Went to a local bakers a couple of doors up from Greggs today. Very good sausage rolls, but the lady called me "love" instead of "duck". I sometimes wonder what the East Midlands is coming to
Happy invoicing!
- Donkey Kong Pauline Edition: Arcade Version - Another brilliant example of how to hack an old arcade game. This one was inspired by Mike Mika, who modified the NES version of Donkey Kong to make the princess the heroine, rescuing Mario for the benefit of his 3 year old daughter. Doing the same thing for the original arcade ROM involves loads of hacking, so the article explains a selection of useful tools for hacking old arcade ROMs that can then run under MAME: "The colors of the gifts were still set to the whites and pinks of Pauline's presents. Luigi would probably make fun of Mario for using a pink wrench, so more time with the debugger and disassembler unearthed a table at 0x3E54 which was copied to sprite memory through DMA (Direct Memory Access) that included the gift shapes and colors. Three more changes were made to set Mario's new gifts to more appropriate color schemes... Further play testing revealed that the colors would revert to their pink/white combinations on the 'springs' stage of the game. So more debugging dug up another table at 0x3E48 which was similarly patched to the earlier one making the colors more "suitable"."
- Bones of Contention - "Along one wall, behind ropes, loomed the skeleton of a Tarbosaurus bataar. T. bataar, as it is known, was a Tyrannosaurus rex cousin that lived some seventy million years ago, in what is now the Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia... The auctioneer announced, “The sale of this next lot will be contingent upon a satisfactory resolution of a court proceeding.”" And so begins a long, involved legal battle over the provenance of the fossil. A mate of mine (well, he lives abroad now, so I may never see him again) is one of the world's top fossil preparers, and has made himself very well off by it; the business, involving smuggling, bribery, and unusual methods of making payments for goods, is Byzantine to say the least.
- Rule Britannia: Empire on Trial - Detailed look at the legalities surrounding the case against the British government brought by those tortured during the Mau Mau uprisings; it includes some interesting details about the secret cache of colonial files eventually discovered by their lawyers: "About 10 years ago, Anderson says, while plodding through colonial papers in Nairobi, he discovered that “there were missing blocks of files.” Moreover, there was a pattern in the omissions... Last year, lawyers for the claimants hit the jackpot, uncovering a massive cache of secret documents at a high-security government building at Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire. The so-called “migrated archives” contain 8,800 FCO files—1.5 tons, or 200 yards deep, of paper."
- URLs are for People, not Computers - A good explanation of why URL construction is an important part of building things on the web, and how big players seem to almost invariably get it horribly wrong: "Let’s take the amazon page selling the mirra chair as an example. The URL seems written by someone rolling their head on the keyboard: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002K11BK/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1348439859&s=home-garden&sr=1-5. Now compare that with http://example.org/furniture/desk-chairs/herman-millers-mirra-chair."
- A Most Dangerous Method - "Early in his career therapist Alan Jacobs admired the ideas of Transactional Analysis guru Jacqui Lee Schiff. In the years since, he's come to see in her extreme practices echoes of the authoritarianism that created the Third Reich." A dodgy therapist in California? Surely not
- Change Computer History Forever: Well, Here We Are — April 13, 2013 - Jason Scott sums up what he's achieved so far in his role creating the software archives at the Internet Archive, and how you can help: "Through these terabytes (!) of software, the whole of the software landscape of the last 50 years is settling in. But since software is just that, programs and materials, it’s best to have some documentation and writing regarding it as well."
- What you need to know about buying a 3D printer - "So you’ve decided that you want a home/desktop 3D printer. But like the early days of personal computers, there’s been an explosion of different 3D printers out on the market. There’s about 120 different desktop 3D printers available in 2013. Until the market decides on clear winners, there will be more to come." A useful buying guide for those wanting the Epson FX-80 of the modern age.
- The King Of The Ferret Leggers: The Classic Tale Of Sportsmen Who Put Carnivores Down Their Pants - Great article about putting ferrets down one's trousers: "Reg's stiff mustache arched toward the ceiling above a sly grin. "You really want to know what they get up to down there, eh?" Reg said, looking for all the world like some working man's Long John Silver. "Well, take a good look." Then Reg Mellor let his trousers fall around his ankles."
- Free Sound Improving Techniques - One for the audiophiles who find their gold-plated cables just aren't enough of a waste of time and money: "If you have a vase of flowers or a pot in a plant pot in the listening room, stand the vase or the plant pot on a plain piece of BLUE paper. Listen to some music for a short time, then remove the piece of Blue paper and see if you can listen to the same music with the same pleasure - without the piece of Blue paper in position !!" This chap is apparently completely serious, and his site offers a variety of expensive and, shall we say, "unorthodox" approaches to getting the best out of your stereo
- Googly Eyes on Books - and why not?
Happy invoicing!
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