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.

Posted by: Mauser at 04:53 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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If you need a Fall Anime Chart, try here. The menu at the top lets you choose other seasons and years.

Posted by: Mauser at 07:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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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....

Posted by: Mauser at 08:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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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!

Posted by: Mauser at 02:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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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?

Posted by: Mauser at 05:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Consider "Beep Beep I'm a Sheep"

If you go from the Know your Meme origins, a simple bit of throwaway rhyming in a selfie video turned into a major YouTube song meme. Please go, and be sure to look at the ASDF Movie 10 video. Two brief bits of what is to come appear in that compilation of jokes that laid the foundation for dozens of music videos that came later. It's the essential key to understanding the meme.

But what it leads me to is this version. It actually cleverly goes beyond the source material, turning ordinary sheep into anthropomorphic sexpots, and then ups the ante even higher by throwing in all kinds of cultural and Anime references into the mix (And I sadly confess not getting all of them.)

So yeah, definitely NSFW.

Posted by: Mauser at 07:44 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Robotics;Notes was in 2012?! I never finished watching it. :-(

Man, I used to run a lot of pictures too.

(Search thingy turned up a review of Episode 5 while I was trying to find something else.)

Posted by: Mauser at 09:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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All I wanted was a USB header Y-cable. Nobody makes one. Some Chinese company sells a dodgy little micro hub, which appears to take the two USB ports on your header and give you... two USB ports.

For god's sake, can't anyone read the pinout diagrams in their MoBo manuals? That header is two ports. The problem is every internal component that uses USB like my power supply or CPU cooler includes a keyed 9 pin connector with only four wires connected to the pins so that the turnips don't plug it in backwards and fry the device.

But Google Motherboard USB Port Splitter and you will find lots of sage advice from people who have no idea what they're talking about, all of them insisting you need all 9 pins to run USB. and recommending buying USB cards to get additional headers. Head, meet desk.

All you need is a short cable that on one side, takes the pins from port 1 and connects them to a header in the port 1 position, and on the other side takes the pins from port 2 and connects them to a header also in the port 1 position.

Nobody makes this as far as I can tell.

I may be forced to pry out the pins from one of my cables and insert them into the plug in the port 2 side of the other cable.

Posted by: Mauser at 06:08 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Probably my final Sad Puppies blog post. "The Claw!"

Posted by: Mauser at 07:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Since he may not have the time to find them himself. From the series with the absurdly long name...

He's blue so you don't have to be.
Click to Embiggen

Posted by: Mauser at 06:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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