Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Working!! isn’t as boring as I thought when I initially tried to watch it

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I tried watching the show when it aired originally but then I got distracted by something and dropped it. I kept current with the show back then for only about two or three episodes and then dropped it. I didn’t pick it back up again until now because I was under the impression that I had found it boring the first time I had tried watching it.

Since the BDs are out though and the second season is airing soon I figured I’d try watching it again. Everyone seemed to like it quite a bit so I thought perhaps something was wrong with me. My opinion of it has improved now that I’ve watched the whole series. It’s still not one of my favourites, but it’s not so boring that I have to read email or watch torrent RSS feeds or write a sub-par essay for school while watching it to keep from killing myself out of boredom. That may not sound like high praise, but I’ve been bored enough to feel the need to multitask even during shows that I like quite a bit, like Star Driver. It’s not rare at all for me to enjoy something and even find it pretty captivating but, nonetheless, still have my System Idle Process at about 50%. To reduce this number I browse eBay for good deals on things I don’t need or stare at progress bars, IP addresses, and hostnames in my torrent client until it’s down to about 10 to 20%.

Working!! is fast-paced enough so that my System Idle Process is at about 25% just by watching it. While it’s not quite ideal — there are still plenty of moments when I feel that a joke has dragged on for long enough — it’s not tedious enough so that I absolutely must multitask to make watching it bearable.

No matter how many times I see it, her haircut is irksome.

Taneshima is probably my favourite character, as I’m sure she’s designed to be. Her CV, Asumi Kana, sure does get that squeaky little girl quality in the voice right. My biggest complaint about the show though are those two thin strips of Taneshima’s hair that hang forward over her ears in a really unnatural and ridiculous way. This bothers me way more than it should, but I can’t help it. Hair just doesn’t do that in the real world! It’s as though she uses the same hair mousse as Goku but only in those two narrow strips of hair, which makes it even more annoying than when the entire haircut a character is consistently unrealistic or gravity-defying. That it’s just one small feature of her haircut that’s ridiculous is what makes it so aggravating.

An imouto in whose sewa the protagonist is habitually in is always a plus.

There are, of course, a couple of features of the show that automatically garner it points, such as crossdressing. Whether it’s men dressing as women or women dressing as men, this always improves the point ranking of a show in my scorebook, no matter how well or poorly the scene or scenes containing the crossdressing are executed. In this particular case, however, it should be noted that I thought the crossdressing was pretty well done, at least on the cuteness and humour metrics.


The show also receives points for the presence of a cute elementary school imouto who is responsible and caring beyond her years and cossets the protagonist like a child. Every protagonist should have one of these.

Androphobia also earns any work some automatic points. In this case, however, the androphobia is inextricably linked to the protagonist getting beaten to a pulp, which is frightening and detracts points. Though humourous to the extent that violence and injury are always funny, the viewer more or less identifies with Souta as the “normal” human male so it causes me to wince every time he gets beaten up. No harm no foul on this one.

But oh, look: RSS tells me that Hansaet beat the Japanese encoders again and episodes 12 of Penguins is out. Now to quit wasting time writing about this average show and watch that fabulous show. FTTH sure has made me impatient.

Kamisama no Memochou made me yearn for that OSX86 setup I once perfected

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The only thing I can say now that I’ve finished watching this show is that it made me really want to buy a Macbook Pro, a Mac Mini, an iMac, an iPhone, and an iPad.

It’s always been more or less hit-and-miss installing OS X on AMD hardware. You’d think that, being the compulsive buyer that I am, I’d have a Core 2 Duo system around here somewhere but, for some reason, I don’t. I’m glad I documented everything I did to get it working on my A8N5X since I’m hopelessly out of the loop now. The HDD that had my working OS X installation on it exploded one day along with several hundred gigabytes of stuff I was seeding, so if I want OS X now I’m going to have to start from zero. That’s what I get, I suppose, for using for bittorrent a partition on a disk that had an OS on it. It’s just not the safest thing in the world.

Now I’m waiting for an HDD to arrive so I can see if I can install Lion. That would be very, very satisfying if possible, but, from what I understand, there’s not yet a modified Lion kernel available that works on AMD processors. If that’s the case, I’ll try Snow Leopard. I have a retail Snow Leopard installation disc anyway and there is more information available about it.

I’m so totally buying an Intel processor next time I revolutionise my setup here. I hate how all of the nice things you can do on a computer are Intel-only. It’s not just OS X; I have to use real PS2 hardware to play PS2 games because, regardless of how much RAM I have, which video card I have installed, or how many cores my processor has, PCSX2 performs poorly on AMD systems.

I’ve done some speed tests using Optimum Online

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I’m on vacation with my family today and the place where we’re staying has Optimum Online service. I’ve never used this service, but I remember there were rumours several years ago about shit service and crazy policies about P2P throttling.

These are the same people who have a TV commercial that claims they are the only ISP in United States to offer 100MB/s service. Yes, they actually explicitly write “100 MB/s” in the commercial. There is no ambiguity in those units; they denote megabytes per second, not megabits per second. This is a blatant lie. OOL does offer 100Mbps (read megabits per second) in some service areas, but not 100 MB/s. They’re just doing that because they think that most people will respond to the capital letters and the exclamation point in the commercial, rather than the actual measurement, which is incorrect. That and the fact that they assume (probably correctly) that even the people who do realise that the usage of the capital letters makes their commercial a lie either don’t care enough to hold it against Cablevision or are in a position where Cablevision is the only non-ADSL ISP available.

But because of the rumours about insane throttling on all service tiers to low speeds as well as the false advertisements, I’ve always had a mild dislike for Cablevision in general and OOL specifically. I also think it’s stupid that the Internet service is called “Optimum Online” while the television service is called “iO”. Time Warner has a separate name for their Internet service and call it “Road Runner”, but at least they’re consistent about it; they call all three of their services “Road Runner”. Verizon also calls all three of their FTTH services — TV, Internet, and phone — “FiOS”. I don’t think Verizon even has a catchy name for their ADSL service; I’m pretty sure it’s just “Verizon ADSL” or “Verizon High-speed Internet”.

My point is that having two names is acceptable, but having three separate names is asking too much of the consumer. Most people can’t even answer the question “who is your ISP?” so asking a person to remember three names for the same company as well as which specific service each name refers to will just cause confusion. Plus “iO” is a stupid name anyway. It’s almost as bad as “XFINITY”.

But I did some speed tests here and they’re consistently good. I was tempted to test some bittorrent downloads and I did for about 10 minutes but I soon started to feel guilty, seeing as it’s not my connection or anything. It was just a linux ISO though so there’s really nothing to feel bad about at all. It looks like these people have the 15Mbps/2Mbps plan. I was able to download at 1.4MB/s on the linux ISO but the speed soon dropped to about 200KB/s and remained stable. I’m sure that’s not throttling though; it’s just a bad configuration on my side, I think. I was curious to see how long the speeds would be sustained, but I really felt too self conscious running a torrent client on a stranger’s connection so I closed it.

On the other hand, I was able to download consistently from my FTP server at home at about 1.7MB/s, even while it was busy seeding ~1000 torrents. This is why FiOS is so great. While they don’t explicitly allow you to run any type of server from a residential connection, there’s nothing stopping me from running an FTP server. I ran it on port 2121 just to be safe, but on dslreports I read that they don’t block it even if you do run it on port 21. My IP address at home barely ever changes either. It’s a bit like the Earthlink connection I used to have, where running any sort of server was formally forbidden but, in practice, even port 80 was open and I could host a tiny website for years, without having to change the DNS information more than once or twice a year since the IP address always stayed the same.

Verizon don't seem to care that I use my full bandwidth 24/7. Who needs to pay for hosting when FiOS residential service is this fast?


My conclusion from today is that I wouldn’t mind terribly if I had to live somewhere in which Cablevision was the only ISP. The channel guide menu on the STB is a bit slow to respond, but I bet this is because it’s an old SD STB they have here. This is the first time I’ve ever used OOL or seen iO TV, so I wouldn’t know if the Scientific Atlanta 4200 is still being given out on new installs or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if newer boxes have a firmware update or something with a nicer-looking guide. This guide is faster to respond than the guide on the HD STBs from Time Warner Cable that I had, but slower to respond than the Verizon FiOS STBs I currently have. The selected line on the guide moves less than one second after you press the up or down arrow with this iO TV STB, whereas with the TWC boxes I had it was at least one second or even slightly more between the time the user would press a button and the time the selection bar on the screen would actually move.

I succeeded in making a two-desktop wallpaper in Debian

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Those Tea Party jerks are just a bunch of IRL trolls. I can hate them 'til the cows come home, but I can't deny that successful troll is successful. I get enough amusement out of listening to the warm bodies on the TV express exaggerated concern over where the country is going and what it means for families like yours, like that irritating stooge Diane Sawyer. Incidentally, my two least favourite people on television were Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer, so all I need is for the latter to drop out too and then I won't have to worry about breaking my hand on my TV screen anymore. I really hope Michele Bachmann becomes President so that she can resign and get a reality TV show where she and a cast of LGBT Wiccans must compete for Red socialised health care while paying high taxes to fund regulatory agencies that extend common carrier laws to FTTH providers and reduce the terms for patents and copyright.

No, it’s not about taxes, it’s about my cake-themed wallpaper. KDE has support for setting a different image as wallpaper for each desktop for people with multiple monitors, like me. Gnome doesn’t. So you have to either use a tool like nitrogen to set separate images as wallpaper or make a composite wallpaper yourself. I tried nitrogen but it doesn’t work with Nautilus. You either have to run Nautilus with the –nodesktop feature turned on or use something other than Nautilus altogether. I don’t like either of those options. I did actually try using –nodesktop with OpenBox and nitrogen but even like this I still had problems. The desktop wallpaper would flicker like crazy. If I were prone to seizures I’m sure I’d be quite angry right now if I weren’t dead.

So I gave up on the seizure inducing nitrogen and decied I’d go ahead and hide all the Gnome panels, move the cursor to the corner of the screen so it wasn’t visible, and take a screenshot of the two images next to each other. I’m now using that as my wallpaper set via the Gnome Appearance menu. This is a very irritating way to manage wallpaper, but meh, it’s better than using an entirely different window manager just to get a purely cosmetic feature like wallpaper working the way I like it. It’s not ideal, but acceptable.

I can’t tell if this is working

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mplayer2 works in the version of SMplayer I’m using. This was easy in Windows because I just downloaded the precompiled build from the site linked to at the mplayer2 website.

Doing stuff in *nix is hard though, especially since, despite the fact that I’ve used *nix operating systems for many years, I’m the worst type of noob; one who’s too lazy to learn. On Debian I had some trouble but I think I eventually got it working by using the latest version from here and trying various things until it seemed to be working.

But the fact of the matter is that I know so little about these things that I can’t tell if it’s playing the Hi10P files that I’m trying to open with it properly or not. For all I know, they’re being decoded improperly and I just can’t tell. I think everything is working fine though because when I used a version of mplayer that I knew for certain didn’t support 10 bit encodes I got the following error message and the video wouldn’t load at all (unlike in Windows with ffdshow and MPC-HC which wouldn’t complain at all but would play the file with various artifacts here and there that were pretty obvious):

Unsupported PixelFormat 72

But when I used the latest mplayer2 version the file did play and I didn’t see the obvious weirdness like I did when I used a version of MPC-HC and ffdshow that I knew wouldn’t play the file properly (I had done this intentionally so that I would know what it would look like when it wasn’t working, to help me be certain that I had gotten it working). But I’m really not so sure…just because there aren’t any error messages doesn’t mean things are hunky-dory.

Is this what things are supposed to look like? I really don’t know. It looks all right to me, I suppose, but I don’t have an eye for this kind of thing. The second Yuru Yuri one has some obvious banding by the lower left star, but this was apparent in 2 other versions of this episode that I’ve looked at as well and it’s a black background so it may not necessarily mean that I”m doing something wrong.

Actually, the thing that annoys me even more than being too dense to be able to tell if these files are playing properly is that I can’t figure out how to play files from SMB shares using mplayer2. I have nearly all of my video files on hard drives in a computer running Windows XP and I access them via the network from my TV with DLNA support as well as various other computers. If I try to open a video file from an SMB share in mplayer I get an error like this when I click Options->View Logs in SMplayer:

Playing smb://server/Video/filename.mkv.
No stream found to handle url smb://server/Video/filename.mkv

Exiting... (End of file)
ID_EXIT=EOF

I tried KMplayer too and got the same results. So I got Smb4K and mounted the shares and then tried playing some files again. It still didn’t work. I compiled mplayer with the –enable-smb option too. So I’m giving up for now and just copying whatever file(s) I want to play to the local drive and playing them that way. The irritating thing is that Totem Movie Player has no problem playing files from the SMB shares, whether they’re mounted or not. I want to use mplayer2 and SMPlayer though, not Totem.