Tag Archives: irishblogs

Raiden, it’s not quite the same on Android..

I pumped insane numbers of 10p coins into the Raiden arcade machine twenty years ago. Over the years I’ve played the dire PC conversion in the late 90’s (argh, it used midi music) and played the arcade version a few times in MAME but the Android version holds up well against the arcade original. It’s a bunch of fun too and it’s part of the Humble Bundle now!

Oh yeah, it’s not quite the same on an Android device. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper and possibly easier. There’s no way I could move the ship around as quickly as I could by dragging a finger across the screen. Great stuff!

Cyanogenmod 10.1: the Jelly Bean update for my Samsung Galaxy S II

cyanogenmod

I’ve had a Samsung Galaxy S II since around August 2011, and while the S3 has of course tempted me the cost of the device and/or monthly commitment was too much. I’m hoping that the release of the S4 will see a price cut in the older phone! I also feel the SGS2 is a “good enough” phone for most of the things I want it to do so there was that too.

Meanwhile my S2 has been rooted for a long time but I was running an old version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich. There’s supposed to be a galaxy s ii Jelly Bean update sooner or later but because of all the tinkering I’ve done to my phone any previous OTA update always fails. Meanwhile, installing Cyanogenmod 10.1 was almost as easy as following the instructions here.

The hardest bit was getting an updated ClockworkMod Recovery on there. In Windows, Heimdall refused to see the phone, or reported an error, “libusb error: -12” or “failed to initialize protocol” even after running the included zadiag.exe. I tried it in Linux too but had similar problems until in frustration I disconnected the phone and put the Macbook to sleep. When I tried it again 5 minutes later it worked and squirted a new CWM down into my phone!

With that in place my phone wouldn’t boot, if I didn’t go into Recovery mode it just showed a black screen. No matter as I had everything backed up with Carbon backup. I removed the SD card and copied the latest nightly firmware and gapps on there. Booted into Recovery, factory reset, flashed those zip files, did a dalvik clear just in case and rebooted into Jelly Bean, Android 4.2.2! Once I logged into Google it started downloading all my apps again and with Carbon I was able to restore the settings of all my apps.

Photosphere isn’t included in this rom but I found it here in a flashable zip. Here’s what it looks like when I used it on Patrick’s Street, Cork today. iOS has a similar functionality I guess as I’ve seen a few colleagues from working waving their iPhones around while at meetups! The camera on the SGS2 is frankly rubbish but Pixlr Express does a good job of making photos look a lot better.

How does it perform? Very well for the most part.

  • I noticed that if I tether my Nexus 7 with a wifi hotspot then I will sometimes have to bring up an Internet app on the phone to wake up the 3G connection.
  • I noticed two Maps processes going a bit loopy when GPS was disabled and I had launched Ingress. GPS is disabled now and the phone is fine. Odd.
  • As a result of restoring settings from Carbon backup, Greenify had a list of apps to hibernate but because I hadn’t run it interactively then it hadn’t been granted superuser privileges. My phone got really hot as I guess the app was trying to hibernate the Facebook app repeatedly. TouchPal kept closing too but clearing the cache fixed it. Those aren’t Android problems, just a side effect of the restore process and insufficient error trapping in the apps. I’ll contact the authors about those (admittedly obscure) issues.
  • Sometimes there’s an odd slowdown in the UI. Ingress was dog slow for about 30 seconds but then it righted itself and it’s definitely faster than ICS.

I love Google Now! I wish the monthly activity card displayed in Km instead of miles. I like the new mini settings but wish that GPS was there to save me having the Power widget on a secondary homescreen. Photosphere is pretty cool. I wish Chrome had browser extensions so that Lastpass could build support for it. I haven’t yet noticed any huge difference in battery consumption. I don’t care if the FM radio doesn’t work, I never used it. Podkicker and Tunein Radio take care of any audio. The Apollo music player is nice, but doesn’t play very nicely with MP3s that don’t have tags. I had to fix some rips I made recently of CDs as they were coming up as from Unknown Artist, even though the files were in artist/album directories. All the other MP3 players I tried did the same however.

CM 10.1 has an auto update feature that John reminded me of. I haven’t enabled it yet though. I need to do more research and find out how it works and whether it will clobber my app settings and data.

If you have an SGS2 you should definitely give Cyanogenmod 10.1 a spin. I remember the first time I upgraded my original SGS to CM7 and the problems it had with camera support but I didn’t have any similar problems this time. CM10.1 will give it a whole new lease of life!

Michael’s Rebel Control Field

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longest-field I think Michael Collins would have been liked to see this. An Ingress Resistance control field all the way from his memorial statue in Clonakilty to two portals next to Blarney Castle.
It’s certainly the longest control field I’ve ever created, probably stretching 40-50km. Unfortunately it’s thin as the Blarney portals are fairly close to each other and I don’t have a key for the portal in Clonakilty so it’ll disappear in about a week.

Ingress has a really high attrition rate. Unless there are portals within walking distance of you (or you have loads of spare time) it’s a chore getting to them to hack or capture them. I’ve seen several Resistance players who were initially keen on the game suddenly disappear, never to be heard from again. Thankfully the Enlightened have two French lads who are really into the game so there are always loads of portals for me and a few others to attack. Now if only I had the time thing sorted out ..

Oooh, looks like I have an invite to hand out!

Extortion by Email Spam

Spammers are getting desperate. I received the following email a few days ago, which somehow got through Gmail’s spam filter:

From: “germes”
To: “donncha” <.....>
Subject: RE: Hello
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:37:20 +0000

Hello You received this message because this is an email list for mass mailings. We analyze the list and remove a lot of email. pay you $ 2 or 2 euro, and we will remove it from the list of spam Email newsletters.

webMoney purse
Z180596051821
E943924283321

I presume they meant to say that I pay them to remove my email address from their mailing list rather than the other way around!

3 months free Backblaze cloud backup!

Argh, I just handed over $95 for 2 years worth of Backblaze cloud backup and now they’re offering 3 months free if you sign up through this link before March 31st! It’s to celebrate World Backup Day, something I’m all in favour of since backups saved the day in 2008 when an external drive died on me.

BTW, both those Backblaze links are affiliate links but I’m a happy customer and I’m currently backing up over 700GB of data to the cloud. 681GB of that is 13 years worth of photos! My upstream bandwidth is horrendous but I still managed to upload 50GB over the last 20 days. At this rate it’ll be a few months before everything is uploaded but the backup hasn’t really impacted on my day-to-day work. Websites and videos still download and display promptly which surprised me. Uploading anything from here usually makes everything else crawl. I told the backup client I wanted faster backups too!

backblaze-performance

It’s not all sunshine and roses though. The client has an exclusion list of directories so it’s easy to exclude directories you don’t want backed up. Sensibly, it doesn’t backup “Program Files” or other system directories by default. However, I’d rather have an include list because on this machine I really only care about my photos, some documents and my Thunderbird mail directory and I know where they live. It’s a small quibble and probably one I’ll soon forgive when my machine goes belly up and I’m desperately looking for a secure cert or the settings for some obscure program!

Backblaze Pod

Curious about where your data lives when it’s in the cloud? That’s a Backblaze Pod there, and it has a raw capacity of 135TB but this post goes into a lot of detail about it and how it’s made. This slightly tongue in cheek post then explains why you don’t want to do this at home!

So that's where all my photos are going
So that’s where all my photos are going

Further on the subject of backups, you should really listen to this episode of The Naked Scientists podcast. This interview with Leo Enticknap, University of Leeds deals with backups but also file formats that scares me. I hope the Canon CR2 raw format is durable enough that it can be read in a few decades, or I may consider converting those files to DNG (which is probably just as likely to be unreadable in the far future TBH).

Try Backblaze, they have a 15 day free trial (or if you’re reading this before March 31st, use this link to get 3 months free) where you can upload data and perform restores to see how well it works. It’s a reasonable price for peace of mind and convenience. My photo archive currently resides in 3 drives on 2 separate computers (using rsync, Samba, Synkron and cronjobs to sync daily) and that won’t change but having an offsite backup like this gives me some confidence in case some local disaster should happen!

So, sorry for the affiliate links but Backblaze is a great service and I hope I’ve made you at least consider duplicating your important files somewhere before it’s too late.

KSP: docked with Blarney Space Station

Wow, Kerbal Space Program can really test your stamina. I finally docked a crew quarters with my space station this evening. It almost broke my heart and resolve to play this game but after taking a break from it I tried again. After a number of manual test launches I reluctantly enabled the “ascent autopilot” because my rockets were blowing up so often it was getting tiresome. I eventually went overboard and used 4 mainsail rockets and the huge orange fuel tanks. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked!

On "final" approach. I had to repeat this several times to line up.
On “final” approach. I had to repeat this several times to line up.
Crew quarters and 3 Kerbals docked with the space station. Note the illumination lighting up the station.
Crew quarters and 3 Kerbals docked with the space station. Note the illumination lighting up the station.
I messed up when I built the station. There's a docking bay at the end but it's turned the wrong way. Argh!
I messed up when I built the station. There’s a docking bay at the end but it’s turned the wrong way. Argh!

Kerbal Space Program is at times (most of the time) a frustrating and difficult game to play but also has these (too infrequent) joyous moments when something goes right. It took more than a dozen attempts to launch the crew quarters and monopropelent into space and when I finally managed to dock I had a tiny amount of the fuel left. Scott Manley makes it look way too easy!

Scott has some great tutorials but AddMeGamers has some very good ones too that are worth checking out too. Be sure to check out r/kerbalspaceprogram on Reddit as there’s an influx of new players and plenty of help given.

The game recently became available on Steam and it immediately jumped into the top 10 best sellers so I guess there are lots of people sharing my frustration. Great game however, I definitely recommend it!

Huge 6.5GB of C64 demos, games, music and stuff on archive.org

Well, this is quite amazing. Jason Scott is archiving all the programs found on The Old School Emulation Center on archive.org.

That means there is now a gigantic collection of retro computing history on archive.org. There’s lots of stuff from the C64 to the Speccy, from the Apple Lisa to the TRS 80 there. I’m bowled over by the huge Commodore 64 collection and even found some tunes ex-Ozone member Merman created in the late 90’s. None of our demos there yet though.

One name that caught my eye was Derbyshire Ram, a swapper/cracker I have a vague recollection of. He died a few years ago but others put his huge disc collection online. I wonder if I should do the same with mine? My collection is much smaller and I think I’ll need to check any notes for personal messages but someone might find it interesting. I’m not the only one either.

Go have a look, you may find something you remember from your childhood!

Steam Games over USB 2.0 is painful

450GB of games Somehow I have over 450GB of games installed. I went a little mad installing them when I bought this PC last year but now that I need the space I don’t really want to download them again. Luckily I have a number of external USB drives so I started copying games over yesterday evening.

Out of curiosity I used Steam Mover to copy and symlink the games back to the C: as I wondered how well games would play over and old USB 2.0. It didn’t work well. It was very painful. Assassin’s Creed wouldn’t even load but crashed on the Ubisoft logo. Arkham Asylum loaded but the graphics of the main menu moved like molasses. I think I’ll use Steam’s backup system to make archived copies of the games as that will compress the files too saving a bit more space.

External drives are simply enclosures with real disks in them so I opened up one of my external drives to see if I could hook it directly to my PC internally but the disk in it is using a different interface to the one in my PC. The last time I went diving into a PC was when IDE was the standard and SATA was only just becoming mainstream!

144KB seemed so big back then

So, I’m going to backup games to the drive instead of copying them. I’ll also dump another copy of my photos there too as I started using Backblaze (aff) to do remote backups. It may take some time to squirt 681GB of data into the cloud though. Eventually I’ll have to buy a second drive for my PC but that’s something I’ll look at in the future.

Paddy’s Day through Google Glass

A stereotypical St Patrick’s Day through Google Glass. Call the day Patty’s Day in Ireland and someone will ask you if you want fries and a drink with that burger. It’s Paddy, not Patty!

Aren’t national stereotypes wonderful?

What the video completely fails to show is the bustling crowds, children on their father’s shoulders watching the parades, food stalls, hawkers selling memorabilia and the crush and stress and the “Oy, stop pushing there!” and getting home exhausted. 🙂

Logical Insanity in World War II

I started listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History recently and I’m now on episode 42 dealing with the morality of dropping the atomic bombs in World War II.

If you’re at all upset by graphic descriptions of war you don’t want to listen to this or read the following which Dan quoted in the episode.

The heart of the firestorm area; a picture taken by the Germans soon after the attack. The buried vehicles are gutted firetrucks that had to be abandoned because of the heat.
The heart of the firestorm area; a picture taken by the Germans soon after the attack. The buried vehicles are gutted firetrucks that had to be abandoned because of the heat. (source)

The rain of large sparks, blowing down the street, were each as large as a five-mark piece. I struggled to run against the wind but could only reach a house on the corner of the Sorbenstrasse . . . .[We] couldn’t go on across the Eiffestrasse because the asphalt road had melted. There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck in the asphalt. They must have rushed onto the roadway without thinking. Their feet had got stuck and then they had put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.

Kate Hoffmeister, then nineteen, on the firestorm in Hamburg in 1943 (source)

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