November 19, 2017

RWBY

Rats, it appears the new version of Firefox and the RoosterTeeth site are not compatible. the episodes won't play. (And there's only audio from the ads before it tries to jump to the next episode)

Seems to be more a problem with one of their ad servers. Advertisers ruin everything trying to crowbar their foot into the door.

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November 12, 2017

Fireball Humorous

Fireball Humorous is pretty much the one thing I saw on the charts this season I was interested in. But to date, I've only seen one episode, raw or translated on the torrents. And that one episode, was, meh. Now, every time this show comes out, they change the character designs. Normally, for robots, they appear to be made entirely of rigid parts. But this year Drossel seems to have a completely flexible black (rubber, plastic) abdomen. It's hard to say where they're going with it this year with only one episode after a month.

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November 09, 2017

The Science Fiction is Settled

My latest on my Wordpress writing blog, where I take David Gerrold apart for an egregiously SJW column in the virtually defunct Amazing Stories.

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September 25, 2017

Renkin San-Kyuu Magical Pokaan

I use the main screen of uTorrent as a sort of Video Manager, with tags indicating things I've watched, things I'm planning to watch, things I have collected but aren't on deck, etc. And I move things around that way.

I recently noticed that I had managed to move something into my to watch label that I didn't recognize. I started to check it out, and then I realized to my chagrin that I had downloaded a batch with GERMAN subtitles. And then I looked further and realized I had downloaded this very old show in 2011. But you know, some people are very dedicated, and a torrent that was posted in 2014 is still running. And the subs are in English, the resolution is higher, and I still don't remember why I downloaded a show originally from 2005 six years ago.

Then I watched further:


Plus, it's a cute show. Four girls have come to Earth each representing different occult archetypes, a witch, a vampiress, a cyborg (Frankenstein) and this girl, Liru, a werewolf. They build a home in a tree in a park, and try to live in this world with absolutely no clue. In the half episode the screencap is from, the witch notices the postal delivery guy dropping off mail at every house across the street, and she wants some, but has no idea what it actually is. She and the Cyborg build mailboxes, but when that cargo cult move doesn't get them mail, they all escalate.

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September 20, 2017

But will it play my anime files?

Yay, Amazon has finally made a Fire Tablet that has a full 1080P screen. But what I want to know is, will it play .mkv files and handle fansubs?

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September 17, 2017

Reno Air Races....

Just got back to my hotel after the last race. It's way too big of an event to cover in a blog like this (Which is meant to be my anime blog anyway) but my god, the final Unlimited Class Race... Voodoo and Strega ware SO fast they double lapped the last plane, and thus the race really resembled an obstacle course.

Strega won, but it was really close the whole time. If it hadn't been for the other traffic, I can't say for sure how it would have turned out.

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September 08, 2017

New Anime Chart Site

If you need a Fall Anime Chart, try here. The menu at the top lets you choose other seasons and years.

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August 26, 2017

Japanese Sparklers

When an episode of an anime show has fireworks celebrations, often children are shown dangling these little sparklers. They're very different from the western kind we have, and both simple and difficult to make. This guy has figured out how to make your own Senko Hanabe sparklers.  Enjoy, but don't burn your house down....


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Success!

For the first time in my personal history, I've managed to resurrect a non-booting Windows machine without reinstalling!

The how is that I had a handy scratch drive, burned a recent image backup onto it, and....

No, it wasn't that easy, the image, and older images for some reason wouldn't boot either.  I mucked about with them for a while but eventually decided that I may as well work on a direct clone of the current drive. This way I could do anything and if I really screwed things up, my original would still be okay.

The problem was somewhere in the Windows/Win32/Drivers folder. Of course, booting in safe mode would fail, and it wouldn't help because it only shows you which file was last successfully loaded, and it doesn't tell you the order they're loading. And that info isn't easily found on DuckDuckGo. (And the Windows technical forum is full of links that don't redirect properly, possibly they only work in explorer, I didn't try).

For a while I was looping through Windows repair, finding the file it choked on, going into the command line, deleting the file in the x: recovery environment that said there was a repair pending, so that I could run SFC /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ offwindir=c:\windows, which worked until I hit compbatt.sys, that wouldn't come back uncorrupted. Plus, since I was formatted under GPT because I have a 3 TB drive, I had to make sure the install disk I was using launched under UEFI or it would complain it wouldn't work with this version of windows (Which I had installed from that very disk!).

Tired of looping like this, I got the idea to delete everything out of the drivers directory. That was less than successful because SFC seemed to skip any file that wasn't already there by this point. But then I had an idea.

I opened up the backup image, and merely copied the drivers directory in anew. And amazingly, my computer booted and said "Hey, you've been away a few days, there are more updates!"

Why this worked I'm not entirely sure. Clearly the driver's folder isn't quite so heavily cross linked throughout Windows like everything else that changing a file screws everything up. And I must have corrected some other error along the way that I'm unaware of as well. No matter, I have actually, successfully FIXED a computer!

So, the scratch drive is now the C: drive, and when everything checks out and new images are backed up, the old C: will periodically be a clone of the scratch drive new C: drive.

BTW, Macrium Reflect gets my hearty recommendation for making this all possible. Bravo!

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August 24, 2017

Can't win, can I?

After recovering from the blown power supply, I came home again to a dead computer. Won't reboot. I was better prepared, with weekly image backups, and a scratch drive laying around. And so I've been spending the week fruitlessly trying to resurrect the thing rather than giving up and rebuilding and reinstalling EVERYTHING all over again. (wouldn't you?)

I think I've reconstructed the events leading to the death as a bad driver that got downloaded when I recharged this ancient photoframe thing I had laying around. But how to identify it and remove it when the machine won't boot? Even in safe mode? It's a classic corrupt classpnp.sys problem, that nobody seems to have a good fix for (Except for folks who have crapware they want you to download and install, which of course requires you to HAVE A BOOTABLE MACHINE TO USE.). Windows install disks didn't want to repair because they're over 2 TB, it also didn't want to install at first (getting win 7 to install on a UEFI drive takes some legerdemain before it works properly.) I was able to successfully install the week old image to the scratch disk, which still wouldn't boot (?!). So I also successfully cloned the current drive to the scratch disk to make all my attempts to fix on that first.

I've learned some cool things, like how to get the repair system to forget it's got a repair pending so you can use tools like SFC /scannow to try to repair things (didn't find anything to fix.). But I'm running out of ideas.

Open to suggestions. Pixy?

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