While we were in town today, I popped into the local CEX shop and spotted, while walking past the Nintendo DS stand, Overlord: Minions. As I loved the original Overlord, and am part-way through Overlord 2, I thought I’d give this handheld “sequel” a go. It was only 5 English Quid second-hand, which isn’t too bad.
I’m home now, and notice that Play are selling it for £2.99, delivered and brand new. Typical. Maybe I should have gone for GTA: Chinatown Wars or Trackmania DS after all.
Not so long ago I decided to upgrade my router with a nice shiny new one. I opted for the Belkin N+ (the F5D8635uk4A to be overly specific). It’s a nice router, with a bundle of features that I don’t really intend to use. One feature that’s great tho’ is the built-in USB port, which allows the addition of either Flash Memory or a real USB HDD, which then acts as Network Attached Storage. Fabulous. I just wondered if it was possible to kick off a download directly to the flash drive, via the router, so that I could turn off all of my PCs and keep the download going…
The answer is yes – with a little playing…
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I’ve just finished my November 2009 book – only a couple days late. I had chosen the latest edition of this unfortunately irregular anthology. I say “irregular” as since I’ve resubscribed the editions appear to be coming out less often – in fact I think there will only be three this year rather than four. It’s a shame, and I certainly hope it doesn’t go the way that other anthologies appear to – do people not read the printed word these days? Certainly I know a couple people who would prefer that others do the imagining for them in the form of film. Tsk, the youth of today.
Anyway, I digress. “Postscripts #19″ returns to the usual mix of Sci-Fi and Horror, after number 18s focus on just the Horror. There are some good stories in this edition (it seems odd to call it “issue” – it’s far from being a magazine), in amongst those I didn’t… appreciate quite so much – that’s simply the way anthologies go… it’s rare that I’ll thoroughly enjoy every story.
Highlights for me include Daniel Abraham’s “Balfour and Merriwether in The Adventure of the Emperor’s Vengeance”, the characters being of more interest to me than the story. Matthew Hughes provides a decent Luff Imbry story in the form of “Enemey of the Good” – I’d previously read another Luff Imbry story in another Postscripts – while M.K. Hobson’s “The Warlock and the Man of the Word” is an entertaining fantasy-western… Demons and Cowboys, what’s not to like? I also enjoyed David N. Drake’s “A Life Cliched”, which read like a Philip K. Dick or Greg Egan story, where Genre Fiction is used as a means to provide social comment. Plus, at only two pages long it’s ideal for a visit to the smallest room.
My book for December 2009 has been picked – Charles Stross’ “Saturn’s Children”. Not, as some would have us believe, a follow-up to “Singularity Sky” and “Iron Sunrise”, but I hope I enjoy it as much as I did those two.
I’m a slow reader. It’s not a bad thing, but where some people I know can read a novel in a couple days, I will use up my lunchtime reading a ten-page short story. It can take some motivation to decide to read a novel – hence my preference for the short story. A 300-page novel can easily take me a month or more. I need to be rather keen on a 500-page novel to consider reading it… unlike some people, I would pick a shorter book out of two that I was interested in. This can cause something like laziness when it comes to reading.
Then I started my “book-a-month” project.
I’m a bit of a fan of command prompts and batch files. Geeky yes, and most other geeks would probably hate the fact that I rather like doing things in Windows command line interpreter (cmd.exe). “Hey, I could find a random file in a single-line perl script, and it would stitch two images together, and it would make you a double espresso” you may say. “Well maybe, but you’re still an ass” I would retort. Despite what some people think Microsofts command processor is actually rather powerful, as demonstrated by the oft interesting Command Line Kung Fu.
Anyway, I decided I wanted to have a photo of my son on my Windows desktop at work – partly to remind me why I spend my days there (so we can afford to keep the little tyke and don’t have to send him back for a refund), and to give me encouragement to go home at a reasonable time of an evening. However, my work system is a dual-display machine, so my desktop resolution is 3200×1200, with a big black gap in the middle (the monitor case). So my idea was to stitch together two images selected randomly from a directory-full, set that as the background, and refresh the display. How to do it? Batchfiles, of course!
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This was my first competition entry that hasn’t been ZX Spectrum-related. “OverXposed To The Sun(down)” caused RC55, the party-organiser, a little worry considering the title. It’s actually my attempt at something like “clever photography”, and happened almost by accident. I was playing with my video camera and took a few still shots while the camera was moving, resulting in some blur (oddly enough) and it gave me an idea.
I borrowed LaesQ’s rather nice camera, set the exposure to about 10 seconds, and… waved it around while taking a photo. The idea was to get a nice “S” (for “Sundown”, you see) from the various light sources, and it went rather well, especially as you can see the whole party-place with relatively little blur.
The photo came something like 6th, which sucks, as I’m better than everyone else, and I smell pretty. Or something. Ah hell, the winning entry was a really nice photo anyway, so props to the winner, although oddly with competitions like this… where do the entries end up?
If you’re feeling keen you can download the large version (2848 x 2136, 1.4Mb), ‘though the linked version above is just as good.
With Sundown 2009 coming up next month I figured it was time I actually posted some information about my entries for last years Sundown.
This is a screenshot for “Tribe“, my fairly quick-hack demo which saw something of a new style for my… stuff. I took what I call the “CPU-Approach”, which means a complete disregard for what the ZX Spectrum hardware is going to do – instead I ignored any possible colour clash and flicker and just whacked some stuff on the screen. Oddly it works quite well, especially when you have some kind of Gigascreen-enabled emulator. It came in second to a rather nice (and marginally more worthy) Vic20 demo, although I believe “Tribe” was the only oldschool entry to be run on real hardware.
The demo features a rather nice little music-loop by LaesQ, and some graphics that I stole from Slengpung… and then forgot to greet everyone whose photo I used. Oh well. The best bit of making the demo was, of course, using Riznix’ PC to finish up the demo at the party (the first time I’ve done that), and being semi-blinded by his bloody huge monitor when I loaded up a pure-white text document. Marvellous.
Here’s a download.
