| Date (yyyymmdd) | Comment |
| 20090401 |
I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my own PC next to Vista last week. The next day I did the same thing on my friends new PC. Quite nice but not perfect. I puzzled a bit to find out how things worked. At work I have been editing a lot of XML, XSD, XSLT. Every weekday I have to get up early since last month to take my son to school. I try to teach him how to ride the bike he got for his birthday. I have to get used to the new regime and don't have a lot of energy left at the end of the day lately. |
| 20090402 |
I realized today that one of the reasons that I am tired a lot lately, is of course the fact that we switched to summertime last weekend. Last weekend was one hour shorter, and on top of that my biorithm was fucked up because of that. I am still not as good at coding XSLT as I am with SQL. This month some retro fair are coming up. No progres with starting our own club. I play the MSX1 game carfighter a lot. I got kind of addicted to it. And I even play it on the PC with an emulator. You race from San Fransisco to losAngeles to San Diego to LasVegas to Texas to Dallas. I did not get past Dallas yet so I wander what city comes after that. I am thinking about cracking the game to find out what comes after Dallas. During playing it would help somewhat if you had some kind of a map of the track. Or if you were able to look ahead a little further to see curves coming up. Of course you memorize a lot of the track, but I think it will be hard to draw an accurate map by hand. By cracking the game you should be able to construct the exact roadmap. I noticed some glitches in the game too. And some strange choices in design. My son likes the Pixar movie cars, and the cars from carfighter slightly resemble some cars from the movie. If I crack the game I could adjust all the graphics so they resemble the movie even more. But the thing with kids is, they get tired of a particular toy very quickly. Although he still likes the MSX1 computer with the game cartridge. And he did not break it yet. He has a lot of broken toys and some toys get broken the same day he gets them. I fixed a toy car for him and he broke it again almost right away and it was reasonable well mended. He gets very upset when I tell him I want to throw away some broken toys. But when I quietly hide the toys away in the shed he doesn't miss them. I don't like throwing away things anyway, but there are so many toy's and there is always new stuff coming in. Sometimes I can harvest batteries or interesting electronic parts from broken toys. Being a maker or a DIY'er is quite a religious thing for me, although I am not that good at it and I lack the time and patience. To get a little practice in electronics and soldering on the cheap, I could Circuit bend some of the broken noise making toys. I saw a video today of making all kinds of simple robots, like bristle bots. The way it was presented it didn�t look too hard. The kind of parts they were using were not that expensive but I imagine that broken toys could be a great resource for parts like that too. It is supposed to be easy to make an amplifier from an old cassette player (have lots of those). The amplifier can then be used for a cigarbox guitar or a selfmade intercom. The pratical usefullness of those kind of projects is not that big aside from getting rid of some toys. But they are fun and educational, especially if you can get the kids involved. |