Snake Year

Went up  town yesterday for Chinese New Year. Always go every year. No fan of fireworks or noise but with the bustle there and drums it's OK. 

Managed to win my money back on slots but got Jewed out of 50p by the machine so all I got back was a fiver, and had a meltdown in Sounds of The Universe. A mix of Caffeine and various things, not good. But managed to hold it together enough to get out, shame really as they were playing classic dub reggae. 

Finally have been taking a look at old posts I've done and revising them so that they now have proper paragraphs and shit. I'll leave you with a nice shot of the dragon lion.

Outlaws Silver

I'm seriously going to look into a Wordpress incarnation of this site, as blogger has become unusable over the past few months. Stuff that has proper paragraphs just get lumped into one and there is the ever present Google censorship to contend with. Doing a feminish got ratioed before they found out it wasn't that bad. Anyway. The Outlaws Silver. The 65th Hardy boys book here and its basically a trip out to the pine woods of New Jersey for the brothers, but also Chet Morton, Biff Hooper and Tony Prito. The official reason they're out there is that Frank manages to get reverse pickpocketed a little Jersey Devil figure that leads them out looking for redcoat pirate treasure. 

The other reason is that a man, convicted of a crime he didn't commit comes into his inheritance along with a pardon for what he didn't do. Of course our boys track him down and the treasure but not without some trouble. It seems that he's a doctor in those parts now, and the people round there are fond of him and protect him. Wiki has a good resume of what a Piney is here,  but for the ignorant its a local name for a Pine Barrens resident.

Because the texts from 57 to at least the late 70's are the same there are no differences, between the two stories regardless of region. But , for the sake of completeness, both UK and US texts can be found here, and here.  

Edit, seems I was  using HTML view for the past two months. Oh and really wanted to talk about the recent sentencing of Axel Rudakubanana, but realized that this wouldn't get me censured, and that I had forgotten all about it until looking at the post list. 

Gang!

Our area's been in the news, no thanks to some kid getting killed on a bus. The thing is, living round here I've never seen it so bad. I wrote a piece ages ago about how if Stephen Lawrence was alive now, he would face more problems from gangs and Africans than the far right, which seems to have collapsed here, and got an angry comment saying how. Well this is how. I'll reiterate this for you, the only other reason it made news here apart from being an abhorrent racist attack is that it someone stabbed and killed wasn't an everyday thing. And no I know Ste Lawrence wasn't the only one killed. But it wasn't 20 knife attacks a year then, there wasn't a large west African community here in the 90's (Lewisham, Brixton or Peckham was much more likely, but still more West Indian than West African,) or people wanting to run with gangs and the live and die by the sword mentality they bring. 

We had a large Indian and Pakistani community that was no trouble at all. We finally kicked out the BNP some time in the late 90's and West Africa moved in. The bingo hall became a church as did the Coronet Cinema in Woolwich (not far from where this attack took place, fact fans.) And it seems that we lost our identity along with our security. I have no solutions to these problems and if you are going to blame Islam because of the mosque I'll say it again for those at the back, we've had Muslims here for ages and have had no problems, same with the Sikhs at the gurdwara at the back of what was Gateway (now a big building project). Its Christians and fucked up gang mentality that is the cause of the problems. Maybe an eye for an eye really does make everyone blind. It certainly won't change whilst Khan is in charge.

Frontiers

One of the joys of the Xbonio system is finding that stuff your old PC wasn't powerful for is now doable. And that is Elite: Dangerous. Did my first mining run today thanks to working out where the limpet drones are held. Advanced maintenance on stardocks, if you want 'em, they're about 100 CR each. And with fuel scoop and a basic refinery was able to harvest some silver and praseodymium Pro tip: get a better refinery set up. Otherwise you'll be seeing resources unallocated a lot, meaning you'll have to empty it, manually. 

I know there are guides out there which'll have you mining platinum and stuff, but its also fun just to rock up to a place with a hold full of limpets and see what you can blast out. Maybe take out a few pirates for combat practice, but they'll leave you alone if you holding nowt. Which leads me to this thought. 

Programmer Dave Lowe's music disks and programs that he worked on are being digitised on Archive.org which includes Frontier the predecessor of Elite: Dangerous. It struck me, looking at this how a 3DS port of this would be the ultimate version of this. 

Of course it would have touch screen inputs for the space station parts and revised combat so you don't have to do autopilot chicken with ships just to get a few hits in. But, as the New 3ds has dual analogue sticks you could use this for pitch and yaw along with shoulder buttons for thrusters. I know they used FFWD style controls to skip time. A predecessor of the Frame Shift Device in Dangerous, but the 3DS has enough buttons to make it halfway between Frontier and Dangerous. 

Finally, the only reason this is on 3DS is because you can view it in 3d thanks to the slider. I never put it on myself, but I can imagine this being quite cool. I'm pretty sure that due the 3DS being a weak follow up to the DS and coming at an awkward time in the industry, coupled with the fact that Frontier Developments still are a smallish company, that it was never considered. But I wouldn't mind seeing this as homebrew, nonetheless.

Edit. Now running a Cobra MKIII, decentish hold, and managed to find a place to mine Palladium like in the tutorial. Go for dinner, find out I'm being targeted by pirates and get killed. Respawn in Alpha somewhere and now have a barebones ship and no docking. But finally manage to land manually. Life can be a bitch sometimes.

XBOX Live! and Direct.

We now have an Xbox one and a new PC. Though if honest we've had the XBOX base unit for ages. We were looking for something on Begay (eBay) and saw a listing for a cheap Xbox One PSU. Coupled with Argos doing cheap wired pads and we now have a working XBOX One unit. 

If we're honest though it feels a lot like Windows XP era computing, everything that can run from disk needs a massive update to play and that eats into the finite amount of space on disk. Just grateful it runs stuff from disk still. 

 The computer I have from 2016 has finally succumbed to its many cuts. We lost trackpad support a year in, CDROM support a good few years later, along with patchy Wifi despite me being right next to the router. The final straw is losing all audio support. So we're now £550 poorer but now am back to a desktop. 

A lot has changed in the PC market since them, it seems I've got less for my cash. Everything is running from SSD now at either 256 or 512 GB. Where I had a 2tb rust spinner on the old set up. Memory seems to be set at 8gb with few going over into 16GB. I know processors are faster now but Windows 11 feels like a retard version of MacOS. No I don't want copilot or to set up a Windows Hello key. I certainly don't want bastard Cortana or half my tool bar to just be a weather app that when clicked on displays local news. I have a phone that does that, and better. 

Finally there doesn't seem to be much CFW / hacking activity going on with the XBonio or one. The Original XBOX was the goat for this and with some soldering knowledge you could do 360. Personally I'd love to decouple this from the M$ eco system. Let it run a version of Firefox instead of Edge. Let it get Foobar2000 instead of windows Media player. And most of all from the XP era let it get no CD cracks, so you can install it from disk to HD to run it.