EricBall

Hmm... I think I had the Mattel Football (I seem to remember at the time there were two common LED football games and I had the cheaper one). One Christmas I also got Defender which did a decent job of reproducing the arcade game. And later I got (bought?) Q-Bert, another arcade game. Great stuff in the days.

Roughly based on: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/03/weekend-project-pinhole-panoramic-c.html The design point is to make a 120 roll film cyclindrical panorama camera. My original idea was to make one with a 90 degree vertical field of view & 135 degree horizontal FoV, with the idea that a full 360 degrees would be covered in 3 shots. But then I got to thinking about adding a zenith shot (which would be easy if the depth of the camera was half the height), so up'd it to 105 degrees vertical FoV. However, then I read a post which mentioned that the effective F-number of a wide angle pinhole camera falls off at the edges due to the greater distance from the pinhole. D'oh! 1/cos(105/2) = 1.62, which is almost 1.5 f-stops. Thus I decided to go back to just 90 degrees vertical FoV (1 f-stop) and not worry about the zenith. From a design standpoint, unlike the Make camera, I decided to make the body interior the same height as the spool (65.5mm). The film guide then is pair of 5mm thick 28mm radius semicircles glued to the top and bottom. Roller pins at the front guide the film from the spools around the guides. Tension on the spools holds the film against the guide. pinhole.zip - updated, with plans for whole camera The lens is a laser cut pinhole 0.2 mm in diameter (aka 200 micron), in as thin of a material as possible. (Turns out the laser cut pinhole would be $30. So I'll start with making my own in some aluminum foil. The result is a 56mm x 88mm frame covering the full 180 degrees (well, less than that due to both the guide pins and pinhole material thickness/fringing). Update - should be ~165 degrees. Assuming 5mm material the camera dimensions should be 120mm x 80mm x 40mm, or 4.7" x 3.2" x 1.6", which seems very, very small. Update: 137.5mm x 45mm x 78mm according to current plans. ToDos: 1. Determine possible 5mm construction materials. Done - black on black foam core board, 5mm thick (perfect), and $10 for the sheet. 2. Get a couple of 120 film spools, find out who sells & develops 120 film. Done - Was tipped off about a local camera show and picked up 3 rolls of color negative for $3 and 5 rolls of color slide (aka "reversal") for $10 (expired, but good enough for what I want to do). I've unrolled one of the rolls so I now have an empty spool. 3. Work out the miscellaneous hardware - guide pins, spool pins & winders. Update: pencils (dia 7mm) for guide pins, PC screws for spool pins, bent wire for winders. 4. Pinhole & viewing window. Update: aluminum foil for pinhole, exposed negative for viewing window.

I haven't seen the 3DS yet. I problem will get it, but not until there are some must-buy games which will justify spending $250 on it.On thing with 3D TV, in addition to lack of content, is the lack of a broadcast standard. Blu-ray, cable & satellite will all be delivered via HDMI, which includes 3D formats as part of the standard (Great unless you were one of the super-early adopters with a DLP checkerboard display.), so that should be mostly future-proof. But if one of the broadcast networks want's to show a movie in 3D, they will lose their 2D audience 'cause there's no standard for 2D+3D broadcasts.

The Complaint has been Amended and Groklaw has converted it to text and commented on it. One item in the amended complaint I disagree with is "the utilization of Linux (OtherOS) did not make the PS3 less secure." Although OtherOS was not directly used for piracy, it provided an alternate method to access the console which could be used to find exploits in the base firmware and GameOS. Hmm... but, to a certain extent, the vulnerability was a self-inflicted self-fulfilling prophecy. As has been determined, there were holes in the PS3 security architecture. OtherOS just made it easier to create tools to find them.

About a dozen years ago I (with the bank's assistance) bought a house. The bank was so gracious for my business they gave me a computer, or rather a gift certificate for the IBM PC Store for an amount equal to their bargain basement Aptiva Isparati. The computer was a dog (Citrix MediaGX processor) but it was marginally better than the 486DX2-66 I had. (And I knew the computer was a dog when I bought it, but as it was effectively free I didn't complain. However, I didn't throw good money after bad and buy any of the other dogs at the IBM PC Store.) It was also early on in the days of Win98 so I initially installed Win95 and later upgraded to Win98. Anyway, somewhere around that time I also bought an IBM Ideascan 2000 flatbed scanner. IIRC it was a decent enough scanner (I was also working for IBM at the time, so might have gotten a discount). That is until I upgraded my PC and went to XP. The scanner wasn't broken, but without drivers it was a doorstop. (Not that you could use it as a doorstop as it didn't weigh much.) IBM had no interest in providing XP drivers, no money in doing so as they weren't selling that model (or anything else in home computers) anymore. Fortunately, it turned out the scanner was a rebranded OEM model, so with a lot of digging and a little coaxing, I found a set of XP drivers which would work with the scanner. Sure I lost the use of the "one touch scan" buttons, and the software included with the scanner (which I never used anyways), but the scanner still worked. (At least when it didn't forget to turn on the CCFL.) All was good until I upgraded my PC and went to Windows 7. Again the lack of drivers turned the scanner into a paperweight. This time the OEM didn't have new drivers. Nor did VueScan support it. I did manage to track down some Linux drivers, but they aren't up to date. So over the weekend I bought a new Epson Perfection V330 scanner. Not because the Ideascan died, but because it was the victim of collateral obsolescence - not supported by current software.

I'd also love to have an A2 or a 512K Mac, 'cause I have fond memories of them. But ... I don't have my software collection for either anymore. My parents bought me (and my son) a CoCo, but it just sits 'cause I don't have that software collection either. Not to mention I have a zillion other projects to fill my time with.

Got H.264 working by disabling as many x264 features as I could. Now I need to start re-enabling those features and find out which (if any) break the Infocast decoder. One frustration is x264 is primarily an encoder, not a transcoder. Thus is has limited input format support and I'm not sure how it handles audio. ffmpeg is a transcoder which uses x264 for H.264, but it doesn't expose all of the x264 input parameters. So I'd really just like to use x264, but need the transcoding abilities of ffmpeg. Maybe one of the other transcoder/x264 wrapper programs (like mencoder or handbrake) will be better.Update: Handbrake is the wrapper I wanted. Any x264 options which aren't set via the normal interface can be set via the Advanced panel. My testing so far seems to indicate the Infocast decoder is more memory & CPU restricted than feature restricted. So the video tends to stutter rather than error out.

Paul Rubens and Elijah Wood? That sounds interesting. (pun intended)

My right eye is nearsighted (-2) but wasn't diagnosed for many years. Thus I tend to be left eye dominant for far focus and right eye dominant for near focus. Although I wear glasses/contact I don't really "see" in 3D, or rather all of my "depth perception" is monocular. #D movies kinda work for me (more "depth" than 2D) but I seldom get a true immersive feel. And theloon is correct, many 3D movies have the second image created in post production (although true two camera capture is becoming more common). However, the problem with "3D" movies is they are limited by how they are displayed. Although they can show each eye a different image, they don't actually show depth (so focus doesn't change).

Bad game designer - no twinkie! (although I don't know which those particular infractions fall under). IMHO the first two are partially excusable if you were given some indication you needed more. (Giant like apples, but giant still hungry! The spell had no effect, but next time you might get lucky.) HHGttG was infamous for requiring the player to do things long before knowing they were required. Forget to feed the sandwich to the dog and it's game over much, much later in the game.

So I have it playing MPEG4 Part 2 (aka XVid) videos. It's also possible to create both channel widgets and control panel widgets. Unfortunately, it seems no-one has tried to develop a control panel widget and the majority of the channel widgets are junk (I mean, 228 different clock widgets?). I'm tempted to take the time to figure out how to develop (or at least reverse engineer) some of my own widgets, although I don't have a pressing desire to.

I don't know whether such a scheme would be effective. From the Apple2 days crackers have been patching games to remove copy protection, including stuff with dongles. Hardware cracking has also gotten very effective at reverse engineering chips. The additional cost would also be a deterrent to game creators. (One of the reasons for the success for the Playstation, and why all later consoles have followed suit, was it used CD replication facilities.)

If it's an IDE hard drive I'd say buy either a cheap USB adapter or just connect it as a slave drive to your current computer. I used to do a lot of quick and dirty programming in Qbasic. Unfortunately, I don't think Windows 7 will run it properly.

While on a 2 week vacation to watch the Daytona 500 (my wife is the NASCAR fan), I picked up the Chumby powered Insignia Infocast (in spite of none of the Best Buy drones knowing what one was). Now that I have it, I'm wondering what I'm going to use it for. It certainly will function as an 8" 800x600 digital picture frame, just stick in an SD card. Ideally I'd like to pull stuff from iPhoto or Picassa (since that's where I store photos now). It can also play back videos, although the challenge will be figuring out the right codec/container/bitrate. It also has UPnP and it sees my MythTV server, so I might try transcoding HDTV shows, or stuff from the TiVo. It also can play MP3s, although I haven't played around with it yet. And I don't know if there's an iTunes interface. There are also a thousand or so Chumby widgets which should work. Finding ones are worthy to use is a different story. I have set up a Twitter app for my wife. It's okay, but not perfect. But it's also a mini Linux box. Whether that gives me anything I want I have yet to find out.

Baccarat is kinda high-stakes Blackjack (in that you start with 2 cards and then get more cards trying to get a higher score). But unlike Blackjack, there's little/no decision making. The cards you (or the dealer) has determines whether you (or the dealer) gets another card. Hmm.. kinda like BJ where you automatically follow the basic strategy. Keno is akin to a typical N of M lotto. You pick N numbers from M possible values and the house picks a set of numbers. The more numbers you match, the more you win. Craps is really two games. There's the base game with the "come-out" (2,3&12 lose; 7&11 win, others become the point number) and point (point number win; 7 lose; others roll again). The second game is all of the side bets. Wikipedia has decent info on the various casino games. The real limitation on the 2600 is the screen real estate and resolution. Tough to display 5 cards with playfield graphics. (Not to say it can't be done, but...) Hmmm... it might be cool (and possible) to do Texas Hold-em on the 2600. Each player has a paddle to select the action, and press the button to pick the action, including showing what cards they have. I spent some time in a casino in the Bahamas and had some fun. But since then I've soured on them as all casino games are either random number games against the house advantage or skill games against the other players. Either way, I'm going to lose.

I have to say that I haven't used the extra DVD or digital copy of any Blu-Ray/DVD I have. I'm more likely to use the DVD copy of a Blu-Ray. I'm tech-savvy enough to rip the DVD if I have that desire.

It all depends on what "coding in C" means. Obviously the 7800 doesn't have I/O which would fit stdio.h, so that's kinda out. The C compiler would also have to do the following (off the top of my head): 1. Provide a peek & poke to modify the TIA, MARIA and RIOT registers. (Although I guess this could be done with pointers.) 2. Handle the 7800 memory map (zero page $40-$FF, RAM space, ROM space) 3. Put code & data on the correct ROM addresses (for holey DMA) But it's certainly possible to use C to develop for the 7800. Much of 7800 code is basically data movement. And it's certainly possible to describe the Display List as a C structure. Of course, it's tough to match the space & speed of hand coded assembly.

I love making backups onto external drives. Plug it in and use EZBack-it-up (now I'm using robocopy) to do a simple copy of every file and every subdirectory onto the external drive. Then put that drive on the shelf until it's time to restore a file or do another backup. Not good for a bare-metal reinstall, but great for a basic file recovery solution. (Also useful when the internal drive gets full and you need to delete some large media files.) And when the drive gets full, buy another drive, copy the old backup onto it, and keep going. Last week I bought a 2TB (100,000 times larger than my first hard drive) for C$120+tax and made a backup of my PC (using Windows7 Backup, which seems to be actually viable). Then I proceeded to dump all of the old backups onto it too. (And it's still half empty!) But now I want to try to take the time to eliminate some of the duplication which has accumulated over the years. I'm hoping I can get down to 500GB used so I can copy it onto the previous drive and stick it in the safety deposit box. But doing it is harder than I thought. I've been playing around with a duplicate file finder and have run into a few challenges. First is the number of subdirectories & files cause the tool to crash after 8+ hours. But I've after doing some more detection with a smaller set of subdirectories, I've made some interesting discoveries. First is that I've got a lot of duplicates, but not for the reasons I thought. There are four categories of duplicates: 1. Duplicate backups. The same file (or subdirectory of files) appears in multiple places because I backed it up at different times to different destinations/drives or the subdirectory tree changed. What I'd like to do is delete as many of these as possible, but I also need to identify unique files and ensure those aren't lost and maybe try to consolidate them. 2. Files which have changed subdirectories - typically they've been recategorized, or appear in multiple subdirectories. Again, I'd like to delete all but one of these. (Or hard link in some special cases.) 3. Duplicate application files. For some reason the application has multiple copies of the same file in the same backup. This is where hard links are useful as that only keeps one copy of the data but with multiple directory entries. 4. Coincidental duplicates - typically because two applications use the same library. Again, hard links should handle this. The problem is the duplicate file detector is focused on finding duplicate files, not looking at the subdirectory tree and identifying subdirectories with duplicate contents. And even if I give it two subdirectory trees and tell it to find duplicates between them, it still looks for duplicates in each tree. I've tried to use windiff on the directory listings, but they are too large! So now I'm thinking I need to create a tool which could be used to identify possible duplicate subdirectories. i.e. two subdirectories with the same name might be the same. I don't know how well it will work, but it's worth a try. I already found one duplicate backup and took back 64GB.

I'm actually surprised the DS has hung on as long as it has. I mean the DSi has been out for two years and there are (according to Wikipedia) a total of five (non-DSi Ware) DSi exclusive games. Even Pokemon Black/White isn't DSi exclusive. And though I'm sure that the number of DS games will drop after the 3DS is out, I suspect there will be new games for at least the next year (maybe longer, depending on Christmas sales). If people keep buyng games, companies will keep churning out games. And don't forget that a DS game will play on a DSi and a 3DS. The future for the DS is going to be on the dark side - piracy and homebrew. The flash cart market is well established and the DS is very capable of playing older GameBoy and 8-bit console games. I'd do it myself except it sends the wrong message to my son. Piracy may also be the reason Nintendo is bringing out the 3DS, and Sony the PSP2. I agree that the 3DS being $250 is giving me sticker shock, and other than the Zelda remake, the launch titles don't appeal to me. So I'm going to vote with my wallet and wait and see. I probably will pick it up, but not until Christmas or next year when I can get a couple of killer games. Both Sony and Microsoft are hoping they can delay the cost of creating a next generation console until the economy picks up. Sony might want to do it sooner because of the recent security hacks, but they are probably don't have the cash on hand. I also don't know whether the software developers are asking for better hardware. A new console means a big investment to learn, and the higher quality graphics are more expensive to create. I don't know about the Wii 2. The latest market numbers have Wii sales dropping with Xbox 360 sales rising (and PS3 holding steady). But I don't think money is the main issue for Nintendo - direction is. The Wii sold very well with SD graphics and a motion controller. Now Microsoft and Sony have their own motion controllers so Nintendo doesn't have that advantage anymore. Perhaps the 3DS is a way for Nintendo to determine if the Wii 2 will focus on 3D.

Any place you find kids where the parents know they will have to be waiting, you'll find kids playing their DS. Actually, the PSP2 is impressive for a different reason - it's coming out only 2 years after the PSP Go (which was really a modified PSP). The graphics processor is also very new. Sony has really reduced their time to market. Not that it will do them any good. They will still be overpriced and coming out 10 months after the 3DS. I also wonder how much piracy killed the PSP.

Huh, this is the first time I've heard of this problem. (Or is it... hmm, vague memories of a complaint.) There was a bug in the original release of Skeleton+ (and maybe in the Activision compilation) where the YOU WIN screen would roll because I messed up the scanline counter. This was corrected in later carts. I don't think the source for Skeleton+ was ever released. The source for Skeleton (possibly an early version) might be in the Stellalist archives. However, I might be able to track down the source code and make a patch. I just happen to be transferring my backups to a new 2TB external drive.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/psxbasic/ It also appears that C is used for PSX homebrew.

Box the 2600 and use the 7800 instead. But I know what you mean. Even with only a Wii, PS3, N64 and 7800 (and a couple of DSs, but they don't count) I don't end up playing them all.

Ooh, I just had an idea. Part of the DVD Content Scrambling system was a table of disc keys encrypted with different player keys. The theory was if a player's decryption key was compromised that playback of future titles could be prevented by not including a valid entry for that player in the table. Well, what if there were a similar table on the game disc; except in this case the player key would correspond to a specific firmware version for the console. So if the console's firmware was compromised two things would happen: 1. New game discs would include the latest firmware (ala Wii) which would include a new public key to decrypt the disc key from the next entry in the table. 2. Prior entries in the table on these disc would decrypt to a value which would tell the firmware that they were invalid and an update was required. This assumes that the firmware update process can't be compromised to extract the public key or to modify the firmware update. The process also assumes that a set of public/private keys are known from day one (so early games are compatible with later firmware) and are kept secret. I'm also assuming that knowledge of the ciphertext and plaintext doesn't compromise the public & private keys, and knowledge of the ciphertext, plaintext and public key doesn't compromise the private key.

Since the PS3's security structure has fallen, I'm left to wonder whether it's even possible to create a secure console. Secure in the sense that it prevents piracy. And if I was Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft I'd be talking to fail0verflow to contract them to help design it. Copy protection basically comes down to making something which can be read (by the console) but not written (by anyone other than the creator). The PS1 used some sectors with zero'd ECC. So the PS1 drive could read the data, ignoring the ECC, but a PC drive would try to correct the "bad sectors" and would add the correct ECC when writing the sectors. Other consoles have used places on the disc which a PC doesn't read or write. I think this is still the best way to provide a base for copy protection, but with a twist. In addition to storing data (signatures & encryption keys) on the hub area, I'd put a light sensor on the top side of the disc. This could then be used to add an additional bit of information not normally readable. Then go to the Wii extreme of encrypting and signing the entire disc to make it impossible to rip the disc contents for emulation. I was also thinking about how to support Linux & homebrew without opening the system to piracy. Because if it is possible to run arbitrary code on the system then that code might be a pirated game (or code to assist in pirating a game). But what if the console has two modes - an encrypted mode for running games where everything (data from disc, internal storage, RAM) gets run through hardware encryption / decryption and an "open" mode for running homebrew / Linux where nothing is encrypted. The encryption engine is simply deactivated and can't be reactivated without a powerdown/reset. Games could easily check whether the encryption engine is running and assume they have been pirated if it isn't.