Happy new year! May 2009 be even better than 2008!
PS. I shot this with my Canon 50mm 1.8 and it kicks the ass of the same image I shot with my Sigma 18-200 zoom (not surprisingly). Donations for “Donncha’s fund to buy L series lenses” should be sent to ..
VirtualC64 is a new Commodore 64 emulator for Mac OS X. It’s a promising project, let down by the fact that it’s still in beta but by the looks of things development is moving at a steady pace.
When you first run the emulator it will ask you for C64 roms: basic, kernal, chargen and vc1541. Ironically, you can find all these roms inside Vice, another C64 emulator. Look in /Applications/VICE.app/Contents/Resources/ROM/. The 1541 ROM is DRIVES/dos1541.
Loading a game or demo is as easy as dragging the d64 or t64 image into VirtualC64. When you do you’ll see a dialog like this.
“Flash file into memory” works great for single load programmes but multiload could be a problem. I tried Armalyte. Mounting the d64 as a disk didn’t work. I couldn’t type anything. Loading the first file on the disk by flashing it brought up the crack intro but failed to load. The neat integrated debugger (click “Inspect”) showed the emulator had died doing jsr $2020 and unfortunately at 2020 was another jsr … ($20 is the character code for a space if memory serves, and the machine code for jsr was $20, so memory was full of spaces!)
Blue Max worked much better, as did a 3D Pool game I tried. the crack by Remember included the documentation and again using the debugger I watched as the programme checked for the various key presses. Geeky I know but it brought a smile of recognition to my lips. Here’s that debugger in all it’s glory. Anyone familiar with the C64 should recognise the code beginning at 1AA0. (I had to look up what D016 does. It’s the screen mode. I had completely forgotten. It’s only been 16 years.)
One thing it has going for it over Vice, is a real fullscreen mode. The current version of Vice uses some dodgy resolution changing in Linux (that I rarely got to work properly without screwing up my desktop) and I couldn’t get to work in Mac OS X at all. Fire this baby up in fullscreen mode and you’ve got your very own C64 laptop! Cool or what eh?
As luck would have it VirtualC64 has blown a fuse just as I finish this post. If you have a usb joystick plugged in and activated in port 2 it does strange things. First the keyboard wouldn’t work, and flashing a file didn’t run it automatically. Then the keyboard sort of worked but the left arrow character appeared for most key presses. Odd stuff. Unplugging the joystick and restarting the emulator fixed that problem.
Even my Bits ‘n’ Bobs demo worked in it! (Bah, all my screenshots failed. They only show white. I wonder if the emulator does strange things to the Mac while emulating mixed video modes? I mixed character and video modes in the screens I tried to capture, ah well.)
VirtualC64 is a very promising C64 emulator, and it’s GPL too! I’ll certainly be keeping an interested eye on it, and I wish Dirk and the other project members the best of luck with it.
I’ll always remember Christmas Day 1998. Ten years ago on the night of Christmas Eve we returned from the Regional Hospital without our mother and my father without his wife.
I was in Kerry 2 weeks before when my father rang with the news my mother had collapsed. A massive aneurysm in her brain had burst. She spent the next 15 days in hospital, sometimes awake and able to talk, but most of the time drowsy or asleep. The day before Christmas Eve she suffered another hemorrhage. An emergency operation was carried out to insert a stint in the blood vessel and stop the bleeding but unfortunately the operation was not a success and the stint failed. Machines whirred and beeped by her bedside. She had aged so much overnight. We all said our final goodbyes.
The last conversation I remember having with her was telling her that we had decided on the Christmas gift we were going to get her. Despite her drowsy questioning I didn’t tell her, because it would be a surprise for when she came home. I hold on to that memory of sitting by her bedside. I don’t want to forget it.
We’ll visit her grave later today. Today is a sad day for my family and I but it’s also a celebration and a chance for my family to get together. We have so much to be thankful for. I know my mother would have adored Adam. Have a great day today!
The world is in recession, and it’s even affected Cork. The city was busy but it’s been much busier in previous years. Every second shop had a “Closing Down sale” or “50% off sale” sign. Usually you have to wait until the January sales. It’s great that prices are down, but depressing what it means for the economy. I heard that many stores on North Main Street have already closed their doors.
Construction work still continues in the center of the city though. I bet the developers of those sites are not looking forward to the job of selling floor space to retailers. The Elysian, tallest building in the country, is practically empty since it was opened officially a few months ago.
Besides the maddening crowds, collectors for Share and other charities were out in force. At least that’s one thing that hasn’t changed. The streets were packed with people, but the queues in the shops weren’t that long.
Bully’s on Paul Street was excellent as usual. Their ground floor tables were all taken but they have a first floor restaurant I never knew existed! We got a nice table away from everyone, it was a nice reprieve from the crowds and sounds outside. Their Bully Burger is well worth sampling too. Yum!
Continue reading “Recession in Cork”
This blew me away the first time I heard it. The title tune of classic C64 game Wizball recreated by Reyn Ouwehand. You could watch the embedded movie, but for the full stereo HD experience take a look at the high quality version on Youtube. Reyn explains why he did it:
I also play this track in my C64 live-set but then I got some beats and the arpeggios coming out of Ableton Live. During the live show I couldn’t get Ableton to work and it kept on crashing on me and then Leoni challenged me to do it acoustically without the computer. And so I did….
Truth be told I never got too far in Wizball. It’s a strange shoot-em-up that has many fans and I’m strangely intrigued by it.
There’s even a remake of Wizball for the Mac and Windows. I’ve played it on the Mac and it’s brilliant. The title tune (by Infamous is spot on, graphics are stunning, and gameplay is as I remember it. Very odd and just a bit frustrating and hard.
You can read more about Wizball here or even download the original game on the Commodore 64 too.
Thank you Walter for my Santa hat! Walter has created a simple Pixenate app that adds a Santa hat to your Twitter avatar. Check out some of the other Christmas Avatars!
As my Gravatar is used anywhere I comment, I updated that too. It’s been a while since I updated it, and it’s nice to see it’s as simple to update as before. It even stores my old Gravatar so it’ll be simple to change back at the end of the month.
A nice demo of the capabilities of Pixenate, good job Walter!
A few weeks ago I blogged about my backup system. How I have two 1TB Iomega external drives and how one drive is a duplicate of everything on the other drive, and how I backup everything on my laptop and VPS accounts. It sometimes seem excessive but I’m paranoid.
This morning I’m very glad I went to such lengths. I wanted to copy some stuff onto my Macbook, and there’s nothing like the bandwidth available from a directly connected disk. I unmounted my drive, at least I tried. Something was keeping it mounted. Instead of following my own advice and checking what program was keeping the drive busy, I used “umount -l” instead. Turns out it was Rhythmbox, but I didn’t realise that until later.
Anyway, I disconnected the usb cable, plugged in the one connected to the Macbook (BTW – Ext2 for Mac OS X is useful for reading ext2/ext3 filesystems) and kaboom. The light on the external drive went out. Oh oh.
Long story short, the drive refused to mount again on the Linux box for several minutes. Eventually it did, but with errors. I’m running fsck.ext3 on it but it’s giving me tons of errors and won’t run automatically. I need to buy another drive this morning.
So what’s lost? My 8 years of photos? All the family videos shot over the last 2 years? My mp3 collection? Nope. They’re all backed up. Murphy’s Law states that if something can go wrong, it will. This was the worst time ever for a drive to fail as I had just reinstalled the operating system, and my backup system wasn’t running properly yet. Thankfully nothing irreplaceable was moved onto the broken drive in that narrow window of time when things weren’t being backed up.
I now want to get that new drive installed before the second goes belly up! Paranoid? You betcha!
If you use ssh a lot, you may have noticed that your ssh session times out and you’re logged out every once in a while. Annoying isn’t it?
Read from remote host ocaoimh.ie: Connection reset by peer
Connection to ocaoimh.ie closed.
There’s a quick fix for that. Actually, there are 2 ways to fix it. You only need to do one of them so choose whichever one is easiest for you. You’ll need root access, so for most people it’s probably safer to do the client fix rather than the server fix.
ClientAliveInterval 60
According to man sshd_config, this line,
Sets a timeout interval in seconds after which if no data has been received from the client, sshd(8) will send a message through the encrypted channel to request a response from the client. The default is 0, indicating that these messages will not be sent to the client. This option applies to protocol version 2 only.
Don’t forget to restart sshd on the server after you save the file.
ServerAliveInterval 60
That will send send a message to the server every 60 seconds, keeping the connection open. I prefer this way because I login to several machines every day, and I don’t have root access to all of them.
I knew I had blogged about ssh timeout problems before, but I hadn’t mentioned the client fix so it’s worth a revisit!
I suppose you could say I’m a long time Debian/Ubuntu Linux user, but the recent upgrade to 8.10 completely messed up my desktop machine.
aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound fixed that, but from time to time sound would break and I’d have to killall -9 pulseaudio;pulseaudio -D to get it working again.I tried recreating my user account in case that helped. It didn’t. The only way to fix my broken Ubuntu 8.10 was to reinstall from scratch. After backing everything up onto one of my external drives the install couldn’t have been easier.
So, now? Any problems? ‘Fraid so.
$ xinput list
See which device number the Xbox controller has…
$ xinput set-int-prop THATDEVICENUMBER ‘Device Enabled’ 32 0
I’ll probably have to add that to the Gnome Session so it’s permanent.
Backuppc is reinstalled and configured. It now has nice RRD graphs! I’m also blown away by the folder sharing in Nautilus. This might have been available in 8.04 but I never noticed. Sharing folders via SMB has never been so easy!
I haven’t reinstalled everything I need yet, but I’m happy that my desktop is working again.
So, I enter my 33rd year on this planet. Highlight of the day was our lunch in the Castle Hotel in Blarney where Adam was on his best behaviour and I was surprised with an apple pie and a rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung by my wife and 2 of the staff!
The burger I had for lunch was delicious too. Yum.