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Reading “BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn’t,” I’m quite sure I’ve known a few sticks that meet this description.

I still remember the pain and suffering that was the performance of USB sticks, back when I had to do some installation framework goodness for an embedded system. The whole live bootable stick was taking about 2 1/2 hours to load per test, so eventually I reached for the pair of USB sticks I was carrying at the time. One of those $10 sticks reduced the I/O wait time down to about 35 minutes, making for a much faster development cycle; so much so that production bought a bundle of those for use in the lab.

And then there was that other $10 stick, which I never realized was so drastically slower than the first. That sucker was so damn slow that it was “Free to good home USB stick, just don’t bring it back!” and of course, I met that stick more than a few times over the years.

Ya know, I should’ve just used the soldiering iron 🔥

MGS Delta: Snake Eater

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At last, the date is announced!

Pretty much, if they can pull off Not Screwing Up, I’m likely to be happy. MGS 3: Snake Eater was one of the most influential games of my teenaged years, and much of its aging owes to the dated controls and limited video output modes of a PlayStation 2. Knowing about Delta, is the main reason I haven’t been playing the recent PC release of the original, that and wanting to dig into the first MGS.

Please, Konami, don’t screw this up 🙂

Dino Crisis

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One of those cases of “Remember to check that out” is the news that Dino Crisis and its first sequel are on GOG. As a kid, I was never really that great at Resident Evil. It didn’t really help that the initial U.S. release kinda had borked aiming until the director’s cut and dual shock versions. I was also more of a dinosaurs kid than a zombie fan.

Needless to say, Dino Crisis was probably my next big take on the then-young survival horror genre. One that I actually played quite a bit of and would revisit as a teenager. Compared to the original Resident Evil trilogy, I found Dino Crisis much less stressful and unnerving, and far more curious and mysterious.

Part of me wonders if the plot and setting have held up, or if I’ll just be disappointed. Part of me also wonders if this time, maybe I’ll finish the darn game. :^o

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Not sure what’s worse, how many of these (most)I’ve seen or that one of them is a movie I’ve been trying to figure out for years.

I’m pretty sure that Dark Angel (1990), also known as I Come In Peace, is a movie that I watched as a kid a few years later around ‘92 or so. One that a few scenes stuck with me in visual memory but frankly, I’ve never seen or heard of it again—until now, over 30 years later.

Between the disc based weapon, the alien dude, and the vial I’m certain as I can be that it’s the film I vaguely remember watching when I was like 4 or 5, short of finding a streamable version somewhere.

Some of the other films noted in the above video, is saw when they were relatively new; either on television or rental. Others in the 2000s, or in more recent years thanks to video streaming services.

But I’ll mostly admit to watching this video because the cover image made me wonder if it might give me a clue about Dark Angel. Mystery solved, I think.

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Reading “I was skeptical about Snapdragon laptops. A work trip made me a believer” from my news feeds, I couldn’t help but snicker at the actual story content.

See, the first time I had the joys of three planes to reach a destination, I was rocking an Asus EeePC 1015-series that I principally kept in text mode and low key to be able to write on. It didn’t even last the first flight never mind the entire 12 to 14 hour trip. All it literally had to do was run vi to be sufficient for my purposes.

The next time I ended up on such a trip, I was rocking an Eee Pad Transformer TF101 and found it to be a world of difference. Instead of a dead battery on the first flight, I literally had enough power left to fall asleep to Netflix in my hotel room before I even reached for my charger.

In the years since, Intel has managed to “Not suck” on power efficiency but only in relative terms in my experience. It’s not crazy to get a decent work day out of an Intel powered laptop, provided you are not pushing it too hard. But once you ramp up the workload the battery life tanks accordingly as measured in hours away from an outlet. By contrast, my first ARM powered tablet never blinked unless I was compiling code in a chroot for 8 hours straight, on a system that wasn’t meant to work that hard in the first place.

I kinda look at the notion of Windows on ARM with hopefulness, because frankly I think it’s about damn time. What helped PCs take over the computer world is the insane compatibility that IBM and Microsoft compatible machines afforded. Almost all of the Windows 95/XP targeting games in /dev/closet just work on modern machines, despite Intel PCs having changed drastically in every sense. Hell, I still have machines that will boot MS-DOS digital eons after both it and floppy diskette ceased to be relevant.

Compatibility is the best reason to avoid different CPU architectures, especially for ‘brainless’ perspectives. But we passed the point where native code was the only option: Apple’s Motorola to PowerPC migration and the original Java virtual machine proved that well enough in the wild. That was several decades ago, and performance has improved all over. Today, my M2 MacBook Air can literally run video games in Rosetta 2 well enough that I wouldn’t know they weren’t native \o/.

One of the things people often forget though, is that Microsoft originally did something really clever back in the 1990s. Windows NT was designed with multiple architectures in mind. In practice, the MIPS and DEC Alpha support didn’t mean much since almost everyone would be using a 386 with a load of memory, or soon would be dominated by x86 one way or another. But NT hedged many bets.

Personally, I have no real love left for Intel despite being an Intel brat most of my PC life. ARM in my experience, better delivers what I tend to want in a battery-powered machine but that tends to be different than what I want in a desktop PC. Likewise, having dealt with more than a bit of shouting, “Damn it, Intel!” back when I was an embedded monkey, I have even less love professionally than personally. Even more so the further you go from purely CPU and into their other pieces of the puzzle.

They had a good run, but I say hasta la vista, Intel.

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On a day that’s been filled with tunes I haven’t heard in a while, I was somewhat fortunate, and oddly emotional, hearing this old favorite come on the car radio. While the things I miss aren’t always, or perhaps even often, what I had imagined growing up, I’ve always been fond of this Trace Adkins song.

She was staring out the window of that SUV
Complaining, saying "I can't wait to turn eighteen"
She said "I'll make my own money and I'll make my own rules"
Mama put the car in park out there in front of the school
And she kissed her head and said, "I was just like you"

You're gonna miss this
You're gonna want this back
You're gonna wish these days hadn't gone by so fast
These are some good times
So take a good look around
You may not know it now
But you're gonna miss this

Before she knows it she's a brand new bride
In her one bedroom apartment and her daddy stops by
He tells her, "It's a nice place"
She says, "It'll do for now"
Starts talkin' about babies and buyin' a house
Daddy shakes his head and says, "Baby, just slow down, 'cause"

You're gonna miss this
You're gonna want this back
You're gonna wish these days hadn't gone by so fast
These are some good times
So take a good look around
You may not know it now
But you're gonna miss this

Five years later there's a plumber workin' on the water heater
Dog's barkin', phone's ringin'
One kid's cryin', one kid's screamin'
And she keeps apologizin'
He says, "They don't bother me
I've got two babies of my own
One's thirty-six, one's twenty-three
Huh, it's hard to believe, but"

You're gonna miss this
You're gonna want this back
You're gonna wish these days hadn't gone by so fast
These are some good times
So take a good look around
You may not know it now
But you're gonna miss this

You're gonna' miss this
Yeah
You're gonna' miss this

Random irony

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A couple days ago, the top sheet I’ve used as a light blanket tore, after probably 15 years of being used. I used to keep it apart, so when the dogs stole my blankets I’d still have something and it kind of evolved into being what I wrap myself with at my desk, etc.

In shopping for a possible replacement, I came across a blanket that I decided to order in the hopes of replacing it, since the woobie is a bit too warm for the same use cases.

The part that makes me snortle about the irony of it all? It’s expected to arrive the same day as a winter storm and several inches of snow!

Reading streak

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An eventual side effect of my goal of reading a little bit every day has been the obvious: to make it an entire year with having read something every day. Typically, I use the kindle reading insights for keeping a tab on this, and have for a few years now.

Well, last year, that every day for a year effort was kind of thwarted, more by software issues than absence, despite being a bit hectic. Today however, I kind of smile–my reading streak shows as 719 days in a row, 122 weeks in a row. So at long last, I’ve completed that goal.

And ya know what I plan to do next? Read another book!

WiBArM

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There was a game that I played as a child on our old Tandy 1000 that I’ve wanted to look up for about the last 20 years or so. A relative had sent us a copy, but no one really could read it since the instructions were in Japanese. The 5 1/4″ diskette however, worked just fine.

One of those problems with being a kid, even if I can remember things from way back in more details than I probably should, is that memory is more visual than auditory for me. My best recollection of the name was something like ‘Wib barn,” but hey I was like 5 when I played the game! It’s not like I could spell yet! Literally, I was using MS-DOS before I could read…lol.

Needless to say, trying to find the game on this side of the floppy diskette era has been largely fruitless whenever I’ve tried.

Well, last night I was watching a video on 80s game development, and noticed that the clip of Thexder was Really, Really similar to what I remember but definitely not the same game. Sadly, doing some research into the game also showed that its sequel wasn’t it. Also, I’m pretty sure that I never encountered the Firehawk games personally.

Attempting to find similar games led me to the similar games tab on Giant Bomb, which began as mostly another exercise in futility. I’ve tried to look up the game in the past, always without success. Like seriously, how many late 80s side scrollers were there where you can transform between a robot, and a jet, and a car while exploring pseudo 3D dungeons reminiscent of the Windows 95 Maze? Yeah, you’d think that’s easy, but a lot of old stuff on old video games never made a big impact on the Internet. There were more than a few such ‘robot’ games, but I don’t think any that combined all three modes.

Then in scrolling through the list, I come across one word and it’s like “Holy shit, I remembered the name right,” and lo’ and behold: their page on Wibarm even matches my childhood memory to a tee on the screenshots. It’s without a doubt the same game, and it checks all the boxes: the three modes, the side scroll and 3D like dungeon, and the almost RPG like battles when you encounter the mobs.

So now, after many years, I finally know what that game was, and that my childhood memories are even more accurate than I expected.