Jay McGavren's Journal

2004-12-31

Been playing around with my GBA Movie Player, which I got not to play movies, but to emulate NES games. I picked up a 512MB Compact Flash card ($50 minus a $30 Fry’s Electronics gift certificate from Diana’s folks) and a USB card reader, put some ROMs onto it (even with all my favorites, it only takes 10% of the space), and found that 75% of them didn’t work.

It was only then that I learned of the limitation that the player could only handle ROMs up to 200K in size, which rules out almost any NES game made after 1989. Fortunately, I discovered that someone had written a special utility to compress ROMs, and had rewritten the PocketNES emulator to work with the special format. Voila - almost everything works perfectly now.

That gives me several dozen classic games on a single cartridge, and still leaves about 450 MB to use with the MP3 playback function. Now if only I’d had this during my flight to Omaha a couple weeks ago…

Read more...
2004-12-27

Flickr searches by photo tag...

Flickr is a service that lets you upload photos to share with the world. You can also browse other peoples’ albums. http://www.flickr.com/

Photos can have “tags” associated with them, which are like keywords denoting their subject. This lets you view everyone’s photos by topic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/

I’ve found that these tags tend to have the best-quality photos associated with them: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sunset/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/nature/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/architecture/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/autumn/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flowers/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/macro/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/reflection/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/trees/

Here’s the URL of an RSS feed that combines all these tags (thumbnails will be embedded in the summaries): http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=sunset,nature,architecture,autumn,flowers,macro,reflection,trees&format=rss_200

Read more...
2004-12-25

We just finished a frenzied gift opening session...

Lenny got more toys than he knows what to do with (the Bob the Builder ones are his favorites). We’ll probably store some and break them out bit by bit over the year.

Diana, unfortunately, found her Tivo early (when Amazon shipped it in its original box), but she’s out there playing with it even now. She also likes her Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, which we’ll play together later.

We’re also going to play Judy in a game of Scrabble on the new board we bought her.

Diana REALLY spoiled me: a Game Boy Advance SP with 3 games (one from Judy), a new watch to replace the one I gave Glen (since it didn’t fit anymore thanks to my weight gains), and a new monitor for my PC (my old one needed to be smacked occasionally to bring it back to full brightness).

Read more...
2004-12-16

By way of showcasing Yahoo!'s new video search...

…I give you - karate monkey!

http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=monkey+karate

Read more...
2004-12-16

Here’s a sampling of the terminology used in Chapter 1 of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style:

appositive posessive singular pronominal posessive indefinite pronoun parenthetic expression nonrestrictive relative clause restrictive term of identification

The chapter’s titled “Elementary Rules of Usage”. No wonder people are daunted by language studies…

Read more...