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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Just a short note to say in two weeks time I will be at LibertyCon in Chattanooga Tennessee, which would be a great excuse for not posting then, if I had any kind of regular posting schedule. Come up and say Hi, and I'll ask "Who the hell are you?" :-) I can't imagine anyone would be there to meet me, but as the Home Convention for Baen Books, the Author/Fan ratio is through the roof! And it's the anti-WisCon. Which is such a rarity it's no wonder I'll travel across the country to visit and totally ignore cons in my home state.

Plus, REAL Biscuits and Gravy!

Posted by: Mauser at 08:21 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1. "Let's welcome our new Transfer student!"
The Alien/Robot/Space Princess from the future just HAS to enroll in Our Hero's school, and go to his class, and embarrasses the living shit out of him with her introduction. SO sick of this. Clockwork Planet just pulled this for NO reason.

2. Arena combat.
There is nothing that makes a show grind to a halt faster than suddenly forcing the characters to fight in some kind of staged tournament. Sure, you came up with all kinds of nifty powers, and maybe even theories behind why they work, and oh, of course they have all kinds of wonderful attack names, and I know you, the author, are SO fucking proud of them. But there's no story there. Bleach and Naruto were two of the worst offenders. Bleach, I especially hated your characters referring to incredible, unbeatable special attacks that the characters had somehow both perfected, knew were unbeatable, yet had rarely, or even NEVER pulled out in combat before. Well, yeah, I suppose it's never been beaten if you've never used it....
And Naruto, I pretty much gave up the first time this cliche reared its ugly head in some "Training exercise." But it's hard to tell when it started because Naruto at that point was having more flashbacks than Dr. Timothy Leary. In fact, at one point I swear Naruto was having a flashback to the previous episode where Hinata was having a flashback to her childhood.
Look, there's filler, and then there's fucking sandbagging. Either you have a story to tell or not. Smashing your characters together two by two might be nifty for a showing off aspects of their personalities, but having everyone else on the sidelines infodumping about the action, and rules-lawyering at each other as to why the unbeatable attack that was secret until just now didn't work, it's boring. It's like that embarrassing high school party where you tried to explain D&D to the cute girl who started gnawing off limbs to get away.

There will be more. Unfortunately, but feel free to add your own.

Added 6/3
3. Freaking out over girls.
I sometimes wonder if this is a contributing cause, or a symptom of Japan's low birth rate. But it bugs me that virtually every guy acts like they've never seen a girl before (even though they've been going to school with them for as long as they've been alive), and goes from lusting like a pig in the distance to terrified, quivering lump of jelly when she so much as talks to him (while apparently girls have no such trouble). We've come a long way from Ataru Moroboshi....

Posted by: Mauser at 04:02 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Apparently Neregate shut down in April, ending the tremendously useful anime charts. Thus when I finally went to look for this season's, it was gone.

I found a site hosting the last one, but it IS the last one. I found another site, but I'm a little unsure about how to navigate it, since it seems to be a document host that may be linked from somewhere else, that host has not been located yet.

On the plus side, I discovered that there's a new Bahamut series, which I'm getting at the moment (And I'm becoming a fan of Magnet links now) and I thought Clockwork Planet looked interesting. This is about half a season of each at this point.

Maybe someday I'll even get a chance to watch all this stuff.

Posted by: Mauser at 06:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Former admins of Nyaatorrents have a new server up. It's still a bit overloaded, and some features are broken, but, it's there at nyaa.pantsu.cat . They don't have their own tracker any more. But it IS being updated, even if it's just Magnet links.

More Info

Posted by: Mauser at 08:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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