In the style of her comic, The Aber Effect, and in the light of recent protests about the religious implications of a comic, Claire has made a marvellous one-framer, shown below:
Much thanks to Claire for allowing me to publish this online.
Curry at Cafe All Spice tonight. All welcome. Geek Night moved to Sunday this week. Jon, Hayley, and TGB in town. Time not yet certain, so meet at The Place during the evening or get a message to Claire or I and we’ll let you know when we know… but it’s likely to be about 9pm (when TGB expects to arrive in town). Also; keep an eye on this blog post for updates.
Be there, or be sober and hungry.
Special instructions –
In actual news, Abnib Gallery now carries 877 photos. My efforts to keyword/caption them all is going slowly, so if you want to help, please do (just sign up an account on the site then contact me to get your permissions sorted out).
You’ve all seen nanofiction before (which must, of course, have no more than 55 words of text plus no more than 7 words of title in it), as is used in games like Chrononauts and some of the other Geek Night favourites, but I’ve only recently discovered the idea of a drabble – a work of fiction totalling exactly 100 words.
I thought I’d share with you all a drabble written by a friend of mine (she’s put it only in places it’s hard to find, so I’m duplicating rather than linking).
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
From the day we were born, my twin sister was always the one people noticed. In our first photograph, just hours after our birth, she looked rosy, while I looked pale, like a wax doll. She grew into a beautiful and talented young woman – her singing voice was quite something to behold. I have no doubt that my mother loved me – although my father’s discomfort and disappointment in me was fairly blatant – but I remained something that was discussed as little as possible. I didn’t want to envy my beloved sister. If only I had been born alive, too.© Faye L Booth 2005 – used with permission – no unauthorised reproduction, in whole or part
Fabulous, I thought, and so I got permission to share it with you lot, too.
Wanted: one competent video games player with free time on Saturday daytimes (and probably at other points during the week) to waste a couple of dozen hours over the next few weeks playing The Legend Of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures alongside me, Claire and JTA. We’ve come into possession of (or will have, very soon) a copy of the game, a gamecube, four gameboy advances (or SPs), link cables, etc. Hopefully, we’ll be ready to kick off this coming Saturday afternoon.
Why do we want you? Because Zelda: Four Swords is blatantly best-played with four simultaneous co-operative players making a collaborative effort to save hyrule/banish demons/rescue Princess Zelda/whatever the plot is this time around. This game is getting good-to-great reviews, but every reviewer is saying that it’s best to play with the full gameboy/four-player affair, so we’ve decided that this is what we’re going to do!
Why is this game special? Well; it’s a truly co-operative RPG which feeds upon the puzzle-solving and co-ordination abilities of a group of people. It’s fluffy and friendly. And, coolest of all, it really does make use of the four (eek!) GBAs we’ll be throwing at it… if your character is seperated from the rest of the party, the adventure continues on your own little screen, right in the palm of your hands, until you can rejoin the main TV screen. Secret voting on each other’s performance, puzzles which require synchronised efforts on the part of the team members, and other goodies, make this a very promising little game.
Provisos:
You probably have to like Zelda games, or, at least, the idea of them.
You’ll need to drag your arse around to The Place to play it with the rest of the group on a regular basis (schedule to be determined), or we’ll happily replace you with somebody more
interested.
BYOB.
Want to join our ragtag band (or even come along early for Troma Night and spectate/shout abuse/complain that “it’s not like the Zelda games you remember – that’ll be you, Paul)? Let me know. And may the triforce be with you.
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Hmm… as part of my ongoing work with Abnib v3.0, I’ve noticed a couple of interesting little quirks in the way that LiveJournal handles security for “friends only” and “private” posts. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve found a way to – for any given user – produce a list of the times, dates, and URLs of all posts made by anybody – even ones to which I don’t have access. Not terribly disturbing news, as I still can’t get access to the content of the posts or even the comments to them, but it’s an “opening” – a “way in” – which could potentially lead to a full-blown exploit.
For example, I can tell you that there is a post on Andy’s blog that I’m not allowed to read, that he wrote on the 17th of Januaryat about quarter past four in the afternoon (I hope you don’t mind me using you as my “guinea pig”, Andy – you’re the first person I came to who had a “recent” private post).
The numbers near the end of LiveJournal post URLs are supposed to be semi-random to prevent people from just “guessing” their way to posts, but it turns out this isn’t necessary. I’ve e-mailed LiveJournal to try to explain their flaw to them, but as I can’t be arsed to debug it myself (hey: not my weblog at risk, here), I don’t know yet how much of a priority they’ll make it.
Ho hum.
Edit: Further investigations have revealed that I can easily get the title (but not the content or the comments) of any LiveJournal post, including protected ones. For obvious reasons, I’ve now stopped using my friends’ weblogs as testbeds, and I’ve set up a couple of “play” accounts to try things out with. I wonder if I can get the content of posts? That’d be an interesting challenge.
Well, I’ve completed the first release of Abnib v3.0. It’s not quite as full-featured as I’d have liked, yet, but a lot of the new “core” functionality is there. I hope you’ll all agree that it’s been worth the wait. And, if you’re reading this on Abnib… Hello there!
So: what’s new –
“Friends-Only” Support For LiveJournal Users
Just add ‘abnib’ to your friends list and abnib-readers will be notified when you make “friends only” posts, so they
don’t have to check more pages than they need to. Abnib won’t show your “friends only” text – it’ll just tell people that you’ve made a “friends only” post, and invite them to click the
link to go to it. If you’re particularly paranoid, you can even set up a custom group that doesn’t include
abnib, so you can make private posts that abnib readers don’t get told about.
I’d appreciate it if a few of you would try out this feature, so that we can be sure that it works.
Integrated Member Descriptions
Click on somebody’s name in the upper-right, and you can read a short description of them. I’ve filled a few in to start us off. You can opt to only view posts by a certain person, and,
soon, you’ll be able to cloak posts by certain people (if you always find their ‘blogs boring, for example). If you want to edit your description, you can! If you do this, abnib will
ask you to prove that you are who you claim to be by posting a certain unusual series of words in your weblog within the next few days. Please give this a go!
Gallery, RockMonkey, and Troma Night
Integration
Abnib talks to Abnib Gallery, the RockMonkey Wiki, and the Troma Night web site in order to bring you the latest news and pictures. These features – particularly the Gallery and
RockMonkey ones – are yet to be enhanced even further, so watch this space. The Gallery “Random Picture” feature refreshes itself every 30 seconds, so even during the most boring blog
rant, there’s always something to occupy your interest.
New Look-And-Feel
It’s got wavy corners and transparent bits and everything. Looks great in FireFox and Opera, tolerable in
Internet Explorer 6 (good in Internet Explorer 7)…
Read More…
If you’re really “out of the loop” and need to catch up, just scroll to the bottom of Abnib and you can easily view “older” posts at the click of a link. The page doesn’t even need to
refresh!
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Flushed with success at my wine-making efforts (which have ranged from “barely drinkable” to “good”) over the last few months, I thought I’d turn my hand to fermenting some different kinds of fruits in my spare time. The first of these that I decided to try is mangoes. So, a few mangoes from the greengrocer on Chalybeate Street and a few litres of additional mango juice from Morrisons later, I was ready to start. I kicked it off yesterday with a hunk of mango pulp, juice, sugar, and – of course – brewers’ yeast. This drink, I have decided, will be called “mangohol”. And if it turns out to be undrinkable, I’ll try my hand at distilling, too, and try to make a spirit out of it. =o)
This morning, I was quite surprised to find that the proto-beverage had escaped from the captivity of it’s bottle, forcing mango pulp up through the airlock and out onto the table by the sheer force of it’s expanding gases. It turns out that mangoes actually have quite a high sugar content, and the yeast in the bottle is having a bit of a party. I looked at my chopping board (which has pictures of various fruits and vegetables and suggestions on how to prepare and serve them). For mangoes, it reads: “Mango [sic] have a juicy, pale, orange flesh, which is full of flavour. Sliced lengthways and served in a fruit salad, puréed for ice creams and mousses, used in chutneys, veg curries, tarts, and pies.” Does it say anywhere, “Warning: may ferment explosively, spewing mango pulp across your surfaces?” Does it buggery.
So violent was the push of the excited fungi, they even managed to compress whole chunks of mango through the airlock, where they became lodged. I’ve no idea how – if it’s at all possible – I will get them out, but I’ll be using one of the larger-style airlocks for the rest of the brewing process.
Of course, it doesn’t take a physicist – even one who’s not been caught in the explosion of an immersion heater (whoever that might have been) – to tell you that the expansion of gasses in an enclosed space is a bad thing. In fact, what biologists might call an “uncontrolled yeast reaction in a sealed container” has another, more brutal, name amongst chemists and physicists. The name they use for it is “bomb.”
Thankfully I noticed the problem before the pressure became sufficient to detonate my (glass!) demijohn, and I had the sense to remove the cork and airlock from the neck of the bottle. No prizes for guessing what happened: suddenly, I found my face, my hands, my body, the room – pretty much everything, actually – showered with partially-fermented mango juice and pulp. It’s not nice stuff to be shot in the eye with. That said, it smells fantastic.
The majority of the drink remained in the bottle, and it’ll be continuing to ferment for a couple of weeks, yet (although I’ll be keeping a closer eye on it’s airlock). I’d never had guessed mangoes were so sugary, but this is really volatile stuff: having already diffused it the first time around I took a short video clip of it bubbling out (observe in the video how it “spurts out” if I hold my hand over the top of the bottle for a few seconds, and how much of the bottle is “froth” generated by the yeast):
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Now our few “odd weeks” are done, Geek Night is returning to Friday nights. See you tonight from 7pm for board games!
If you don’t know why I’m writing this here, then that’s probably for the best: Eat my ticklish surfboard. There. I said it.
For the last few months, Claire and my GameCube has been broken. It broke at one point, which I attributed to the drive motor being jammed up with dust and hair and crap, so I opened the lid and wiggled a knife-blade around inside it for awhile, which seemed to fix it… but a couple of weeks later, it was dead again. I decided to have another look into this, yesterday, and a little bit of research online revealed that the problem was probably that the strength of the laser had degraded, rendering it unable to read any discs. This is, apparently, one of the most common causes of death for the GameCube (and I’ve seen a good number of ‘cubes go on eBay which would appear to have exactly this problem). Thankfully, there’s a really well-written guide on lens calibration for the gamecube, which helped a lot. However, the thing that’s lacking online is a photographic guide: so, as part of this ‘blog entry, I’ve written one.
Usual disclaimer: following this guide will void your warranty. Plus, if you do it the way I did it, you risk electrocution, exposure to laser radiation, and worse yet, you may break your GameCube beyond repair.
I recommend that you read the guide to lens calibration for the gamecube – it’s far more in-depth than this blog entry. However, this blog entry has prettier pictures.
Symptoms
Problem
The power output of the laser which is used to read the surface of the disc has reduced with age. This is a common problem in GameCubes, apparently, between two and five years old. It can be repaired by a Nintendo engineer, but the price is prohibitive (you might as well buy a working second-hand one). However, we can fix it ourselves. [if you can’t see the rest of this article, read it here]
Tools
I didn’t have all the tools to hand that the author of the guide I followed had, but I made do. Here are my tools:
Method
First step is to prepare the tools as you’ll need them. The four main case screws that prevent you from taking a GameCube apart are a strange custom design deeply recessed within deep holes on the underside of the device. You can apparently buy a specialist tool for manipulating these screws, but I couldn’t be bothered, so I made one: remove the ink tube and nib from the pen, so you’re left with a long plastic tube. Then, using a hot flame (I used a gas ring) melt/ignite the end of the tube you’d normally write with (where the nib was, before you removed it). It will probably catch fire, but just blow it out while trying not to breathe in too much of the toxic black smoke you’re producing. It needs to be molten enough to be malleable. Then, once it’s hot, put it down into one of the four deep holes on the underside of your upside-down GameCube.
Push it down firmly but evenly so that it points directly up, and hold it there for a minute or so while it begins to take shape. What you’re doing is moulding the shape of the screw head into the molten plastic of the pen, so that when the plastic sets you will have a tool that exactly fits them. Of course, if then pen snaps, you’ve buggered any chance you had of ever getting into your GameCube, so be careful! Once it’s standing upright by itself, leave it for four or five minutes to finish cooling. Now’s a good opportunity to read the rest of this guide, if you haven’t already.
You should now be able to use your new tool to unscrew the four screws that hold your GameCube together. That’s the hard bit over with. Flip your GameCube the right way up again, put your hands on it’s sides, and pull upwards to remove the cover. If there isn’t one already, put a GameCube disc onto the spindle. This will serve two purposes: it will allow you to test the GameCube without reassembling it, later, but more importantly it will help to protect the laser lens from damage when you turn the drive mechanism upside-down, later. Next you need to remove the front and rear panels. These are attached by small plastic clips in the corners of the cube, as shown below.
Be careful not to detach the cables that connect the front panel to the rest of the GameCube, as these ribbon cables are very difficult to re-attach without damaging them! Now you’re ready to start removing the chassis screws (which are holding the fan in place and preventing you from getting at the underside of the disc drive. There are 14 screws to remove, in the areas shown below, but 3 of these are concealed underneath the fan and the 2 holding the fan in place will need to be removed to reveal them. Why did Nintendo see fit to use 14 screws where 6 would have done is beyond me.
By now you should have something that looks a lot like this:
A GameCube with the top, sides, and fan laid bare, and the screws removed from the main chassis. Now’d be a good time to have a closer look at what goes on when your ‘Cube turns on. This is optional, but I think it’s interesting. If you look near the back of the GameCube, on the right-hand side, you’ll see two plastic forks. This is the switch that detects whether or not the lid is closed (as a safety precaution, the disc will not spin and the laser will not turn on if the lid is opened).
Next, you need to remove the four long screws behind the ports (above the memory card slots).
This will also release two strange bits of metal which are held in place by these screws. I don’t know what they do, but I’m sure they’re probably important, so make sure you put them back after you’re done! Right; time to detach the disc drive. Lift the entire upper part of the system up and away from the base: there’ll be a little resistance as a plug becomes detached, but if you find you’re having to pull hard, you’ve probably left a screw in somewhere. The whole metal plate with the drive on top will come away in one piece. This is the bit we’ll be working with. Flip it over. Now, you’ve got to remove six small screws, highlighted in red on the photo below. I’ve also highlighted (in blue) the connector that links the drive to the bottom half of the console.
Removing the screws allows you to detach the metal plate and gain access to the circuitboard underneath. This is what we’re looking for. Again, I’ve highlighted the connector port in blue to help you navigate.
What you need to do is to turn the screw (highlighted in red) about 3 or 4 degrees anti-clockwise. This will increase the power given to the laser and fix your problem. If you turn it too much, your laser will overheat and burn out. If you turn it too little, the problem won’t be fixed. I recommend that you turn it a little at a time to find how short a distance you can turn it (anti-clockwise) to have the console begin to work again (i.e. so it “barely” works)… then turn it an extra 2 degrees or so to be sure. Be gentle!!! When you’ve made the adjustments you want to, re-assemble the thing so far as you need to to test it. You don’t need to put any screws in or even put the fan or panels back on – just hook it up to the TV and try not to look directly at the laser lens. If it still doesn’t work, go back and turn the screw a little more anti-clockwise (to boost the power some more). Hope that helps you get your GameCube back up-and-running again: it did mine! Feedback is welcome, but if you need more information I still highly recommend Lens Calibration For The Nintendo GameCube, which also has pointers on some of the other things that could be wrong (if this fix fails), what tools you need to do it without melting pens, and tips from somebody more-experienced on how far to turn the circuitboard screw. Good luck!
