Ah good, I got gnome-blog working again.

Christmas

Christmas was great this year. I got some nice stuff. The main highlights that I'll mention at this point include Super Mario Bros 3 and Fire Emblem for the Game Boy Advance, a UPS for my PCs, a board game called Vampire Hunter, a power drill set, some books (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Nimh), and some other goodies.

What I really liked about this Christmas is the stuff I got other people. I finally got my mom print-outs of the pictures I took of my little sister Jenna over the years. I gave my brothers a couple books I hoped they'd like and a pack of strategy games for their computers. I gave my grandparents some small things they'd like. Jenna got a Tigger bobble-head and a penguin to add to her wide collection.

Rachael and I are having our Christmas probably tomorrow. I can't wait for her to see what I got her. It's going to be fun.

PDA Troubles

I went to re-setup my old Visor Edge PDA today, and found it covered with black pixels. Now, to those who aren't familiar with PDAs, a screen full of black pixels where there should be white pixels is considered in the industry to be a Bad Thing (TM).

Being myself, I decided to grab a screwdriver and open it up. I fiddled around with it a bit, reset the screen, fiddled around more with cables, and observed the pixels slowly going away over the period of about 10 minutes. I put it all back together, waiting patiently, and all the pixels finally went back to normal while the PDA was in sleep mode.

However, the black pixels were there when the PDA was "on." Those eventually disappeared as I kept turning the device on and letting it sit. There's a couple faint lines near the bottom now, but that's about it. I'm satisfied I guess. Not that I use it too often.

Angry Emu

I got fed up a couple of days before Christmas with my emulator front-end, AdvanceMenu. Don't get me wrong, it's a good program, but there are things I wanted. For instance, to setup screenshots for my games, I've had to press whatever button on the emulator to screenshot it, hand-rename it to the correct name and put it in the right directory, and often restart AdvanceMenu. That was just too much, and locating one file out of all the games in the list was too time-consuming, especially since they used their own widgets and didn't have a scroll bar.

I started work that night on Angry Emu (inspired by this picture). It's a GTK2-based emulator front-end, which currently works rather well, shows the screenshots, title images, etc. As of today, it even lets you play the games! Imagine that.

There's still a bit left to do before I'm satisfied, but I kind of wanted a break from my other projects, and didn't want to use AdvanceMenu much longer.

Before I offend anybody who may work on that project, let me say I love what they're doing over there, and if I had an arcade system setup, I'd use AdvanceMenu. It does the job it's designed for. It just doesn't do what I want right now :)

This is getting a bit long, so I'll save some of the thoughts I have on other things for another entry.