Month: April 2004

Last.FM

I’ve been getting some artists that I like into my Last.FM profile. Looking at the details for Theo Parrish’s First Floor album it had some similiar artists such as Queen, Limp Bizkit, Wu Tang Clan and Sonic Youth. Riiight…

For those of you unfamiliar with Last.FM is a personal radio station that “builds up a personal profile of your music taste, consisting of tracks you added to your profile and tracks you listened to on Last.fm.” It also ties in nicely with Audioscrobbler which is developed by the same people. Audioscrobbler is “a computer system that builds up a detailed profile of your musical taste. After installing an Audioscrobbler Plugin, your computer sends the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler Server.”

Their both worth checking out and its fun to see what your friends have been listening to.

Audioscrobbler also offers RSS feeds of what you’ve been listening to so you can extract that data and use it like I have in the side bar of this blog in the “10 recently played songs” section.

MAME 0.81u8 & u9 Released

0.81u9
New Games supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Strider 2

New Non-Working games / clones supported:

  • Monster Bash (2 board version)
  • One + Two

0.81u8
New Games supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Atari Mini Golf (prototype)
  • Inca (clone of Maya)

New Non-Working games / clones supported

  • MACS (Multi Amenity Cassette System)
  • Namco FL (Speed Racer / Final Lap R)

Pointer Sisters – Automatic

Pointer Sisters - Break Out album cover

Look what you’re doing to me
I’m utterly at your whim
All of my defenses down
Your camera looks through me
With its X-ray vision
And all systems run aground
All I can manage to push from my lips
Is a stream of absurdities
Every word I intended to speak
Wind up locked in the circuitry

Chorus:
No way to control it
It’s totally automatic
Whenever you’re around
I’m walking blindfolded
Completely automatic
All of my systems are down
Down down down
Automatic
Automatic

What is this madness
That makes my motor run
And my legs too weak to stand
I go from sadness
To exhilaration
Like a robot at your command
My hands perspire and shake like a leaf
Up and down goes my temperature
I summon doctors to get some relief
But they tell me there is no cure
They tell me

Chorus

Happy Birthday Nadia

A late happy birthday to me mate Nads. Not that she reads this. Or does she? Anyway, much fun was had at her party on Sunday night at the Hollywood Hotel. Everyone has fun there don’t they? Well Joanne and Thommy got hassled by some random blonde for not playing enough “current” music (for crying out loud, it was Nadia’s party ya scrag!), Adam put in a good effort of trying to get into a fight and Matt C got hit on byone or two random girlies on the prowl. I had an awesome time, cumulating to my kareoke performance of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” (Too cold! Too cold!). I feel I now have a calling… but I have to deal with that meddling Cyia first. I feel she may be a hinderance to my future in the kareoke industry…

Oh yeah, I’ll try and get photos from the party online tomorrow, I swear!

The nasty side of retrogaming addiction…

So I’m currently in the market for an old Sega Saturn. Not too much of a problem. They go for under AU$100 and a guy from work is considering selling me his old Japanese Saturn with all the games and lightgun controllers. So I’m looking for good games. Apparently Radiant Silvergun is an amazing shoot’em up (or shmup as apparently the kids call ’em these days). I love shoot’em ups. So I’m looking around on Ebay for second-hand copies of the game. Bloody hell, starting bids of US$150 for that game!!! There’s a few copies in the UK starting off nice and cheap though. Perhaps I’ll keep an eye on those auctions. Or perhaps pursue other avenues.

Apparently other great shoot ’em ups for the Saturn are Soukyugurentai and Thunder Force V. And it looks like the pricing on those are a little more sane.

Kraftwerk Announce Plans to Reissue Entire Catalog

From Pitchfork Media:

“Kraftwerk have just revealed to the Toronto-based music magazine Now that they’re in the midst of an ambitious project to reissue their entire catalog– including their first three albums, which have been available only via UK import for years. Speaking by telephone from the band’s Kling Klang studios in Düsseldorf, Germany, Kraftwerk co-founder Ralf Hütter told the publication, “We’ve been digitally transferring all of Kraftwerk’s original recordings and sound sources from our badly degrading master tapes while our engineers, Fritz [Hilpert] and Henning [Schmitz], have been working in parallel to remaster our early albums for re-release.”

New job stress

Well some of you may know that I recently got a new job. Its still with the same company, but in a different area doing something close to my heart, Linux. 😀 So I thought I was supposed to be starting my new job on Wednesday. I decided to chat to my now old manager this afternoon just to make sure and everything.

Me: “So, just to make sure. I’m starting this job tomorrow right?”
Old Manager: “Ummm, I thought you were starting today?”
Me: “Uh. OK. I got told by Mr X (temporary manager while old manager was on holidays) that I was starting tomorrow”
O.M.: “OK, let me just check my emails… Hmm. OK. Its says here the 27th, but it doesn’t say whether your finishing or starting on that date. Let me give your new manager a call.”
Me: Wow, vote of confidence. I walked back to my desk while O.M. called my new manager.

Turned out Mr X kinda sorta agreed to me starting or something around that date, but didn’t get back to my new manager. I think. And O.M. had assumed that everything had been sorted out. Not so. Arrgh. Well I start next Tuesday now after my trip to Wellington to visit my good mate Martin. So hopefully I’ll be happy and refreshed after that. I was kind of dreading starting tomorrow anyway. Not sure if its new job jitters, the fact that I haven’t started a new job in almost 5 years or the combination of too much caffeine and the new asthma medication I’m currently on (it does contain pulmicort (sp?) which has made me feel pretty anxious in the past 🙠).

MAME 0.81u7 Released

New Games supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Twin Eagle 2 [Olivier Galibert]
  • Megaplay : Sonic the Hedgehog [Barry Rodewald, GreyRogue]
  • Megaplay : Tecmo World Cup [Barry Rodewald, GreyRogue]
  • Megaplay : Golden Axe 2 [Barry Rodewald, GreyRogue]
  • Megaplay still has a few issues (continue without extra coins etc.)

New Clones supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Area 51 (R3000 Version)
  • Ninja (clone of Sega Ninja)

New Non-Working games / clones supported

  • Battle Balls (Asia)
  • Super Pang

MAME 0.81u6 Released

New Games supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Renju Kizoku
  • Neratte Chu

New Non-Working games / clones supported:

  • Mayjinsen
  • Mayjinsen 2
  • Super Eagle Shot
  • Super Real Mahjong P5

Grinding hard not soft, fashion core on a freestyle jazz metal tip

Reading the article about “Fashion-core” that Nik linked to, it kind of made me feel old that “hardcore” no longer means early nineties UK rave breakbeat or mid-nineties Rotterdam gabber and that it has gone back to one of the first uses of “hardcore” to describe music that I heard. Actually it also made me feel old because I’ve actually witnessed a term for music change over the course of more than a decade.

St George Bank vs the Browser

From some dumbass reason, when St George Bank made upgrades to their online banking system earlier on in the year, they managed to break just about every browser except for a small selection of Internet Explorer versions and one version of Netscape Navigator. Luckily for users of Mozilla browsers its as easy as changing your user agent string.

In your prefs.js file you’ll just need to add user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/5.0 [en] (Windows NT 5.1; U)"); to it. Solution courtesy of a SLUG list member.

MAME 0.81u5 Released

New Games supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Brave Blade
  • Ray Story
  • Pirate Treasure

New Clones supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • NBA Maximum Hangtime v1.03
  • Leprechaun (Pacific Polytechnical license)

New Non-Working games / clones supported

  • MegaPlay: Tecmo World Cup
  • MegaPlay emulation is still incomplete
  • Vapor TRX
  • San Francisco Rush: The Rock
  • Hyperdrive

SNES on Dreamcast

Last night I burnt up a CD-R with DreamSNES, a nice Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator for the Dreamcast. Busted out some Super Mario World, R-Type III and Super Ghouls and Ghosts. Fun fun! I wasted a few blank CD-R’s in the process though. Must rememeber this forum topic over at DC Emulation for burning Dreamcast CD’s under linux.

I’m also currently got a Dreamcast VMU, Keyboard, Mouse and extra game controller on order. Now all I’ve got to find now is a Broadband Adapter and I’ll have a nice cheap web terminal for the TV room.

MAME 0.81u4 Released

New Games supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Ghostlop
  • Super Rider
  • Groove On Fight
  • Othello Shiyouyo
  • Danchi de Hanafuoda

New Clones supported or promoted from GAME_NOT_WORKING status:

  • Driving Force (Galaxian hardware, bootleg)
  • Snow Bros (set 4)

New Non-Working games / clones supported

  • Lord of Gun
  • Densya De Go (1, 1ex, 2, 2ex)
  • Side by Side (1 & 2)
  • Landing Gear