This week’s strange. Through an amusing coincidence I am going to be teaching Monday, Tuesday and then that’s it. Wednesday is an NQT conference, Thursday is the year 10 parents evening and on Friday it’s an INSET day.
My god, what a haul of goodies we managed today! It was like someone knew we were going and got out the goodies ready for us. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to have a second XBox running XBMC in my bedroom, but never thought it worth the £40-odd for a second hand XBox.
Well… how does £10 grab you? No? Well after taking advantage of our technical knowledge and bamboozling the seller we got it for £8. People’s brains fuse if you start prodding their stuff and saying “ahh the labels are intact, it’s not been opened. This one would be ideal”. It also helps if you have a female counterpart 
The XBox even works. I’ve had to order a video cable from eBay, and a Modchip is now in the post too. Looks like I’ll be spending a fun hour with my soldering iron again soon. I get to go cross-eyed soldering SMD components again.
I also bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for 20 quid, including two controllers and a light gun. The light gun won’t work on my TV, but this is OK since the NES itself doesn’t seem to work either. It flashes the power light at me. Yes, this means the cart isn’t connecting properly and I need to repair the contacts. I’ve added that to my list. I’ll swap the cartridge slot from a working NES just to make sure the main circuit board isn’t faulty though.
I then bought a couple of books (a Red Dwarf book and a William Gibson), a cheeseburger and managed to block the toilets. Amy bought several of those TV games units that contain an FPGA emulation of an old console and its ROMs. She’s got a Sega Megadrive one that has Sonic the Hedgehog, Columns and other games, and a bizarre Tetris game.
We very nearly bought an Amstrad PCW1512 word processor, but having no money and no desire to carry it across the field stopped us. We also successfully resisted buying another Sega Megadrive, but David did buy a Sega Saturn. There were also many Gameboys for sale and those amusingly illegal “52-in-1″ games carts.
We will return another day looking for games and junk. I think I’ll have to start looking for a bigger house too
As is usual for some weekends, I’m at Amy’s again. I also took Dave, another Llamasoftie, along too as he had some retro hardware to give Amy. She’s now got a colour monitor for her Amstrad and while cooking tea had a fun bit of gaming in the kitchen with the Amstrad set up next to the cooker.
Tea was made to the squealing tune of Manic Miner scraping its way off tape, Commando and KickStart 2. All amusing games that after spending five minutes loading, we were going to get our money’s worth. If a game takes [i]x[/i] minutes to load, you have to play it for at least that much time – a hard task when some of these old games are just utter rubbish. We found some space shooter that was truly awful, both technically and as a shooter game. They really did peddle some gash back then.
We’re off to the giant Hemswell car boot again, but earlier in the hope of scoring some bargains.
Inspired by a set of photos on nuxx.net of lightsticks that were cut open and tipped down a toilet (why? well… they glow, what other reasons do you need?) I decided I had to have a go. While making a cup of tea I discovered a glowing drinks stirrer and set about it with a pair of scissors.
My photos, while interesting, don’t quite have the alien glow of c0nsumer’s. I think I’ll try again with some proper glo-sticks. Mine look like luminescent creatures in some underwater cave, or possibly a Predator with severe haemorrhoids
All photos shot with my Canon A85 camera and a 15 second exposure. My bathroom now has a pretty sparkling effect after I accidentally flicked some glo-juice up the walls and onto the floor.
(or Airplane if you’re from the other side of the sloshy wet stuff)
http://www.sonnyradio.com/airfactory.htm
What do you do when the Japanese are looking for things to drop bombs on, and you need to keep your top secret aircraft plant that bit more top secret? Easy… cover the whole lot in camouflage netting and make it look like harmelss residential buildings, fields and trees.
Yes, cover the whole thing – buildings, carparks, the runway… the lot, with added creativity bonuses for allowing some buildings to poke out the netting as though they were houses.
This rates up there with the inflatable planes and tanks used in World War 2.
