t just pick a spot and go straight to it. Even if the players could seek out segments, you’d still have to wait while it searched for them. I think these are another 2 reasons that CDs remained the better choice for consumers. You can jump between tracks very quickly, and there’s no wear on the disc caused by the player. So to conclude, it would’ve been a great format against the older, regular compact cassettes, especially for much better home recording, but with CDs having already been well established, and offering a higher quality for commercial offerings, (whether or not you could tell the difference,) and at a lower price, you can understand why it didn’t quite work out. But yep, rather interesting for sure.
• (23:53) Also in this issue of EA, they had a Panasonic DCC player mentioned, plus you could make your own CDs for $14000 on your Mac. Holey beep! There was also a bit about a company from Britain, called Nimbus Technology, which developed a type of video CD, which could be watched from your audio CD player with a small decoder. Hmm. With DVDs coming in 1995, I dare say this was sadly short-lived as well.

Monday, 22nd of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:35) I looked through a stack of my old E.A. magazines today for an ad I thought was in one of them, for the DCCs, but I couldn’t find it. There was another thing in one of them though for a CD recorder, that cost like $11 000. So not much less than that Mac connecting one. The price of making your own CDs certainly plummeted within a decade or so after those magazines were produced.
• Speaking of things audio related, I remember an ad in one of my music magazines, I think it was, promoting MP3 files, and how you could copy your CDs to them and give them to your friends! I bet that went down well with the music companies. I had an old encoder that ran on DOS originally, for making MP3 files. Then later I had one for Windows. But I quit making them probably more than a decade ago, when I moved to Ogg Vorbis, and then FLAC & Monkey’s Audio files. I don’t think I’d go back to making my own lossy compressed audio files any more.
• (16:16) I found that ad. It was for portable MP3 file players at Dixons, in the December 1999 issue of the Top Of The Pops magazine. Here’s a portion of it. (Their spelling / punctuation’s a bit iffy too. CDs doesn’t have an apostrophe, because that refers to “ownership” of a CD. The plural form should just have an added “s”. Plus e-mail should have a hyphen. There’s also a company name “Email” anyway, which is probably of German origin. I know I’m having a whinge, but this stuff sticks out like a sore thumb. ) It might be permissable to make a copy for your own personal use, but sending your copied music by e-mail to your friends isn’t even legal, so it’s wonder this ad got approved. I remember all that controversy to do with that Web site called Napster, where you could download music illegally. Now though, most of the music companies stick all their tunes on YouTube, and you can listen to them for free. So I dunno. Although you don’t get the same quality as CDs, and they don’t point this out in the ad for MP3 files either. The ad also pointed out how there are no moving parts, which is one plus. But that said, both my Cowon PMPs failed in one way or another, and my Panasonic CD player was still working well up until 4 years ago, making it about 22 years old. My X9 was barely 7 before it went tits up. So not having anything mechanical isn’t necessarily an indication of how much longer something with last for. At the moment, I’ve gone back to CDs, since I have that portable Philips player that I got in 2020. I just don’t go out all that much at the moment to make another (computer file based) PMP worthwhile.

Tuesday, 30th of July, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (23:20) Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! Figging Windows 7! Something cocked up with the task bar, so I had to restart Explorer, and then it screwed up my icons on the desktop. Sh*gging $#!+! I didn’t have a bitmap to refer to, to put them all back in the right place either, but thankfully it didn’t completely re-arrange them, so I got it corrected pretty quickly. Then the freaking truncated file names issue cropped up AGAIN! I have to have all these blank files with long names as a stupid kludge fix. Isn’t there some registry adjustment for that? Write in and tell me. I’m sick of looking up how to fix things with MS slop-erating systems.
• I was reading about all the hideous advertising still in Windows 11 that people are still suffering with. I guess it’s their choice to keep using it, but a lot of us have become pretty dependent on Windows for maybe hundreds of programs that we’d rather not spend a year trying to find replacements for on other operating systems. So it’s pretty frustrating and depressing. I think this is why Microsoft know they can get away with putting out the worst cr*p they can. Their arrogance can be supported by user dependence.

Friday, 2nd of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:09) I looked up 2nd hand amplifiers on eBay this evening. There wasn’t a whole lot from here in Australia. Most I couldn’t afford anyway. There were a couple of valve based ones for a few grand, if I recall. I did see a Marantz combination radio & amplifier for $150, which seemed strangely cheap. 1970-something I think they said it was from. Hmmm. Nah. I wouldn’t use the radio. I’d like something from the 1980s probably.
• My Mum was saying to me earlier today that she went out to this shop, and saw some cushions for $500! $500?! What the fudge? What were they made of? Pure silk? It’d have to have a hand stitched tapestry of John Henry Dearle’s Tree Of Life or something. If I had $500 to blow, it wouldn’t be on a cushion. It’d be on an amplifier, or a 2nd hand Mac perhaps.

Sunday, 4th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:59) I was doing some photos of my NEC RM-844 radio & cassette recorder for the Radio Museum web site, and decided to plug it into my new PC today to record some stuff off some old cassettes. Holey moley — it’s a bit knackered in terms of the “spindle” doodads. The ones that spin the tape reels. It could barely manage to turn without cutting itself off. Something’s worn out in there. I recorded an old Thomas The Tank Engine cassette that went with a book, narrated by Ringo Starr. Anyway, my Sharp mini “hi-fi” system thing is stuffed too, on the 2nd cassette side, as is the Aiwa one in the TV room. So they’ve all dropped like flies. Bah! I dunno how anybody can bother with cassettes any more. There are so many issues with them. Magnetic sensitivity, stretching of the tape, inconsistent sound quality, belts wearing out in the players, sequential access, etc. I’ll be sticking with my CDs I think, and computer files.

Friday, 9th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:43) Check out this collection of cassettes that I took pictures of yesterday. Some old classics there. That Concertape one from Tandy must be about 30 years old. The Aiwa demo one at the bottom is closer to 50 years old. I recorded it on my computer yesterday, after having to repair it after dinner last night. The join between the leader tape and the brown part split. I had to carefully crack the corners open using a few tools, because, apart from 1 screw, the rest of it was pretty well sealed. It used to belong to my Dad, and came with his old Aiwa cassette recorder from the 1970s. He had a few other songs on there too, but got rid of track 2. Some of these images I “cleaned up” on my computer, since some of the cassettes were pretty knackered, and had writing on them. Yeah, I think all the other cassettes, apart from the top right one, must be at least as old as me. Some are probably from the 1970s. I think numbers 1, 3, 4 & 5 are all from my grandparents.

Tuesday, 13th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:34) My NEC RM-844 cassette recorder (& radio) partially died the other day. The left side’s right spindle thing broke off! The one that takes up the tape in play mode. Cassette woes in all forms!
• I kind of feel like exploring more music from the 1970s at the moment. I’ve got ABBA on at the moment. I was listening to the tunes from 2 of Claude Papesch’s albums as well. Actually I’m not sure if he did any more.
• I spent most of yesterday changing my microphone circuit back to the un-amplified version. I couldn’t get to the bottom of the distortion issue. It was like the other components were being overpowered, and there seemed to be this kind of recovery delay, especially with higher value capacitors. Circuit design is not my expertise, so I threw the towel in. It’s still pretty good though when it’s plugged into my new computer, even without any kind of loudness boost. I can just maximise anything I record anyhow, and it’s pretty clean. There’s no buzzing. Running it off batteries probably helps in that regard. I ditched the circuit board as well, since it only needs 1 resistor and 1 capacitor.

Wednesday, 14th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (17:25) How the heck does a fuse not blow under a short circuit? That’s what happened recently, and again today when we had an electrician in to see to our kitchen ceiling lamp. Check out that picture to the left, and click on it to see it @ full size. That wire must’ve been scorching hot to melt the inner & outer insulation like that, and apparently it was smoking as well. The dude said he’d never even seen that happen before. I’d changed the bulb the other day, and because of the poor design of the lamp, and that it uses Edison screw bulbs instead of bayonet cap ones, the back piece would unscrew itself. Somehow, the wires twisted together as well. So when I went to test it, there was a brief flash, and then all the other lights went out. When the switch was tunred off, they came back on. How did this not take out the 8 amp fuse? That fuse wire must’ve been glowing white hot. So on Friday we’re having new circuit breakers installed instead. They might go off then at the correct amount of current being drawn, or in this case, over-drawn. I mentioned to the guy today that perhaps somebody accidentally wired things up to the wrong side of the fuse. I want him to check that. Plus the rest of the wires in this particular circuit. We don’t want to find out that something else melted, like in the switch perhaps.

Friday, 16th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:55) I watched a few more previews of Japanese tunes from the last few months, but not much showed up that was really brilliant. That Familie song from Mrs. Green Apple’s probably the best recent thing, although there’s no video for it, it would seem. I spotted some new stuff from BWitched though, but links aren’t currently working. So who knows?
• As for the new kitchen lamp, there weren’t any ones available locally that looked any good, so I had to resort to trusty ol’ eBay to deliver the goods as usual. I found a beige, triple bulb type lamp, with adjustable direction holder pieces. It was from Sydney. It was tricky to find the good stuff at 1st. It was mostly cheap looking junk. Or bizarre designs out of some kind of nightmare. They had some really nice coloured glass lamps from China with free postage too. I looked at these early on too, but they didn’t feel very “kitcheny.” Mmm… so all the electrical work is now delayed until the new lamp dealie turns up in the mail. Probably around the 24th of this month.
• I was considering that L.E.D. based ceiling lamp again tonight. One of the main problems is getting L.E.D.s bright enough for a reasonable price. You need 20 L.E.D.s rated at 50 000 m.c.d. for the equivalent of a 100 W light bulb. They have some from Germany on eBay, but they’re about $15 or more each! 20 000 m.c.d. ones are more common, but then I’d need 50 of them. It’s quite a lot.
I cracked apart one of those Mirabella brand L.E.D. “bulbs.” You can actually snag a capacitor out of them, so don’t just chuck them out! It’s a really puny value though. Only 5.6 µF, which isn’t a lot. It’s no wonder some of them flicker. But it is rated for 400 V. I’ll be using a 4700 µF capacitor on mine. That’ll keep out any ripples. It might take a while to fade out. Anyway, this one has 16 surface mount L.E.D.s, which means they’d be about 62 500 m.c.d. each! Holey moley. They’re connected in series, and if they were rated for 4 V each, they’d need about 64 V to light them all up. There’s a resistor by the feels of it, in some heat shrink tubing, up from the base, what looks like a rectifier on the top, an 8 leg I.C. of some kind and 3 other surface mount components of some kind. I don’t know which thing died. Hopefully in my design, it should last for years and years. Then I’ll never have to change the thing again.
If you want to open one of the commercially available ones, you can just stab through the thick plastic top and cut around the rim with some scissors. Inside, there should be a circular board with the components, and it may be connected by a small socket to the wires underneath. Just lift it off with a stiff blade around where the glue is on the edges, and it should come off. You can find the capacitor on the other side.

Monday, 19th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:51) Here are another couple of old cassettes that I got pictures of. I cleaned up all the writing and stickers on them on the computer so that you can see how they’d’ve originally looked. This top one says Robins Green PTY LTD Matraville, so maybe it was made here in Australia. There was no sign of any of those on the web that I could spot. Anyway, I don’t know if there’s much interesting on these. When I was a little kid I used to just record a lot of stuff of myself talking. I’ve got quite a lot of newer TDK & Philips cassettes too. This Sonoramic one would be from the 1970s, I think. I’ll have to sort through more of my collection and see what uniqe ones I can find. I really need a good picture of one of those Soundson brand ones, but all of the ones I have of them have stickers and writing on them. They had a shiny gold finish to the sticker and the box, somewhat. I don’t know when or where they were made.
There are a lot of tips on the web about recording your cassettes with your computer. Yep — all you need really is a cassette player of decent quality, and a cord with 2 male phono plugs on each end. Then you connect one to the line input socket on your computer’s sound card / motherboard, and the other to the headphones socket on your cassette player. Obviously using stereo phono plugs, if you want it in stereo! You can then just use an audio editor program to record what you like. It’s pretty easy.
• (20:54) Here are 6 more cassettes that I got pictures of tonight and “cleaned up.” A TDK one of Christmas stuff, a Maxell one that’s worn out, an older Philips cassette, and my one & only Sony cassette, I think, which is quite a memorable one. I got this 100 minute length one at David Jones @ Bondi Junction in 1991. I like its appearance, and it has a smooth edged box too, that’s comfy on your hands. Then a new Philips one intended for recording from CDs, probably from the late 1990s or very early this century. Lastly, a G-Tape, which is also a one off in my collection, I think.
I should do a wallpaper image of all of them, or something.

Wednesday, 21st of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:34) Sadly, John Clegg died, who was in Are You Being Served?, Bridget Jones’s Diary & Mr. Bean. My parents know some relatives of his, who live here in Australia.

Friday, 23rd of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:54) Here are 2 more cassettes from the other day. A blue Hitachi one and a special demagnetising one which I’d completely forgotten about. I think its battery would be long dead by now! The little L.E.D. would come on in the centre when you used it. Yeah — the Hitachi one has me speaking at 3½ years old. Holey moley! I can barely understand what I was saying in some parts! Listening to it 40 years later made me feel like it was some different person. How the heck am I this old anyway? I don’t feel like it. (Actually, I just tell everyone I’m 22 this year. ) Anyway, it was recorded with my Dad’s old Aiwa cassette recorder. You could tell from what we were saying. We’d just been on a trip to Mona Vale, which I barely remember. I was talking about the colours of stuff, like my toys and clothes. Hee hee — here’s a little sample portion if you wish to hear it. You can hear my Dad asking the questions and Mum in the background. (The link may play the file in your web browser, or a plug-in to handle Ogg files or you may be asked to download it.) In 2030-something there should be a time capsule opened at St. Thomas’ primary school at Springwood, which has me speaking on a cassette then as well. I think it was supposed to be 50 years after it was sealed up. I remember it was done in a brick box in the corner of a room near the office region.

Sunday, 25th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:19) I’m going to see if I can fix my plasma ball. I reckon the transistor in it’s dead. I’m going to test it tomorrow. It’s a TIP122 type, which is supposed to have a gain of 1000, so let’s see what the multi-meter says. I also have to reconnect the high voltage wire, because I chopped it some years back to try something else, which didn’t pan out. As long as I can keep it insulated well enough. This thing’s going to be of pretty high voltage. My heat shrink tubing can handle up to 15 kV per mm of thickness before it sparks through, so I might need a few layers. Hmmm… I would still like a few other cool plasma lamps. I wish it was easier to get more variations in colours other than those cheap things on eBay and Amazon. I’ve seen quite a few blue, white, green and red ones on the ’net, rather than just purple. I think neon is a bit too fuzzy for plasma lamps, but it would be interesting to see it used anyway. From what I recall, it doesn’t make very well defined “tendrils.” Mmm. So one of those tubular style lamps would be neat, with the electrode up the centre.

Monday, 26th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:06) Those TIP122 components are more of an integrated circuit. They’re actually a darlington transistor pair, with 2 resistors and a diode. So testing their gain on a multi-meter is said not to work, and when I did the test, nothing happened. However, other tests through just the base and emitter, and collector to emitter showed it may’ve been operating after all. So perhaps something else died in the plasma ball. Maybe the gas leaked out or air got in. I have no idea. Anyway, I will probably put the transformer to use. It’s got a 12 V AC output, (which is more like 15 with no load,) so I can put together another regulation circuit to drop that to 9 V DC for use with other things I might make. I still have a bunch of rectifiers, 7809 voltage regulators, heat sinks and so on. I might need some more capacitors though. You’re supposed to use 0.1 µF ceramic disc ones, I think, on the output side. I still have about 4 of those 4700 µF ones for filtering.

Friday, 30th of August, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:37) Last night I was trying to work out how to do an inflated text effect, like I saw for a recent song. I really wanted to do it in 3D though. Well, today I tried out the sculpt script in Art Of Illusion, and that was pretty much what I wanted! You give it a closed curve and it creates a mesh which is more plump in the larger areas, and thinner in the closer together sections, yet retains the same outline thickness. So really, it just changes the thickness from back to front. You need a pretty smooth curve with as few nodes as possible. So I did some text just to curved lines, and that was a little rough. So I then manually drew around them and made my own curves with less nodes, and that seemed smoother. You want to use a pretty curvy, flowing font. I used Cupertino from the beginning, and it was a good choice. So this works well for glass / liquid looking objects, because of the smooth finish. I should do a tutorial on it. Anyway, I have my 2018 PC rendering a 5 second animation now with some of the stuff I did, and that’s going to take about 1 hour and 15 minutes or so.
• (20:15) Here’s a sample of the stuff I was doing in Art Of Illusion 2.5. This has had the saturation increased afterwards and a glow effect done in Corel Photo-Paint 8, but the rest, apart from the chequered texture, was done in AOI. The upper text was done manually with tubes, and spherical ends added on. The JMK part is the stuff done with the sculpt script. You don’t have to do it so flat of course. I did the swirly bits by sculpting also, although you could’ve done these fairly easily by using tubes as well. The rainbow coloured bits are just lengthened spheres.
Mmm — so perhaps I could add some more glitz to my web site here with some more “snazzed up” titles.
There were a lot of tutorials on the web about how to do inflated text with Adope Illustrator, so it’d be interesting to learn some tricks and see if it could be done in Corel DRAW / Photo-Paint. I know how to do metallic style text in Photo-Paint, but it’s from somebody else’s tutorial, so I can’t nick the exact procedure.
• (23:16) I’ve just found a big limitation with doing those letters in Art Of Illusion. You can’t do any with holes in them, like Bs, Ps, Qs, etc. You can’t get a single curve with a hole in it. Bah! What a disappointment. So I guess that’s the end of doing a lot of other stuff. I looked at a tutorial for Adobe Illustrator, but it was just about using a built-in feature, rather than creating it yourself.

Sunday, 1st of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:23) Oooooh! Check out these sexy, electrode-less plasma balls and other shapes. Ones with krypton, and a blue and red one with neon. Although there’s actually a few of them. Wow! Some of them look like something out of a dream. Especially the pure krypton one. Mm mmmm! This is the kind of thing I want, instead of that pile of same old tat on eBay and Amazon. There are a lot of used plasma balls and other lamps from America on eBay, but the postage costs are a bit painful. I spotted a few made in the 1980s, which means they’re probably designed properly if they still work now. That blue one at the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney was made in the 1980s, and it still works.
• I did a Windows version of my Plasma Thing program today, so if you want it, let me know. You need QuickTime installed to run it too. It runs with barely any CPU usage on my Intel Core i3 CPU based compo.

Monday, 2nd of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:54) Along with thousands of other homes in eastern NSW, we’ve been without electricity for about 6 hours today, due to the wind. It only just came back on about 20 odd minutes ago. Hopefully it will stay on! So I didn’t have a shave, and I spent most of the day fixing up the holes in my socks. I also cleaned the dust out of my new PC. So thankfully that’s done, and now it can wait another year before I do it again.
Oooh! The lights are still flickering a bit, so hopefully that isn’t a bad sign. Although ’round here they often do that anyway.
Well, nobody bought anything else off me from eBay, so I didn’t have to worry about that, and I have 3 days to send stuff anyhow. Ahhh! It’s good to have the air conditioner and heater back on. It was getting chilly.
• (22:32) I found the web site to the makers of those plasma balls — Tesla Coil Pro. Make sure you use a fairly new web browser on this link. It made Pale Moon 27 go nuts and use up about 6 GB of my RAM! Anyway, those electrode-less bulbs are reasonably priced, although I would need a Tesla coil too, which they also have a selection of, of course. Their museum grade plasma balls are out of my price range — like a few grand, but that’s something you’d expect. They also have a gorgeous, pink plasma tube for about $800 (in American money?) and they also do custom shaped stuff, plasma mugs (that you drink out of), Tesla coil pad things to put the mugs on, huge plasma tubes that are 2.2 m tall and this freaky thing with a ring of plasma in it, that I’ve never seen before. A bagel ring or something. So yeah, this is real serious stuff, not those toys on eBay and Amazon. I told ’em that too! Hopefully I’ll get a reply soon, and then I might buy something, and a second ball before the year’s out. Although I dunno what the postage costs from Russia are. I should check that.
Aurora in Canada have updated their site now with some junior plasma balls, which are more affordable, but they still only send to their own country and America. D’oh!
And if you want to drool, check out this video of some person’s huge collection of plasma lamps! Oh my gosh! What a sexah line up! There are some really nifty looking ones in here, in varying shapes and colours. Plasma heaven there, I reckon. I even spotted a yellow-ish one in there. I wonder what gases are in that? You barely ever see yellow ones.

Tuesday, 3rd of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:47) Why are there so many new plasma balls with USB connections? Why in the name of f**k would I want to connect a plasma ball to a computer data port? Bizarre.
• No response from Tesla Coil Pro yet. Hmmm. I guess I’ll have to be patient. Maybe I’ll try again from my Lavabit e-mail address later in the week.

Wednesday, 4th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:43) I was just ordering my birthday pressies on eBay. Those’ll be from my family. I got some Noodler’s bulletproof black ink, a packet of 10 0.1 µF ceramic disc capacitors and 100 slim CD cases. Still nothing from the folks in St. Petersburg. Anyway, it’s only 6:43 this morning over there. I hope the postage cost won’t be more than $100. Less would be better. It’d be great if there was an Australian joint that made plasma balls and stuff, but I’m not aware of any. If I had the experience and equipment, I’d make some balls myself. You need a vacuum pump, the gas bottles, and probably some kind of pressure gauge as well, and a method for sealing the glass, and I’ve never dealt with any of that. Where do you even get the gases from anyway? I doubt you could go to the chemist and say: Could I please get 2 small bottles of xenon and krypton? They’d be like: What?! We don’t have that here. Plus, how do they add iodine to the mix? That’s a solid, not a gas. So I really would be clueless. It’s one of those things where a lot of different skills have to come together. It’s like Geissler tubes as well, and those Aerolux flower bulbs. Who would even be making such things now? Maybe nobody. There was a Russian guy who started making new nixie tubes. I remember seeing a video or something about that. That was quite interesting. I thought I mentioned that before. Maybe not. It’d be interesting to use other gases besides neon in them. Although maybe that was actually done somewhere. You just usually see ones with neon.
• (20:07) Check out this “BagelGen” plasma ball doodad, which has a torus shaped glow, which also bends. I’ve never seen these before to my memory. This is the joint I enquired about the small plasma globes from — Tesla Coil Pro. You can buy these as well, and the base part. They’re more than I can afford at the moment though.

Thursday, 5th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (21:02) There are quite a lot more Elektronika clocks from the old USSR days on eBay than I would’ve thought. Most for a lot of money too. This one from the Ukraine isn’t badly priced, and it’s got free postage too. Some people call them nixie tube based, but they’re not like the neon filled nixie tubes you’d normally see. These are more like vacuum fluorescent tubes or something. They’d be suitable for Australian use also, because they use the same voltage and frequency over there, like Europe and China as well.

Sunday, 8th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:14) I sent Aurora Plasma Design a message last night and got a reply already, even though it’s Sunday! They said the only way you’re going to be able to get a plasma ball from them is to organise a courier to collect it from their warehouse, but the cost could be as much as the ball itself. They also said that once it’s collected they have no further responsibility. So I would need to pay for insurance with the courier, and any other customs charges may apply as well. The size of the boxes is up to 43.18 × 43.18 × 68.58 cm, for their larger 38.1 cm plasma balls and the weight was about 9 kg. So it might be difficult to get somebody to handle that for a good price. Using Australia Post’s prices as a rough guide, it could cost over $260. So mmm. I might leave that for now.
As for Tesla Coil Pro — still no response yet.

Monday, 9th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:56) I found my Dad a used LCD monitor on eBay today, which he had a look at and agreed to get. I don’t think he wanted to pay over $500, and even some of the 2nd hand ones were getting up to that. Also, a lot of them were way too big to fit his bench thing. Like over 76 cm! My TV isn’t even that large. I found one that was 43.18 cm (17 inches in ye olde school measurements), and that should fit. He’s had the old Sony Trinitron CRT one that we got back in 2001, and after 23 years, it’s not doing so well any more. It’s faded quite a lot, and it doesn’t like the ATi video card in Dad’s computer either. It has some kind of ripples in the picture, even though it can synchronise to various refresh rates. Plus the picture has a habit of stretching or shrinking horizontally. It’ll just suddenly change when you least expect it. I don’t know what’s up with that. Anyway, the new one’s resolution isn’t quite as high, but it will still be an upgrade from what Dad was using. He had it on 1152 × 864 pixels, which is about the highest you can do without it looking flickery. I think it runs at 85 Hz on that resolution. It will go up to 1600 × 1200 pixels at 60 Hz. The new monitor does 1280 × 1024 pixels at 60 Hz. It’s a CMV CT-726D. The seller still had the original box, and I chose the extra insurance for a year as well. The seller had plenty of pictures of it, and it looked to be in good nick. Dad’s computer’ll be 19 years old at the end of this year! Holey beep! How does it keep going? It still has the original hard drive too. It doesn’t even have much dust in it. (The case that is. Not the drive.) Mine are hideous dust traps. Yeah, so it’s a 3 GHz Pentium 4 based PC with 1 GB of RAM, some cheapo ATi video card, built in sound processor and… uh… I’m not sure how big the hard drive is. It did get a new DVD drive a few years back, which I got off Amazon, or eBay. I don’t remember. Other than that, it’s worked really well. The keyboard and mouse are as old as mine — from 2001. Yeah, these Logitech keyboards are pretty well made. Mine’s seen a bit of abuse. I don’t like those Apple keyboards with the really low keys. They’d be like using my MacBook’s built-in one. I like these taller ones. This is much smoother in feeling compared with my iMac G4’s keyboard as well.
• 2 of my birthday presents rocked up today. My 100 slim CD cases, none of which appeared to be broken, and my bottle of Noodler’s Ink. So I left those sellers good feedback.
• I saw a Realistic Lighting Fury plasma lamp on eBay yesterday, from America. Not badly priced either, nor the postage cost. It looks like something you’d make coffee in. It’s got a space in the middle for the high voltage output, and a separated section with the gas. The power supply is 24 V, which might be hard to replace, or even recreate. I’m not sure if it would be happy running at 50 Hz here in Australia either. It’s hard to know what the rest of the circuit would be. Anyhoo, there were 4 of them in that big collection video I mentioned last week on the 2nd. Somebody from Tenterfield has a used plasma ball for sale as well. I added it to my watch list, but I don’t know if I’ll get it. It was just a regular coloured one. That kind of pinky violet. I really want a green one. Mmm, so in terms of blue plasma balls, it would seem that iodine is the element to use. Somebody had a neon and iodine one, and it was blue. And somebody from Strattman Design in America had one with another gas and iodine, and it was still blue. Anyway, I’m not an expert — that’s just what I noticed them saying.

Tuesday, 10th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:35) I’m waiting to hear back from 2 eBay sellers who obviously don’t understand the concept of detailed descriptions, which makes buying stuff so frustrating sometimes. Some people shouldn’t be selling items they know nothing about. Hopefully they’ll reply today, and not be these sellers who leave you waiting for a week, because they’re off with the fairies. In my opinion, if you sign up and choose to sell on eBay, like I did, you have a responsibility to promptly answer messages from your potential buyers, and especially to those who do buy. Unlike that other person who completely ignored my order for Toy Story 4, & never answered me, nor apologised, even though they’ve still been selling stuff. I mean what is up with that? You should also spend time to fill in all the details you can think of, because people who are clueless need to know. When I sold Blue Stinger, I even said how much room you needed on your VMS. Buyers can appreciate this then, so they can prepare for save files. Well, I hope the items I want don’t sell overnight. At least they’re in Australia, so all us locals will mostly be in bed.
As for Tesla Coil Pro, I sent them a 3rd e-mail message, but it’s getting a bit ridiculous that they didn’t answer me in a whole week. Or do the Russians have some grudge against Australians? I dunno. I used to speak with a Russian chick on ICQ, and she was really friendly.
• (12:27) Hee hee! I was a bit frustrated last night. I feel a bit bad about what I said now, because I got a quick reply from the seller, and they said too that they should’ve included some extra information. One of the other sellers hasn’t replied yet, and still nothing from T.C.P. I don’t think I’ll bother nagging them.
• Anyway, I did finally get a plasma lamp! One like that Lightning Fury one by Realistic. Although this is by another brand: Rabbit Systems. I suspect they were made under different names for different sellers.fsfss Holey beep, Dreamweaver! What is with that non-responsive menu business? Um… where was I? Oh yeah — I remember Tandy here in Australia used to sell products under their own brand name which were available elsewhere as a different brand. Dick Smith had a radio… Oh. Hang on. I have e-mail… (Some minutes later:) I’m back. LOL! Yeah, Dick Smith had a radio that was also sold at Tandy under a different brand name, so they must’ve come from the same source.
• Next week, on the 17th, it’s Yuji Naka’s 59th birthday. Crack out your copies of Sonic whatever, and NiGHTS, because we wouldn’t have them without him.
• (13:45) Speaking of Sega related stuff, it was 25 years ago, yesterday, that the Dreamcast came out in America! Holey figging beep! Where did that time go to? Seriously? ¼ of a century! Get outta town! It’ll be 25 years here in Australia, on midnight at the end of the 29th of November. (So, when the 30th started.)
• Here are some plasma thingies and neon tubes from the old 2006 and 2000 Jaycar catalogues. To the left are the 2006 doodads, and to the right are the earlier 2000 items. A colour changing neon tube — however that worked — and a plasma tube. Although they called it a lava lamp. That’s more like the wax and oil lamps though. 20 inches is 50.8 cm, by the way. I’ve got a purple / UV neon tube from Jaycar which also has a ciggie lighter plug. I had to make up an adaptor with a cigarette lighter socket and another socket, to connect it to a normal “plug pack” transformer. I also had some wire light stuff from Jaycar too, which I mentioned on this page a few years ago. It really faded though. It barely gives off any light now.
I was looking at the Etsy web site last night, and somebody had a green plasma table! It was like a massive disc.
• (19:57) I forgot to mention earlier, that sadly, James Earl Jones died yesterday.

Wednesday, 11th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:31) Here’s a video of a collection of big plasma tubes in St. Petersburg, by Tesla Coil Pro. Dang. They really are tall!
• Oooo-ah! I’d better go to bed soon. I’ve got the new video of recent Japanese songs to watch today, by “Relatives Of Del Potro.” Maybe if something’s good enough, it might make it to my list.

Thursday, 12th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:32) All right now! My new plasma lamp turned up today! Huzzah! I tried it out, and it works pretty well. It tends to want to do the fine streams of plasma more than the thick, wiggly lines. The atmosphere around it might be affecting it too, because the 1 at the PowerHouse Museum had a tendency to change its behaviour. I’m going to do a new page here on my site about plasma lamps as well. Maybe I can get a small collection happening eventually. But I have 3 to talk about so far.
• I’m selling Battletoads for the Mega Drive, if anybody wants to buy it via eBay. $64, and $13 for postage. Non-Aussies: $30 postage. It really does cost a fair whack of money for foreign sending.

Sunday, 15th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:03) *YAWN!* I’m back from looking at eBay (& Amazon) for more plasma “lamps.” I looked at some really nice Luminglas discs from America, but they were a bit expensive to get them sent here. One was quite big too. Like 50 cm or so. There was a 40.5-ish cm green one, which looked so nice, but I think it was pretty expensive as well. All used of course. Yeah, it’s nearly all stuff from America. Barely anybody from other countries is offering to send used plasma lamps internationally. That one I got the other day really was such an excellent price too. There are a few available from the USA for much more. It’d be interesting if an Aurora plasma ball showed up on eBay, but I expect the postage price would be crippling. One of the plasma discs reminded me of the Sparton Bluebird radio, a little bit. Mainly because of the black “feet” at the bottom.
So come on, all you billionaires — buy some of my goods from eBay, so I can have a bit more money! Click on that link above, and start with Battletoads.
I wonder how they make the plasma discs? Do they actually have gas involved, or is it some other method, using some kind of partially conductive stuff on the surface? I’ll have to look that up @ some stage.

Tuesday, 17th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:24) All right! My D-Link Bluetooth adaptor sold on eBay. That’s nice to have a bit more dosh to offset my recent purchase of that plasma lamp. There’s a sweet looking 40.64 cm blue Luminglas plasma disc that I was watching, but somebody has it in their cart now. Or shopping trolley for us Aussies. So I think it’s good manners to let them get it, rather than snatching it from under their nose. Anyway, I want to sell some more stuff before I blow ~$300 on another plasma gizmo. I thought I had a book I could put up for sale, but I can’t find it. Burning Rangers would get me a good bit of money, but I’m not selling that.

Friday, 20th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:01) Cor, blimey! I was going to get up at my usual time this morning, but I fell back to sleep, and when I woke up again, it was 1 hour & 20 minutes later! Oh well, I didn’t get to sleep until after 2:30.
• If you’d like to buy a Mad Catz Saturn steering wheel, I’m going to list mine for sale on eBay next week. I’m asking for $150 for it, based on other eBay prices. Postage will be around $60, but I want to check @ the post office 1st. It weighs 3 kg and the box size is about 34 cm³. There’s only one other wheel (of this brand) on eBay for the Saturn, and it’s from America. I’m not sure about offering international postage. It could be over $200. I don’t know if people would be willing to pay that. Anyway, I will add a link here to the sale dealie when it’s listed.

Sunday, 22nd of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:44) I soldered up another rectification and regulation circuit today. In fact, here it is to the left. You don’t want to see my dodgy soldering underneath. It’s adequate, but not overly neat. I almost soldered pins 2 & 3 of the 7809 regulator together. My eyes really aren’t the best at this stuff any more. If it’s still there, and you go back to the 27th of December, 2022, you can see my previous dealie, which looks like this. I’ve got the right 0.1 µF ceramic disc capacitor this time.
Anyhoo, this circuit will connect on the left to my old plasma ball transformer, which has a 15 V output, when it’s not under any load, but it’s supposed to be 12. So that’s ideal for a 9 V output, which on this, connects to that bottom trio of wires for negative, and the short one on the right for positive. I ordered some sockets, plugs & a box for this tonight, so hopefully they’ll turn up this week. I’ll be able to run a few future circuits I do off this on my new bedroom shelves.
I found a switch mode power supply, which I hadn’t really forgotten, off our previous router, which should be great for one of those Luminglas plasma discs, if I get one. They need a 1 A power supply, and this one’s rated at 2 A, so that should be ideal. And as it’s a switch mode type, it’s already regulated to a constant 12 V.

Monday, 23rd of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (19:22) Here’s my steering wheel if you want to buy it off me via eBay. $150, it is, plus $78 postage. The woman at the post office said $89.45 to send it to Perth, so that’s cheaper than that if you’re from there. She said it wouldn’t be the same price to anywhere in the country. I dread to think what foreign postage would be. $250, probably.

Thursday, 26th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:10) All right now! I managed to order a green Luminglas plasma disc from America for a great price. And the seller offered me a discount too! Wow! I thanked them for their generosity. They said it was in “like new” condition as well, so hopefully it should be superb! That will be great for my new bedroom shelves, along with my other plasma dome thing. The Rabbit Systems White Lightning one. That’s it for my spending this year! Let’s look for more stuff to sell off! I’ll have to put my body on eBay otherwise. And I wouldn’t get a lot for that!
• (14:40) If you’re looking for a good deal yourself on a blue Luminglas plasma disc, check out this one on eBay that I sadly had to pass up. It’s a 30.48 cm (12 inches) size model and has barely been used. The price with postage is around $278, depending on fluctuations in the exchange rate.

Saturday, 28th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:16) I found an old Granny May’s catalogue on eBay from 29 years ago. I’m sure there was a shop at Penrith Plaza called That’s Entertainment, or something like that, on the other side, with this greeny coloured effect on the floor, which Lend Lease or Westfield later removed. I’m sure they had plasma balls there, and they seemed really expensive when I was a teenager. They had some Saturn games there too. Yeah, that place is LONG gone. I remember back around 1992 when the place re-opened after the huge renovation from the old plaza. And a bit later, the 2nd part of it. Lots of people were there to see all the new stuff. It was really nicely designed. They went to town with all the lights. I should have some photos of it in the the early days. I’ll have to crack them out. The negatives are somewhere too, I think. They’d be better to scan. Mmm, and the arcade that used to be near the old food court. That went by the board. I don’t live near there now, so I don’t know what it’s like now. Westfield taking it over put a bad taste in my mouth. They weren’t very nice. Money hungry dictators with no class. The same with Centrepoint in Sydney and whatever else they got their claws on. Some of the shop owners were treated like scum, and they seemed to be in bed with the council as well, to make further unfair demands on the shop keepers.
I remember when Grace Brothers there had the touch screen shop guide things on each floor. They dumped them later. They had that kind of thing in recent times at the Robina Town Centre, or whatever it’s called, in southern Queensland.
• Anyway, nobody’s bought anything further from me on eBay. I wish one of those people who have my fountain pen in their “cart” would just buy it. I’ve been wondering what else I could sell. I’ve got a few dead electronic things that nobody’d want. That’s why I no longer want them. I’ve got a couple of old video cards and an Intel Pentium CPU (of 75 MHz). They’d probably be worth sod all. Let’s have a look… Uh, there’s one for $29.50. Somebody’s got a Pentium 4 CPU for under $12. Hmm… a bit of value for TNT 2 video cards. What about a GeForce 2?… Yeah, about $50 to $60 or so. Oooh! Quite a bit for 3Dfx Banshee cards. Over $200! Mine still works as well. I haven’t used it since 2002 or so. Here’s one from Slovenia for over $320!
• (0:53) Fig a pig — I’d better go to bed.
• (12:46) Aww man! Maggie Smith died yesterday. This is really sad news.
• (13:53) Here's a picture from about 1994 of Penrith Plaza @ night time. This has just been scanned directly from the printed photo, rather than the negative. I wasn’t going to spend all day trying to track that down. This was looking from some place called Shoo Biz, across to Ooh La La. It’s near the pink stairs, if you know the place. On the right is a picture from around the same time, of the ground floor of Grace Bros, as it was then. Look at all those tellies! I wish I could go back and grab half a dozen. You can’t get ones like that so easily now. On the left was the computer section. Check out the old IBM desktop style PC. Most of them are floor towers these days. And on the right, in the foreground is a bunch of luggage, which is as boring as bat poo, and in the background was the music section, with lots of CDs. They didn’t have DVDs then. It would’ve been video cassettes. I think the music section was Virgin at one stage. They would’ve had video games somewhere there too, I’d say.
Electronics Boutique didn’t exist at the plaza then, and I’m not sure about Game Keeper. This was before I got my Mega Drive! (But it was Christmas that year.) So I was still playing my Atari 2600 when these piccies were taken. Goodness.
• (14:50) What the fudge?! Is this a joke? Over $10 800 for an old, unused 1 GHz Pentium 3 CPU?! Why so expensive? I wouldn’t pay ¹/₁₀ of that for it, even if it is in new condition. You can get a used 866 MHz one here for $19.40. I wouldn’t be paying 556.7 × the price for 1.1547 × more performance. That’s just nuts.

Monday, 30th of September, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (19:28) All righty! My Montegrappa Espressione 2012 pen sold this morning. Hopefully the buyer will love it more than I did. That’s a nice bit of dosh to offset that plasma disc I got from America. I think it’s still over there, according to the tracking. It seems to be going from place to place, before it finally leaves their country.

Tuesday, 1st of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (21:48) No Aurora plasma balls on eBay. Mmm. I didn’t think there would be. I should save up next year and try to get one. I’d have to contact some big international courier company, like DHL perhaps, and see what they’d say about collecting such a thing.
DHL operator: “Oh, yes, sir — it’ll cost you $550.”
Me: “Aaaaack!” *Hangs up the ’phone.*
It wouldn’t be that expensive. It’d probably be this time next year. I don’t want to blow more money yet, even if it is for such a worthy cause. I’d also have to ask Aurora about the power supplies. They may not do ones for 240 V, unless they use a switch mode kind of dealie. Yeah, after looking @ the Aurora ones, it just makes me weep seeing some of the new cheapo ones on eBay. We really need an Australian company of the same calibre (as Aurora). There are quite a few 2nd hand American plasma balls (like from Realistic / Radio Shack) on eBay, but if I was to fork out money for one of them in a decent size, I might as well go the rest of the distance and get a new Aurora one. That’s what I reckon. Well, we’ll see how things play out.
Anyway, people, buy my other items on eBay! Most of the prices are cheaper than what other folks are asking.
• Panzer Dragoon Orta sound track CD — $105.
• Britney Spears Born To Make You Happy doll figure — $112.
• Mad Catz Saturn steering wheel — $150.
• Battletoads — $64.

Wednesday, 2nd of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:08) When my Luminglas plasma disc arrives from America, I’ll have some piccies of it on my new page about such stuff, plus more video links as well to other people’s items. I watched a few last night from Tesla Coil Pro.

Thursday, 3rd of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:14) There are some Chinese made, boxed, “flat” Tesla coils on eBay for about $90 with the postage cost. These are a bit of a cheaper looking version of the ones that Tesla Coil Pro do. Something like this’d be good for lighting up various gas filled… things! I don’t know how powerful it is though, or what kind of power supply it comes with. Probably a switch mode dealie. Although it might be a bit cheaper to make your own coil. The box and power supply might come to $30 or so as it is, so there is that to consider. If I nicked some of my Dad’s huge collection of fine, lacquered wire, that might be 1 less thing to buy. If you wound it on a tube, you could put it horizontally as it were, and possibly insulate the end to prevent sparking. I guess some people just make them to do huge sparks, but that’s not my interest. I want one to power other gaseous things, like fluorescent tubes, neon bulbs and maybe my poor old plasma ball, unless it leaked. Doing something like 500 turns of wire would take some time though. On a 3 cm tube, the circumference would be 9.424777961 cm. So multiply that by 500, and divide by 100, and you would need 47.1238898 m of wire. Or maybe a touch more if you count the diameter of the wire, but it’s going to be pretty thin.

Friday, 4th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:25) Dang — still no feedback for my last item that sold on eBay. Why don’t people bother to leave any?
• Anyhoo, I’ve been looking at starting on a Tesla coil. I got some wire off my Dad. He had a bunch of reels of it from his uncle, who used to make transformers. There’s a really fine one — it must be 0.1 mm or something. So that might do for the long secondary coil. I checked it with my multi-meter — there doesn’t seem to be any breaks in the lacquer, but there are some kinks which need dealing with. I also need a plastic tube, which I still have to get. I watched a few more videos today of people making Tesla coils. There seems to be a bit of variation in their choices of transistors. I’ll need to get a big heat sink also. Somebody had a power supply which showed the volts and amps, and the amount of current being drawn by their circuit was about 300 mA at the most, which is reasonable enough to deal with.

Saturday, 5th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:55) I unwound that reel of fine wire, and discovered it was in 3 strands. 2 really long ones, and one about 10 cm in length at the very end. It’s probably been on the reel thing for over 50 years. Some of the lacquer’s come off in places, so I’ll just redo it as I wind it onto my bit of pipe, when I get some. I’m going to the tip on Wednesday to see if there are some bits out there. As for the rest of the circuit, I’ll assemble some stuff on my bread board thingie, and test some stuff out before I buy more odds and sods. I’ll see if anything happens with that TIP122 darlington transistor component from my plasma lamp, and if not, I’ll buy a different transistor, like in one of the videos I watched. As for the primary coil, you can use plastic insulated wire, as I saw that done too. I have the right kind of resistors already, so I won’t need to worry about them. I’ve got an old transformer for model railways, but I’m not sure what the rectification’s like — whether it’s half or full wave. Although it does have a 16 V AC output, so I could rectify that. Although it really needs some kind of thin banana plugs, which I don’t have, so that might just be for testing purposes. I think I’d eventually get another 12 V plug pack kind of power supply and use that.

Sunday, 6th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:59) I tried that circuit with my TIP122 thing, and nothing happened, so perhaps it is dead, or inappropriate. I watched another video with an American guy who went into detail about testing a Tesla coil’s resonant frequency, tips for protecting the transistor, and saftey issues. Yeah, the reason you shouldn’t use a light bulb as a plasma ball, is that it can give off x-rays. I knew it was something unhealthy for you. Anyway, this circuit on the left is a gernalised kind of design. The transistor needs to be able to deal with a high current, because a coil of just 4 to 6 turns of wire for that primary coil is nigh on a short circuit. So something that could handle a couple of amps or more is what you should use, and a huge heat sink. You can’t let the transistor go over its operating temperature, or it will fry. The diode is also a good idea, because it will deal with the residual power in the primary coil when the circuit is turned off.

Monday, 7th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:11) I think I’ll leave the Tesla coil stuff for a while. I don’t think I’d use it much in the long run, and I’d probably end up buying more components than I’d need. I looked at my plasma ball PCB, and it’s a similar circuit to the diagram I showed yesterday, except they didn’t use the resistor. The PCB has a capacitor in there instead, in the same location. They do have the protection diode in the exact same spot though. Although, the TIP122 also has a built in diode across the emitter and collector, seeing as it’s more of an integrated circuit than a plain transistor. The coils are concealed in a completely sealed box thing. It’s got a label saying PH6034-1 & then 170512, so I dunno if that’s any help to anybody. Let me do a search for it…
(14:34) Yeah — nothing really relevant. Hmm; so I would say part of the TIP122 dealie died — probably because the heat sink wasn’t sufficient. I could probably solder in a new one, and use a whopping big heat sink, but mount it externally. I’d also have to reconnect the high voltage wire to the ball part.
• (19:53) I ordered the parts to fix my plasma ball. Or at least what I hope will fix it. I watched a video of a chap testing a TIP122 wotsit, and mine was definitely not functioning the same, so I think that confirms it’s the cause of the problems. I ordered 2 new ones, and a much bigger heatsink with large fins. About 6 × 4 × 2 cm in size. I also got some 3 pin connectors to put it outside of the plasma ball case, since it’s too big to mount internally. I reconnected the high voltage wire as best as I could. I was surprised though that the filter capacitor for the power supply was so close to it. So I covered the capacitor this time in Blu-Tack. Hopefully that’s sufficiently insulating enough. Although it didn’t spark to it before. So I could only have improved things. Mmm — the parts cost almost $30, even with a discount, so I hope this works out!

Thursday, 10th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:39) All right now! My Luminglas plasma disc arrived from America. Wooooo! Yeah! It was well boxed and padded. In fact, it had some kind of weird paper based padding that I’ve never seen before. It looked like a pattern off a metal fence. Anyway, I went to try it with my 12 V switch mode power supply, and the plug wouldn’t fit! Even though it looked exactly the same! The official one had an ever so slightly bigger central hole. Maybe by 0.2 of a mm. So I thought: “Well, I still have to test it.” So I cracked out my transformer for American appliances, and checked the voltage on it. I got about 15 V with no load, so that seemed correct. I then plugged it in, and nothing happened. Hmm. So I turned the low voltage plug a bit, and it kicked in! Hooray! So I then chopped the plug from the official transformer, and the one from the switch mode power supply doodad, and changed it over. I then tested it, and it was perfectly fine. So it’ll be running on regulated 12 V now, although I doubt it really was critical. It’s not like L.E.D.s with their short voltage range and low current requirements. I tried the sound activated mode too. That was interesting. When you make a pulse of sound, it changes, but otherwise, the streams stay almost stationary. The glass needed a bit of a wipe over, but the instructions say not to use any liquids, including water. So I just used a dry tissue. Anyway, I should have some pictures and a short video of it in the next few days. Probably when my new bedroom shelves go up. I’ll be putting any plasma lamps away from my computers, so up on the top shelf. And I won’t use them and my PC at the same time. I’m not too sure the distance they should be kept from each other. The Luminglas instructions mention to keep it away from other electronic gizmos too. I should make sure the actual power supply is kept away from it also. The other day I put a neon bulb near that Rabbit Systems plasma lamp, but it didn’t light up until it was pretty close.
I’m still waiting on the other components to arrive to attempt to fix my 1st plasma ball.
• (20:08) Oh! Happy 38th birthday, Lucy Griffiths! I was just watching Robin Hood, then looking up to see if she was hitched, and discovered it’s her birthday today. Mmm — I’d probably be willing to give her a good pressie. She probably wouldn’t be amused with that idea. She looked pretty good in the show though. It’s my birthday on the 15th, so she could give me a pressie in return.

Monday, 14th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:45) Oooooh! My birthday tomorrow! If you want to send me something, here’s what I’d like:
A 12 V transformer (AC) with a 1 amp rating, a green Aurora plasma ball from Canada, one of those bagel-gen plasma things from Russia, an Elektronika 7 clock, one of those star shaped Puxtiw plasma panels in magenta / pink and all the components to finish my inverted chaser circuit. I could probably think up a few more things too! Hee hee.
• I’ve almost got 23 000 000 gold pieces in Oblivion now. I don’t know how that compares to other players out there. You could probably buy up the entire contents from every seller in the game.

Tuesday, 15th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:45) Ah yeah! It’s my birthday! So that means I should be doing something better than typing this. Anyway, I got a white T-shirt that I didn’t know about, some black Noodler’s Ink, 100 slim CD cases, a packet of 10 0.1µF ceramic disc capacitors and there are some fancy shelves for the bedroom still on the way.
• I got the new video of recently released Japanese songs from Relatives Of Del Potro to watch later too.

Thursday, 17th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:23) If you want Virtual On for the Saturn, I’m selling my copy. It’s $65, plus $13 for postage. That’s a bit better than some other sellers. I haven’t played it much in 21 years, so it’s time for somebody else to get it.
• (14:56) Ooh my! My components turned up from Tron-FX on eBay this morning. The ones to fix my plasma ball. So I soldered the socket onto the wires coming out from the plasma ball base, which I did last week, (or whenever,) covered the joins in heat shrink tubing, and then filed out the hole on the new heat sink a bit bigger for a bolt I had, and firmly fastened on the TIP122 darlington transistor pair component. I then soldered on the wires from the 3 pin plug to that, and covered each leg of the TIP122 in heat shrink tubing as well, but just held all 3 pieces in place with some sticky tape, rather than shrinking it permanently on there. I then plugged everything together, including the transformer for the plasma ball, and turned it on. Nothing happened. That did not make me feel good. So I opened it up again to check my wiring was correct. It was. So I checked for power in the new plug with my multi-meter. If you see that circuit above from the 6th, there should’ve been electricity coming through the collector and emitter connections without the TIP122 in the circuit. There was nothing. So where was the break? I was about to check the power at points on the PCB, when I noticed that the figging positive wire to the power socket had somehow snapped off! What was it soldered on by then? A puny strand of wire? Holey moley! So I melted some of the plastic off, tinned it with the solder, and put it back on. I then reconnected everything, and hooray! It was working again! So I screwed the base back on, and it was working like that too. There was no internal sparking through that blob of Blu-Tack either. Phwoar! So I fixed it. But that bit of wiring did my head in. How did something like that not get done properly by the manufacturers? It makes me wonder if that was partially to blame earlier for it not working, but the original TIP122 doodad did check out badly in comparison with that video I watched regarding testing such a component. Anyway, that can go on a new shelf, when the pair of them go up some time this month.
Oh yeah! And I put my finger on the TIP122 dealie to see how hot it was, and it sparked to my finger and the heat sink! I won’t do that again! It was a little tingly zap; nothing painful. But mmm… I might kill it if I do that again. So in future, I will only feel it when the power’s off. I put a pair of neon bulbs near the ball too, and they also lit up when you got them fairly close. Somebody from China had 60 of them for sale for under $10, which seemed reasonable. Red, blue and green ones. They must put something else in them, because pure neon lights up orange. They don’t specify the voltage though. Usually they run from 70 to 90 V. So you need a resistor for use on 240 V. The old Dick Smith catalogue says to use a 240 KΩ resistor. (¼ watt type.) Apparenly they only draw about 600 µA. That’s like 0.6 mA then. So sod all. They were 75¢ back in 1992, so yeah, that is a good deal from the Chinese seller, if you want a lot. You could make up some fancy thing with a few of them, and put them near a Tesla coil or plasma lamp, and they’d magically light up. This person, Vannamore, from the Ukraine should have some neon bulbs too. They’ve got some luminophore coated ones for sale, I noticed. Yeah, heaps of really cool retro kind of electronic things.

Friday, 18th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:54) Yeah, that thing I said on the 1st about the power supplies for the Aurora plasma balls — they’re using switch mode ones now, that are suitable for whatever voltage your country uses. They also said they’ve improved the internal circuitry for the ball part, and did tests, running one for a month or something. So they really do sound like they’d be worth the money. I wouldn’t leave mine on for more than maybe ½ an hour at a time. Just each night for a bit.

Sunday, 20th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:28) All righty! Virtual On sold. So I will send that tomorrow. I feel slightly sentimental about letting it go, but I never played it much, and I wasn’t too good at it.
• My Dad said he was having issues with some web site, so I offered to stick Virtual Box on his computer and my copy of Tiny Core Linux. So I set that up for him last night, but: Ugh! It was so-o-o slow! It seems that Pentium 4 CPUs don’t have virtualisation extensions, so it took an absolute age to load, and trying to do anything almost brought things to a standstill. Perhaps the extensions came in with the Intel Core range of CPUs, because Windows XP used to run pretty well under Virtual Box on my MacBook, and the operating systems I have on my PCs with the Intel Core i3 and i7 CPUs really zip along. So the next best option would be to install Tiny Core Linux on a flash memory unit or portable hard drive perhaps, and boot from that. Then Dad can use a newer web browser. Mmm, anyway, that OS should run really well on that PC. I checked the BIOS, and it supports booting from drives that are connected to the USB. Plus from a LAN. However that works.

Monday, 21st of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:28) I had to fix my headphones on Saturday, and again today. I think the fix I did wasn’t actually the problem.
• I got Virtual On sent to my buyer. Hopefully this time I’ll get some feedback. Even with the effort of having to turn on my 2018 PC, waiting for Windows 7 to load, then Tiny Core Linux to load, and getting to my eBay account, I still leave feedback for sellers. Surely other people can make as much effort, or even a bit less.
• From what I gather, there should be a MV coming for Reversible Baby from Kanoe Rana on the 23rd. I heard about this a few days back, but whether it’ll be good, or what, remains to be seen. I like the song though.

Tuesday, 22nd of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:45) Well, Virtual On was delivered to my buyer today! So that was super quick. It was left in a safe place, they said. So they must be out. Hopefully they’ll leave good feedback after the communication I provided and prompt postage. I said I’d appreciate it if they could. Heck, I’m impressed with my service! I can’t leave myself feedback though.
• Here’s a new song from Kinki Kids called Speed, which has a cute MV. This queen passes out from some cheeky monster thing, and the 2 dudes rush off to find some kind of love fruit, and then bring it back to revive her. It looks like a combination of toys and computer generated stuff.
Tomorrow is the day for that Kanoe Rana MV, apparently. Anyway, if I don’t mention it again, it’s not worth bothering with.

Wednesday, 23rd of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:10) I was having a browse at plasma balls on eBay again of course, and I think I might’ve actually spotted a genuine green one by a company called Kicko. It looks like the glass is a bit green too, but I think the actual plasma streams appear to be more truly green than some of them. You can check it out here and see what you think. Some of these ones that are supposed to be green, orange or blue, just have tinted glass, and they put up some brilliant looking generic image that’s really a trick. Anyway, I won’t be buying this thing. I’ll be saving my dosh now for that Aurora one, if I can get it sent here. That will be truly green! Yeah, I think some people bought some of those “fake” coloured ones on Amazon, and were disappointed. They said the glass looked a bit frosty too. You want a perfectly clear, colourless glass ball. It’s the gas mix inside that should be the only thing determining the colouring. Ones like this one here are the coloured glass models, which to me just look cheap. It’s a pity there aren’t any other better quality brands on eBay or Amazon for those of us who’d spend a bit more. They’re mostly like toys for kids who probably have a short attention span and don’t care so much if they only last for a couple of years. Perhaps companies using USB connections is a way of cheaping out too, by not providing a proper power supply. But there’s no way you should be putting plasma balls near a computer, and if the main transistor fails to a short circuit, you’d probably kill your computer’s USB as well, meaning you may have to get a new motherboard. Maybe some of them have protection for that, but I wouldn’t bank on it. That is the stupidest way to power stuff like that. Plasma balls have nothing to do with data transfer anyway.
• (12:27) Still no feedback for Virtual On. That’s really disappointing that some buyers don’t seem to give a $#!+. Maybe they were too absorbed by the game. I guess eBay will nag them after a while.
• (22:21) Kanoe Rana’s new video for Reversible Baby is out now. It came out a few minutes back. It was a 21:00 release in Japan.

Thursday, 24th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:01) Yeah, everybody must’ve been watching that video last night. The download speed was a bit sluggish.
• The new Japanese song releases video is out from Relatives Of Del Potro as well, so I’m going to have a flick through that in a few jiffies. Hopefully there’s something good in it.

Sunday, 27th of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:47) If you want a Mad Catz steering wheel for your Saturn, mine is still the best offer at the moment on eBay. The only other one selling, is from America, but its postage cost is about $229. That was the one that was there last month, so it still hasn’t sold. Plus that PC version, incorrectly marked as a Saturn wheel. You might get a Sega brand wheel for cheaper, but they don’t have the pedals and gear stick.
• (22:52, depending on which clock I’m looking at.) There used to be some plasma tubes, to buy, with a long central electrode, which had little streams of plasma going out horizontally to the glass. I haven’t seen any of them for a while. A lot of the tubes you can get now only seem to have a high voltage connection near the base, which just sends the plasma streams creeping up the inside surface of the glass. That’s nice too, but it would be good to see some of those other ones again, even in just the old regular lavender & pinky colouring. Although some other gases would certainly be welcome, like argon perhaps.

Wednesday, 30th of October, 2024
Mum’s birthday
Today’s current mood:
• (0:47) Aurora Plasma Design showed a picture of the PCB of one of their Junior Pro plasma balls. I was wondering what the TL494CN integrated circuit was. It’s for pulse width modulation, from what I read. A pretty common I.C. by the amount of results I got on it. The transformer for the high voltage output looks much the same as the one in my cheapo Heebie Jeebies plasma ball.
I was thinking of maybe getting some green neon bulbs off eBay eventually. Then I could put one or 2 in a fancy glass bottle / jar / vial / something, near one of my other plasma lamps. Then it’d look a bit magical just glowing with no visible means of connection. Although I’d still know why it works. I’m going to try some other switches first and see how close they have to be before their bulbs come on. It’ll also be a good way to test a switch I have that I’m not sure about. I think it has a neon bulb, but it’s hard to tell.
• (21:02) Flippin’ heck! My 2023 PC’s DVD drive just died! No-o-o-o-o-o-o! It’s 2 months out of its warranty now too. LG. Lousy Garbage as somebody once said. In this case it’s true. That’s the shortest life I’ve ever had on an optical disc drive. So I’ve had to order a new one off eBay, which cost $39. Although with optional extra cover and postage, it was more like $56.
Yeah, I was watching a show, and I started hearing this weird humming noise. It felt a bit vibratey, so I took the DVD out and put it back in. Then it took an age to read it, but it got up and going again. But a few minutes later, I paused it, and when I got up from my chair, it started going: Brrddaak! Brrddaak! Brrddaak! Brrddaak! And I’m like: What the f**k is that noise?! So I tried out Robin Hood, and it played all right. Then I went to go back to the other DVD and I said: “Phwoar! It stinks!” The drive had fried something inside it. So I ordered a Pioneer drive this time. Why couldn’t it have been like my Lite-On CD burner, which has lasted for 21 years? So much for saving my money. I’ll have to open the compo up to put the new drive in of course, but that shouldn’t be too much effort. It could be here by Friday, or next Monday, eBay reckons. I wonder if the glitches I was getting in Robin Hood, and it not reading that backup copy I did, was something related to it failing?
Poo! It smells like burning oil almost.

Thursday, 31st of October, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:50) I had to watch Robin Hood on my 2018 PC last night, since I’m not risking using the DVD drive in this one again. Anyway, there was a girl in episode 1 of series 3, and I thought: “Oh! It’s Lily Potter!” Yeah, Ellie Darcey-Alden. I didn’t notice her before, but I have watched it since 2011 (when I saw H.P. & The Deathly Hallows: Part 2).
Anyway, that replacement drive has been sent this morning, so hopefully it will be here tomorrow. I also hope that the person who made my computer didn’t screw the DVD drive in on both sides, or I’ll have to take the other side off as well to get it out. You only need the screws on one side. The cases have holding bits anyway. It’s mostly to stop vibrations shaking them about.

Monday, 4th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:13) No DVD drive yet. Hopefully it will turn up today. My birthday bedroom shelves should be going up today as well, so I can finally get my 3 plasma lamps on display. So that’ll be great.
• At the end of the month it will be 25 years ago that the Dreamcast came out in Australia. Holey moley! Where did that time go, huh? I fondly remember those days when I 1st played Sonic Adventure.

Tuesday, 5th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:33) My new bedroom shelves went up yesterday. I decided to have 1 on 1 wall and 1 on another, instead of 1 on top of the other, because they would’ve been too close together. I put my 3 plasma lamps up, as you can see. I need a longer extension cord though, to plug them in where I want. I just had a short one connecting to a different spot for this. As you can see, the Luminglas plasma disc is the brightest dealie by far. It’s really intense in comparison with the other 2.
• Hopefully my new DVD drive will turn up today — there was no sign of it yesterday. Anyway, I barely had time to deal with it, since I was busy with the shelves.
• I finished watching Robin Hood. It seems that it was in 2015 that I last watched it. The DVDs are all for regions 2 & 4, as we got 2 box sets directly from England. (They’re region 2.) I was thinking of watching The Hobbit again, and keeping Richard Armitage going, but I changed my mind and watched a bit of Shanghai Noon instead.
• (13:02) Ah — the Melbourne Cup horse race today. I didn’t put any bets on. I picked the winner a couple of times in the past though. I didn’t have any money on it for one of those occasions either, but I did for the other, and got something.
• A got an e-mail message saying my Pioneer DVD drive would turn up today, so that’s good. I just wanna get that thing into my PC!
(14:23) I went to the post office to transfer some money, and the DVD drive was delivered while I was out. So it’s in my compo now. Yeah, the person who assembled it did screw the LG drive in on both sides. Ugh. So I had to unplug everything, put it on the floor and take the other side off. What a pain! I only did one side for this new drive. It has holding pieces in the slot things as part of the case, so it’s not going to drop down or be under stress. I don’t have anything to burn yet, but I checked the capabilities in CD Burner XP Pro, and it had everything I could need. I think it was manufactured in 2021. The LG one was made in 2019.

Thursday, 7th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (15:48) I was just trying out this RCT Save Game Modifier program with some of my RollerCoaster Tycoon saves. Wow! It worked fine for me, to add in more land and rides. I added extra land for Trinity Islands, plus some more available rides, and really expanded the place. I also added the boat hire ride for Dynamite Dunes and did an elevated viaduct thing with paths underneath. It was interesting that some of the names in it were different for the rides. Perhaps different regions had different names for some reason. Maybe the Americans didn’t like the British stuff as usual! Ha ha. I’m not sure. Because it has Fries instead of Chips and Cotton Candy instead of Candy Floss. In Australia, we call it fairy floss. The dentist’s nightmare that stuff. Also, it has Crazy Rodent, instead of the wooden wild mouse roller coaster, Whoa Belly, whatever that ride normally is, and Gravitron, which I think must be the Launched Free Fall ride. Plus Bumper Cars instead of Dodgems. It has stuff for the add on packs as well, which aren’t in the original. They did do hotdogs for one of them, it seems, plus doughnuts, coffee, chicken, seafood, T-shirts, hats, toffee apples, & lemonade. So that’s interesting.
You could certainly use it to cheat, but I think once you’ve completed the goal for each park, editing it should be a bonus. You can do your own scenarios too, but I’m not sure if they’re added to the list, or if you have to replace the current ones. It would be cool to design some new parks. I think the 2nd game gave you a scenario editor, as well as that ride editor too.
I saw a demo video for the XBOX version last night, and it appeared to have the add on packs for it as well. The introduction song had a different piece of the tune in it as well.

Friday, 8th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (0:33) I should have some new save files available soon, for RollerCoaster Tycoon, which present you with some custom parks that I tried making with the RCT Save Game Modifier. They seem to work fine, and they’re just for fun, rather than having a goal. They might need to save something if that was the case. You just load them, rather than choosing a new park from the main menu. I’ve done 2 so far, but I’ll probably do a bunch just for the heck of it.

Saturday, 9th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (22:08) I’ve done 5 parks for RollerCoaster Tycoon, but I’m going to play them all before I upload them. I might chuck in 1 screen shot, but the pictures’ll take up more room than the actual SV4 files. But everyone likes to see what you’re going to get 1st. Oh yeah — I’m going to have suggested goals as well, in the “read me” file, since they’re all just for fun.

Wednesday, 13th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (16:34) Emma Hamilton’s 40 today. Ooh, if I was her chap, I’d give her a yummy pressie, that’s for certain.
• As for my new RollerCoaster Tycoon parks, I’ve got 1 more stage to test, and then I’ll have them for you to download. There are 6 in total now: Volcanic Islands, Babylon Canyon, Super Highway, Sandy Castle, Paradise Gardens and Park In Da Nile. That’s the order I did them.

Thursday, 14th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:00) Well, I’ll be jiggered! Lovelyz had a new cartoon style MV out yesterday. When I Touch You, (닿으면, 너) it seems to be called. I thought they were finished for good. Apparently they’ve made a bit of a comeback. (You’ll need a font with Korean characters installed to read that bit in brackets.)

Wednesday, 20th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:10) If you’d like to buy my Britney Spears: Live From Las Vegas video cassette, I now have it listed on eBay. $40 it is, plus $13 for postage. There aren’t many other PAL ones available, apart from one in Greece.

Friday, 22nd of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:45) I just watched a video of a dude who bought a broken plasma ball, and decided to re-use it. He wanted it in blue, so he added iodine, like most people seem to use. It was apparently a pain, because it stained your hands and if it reacted with any air in the plasma ball, it could create white particles. What a nightmare! He “flushed” it out with argon, and also had to flush out a fill of krypton, which was quite expensive, and then he ran out (of krypton), and had to seal it quickly with his blow-torch. It ended up quite cloudy looking, which was a bit weird, but he seemed to like it. Maybe if it was intended to be like that, it would’ve been good, but I got the feeling that wasn’t what he was aiming for. It was interesting to see what kind of a pain in the butt it was to do. He had to have a friend who worked with glass, attach a new rod to the broken “sealing point” as well. Yeah, that would turn me off trying to make one myself. It’s all right for these companies who have all the best equipment and people with different skills, but doing this stuff yourself looks very expensive and awkward, especially if you aren’t properly prepared, and get in over your head. It would be great to make one that was really good yourself, but the expense for a one-off wouldn’t be worth it. You’d have to be making several and selling them. Because it’s a “niche” kind of art form, that isn’t too common, outside of all the cheap, mass produced ones, you can understand why companies like Strattman Design, Tesla Coil Pro, and even Aurora Plasma Design to an extent, can ask for such high prices. At least this year, I’ve learnt more about them, and the circuitry. The electronic stuff really is easy to assemble compared with that glass work and gas filling. I have no skill in that at all.
• (20:41) There are some really nice looking Geissler tubes for sale on eBay, but they’re not in my price range. I don’t know how old some of them are. Here’s a nice one with uranium glass. That’s not unusual though. 5 kV to run it. I don’t have an appropriate power supply for these either. As Geissler tubes go back to the mid 19th century, they obviously wouldn’t have been using any circuits with transistors. They’d be using some kind of transformer with a high voltage output. This one looks gorgeous on the picture. This German seller has quite a lot of them. I’ll have to load up Linux and see what else they have, in my newer version of Firefox.

Thursday, 28th of November, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:19) Ah, dang! Scott L. Schwartz died 2 days ago. He was 65. That was unexpected. I saw him in Ocean’s 11 & Ocean’s 13 and Nash Bridges.
• (22:53) I was going to upload this earlier, but there was a huge storm for most of the afternoon.
• I should have a program available soon which lets you measure distances on maps, for up to 10 lengths in straight lines. It’s a little basic in places, but it’s not something I’ll probably be using all that much. All you need is a map with a horizontal scale on it, Windows ’98 with QuickTime 5, or later, and about 24 MB of free RAM.

Sunday, 1st of December, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (23:51) If you want to buy Panzer Dragoon Orta from me, I have it for sale on eBay for $55.
• My poor XBOX consoles aren’t in great condition any more. My original one gave me some error message saying to contact some Microsoft support dealie, and the glow around the eject button changed to flashing red, which isn’t a good sign. My newer one is having trouble loading games as well. It’s something up with the DVD drive. I took it apart again tonight, and the switch that indicates that the tray is closed is kind of working, but it seems to be having issues spinning any discs, CDs, or DVDs. Considering how much I use them, @ the moment, I’m not willing to spend any more money on them. It’s a shame though, with all the great games I have for the XBOX. Out of all my consoles, the Dreamcasts I got and my XBOXs were the least reliable of any of them. I think my Mega Drive will outlast me, and maybe my Saturn too. Somebody else said the Saturns are built like a brick.
• I’ve been watching The Amazing Race 12 again. Man, it’s so deliciously smooth at that full NTSC frame rate. It makes nearly all the recent music videos I’ve seen look like $#!+ in comparison.

Monday, 2nd of December, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:42) Phwoar! I just stuck up the Christmas tree. I’d forgotten how awkward it was. The branches each have a letter, and you have to sort out the order, but they start at C & work down to H, instead of A & B for some reason. That can stay up for a month at least! And I still have to decorate it yet. This is why it goes up so early, because I’m really slow at getting it done.
• I looked up again about using a DVD drive intended for a computer with the XBOX, but it won’t work. You need to change the PCB, because the XBOX ones have special firmware, and that might not even be physically possible on some drives, or even electronically compatible. As for the power supply, you’d also have to plug in some kind of external unit, because the XBOX uses an unusual power connector. Ugh. I don’t think I’ll risk destroying my Lite-On DVD burner for a console I barely use any more. For anybody else willing to try this idea, keep in mind that the XBOX drives use parallel ATA connections, not serial. So you can’t use a new serial connecting drive with one, unless you had some kind of skinny adaptor thing. These didn’t exist back in 2001. If you ask me, they might as well have kept the parallel connections, because I don’t think a DVD drive can beat that transfer speed anyway.
Well, there is some XBOX emulator, but how complete it is, I couldn’t say. They usually release these things in beta form, and it takes years before they’re ever close to perfect. Then I’d have to find some site where I could download all my games again. I don’t know if there’s a way to read them on your computer. They use a special file system, so you’d need extra software. It might work in Linux perhaps.

Tuesday, 17th of December, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (19:02) I printed out 54 pages this afternoon, and then our printer’s main L.E.D. went red, and the information program said to prepare a new imaging unit. I was like: What the heck?! It seems something’s potentially died with it. However, on eBay, I saw these reset gizmos that apparently allow it to start working again, so maybe some built-in cr*p-out condition has been reached. I don’t know. I’m waiting to hear back from 2 sellers to see what they say. One for a refurbished imaging unit, (which is the thing with the drum,) and one for the reset doodad, which is a LOT cheaper.

Thursday, 19th of December, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (13:38) We’re going to try the reset gizmo for the printer & see if that works 1st.
• I did a new CD yesterday for when I’m sleeping, but my dodgy Philips CD player that I got 4 years ago is skipping on it. It fouls up like that on a lot of CDs. I’ll have to use my grandfather’s one, or Pa as we called him, before I spend any more money.
I can’t believe one of the reviews on eBay for that Digitech portable CD player that Jaycar sells, where somebody gave it a bad review because they seemed to be clueless as to how a CD player operates. They said it still used power while it was paused and if you turned it off, it lost its place. Yeah, no $#!+. Even if you pause a cassette, it’s still running the motor. My Panasonic portable CD player never remembered beyond what track it was up to when you stopped it / turned it off, and my Philips one only remembers because of the position of the LASER, so if you bump it, it just carries on from somewhere else. I think they should’ve got some kind of PMP instead.

Tuesday, 24th of December, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:48) Happy Christmas for tomorrow! I won’t be doing anything on the Internet as usual. Think some nice thoughts for my Mum who isn’t the best at the moment. She’s got a throat operation coming up in the next month or so, and she’s been feeling a bit glum, waiting ’round for it to happen.
• I uploaded another custom park for RollerCoaster Tycoon yesterday, so if you’re interested, check that out. It’s of a beach. I added another ride or 3 to the rides file I did too, but I suspect they’re less popular.

Thursday, 26th of December, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (20:12) Well, it’s almost the end of the year, so I don’t know if any more epic songs will come out before 2025 starts. I’ve got good hopes though for next year. It’s the middle of the decade, so perhaps people will be making more effort for this slightly significant dealie.

Sunday, 29th of December, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (12:43) I found 3 more electronics stores catalogues last night, which I’d forgotten about. A 1994 Jaycar one, a Tandy one for 1993 - 1994 and another Tandy one for 1994 - 1995. This one has a dark blue cover with a lot of brands on the front, which seems to indicate the company’s changes in stocking more well known brands apart from just their own. I was also interested to see that portable Philips DCC player, which I was yapping about back on the 21st of July. That was $699, or for an extra $100, you could get a full size recorder (just for use in your home), also by Philips. Yikes. You’d’ve had to’ve had a lot of money to afford stuff like that. If you wanted to spend more dosh, they had a portable Sanyo Mini Disc player for $1299, or a Sharp (portable) one for $999. Holey beep. You could get their most expensive Sony portable CD player for $429.95, and they had a Sanyo one with an anti-shock feature for $299.95, which makes it obvious why the DCC and Mini Discs didn’t make so much of an impact. If the companies had been able to offer this quality for ¾ of the price of CD players, they might have been onto something, but they were trying to introduce a lower quality system for a higher price against an already well established method of presenting music.
In terms of computers, they had a 486 DX2 CPU based one at 66 MHz, but they don’t say the price. This was a package deal, so you got the monitor and software as well, so it was probably pretty expensive. They also have a CD drive for $499! “… allows you to enjoy high quality graphics, narration and amazing colour not available from regular drives.” What a load of bollocks. It doesn’t make any difference where your data’s coming from. It was just because CDs could hold more than floppy disks, allowing companies to use larger images with more colours, but they make it sound like the type of drive has some effect on the quality somehow.
The Jaycar catalogue just had grey-scale pictures back then, and the front cover also shows pictures of about 11 of their stores. Surely they have a lot more now. I certainly remember the old York Street store in Sydney, and the one at Penrith.
• (18:37) Uh… what the fudge is going on with my access to various web sites? I can’t access stuff from Firefox in Linux, or in Pale Moon in Windows. Weird.
• (19:34) Something has gone tits-up big time. I tried another PC, and the same problem. I can’t even access IIG’s site to see if they have troubles listed. I can only get to about 40% of sites that I try. I can access the server for my web site, and e-mail, and I’m getting mail from Lavabit. It’s like some major connection to Australia, or to this region has lost access to stuff. Or something. I don’t know if that even makes sense. Dad was able to get to DuckDuckGo on his mobile ’phone, so access to that via Telstra is working. This is odd. I don’t think I’ve seen a partial malfunction like this before. I can’t get eBay to load, but I had some luck with some Japanese sites, some British ones, and a couple of American joints. I tried a Korean site, but it’s not loading either.

Monday, 30th of December, 2024
Today’s current mood:
• (14:31) I contacted IIG, and they did some kind of reset thing, and now things are working again.

Wednesday, 1st of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (12:45) Happy new year! Goodness. Where did the last 2 years go to, huh?
• I should have a new page for music videos for this year when one comes along that’s good enough to go on it. It might take a month. Who knows?

Thursday, 2nd of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (22:17) If you can’t add up, this year marks 30 years since Windows ’95 came out. Can you believe it? What an improvement it was over Windows 3.11. Although I didn’t start using Windows ’95 until 1998. It kind of makes me feel like cracking it out for a bit of nostalgia. I don’t know what for though. I can run my old 16 bit programs in Windows XP. It’d be interesting to see what DVD playing software there might be for it. The only thing is, the hardware that Windows ’95 was designed to run on wasn’t fast enough to play DVDs, especially without some kind of hardware acceleration. Plus, in a virtual machine it mightn’t work with the video overlay. I know when I tried PowerDVD in Windows XP on VirtualBox, it didn’t.

Saturday, 4th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (1:05) What a pain in the bum! I just spent the last 20 minutes or more trying to locate my ICQ password so I could close my account, only to find that ICQ closed down entirely last year! Holey moley. Well, I didn’t know. I haven’t used it since probably 2010 or so. I probably last had it installed between 2008 & 2018, but I never set it up again when I changed to a new hard drive on my previous main PC. Or was it 2015? I can’t remember. Anyway, I should be off to bed.

Sunday, 5th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (18:13) It’d be nice if Aurora Plasma Design made a blue plasma ball. I’d still like to try to get one of theirs this year, and if they suddenly added a blue one to their line up, that would be a great alternative choice to their green Genesis one, especially since I have that green Luminglas plasma disc now. If I had the money, I’d get a blue ball from Strattman Design, but that is just a dream for now. I can’t afford their ones. Ah well. Here’s a video at YouTube of a big blue electrode-less plasma ball between 2 Tesla coils. It looks like a Tesla Coil Pro one maybe.

Thursday, 9th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (14:11) There’s a new song out from Shishamo called Self-Revolution, but it sounds almost the same as Colourful from October last year. Plus Wasuta have a new one called World Standard, and I thought: I bet that’s Sho Yamamoto’s composition. Yep! I was right. All their stuff sounds the same as well. I wouldn’t call the quality of the song World Standard that’s for sure. It’s good to have consistent quality from a composer, but when all the songs sound alike, it’s not too great.

Friday, 10th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (15:12) All righty! Somebody from Hungary bought my Panzer Dragoon Orta sound track CD. Struth — they paid almost double the base cost with the postage and something like 27% tax! Holey fudge. It’s 2nd hand too! The Hungarians must be worse than we are in Australia. I included a thing on the postage label to say that they’d paid it. (Their tax.) I didn’t know if I had to or what. I don’t know about foreign stuff like that. It said on eBay’s web site about it, but not in the e-mail they sent. I left them feedback about this too. Somebody in Japan has the sound track available for $150, which is more than I asked, and another person from there has it for about $101.50. So the $105 I asked was reasonable, but the other people were doing free postage. It was $55 for international sending, but probably about $10.60 for here in Australia. I had the decency to send my messages with a Hungarian translation too, because they might not speak English, or might be fed up with having to work out what stuff says.

Sunday, 12th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (15:29) There was a short storm earlier, so I decided to get out some of my Lego and take photos of some of the stuff. Awww! It brought back fond memories of when I was a kid. Most of the stuff would be from the 1980s, so probably getting on to about 40 years old. Not quite though. Maybe in a couple of years or so. I still have the instruction manuals for a lot of the kit dealies, so I should put some of them back together that came apart in the box when I moved house 12 years and a bit ago. There was a really cool burger shop, which needs to be rebuilt. I mostly had a lot of vehicles, but a few buildings. The 1st Lego thing I had was probably a garage, with white doors. They looked more like barn doors. It didn’t have a B & D roller door. It’s come apart too, and I think it has the wrong coloured windows at the moment.
Here are 4 of the pictures I took:

A holiday couple with a caravan. Unfortunately the woman doesn’t fit in the car, so she has to travel in the caravan. This is one of my favourites, because it was in 2 parts, which was more impressive when you were a kid.	A cement mixer.
Here comes a plane that just landed.	Here’s a little diver dude with a boat. His diving gear fits in behind the back window of his little truck. He usually wears a cap and doesn’t have the oxygen tanks on his back. One of the lights is wrong on the back too. It should be a flat one, but I obviously couldn’t find it when I re-assembled this back in about 2009 or so.

Hee hee! So there you go. They’re so cute looking. The vehicles seem to have different wheels in the newer kits and things these days. There were fewer colours of stuff when I got this stuff as well. You didn’t see orange or green blocks, or some of the other varieties available now. It was pretty much white, red, blue, yellow, grey and black, I would say. You did get colourless transparent stuff though. Only the trees seemed to be green, and bits of land related plastic, for grass. I’ve got a bunch of road signs and flags too, and my newest kit dealie, is a pirate who has a beard, a monkey, a treasure chest, a palm tree and some gold coins. Prior to me getting that one, none of the faces had different expressions. They were just the smiley face, and that was it. I remember my Dad getting me a box or 2 of Lego at David Jones at Bondi Junction yonks ago. I’ve got 2 police trucks and a fire truck with flashing lights and sirens too, but I don’t have any 9 V batteries at the moment.
• (21:00) Here are a few more Lego piccies:

This is my garage, which was one of my very 1st Lego… things.	This is the correct trailer for this truck. I had the wrong one before.
A food shop. He should have a grey umbrella stick, and I did find it later. Also, there should be a table for it, but it’s missing.	A post office. One of the blue blocks was missing, and I don’t know where it went. You can’t see it in the photo though, where I changed it.
	Left: A little ice cream chappy. I had to borrow his yellow umbrella stick off a truck. Another missing item. The cop looking dude isn’t part of it though.

I’ve got a little catalogue from 1988 with Robin Hood on it, and heaps of cool stuff inside. Age 16 is the highest rating in there. I dunno what us 40+ year olds are supposed to go for. Those spacey things for some other planet, Legoland items and good old Duplo. I used to have some of that from when I was younger as well. Actually, it might still be in the garage.
• (22:20) Ah! Here we are! The 1988 one. Mine looks a bit less tattered, although it has a fold in the middle.

Wednesday, 15th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (14:28) Ugh. I’ve got a cold. I haven’t had 1 in under 8 years and a bit, so I should be grateful for that at least. It was around Christmas in 2016 that I was last crook in this fashion. That’s the longest time between colds ever for me. So I’ve put myself as being away @ eBay until Friday, in case anybody buys something. I’m not going down to the post office in this condition. My Dad got a cold from somebody, and I picked it up off him. Ah — all the things I’ve done in the last 8 years. My Cowon X9: Been and gone! Looking at all those Korean music videos, then the Japanese ones up until now. Getting about 3 more computers. Doing quite a few plug-ins for Morrowind and Oblivion. Lots of stuff!
• It’s the middle of Summer now of course. And a hot day it is too, outside. Thank goodness for the air conditioner. Well at least things should be cooling off from now on. I’m looking forward to Autumn at the start of March. It’s been a bit of a wait, but it finally seems to be in sight!
• I looked up Lego roads on eBay — holey beep! Somebody wanted $17 per road… base… thing. Each panel dealie. I’d better hang onto mine! Even those road signs were worth a bit. I’ve got quite a few broken ones. Well, I’m not selling any of my Lego items.
• A few years ago, I was getting screen shots from all the James Bond movies in which an aircraft was destroyed. I think nearly every movie had one that got knackered. Apart from Casino Royale. James prevented that huge plane from being blown up. Anyway, I captured some video action of them recently too. That bit with the helicopter in Skyfall was much more impressive than those missile explosions in Diamonds Are Forever, which looked more like somebody blowing smoke rings.

Friday, 17th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (10:57) The horrid cold continues. I’ve had a sore throat for 3 days now. It’s really bad in bed too.
• I noticed the other day that GFriend are back together again. All 6 of them. So I guess that might be the end of Viviz.
• I’ve got a DVD being processed today on my MacBook. As in, one you can watch a bunch of video action on. Not one of just files I’m backing up. So that will take just under 7 hours, due to my MacBook’s dead battery causing it to run at ½ speed. Hopefully that will suffer no interruptions. It’s plugged into my UPS anyway, so it’s fairly safe.

Sunday, 19th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (12:42) I’m feeling a bit better, but I still have a lot of symptoms from this cold. Ugh. Anyway, last night, I couldn’t taste my dinner at all. It was so bland. When I was fixing up my salad, a little ladybug came on out of the lettuce. It was still alive as well, despite being in the fridge. So I carried it on my finger to take it outside, and it tickled. Hee hee. I remember when I stayed at Scarborough in England in 2002, and there were a whole bunch of ladybirds on the window sill. I picked a few up with a cassette box and put them back outside. Apparently some other person who stayed there was a bit freaked out by them, but they don’t really bother me. Here’s a cute toy one off eBay. Although I’ve got too many toys as it is. It does look great though.

Thursday, 23rd of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (22:16) I saw another Zerg Labs / Tesla Coil Pro video the other night, of a collection of their bagel-gens, showing various other elements in them. I think one there with barium in it, had quite a pretty sparkle. That would be interesting to see if it worked well in a regular plasma ball.
• I should have some more RollerCoaster Tycoon (1) parks available soon-ish. I’ve only done 1 more new one so far.

Sunday, 26th of January, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (20:36) Another plasma ball that would be interesting to obtain is the With Design In Mind 201 from around 1987. It’s quite red looking, which is quite unusual, apart from some of those ones by Tesla Coil Pro. There seem to be 4 of them on eBay at the moment, all from America. Here’s one of them and another one here. I won’t be aiming for one of them until I’ve tried to get my mitts on an Aurora one first. I want to sell 3 more things to make the money for it though.
• In terms of those new parks for RollerCoaster Tycoon, I have a 2nd one which I revived from November, which was an experimental location. I decided to fix it up to actually be playable. So that should be included eventually when I make up a 2nd archive of them. I’m just testing it 1st. It had some odd issues I want to be sure are dealt with.

Thursday, 6th of February, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (12:41) The last week and a bit has been the saddest and strangest of my life, because on the 27th of January, my Mum passed on, which was terribly shocking and unexpected. I don’t even feel like I can write something significant enough to represent how much she meant to me. Tomorrow is the funeral, which will be painful. I’m doing a presentation of pictures and videos at the wake afterwards. All the kindness from our neighbours, relatives and friends of my Mum has been overwhelming really, so that was really great to see at this sad time.

Saturday, 15th of January / February / whatever bleedin’ month it is, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (15:04) I don’t know what’s happened with BlockSite in Firefox 130. Apart from the fact that’s it’s got more cr*p since version 1.1, which I use in Pale Moon, it’s not doing what it should be. Sites that it has listed to block are still showing content on other sites, such as ads. Plus, when you go to open a blocked site, it still partially loads before a message comes up. So I figured I’d just dump it and use the hosts file instead. The problem with this though, is that Tiny Core Linux loads most stuff into RAM when it starts, so changes to most directories will be forgotten about at the next load up of the OS, including the etc directory. This is different from most other operating systems of course. So the solution for me was to make a copy of the hosts file and put it in a persistent directory, such as one off my home location. I then added a line to the bootlocal.sh file which copies my updated hosts file to the etc directory on start up. I put a tip in The Computer Page about it. At a forum I read, somebody said their hosts file had grown to over 15 000 lines long and more than 500 KB in size. Wow. That puts my BlockSite list to shame. It’s only 13.4 KB. One advantage of the earlier versions of BlockSite, which won’t work in the hosts file, is being able to use asterisks to block all variations of stuff at a certain address. So one line I have here has: http*://*.doubleclick.*, which is an address owned by fizzing Google. This will block secure access as well, and any net, com and org endings, and any variations to the start of the address, such as www, ads, or whatever else they come up with. Most of the stuff you’d want to add are advertising sites, but anything else offensive or stupid makes it to my list as well, so I don’t get it to load in the future by accident. It was also a big boon in the days when I used the “dial up” modem, from 2002 until 2017, because you wanted all the speed for what you wanted, and not bits of junk loading up that would waste your time.

Monday, 17th of February, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (12:39) It looks like my hosts file is working. That’s one less load of malarkey to endure.
You can understand why people advertise stuff, but it never seems to hit the right target, so to speak. It’s always something irrelevant to you. As I once said in the past, the only ad I can recall acting upon was when Electronics Boutique were offering the XBOX 360 for a lower price, and I went and bought it from The Gamesmen instead. That was about 17 & a bit years ago. Goodness.
• Hopefully Summer’s at an end. It’s got a bit colder over the last couple of days.
• I’m still making some new parks to play for fun, for RollerCoaster Tycoon. There should be 20 in total, when I complete them all. That’s 1 less than what you get with the base version of the game.
• I’ve got something like 26 200 000 gold pieces or so in Oblivion now. Holey moley! I’ve got 12 000 000 in storage, using my Gold Deposit Vault plug-in. It’s all trophy money anyway. What could you possibly spend that much on in the game anyhow? You could buy up everything for sale from every shop. I wish I had that money at the start of the game, when I needed supplies. Now I don’t need to buy much of anything.

Tuesday, 18th of February, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (9:46) What is with these weird bar code / dot code things of late? I know companies have changed to using them on products you can buy from shops, but this tracking web site I went to had this one as well. Who’s the person who’s supposed to have a bar code scanner to read it? And for what purpose? The information is already on the computer, so why would you be optically scanning a monitor? You can just copy and paste the information, or save the page if you need to transfer it to another computer. What more is there to achieve? It doesn’t link to anything either to explain its purpose. Weird. If anybody knows, write on in! It reminds me of The Net with Sandra Bullock. Except with that, it actually did something.
• Yeah, I’ve got about 26 291 995 Septims in Oblivion now. I sold about 200 grand worth of stuff the other night, so I thought it was about what I said yesterday.
• If you’re wondering why I’m up so early today, it’s because I had to go and see the family solicitor again, regarding my Mum’s will. We still have to see about the stone dealie at the cemetary as well. It’s not been a happy time in that regard. I’m off to see my doctor this afternoon as well. Yippee. I want him to have a look in my ears as well. Speaking of ears, I had to order ANOTHER pair of replacement ear pads for my Sennheiser PXC-480 headphones last night. The last left one I got has been utterly cr*p. The foam inside it seems to have disintegrated or something. It’s gone all flat.

Monday, 24th of February, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (12:44) I dreamt I’d met with Sumika in Australia, and I was trying to say stuff in Japanese. We said about Emperor Naruhito’s birthday yesterday and some stuff about video games too, if I recall.
Speaking of Japan, I got a discount offer from eBay this morning for items from over there.
• I got a message from Lavabit saying that they were changing to some new hosting facility, and that they may be offline as soon as today. So send your e-mail to my web site related address instead, for a few days.
• In case you didn’t notice, I added 2 more fountain pens to the page on them. A couple from my Mum, one of which I thought had been lost. There was also a Cross Century 2 Starlight ballpoint pen in Sky Blue colour that showed up as well, which I hadn’t seen for years.

Thursday, 27th of February, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (12:41) Oh my gosh! Michelle Trachtenberg has died! Struth. I didn’t expect that to happen. She’s younger than I am. She was only 39.
• (20:49) Holey moley — Gene Hackman’s died as well! Struth in a booth with no roof. Who’s going to be next?

Sunday, 2nd of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (22:24) Bamboo’s pretty popular for all sorts of stuff. They make washers out of it, cotton bud sticks, burger skewers, and of course furniture. So what does Japanese bamboo have to do with lighting? Back in the day, Thomas Edison tried all types of substances for making light bulb filaments, and in the end, he chose to use bamboo from the Iwashimizu Hachimangu Shrine in Kyoto. It was then cut super fine, covered with powdered carbon and baked in a furnace. Once it was well and truly cooked, the whole thing had become carbonised. As we know, carbon conducts electricity, so that was how filanents were made. They could also be used in heaters. If you want some more information on the dates that the noble gases were found, check out my Plasma Lamps Page.
• (23:19) Oh yeah — that was a bit strange — Betsy Arakawa, who was Gene Hackman’s wife, died also.

Thursday, 6th of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (19:06) I put VirtualBox 2.12 back on my MacBook, hoping to see how Tiny Core Linux would run. Well, I found out in a hurry! It doesn’t work. I guess the OS only likes newer renditions of the virtual machine. I was a bit surprised, because Linux is usually pretty flexible with what hardware it supports, and the requirements for TCL are pretty low. It came up with one line about Linux and then you got complete blackness and that was it. So I tried the installer and it had a kernel panic. So it didn’t like something.
Then I tried VirtualBox 4 on my HP laptop PC, but it doesn’t work in Windows 2000, so that was out. Speaking of out, the clock had gone barmy again, and Windows 2000 complained that the time was invalid, or something. It came up as being in 1980. So I set it again, and then for some reason, the 5 key was sticking down, and all these 5s were going berserk. I ended up pulling the plastic pad off the top of the button to get it to stop. What happened since last month when I used it, I don’t know.

Sunday, 9th of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (13:20) Huzzah! Lavabit has finally kicked back in. I got an e-mail message from somebody @ eBay this morning. That’s a relief of sorts.
• The software review for this month has been updated as well.

Friday, 14th of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (0:18) I should have another Oblivion plug-in out today. A ship house! Not a $#!+house. It’s situated south of Roxey Inn, to the north-west of Vilverin. I have to finish the “read me” file yet and fix up some screen shots.
• I’m also going to do a program intended for Windows 7, which gives file information from files dragged onto it. One of the pain-in-the-bum alterations with Windows 7 over Windows XP is that you can no longer attempt to rename files on read only discs, like CDs and DVDs. This logically makes some sense, but what if you want the names for some purpose? How can you copy them? I need to duplicate the contents of optical discs for backup purposes, so I can only do this quickly in Windows XP. Anyhoo, I will see to that later today. Another advantage will be the accurate file times. Windows 7 really pi$$€s me off with that “5 minutes ago” or “6 hours ago” bull$#!+. Why couldn’t they just display the exact time instead of being a bunch of annoying smart-@r$€s at freaking Microsoft?!

Wednesday, 19th of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (0:04) I’ve decided not to get that Aurora Genesis plasma ball this year. After looking at pictures from people who’ve bought one, (and a video,) I think Aurora are giving slightly over exaggerated images regarding the richness of the green. Some of the pictures just look like regular purple plasma balls almost, and I’m only lying to myself if I get one and say that’s what I want. I want one with a proper green colour like Tesla Coil Pro’s Chrysolite model, even though that’s more like museum grade, and more than 35 × the price. But it’s a true green. So I’d rather have none than something I won’t be totally happy with.
• It’s a pity there are still all those misleading plasma balls on eBay with the fake pictures making them look better than what they are. It’s not right to have false advertising like that, making people think they’re getting something amazing, and then they find out what a disappointment they are. I know I said that before, but nothing’s changed. You go: Oh! What a great looking blue plasma ball! Just what I want. Then they turn out to be just the usual old gas mix with tinted glass, which is such a cheapo way of doing it. It’d be nice if a few more people could at least offer some electrode-less balls aimed at use with a Tesla coil. Maybe I should look at Etsy again.
• (16:08) Here’s something I was working on today. The glass of a plasma ball done in Art Of Illusion. Apart from the metal electrode bit and the wire, the rest is one piece of glass. It was a bit awkward to work it out, but I got there in the end. It even has the hole for the vacuum and gas filling, and the sealed piece of glass tube sticking out the bottom to the left, which you can’t see too well. So if you had to melt all that glass together into that shape really, it would be quite a task, and you’d want to be very skilled, I think. Then to put it in some kind of base where the electronic components would go, you’d need some kind of circular metal clamp with padding to hold it in place, I would say. I’d done a plasma ball in AOI before, but as it had a base, I didn’t make it the one piece of glass, since you couldn’t see underneath.

Thursday, 20th of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (20:06) I ordered a packet of 60 assorted neon bulbs from China off eBay tonight. It’s probably 20 each, of orange, blue and green. I’m going to try some of them near my plasma lamps. There’ll be pretty much no chance of knackering these, unlike my green L.E.D. which half bought it. It still works off a battery at least, so it’s not completely wasted. I might use some of the neon bulbs for power indicators too, using a resistor, off 240 V. I haven’t bought any of these since the 1990s, I think. Maybe I can improve upon my foil covered cardboard too. I wonder if 3 layers would do the trick? I’d need to test it with my multimeter and see how many volts it gets up to. I got up to about 50 V from my single piece of foil. See The Plasma Lamps Page, if you don’t know what I’m on about.

Friday, 21st of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (13:35) Here’s my new contraption to put near my plasma lamps. Hee hee — I don’t know how much more effective it is. 3 times? Maybe not quite that much. Last night I did a test with it, and between my thumbs and the huge connected pieces of foil around the edges, I got my multi-meter up to 150 V, so that was impressive. It should be more than enough to light up a neon bulb from a greater distance away. I also tried it today on my UV neon tube from Jaycar, and I got up to 10 V, so that’s obviously why L.E.D.s come on for that too. I saw a preview image for a Japanese video where somebody’d put a ring of metal around their plasma ball, which would most likely be the most efficient way to absorb the juice coming out of it, but I was aiming for something hand held and detached.
Anyhow, in this picture you can see I have my muti-meter attached to a piece of terminal strip, which connects 2 wires to the main foil area, and the smaller piece that you hold. That (terminal strip) will be the connection point for one of my neon bulbs when they arrive. You hold the cardboard doohickey by the short piece coming out of the bottom left corner there. This was a much more elaborate set up than my single piece of cardboard with some foil wrapped around it. I was measuring the stuff out last night with a tape measure, punching holes, tying stuff with string, stapling bits and what not.

Saturday, 22nd of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (20:48) Ah — George Foreman died. That’s a shame. He was 76.

Tuesday, 25th of March, 2025
Today’s current mood:
• (13:49) I ordered one of those Chinese “flat” Tesla coils yesterday. I got offered a discount of 8% on one of them, and decided to accept the offer. It’d be nice if it came with a plug suitable for Australia, because the Chinese use the same as us. There are few people selling noble gas tubes on eBay, some of which might be interesting to get in the future. Although I’m more interested in fancy mixtures of elements, making various colours. Hopefully if I can get Tesla Coil Pro to answer my e-mail, I will see about getting a couple of their mini electrode-less plasma balls. They’re selling them as a “prop” for use with Tesla coils. I’d like to get a green and a cyan one, and a blue one in the future, when I can afford it more so. I’m still waiting for my things to sell on eBay, but I guess nobody’s interested in what I have on offer.

John’s Top 5: Most Recently Played Games:

Game:	System:
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion	“2018 PC”
RollerCoaster Tycoon	Main PC
Battletoads (to test it)	Mega Drive
Teddy Maze	Main PC
Fighters Megamix	Saturn

John’s List Of Interesting Articles & Scams:

“Beach’s Bizarre Broadway Subway” — An article about Alfred Beach’s pneumatic transit system in New York, which you may have seen a reproduction of in Ghostbusters 2.
City Of Darkness - Revisited — A fascinating look at what was the Kowloon Walled City.
Livermore’s Centennial Light Live Cam — Get an up to date view of the world’s longest running light bulb! This thing puts modern bulbs to utter shame!
Making Ice In Mississippi
A Keeper’s Account - A Quiet Night In — This is Charlie Riding’s tale of working at the Bell Rock Lighthouse in Scotland, on the 2:00 to 6:00 A.M. shift.
Read about Geoffrey D. Bennett who had a heck of a job trying to get a refund for Windows ’95, which he didn’t want with his laptop PC in the 1st place.
Letters from BBC Television Licensing — The BBC’s TV Licence over in Britain is one of the biggest jokes of our time, not because the BBC shouldn’t be getting paid, but because you still have to pay whether you watch them or not. It makes as much sense as me asking everyone on the planet for $5, because they may happen to stumble upon my web site. The BBC have always wanted to charge TV owners to receive their broadcasts, but made no effort to block them to viewers of other channels, and demanded payment whether you watched what they broadcast or not.
Ever wondered how to completely remove iTunes? Here’s an interesting article on the procedure. (This site now requires a pretty new web browser.)
London Underground History. (This has gone for now.)
Game Copy Wizard — This is a big fat SCAM! Check out the website, but do not fall into the trap of buying! One affiliated site even claimed it could duplicate cartridge based games! It is also a pyramid scheme to draw in affiliates to put up positive reviews about it in order to get paid when they can sell a copy. Lots of people have been burned, and there are dozens of sites out there claiming it DOES work, when it clearly does not. As easy as it is to see through this fake product, I put this here to make it more well known to those who aren’t familiar with copying console games. Click here for a list of sites that seem to be pushing this. (This site has finally gone, and just re-directs to some other thing.)
Ever heard of the Better Business Bureau from America? It would seem they’re not as straight as you may have thought.
Transparent Audio — Another company bordering on scam status. Anyone who makes $777 USB cables, and somehow magically thinks they’re better, has no credibility at all in my book. Not to mention their $84 900 speaker wires. The problem is, I think they actually believe what they’re selling makes a difference.
AudioHarma’s Cable Cooker — more snake oil.