Yesterware

The Super Famicom is a contender for my favorite game console of all time.  I loved the North American redesign as the Super NES, but the Super Famicom was what I fixated on for years leading up to its release.  Everything from the contours of the console to the colors of the buttons on the controller seemed so lovingly and carefully designed.  Nothing before or since has really come close. So when Nintendo announced in early 2016 that there would be a limited edition New Nintendo 3DS LL (that's what the XL is called in Japan) to celebrate the anniversary of the Super Famicom, I immediately pre-ordered it from National Console Support, then dutifully waited 8 months until it arrived.  Whenever a new 3DS special edition is announced in Japan, there's usually a bit of uncertainty about whether it will also come out in the U.S., but this one was clearly not going to be brought here.  It's doubtful most Americans would even recognize what it was supposed to be. When...

The Problem: I've been getting away with using a 200MB boot partition for over a decade, but RHEL 7 has started pushing the limits of that scheme.  Between GRUB2 and the automatic creation of a rescue kernel and initramfs that's twice the size as a normal initramfs, that 200MB gets consumed much more quickly.  I can only make it through about two update cycles before having to uninstall the old kernels to avoid upgrade failures. This is a handy command for removing all of the old kernels by the way: yum erase $(rpm -qa kernel* | egrep -v $(uname -r)) I've updated my provisioning tools to make the boot partition larger, but obviously I still have to do something about the pre-existing systems. All of my VMs are built with provisioning templates that create a boot partition on the first disk, then format the remainder of the first disk for LVM.  In order to expand the boot partition, it's boundary needs to be moved into space occupied by the OS itself.  Fortunately LVM...

The unit was purchased on Ebay for about $10.  The seller basically said he pulled it out of storage and it just didn't work.  Images in the listing showed both the LD and DVD trays ejected. When it arrived, as per usual, the packing job was not adequate to protect the unit from damage. The machine powered up but the tray would not eject. Disassembled the unit and found the tray was jammed by the yellow switch lever that switches the eject mode from LD to DVD.  It had evidently received a shock hard enough to push it up into the workings of the tray itself.  Carefully prying it loose allowed the tray to be manually ejected by finger-turning the pulley just under the left side of the tray at the front of the unit. The next issue I noticed was that the pickup had received a shock hard enough to move the left side up above its track so that the entire LD pickup was sitting at about a 30 degree angle.  Miraculously the motor holder was not damaged at all.  I re...

Why Laserdisc? Plenty of obsolete formats garner a following because of nostalgia (I can't fathom why else anyone would actually like 8-track cassettes), and a few of them remain popular long after the sun sets on their era because they remain superior in one way or another to the thing that replaced them. Laserdiscs kind of fit in both categories.  I didn't grow up with laserdiscs.  Heck, I only ever remember seeing a laserdisc player once when I was growing up.  But I sure knew what it was when I saw it. Dipping My Toe In the late 90's when DVD was on its meteoric rise as the replacement for both Laserdisc and the vastly more popular VHS, I dabbled a little with laserdiscs.  Being a 12 inch disc format just like vinyl records, the disc jackets featured a whole square foot of artwork.  They were just cool to look at.  So, like a lot of people, I bought a handful of laserdiscs before I even had a player to play them with. Some time in the late 90's, My wife...

Finally working again after 3 years of saying "OPEN" Updated March 2019 Fixed my VDB-100 today. These watches (the VDB-100 and VDB-1000) were, in my opinion the pinnacle of Casio's innovation in the 80's and 90's. This model in particular has a touch screen and dot-matrix display and is more sophisticated than just about anything they've released before or since (android watches don't count as innovation!).  It's a bit of a long story, so if you just want to know how to fix the "OPEN" message, then skip to the last picture in this article. About 3 years ago I changed the battery and when I reassembled the watch it perpetually had "OPEN" printed to the screen. When this happens none of the functions work and the touchscreen is unresponsive. The watch is on but effectively useless. VDB-100 rendered useless because it "senses" the back cover is still open. As popular as these old watches are, it amazes me there aren't be...

In the most recent issue of EGM a writer named Brandon Justice penned an article titled "Used and Abused" wherein he parroted this sentiment that has been floating around that used game sales are somehow harming the games industry. This argument has reared its ugly head in increasingly more video game media outlets, and it is both wrong and shameful, but because these writers have allowed their emotions to guide them they keep regurgitating what amounts to a marketing ploy by certain game publishers all the while thinking they are making a moral stand. I don't have permission to repost the article, but you can see it in issue 249 of EGM - second to last page. Dear EGM, In response to "Used and Abused" by Brandon Justice, Issue 249 No doubt Brandon's heart is in the right place, but this notion that gamers should feel guilt and "take some accountability" over what he dubs "the functional software piracy of used game sales" is not only...