Category Archives: Miscellaneous

I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this,

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but I’ve found a new way to delevel characters for SP farming. I have a level 53 wizard that I’m using to farm SP for a new character I created. A level 53 wizard is not able to one-hit kill party Ongs, so I thought it would be best to do the SP farming at Chakji Workers. For this to work properly, I decided to simply leave the mastery levels for all skills on my new character at zero. Ideally, the character should be about level 8-10 to be farmed at Chakji Workers. The spawn rate there is fantastic and I can one-hit Chakji Worker party mobs. It’s also good because Chakji Workers are non-aggressive and won’t attack the character getting farmed, so you don’t even need to worry about protecting him or her.
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Well, I wasn’t gonna watch Hanasaku Iroha but now I guess I’ve got no choice

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Chiaki Omigawa plays one of the main characters.

minko02

二回死ね！

I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach this show after watching the first episode. The entire premise by which Ohana is carted off to the old hag’s ryokan was not believable. The whole thing with the boyfriend kid confessing in the first episode just as she’s about to leave town was also a bit off-putting, but I can see how perhaps further developments could make it work. In any case, I wasn’t particularly interested in watching more after seeing the first episode.

But then I realised that the reason that Minko character sounded an awful lot like Chiaki Omigawa was because it was, in fact, her playing the voice. She’s not a dojikko in this show, so that’s too bad, but she can make tsundere work too. Minko does seem to fail at all of her chores though, which provides plenty of opportunities to hear her curt, businesslike apologies, which is nice, I suppose. That’s a type of clumsiness, at least.

Now I’ve really got no choice but to watch the rest of the series, even if it’s garbage.

minko03minko05

minko01

I'm sorry my Cammy cosplay does not please you

cammy

I had a dream that was sort of about FiOS

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I dreamt that I was riding in a city bus, looking out the window, when I spotted an advertisement on a phone booth that announced,

At long last FiOS 1 coming to the New York City area on 12/10/2010!

I knew in my dream that December 10, 2010 had already passed. I think it was still March in my dream. I was confused as to why I hadn’t yet noticed that FiOS 1 was now available, seeing as the sign suggested that I could have been watching it for more than three months by then. I was bit angry.

I love FiOS, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t ignore the explicit message embedded in this dream. That is, the logo for FiOS 1 New York that was on the sign in my dream looked exactly like this:

Now, I would never go back to Earthlink for Internet service. Road Runner itself is not available here, but Earthlink was my ISP through some kind of arrangement with TWC. Not that they were unreliable or anything — they were the perfect ISP in nearly every way — it’s just that they hadn’t upgraded the speeds they offered since 2001. If TWC increased the upload speed on their Wideband service here in NYC, I would consider switching to it, even though it’s still more expensive than 35/35 FiOS service, which is still the fastest package available here. In parts of Long Island though I think Verizon has introduced 100/25 service or something like that. At least that’s what those commercials with “real” customers with those dumb Long Island accents seems to indicate. Paying more for Wideband if it had comparable speeds to FiOS is worth it, if you ask me, to get NY1. Wideband upload speeds just aren’t fast enough to compete with FiOS though at this time.

Now, having said that I would never switch to any other ISP as long as they don’t upgrade their offerings, I have to admit that I miss New York One like I miss my first edition holographic Charizard. The several times I had been in homes in New Jersey in which the owners had FiOS, they all had a channel called FiOS 1. I’ve read in forum posts online that some FiOS customers in New York City get the Long Island/New Jersey FiOS 1 channel, but I don’t. As a result, I have no real replacement for NY1. There’s channel 460, which is NBC New York, but that’s not so much a dedicated local news channel as a variety show/elaborate promotion of tourism. They tend to spend entire half hour programming blocks profiling some local fashion designer or visiting “hot NYC restaurants and nightclubs” or some such rot. It’s not a channel that you can turn on for 10 minutes before leaving home in the morning to find out about the weather and what the top local news stories are.

Weatherscan on channel 49 solves the weather problem, but there’s still no dedicated local news channel. I think my dream counterpart and his puzzlement at the lack of a New York version of FiOS 1 (or even reception of the LI/NJ version) reflects my conflicted feelings about the loss of NY1.

Of course, I could always get TWC for cable TV service and keep FiOS for Internet service, but that’s impractical for two reasons: it would be at least twice as expensive as a package deal and TWC cable TV was about the most unstable service around during the last two years or so that I had it. The STBs were rubbish, even after multiple replacements, and would crash like clockwork nearly every day during primetime, taking as long as 20 minutes to turn back on after a crash, every Sunday at midnight the EPG data would run out and it wouldn’t update until Monday night, even after many forced hard resets, Pay per view and even free videos on demand would fail to load far more often than was acceptable, and the picture quality really was inferior, at least to my untrained eye.

One point on which to praise TWC cable TV service though was the fact that there were at least a dozen, perhaps two dozen, free non-English, non-Spanish language channels. There were several CCTV channels, a few Korean language channels, at least one Arabic channel, and quite a few others. I think RTN might have been free too on TWC, though I’m not sure. On FiOS all of those require a subscription, even CCTV, which I always assumed was free with all TV service providers. TWC also had a much better selection of pay-per-view movies on demand. TWC updated their Sundance, IFC and foreign language film sections very frequently; FiOS doesn’t even have a foreign language movies section, let alone an independent films section or a documentary section.

Since well before I even had FiOS here I’ve read over and over again that FiOS 1 is supposed to be coming to New York sometime before the end of 2009. This is getting to be a little bit disappointing.

My Internet connection is so damned fast though. I really can’t even take my own complaints seriously when I think that I actually have a 35/35 Mbps connection. That’s not a lie. In fact, it’s a little bit faster than that. I can download at a sustained 5.0MB/s and upload at a sustained 4.0MB/s. I still don’t believe it. I was on 8.0Mbps/384Kbps on Earthlink cable and ~2.5Mbps/512Kbps on Verizon ADSL before this.

iBot works on Windows 7 x64!

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botters

Goldbots at Hashades/Ishades and Sonars will sometimes auto-invite you to exp share parties. You can just get on a horse, go afk and be a leech off of them for as long as you don't disconnect!

I’ve been using iBot successfully on Windows XP for months, but I had never gotten it to work on Windows 7 x64 until today. Other people seemed to have problems registering the required ocx files in Windows 7, but that was never an issue for me. I didn’t have any of the problems that people seemed to typically report; I simply couldn’t get the bot to run at all.

I would open the bot and click “Run client” and the game would start, but it wouldn’t capture the information from sro_client.exe. It wouldn’t say “Connected to login server” when the game started. I could login successfully through the client, but as soon as I did, I would get disconnected. The bot window would never display any of my character information. It wouldn’t say a thing, not even “Login successful”.

I tried seemingly endless combinations of firewall and antivirus settings, even going so far as to completely turn them both off trying to get this thing to work. Everyone seemed to insist that it does indeed work on Windows 7, so I had no idea why I was having such a ridiculously difficult time getting it up and running. Running it in compatibility mode for Windows XP Service Pack 2 or 3 didn’t work and neither did running the bot as administrator. I really felt I must have been some type of an idiot since, as far as I could tell, no one else was experiencing the same problem I was.

I finally figured it out today, after having given up for some months. The problem was that I had my language for non-Unicode programs set to Japanese, which caused a problem with srodir.ini. I would type in the correct path to either my Silkroad directory or sro_client.exe itself in srodir.ini and it would look correct in Notepad, just like this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Silkroad

I also tried variations on that, such as adding a trailing backslash or specifying the path to the sro_client.exe itself instead:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Silkroad\

C:\Program Files (x86)\Silkroad\sro_client.exe

So in Notepad it would look just fine to me, the human reader. But it seems that what was getting passed along to iBot was this:

C:¥Program Files (x86)¥Silkroad¥sro_client.exe

Of course, I’m well aware that the backslash displays as the yen symbol in file paths and the like when you’re running a non-Japanese version of Windows in Japanse locale, but I didn’t think it was the problem since I couldn’t actually see anything wrong with the way I was typing in the path. Notepad displayed it correctly, so I thought there was no problem. For the hell of it, I changed the language for non-Unicode programs to English (United States) today and the bot instantly starting working perfectly, just like it does on my XP machine. Turns out the problem had nothing to do with the OS at all; it was just user error. I fail again, it seems.

Oh the irony

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I get a lot of spam from what are, presumably, zombified computers owned by negligent FiOS customers, but I thought this was pretty funny:

A new comment on the post #602 “FiOS just keeps getting better and better” is waiting for your approval
http://orgdotorg.com/?p=602

Author : asdfasdfsdf (IP: 173.63.81.48 , pool-173-63-81-48.nwrknj.fios.verizon.net)
E-mail : [email protected]
URL : http://wrweazzzz.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=173.63.81.48
Comment:
sfafwefwef

Approve it: http://orgdotorg.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=approve&c=690
Trash it: http://orgdotorg.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=trash&c=690
Spam it: http://orgdotorg.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=spam&c=690

I completed The Phantom of the Crimson Blood Collection

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phantomofcrimsonblood06

Yay. Of course, I’m very happy that I completed this quest since I now have my SOSun level 64 glaive, but I still can’t help but think that these quests are one of the things have the have contributed to the ruination of this game. I really don’t play SRO at all. I bot all the time. If I’m not stalling, I’m botting. That means that I’m probably not very good at actually playing the game. I know I would die instantly in PVP. People like me don’t really deserve SOSun stuff. But quests like this make it possible for me to get one, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

Party mobs are worse though. Damn party mobs. Can’t grind anywhere because of them. They should at least make it so that party mobs don’t spawn in the Donwhang Stone Cave.

I documented the entire quest by taking a screenshot of every treasure box I encountered right before breaking each one open. I started the quest as soon as I could enter the Forgotten World. I’ve only done grade 1 runs and I rarely go beyond the very first treasure chest in Togui Village. I’ve tried to defeat the Togui Elder about five or six times, but I’ve never done it. I initially thought that perhaps you could only get the “Elder Staff” talisman by defeating “Togui Elder”. That would make sense, right? Since he’s the “elder” and actually holds a staff. But no, you can get an Elder Staff from any treasure box, even the first one. I read that online though; I never got an Elder Staff on my own.

I bought most of my talismans. Since on my server, Maya, at least, they’re all very cheap except for Elder Staff and Spell Paper, I bought everything except for Red Talisman, Red Tears, and Western Scriptures. I got a good deal on Elder Staff for 65 million gold and some weapon elixirs when it usually sells for 75-85 million gold. The rest of the talismans I got for about 1 million gold each, even Puppet and Dull Kitchen Knife, which sometimes sell for up to 9 million gold on Maya.

Spell Paper never seems to sell for less than 100 million gold though. Since I bought Elder Staff I had no way of paying that much money, so I figured I’d just keep going to the Forgotten World and sell the talismans I got there for as much money as possible until I either got lucky and found Spell Paper myself or had enough money to buy it from someone. I also noticed that on consignment some people don’t realise that, when selling more than one unit of an item, you have to type in the total price, not the price per unit. As a result, you sometimes see people selling three Togui Masks for 500,000 gold or something like that. When I see that I buy them and resell them for 3 million gold. That’s another easy way to make money. I suppose people will stop making that mistake soon enough though.

I was amazed yesterday that I found Spell Paper in the first treasure box in level 61-70 Togui Village, making my collection complete. It’s absolutely true that you get more talismans in the 61-70 Forgotten World than in the 51-60 or 35-50 Forgotten World. It is not a myth. I went to the first treasure box about 20 times in the 35-50 Forgotten World and never got a single talisman. I went about 20 times to the first treasure box in the 51-60 Forgotten World and got one talisman (I think it was Red Talisman). I went only about 10 times to the first treasure box in the 61-70 Forgotten World and got maybe 7 or 8 talismans, one of which was Spell Paper. The pattern is clear.

Of course, here are the screenshots I took in triumph:

alternate text

I have about 40 screenshots like this, but this one is different because it immediately precedes the Spell Paper drop!



The Elder Staff I had purchased before this


The completed collection


Unknown error

When I tried to get the reward I encountered this error that I had seen reported a few times on rev6 forums. I logged out and logged back in normally (i.e. without launching the game through ibot) and I received the reward without a problem. I was scared for a moment though.

The best part of this may be that the SOSun reward is NOT ACCOUNT- or CHARACTER-BOUND! I can sell it when I'm done with it!

I'm too poor to do much alchemy on it right now to fix the stats, but I at leat got it to +3

I got a +5 ring drop

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I had been botting all night and when I woke up I saw in my inventory this ring:

I wish I knew whether I got it from a mob or if someone died and dropped it. I also woke up one day to find I had picked this up:

I can’t believe I haven’t been banned yet. I’m using ibot and even though I have it set to teleport back to town when I have low weapon or armor durability, it seems to only actually do so about half the time. As a result, I end up stuck every night in the middle of Karakoram without a weapon, probably looking like an idiot, standing there until I run out of HP potions and die. Short of running into a wall, that’s about as obvious as a botter can be.

Success! I fixed my laptop

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So I bought this laptop on eBay with a broken screen for virtually zero money. I was sort of vaguely thinking about setting up a dedicated MythTV box or something to leave by my TV but then I got scared since I don’t know how to use MythTV so I decided to use GB-PVR, which I already use but only inconveniently since I need to run a 50 foot cable from my STB to my desktop computer, which is a fire hazard since you’d probably trip over it when trying to leave the apartment. Whew.

Anyway for more or less this reason, as well as the fact that I evaluate my self-worth in terms of the good deals I find on eBay, I was half-heartedly browsing for reasonably priced laptops with cracked or broken screens to set my plan in motion.

A desktop would have worked, I suppose, but I like the idea of giving an abandoned laptop with a cracked screen a nice home and steady work. I also don’t have much space. A desktop needs desk or floorspace but a headless laptop could just sit on top of my standalone DVD/DivX player, which, incidentally, I also procured on eBay.

Among the broken laptops I found on eBay, however, was the one I’m currently using to write this. It was listed as fully working but with a broken screen. The auction even explicitly mentioned that when connected to an external monitor via HDMI it worked fine. So I bought it.

Dual core 2.0GHz processor, 3.0GB of RAM, expandable to 8GB, 802.11n (which is actually useful to me finally since the Actiontec router Verizon gave me for FiOS supports N), and a CD/DVD±R/RW/BD-ROM drive. That means if I ever brick my PS3, which I also bought broken from eBay and fixed, by neglecting to read the readme before flashing it with some CFW, I’ll still have a working Blu-Ray player.

When I got it though I liked it so much that I decided I should try to get the thing into perfect working condition. It looked completely unused with barely a single blemish on the plastic cover, body or anywhere else. The screen was really beautiful without a single mark on it. There is just one small stain on the left side of the speakers. If it weren’t for that though you’d think this was a brand new computer, so I thought it was a shame that the screen didn’t work.

When I got the laptop I went ahead and turned it on, not expecting to see anything. I did not, in fact, see anything on the screen. I connected it via HDMI to my nice ASUS monitor and it POSTed fine. I was surprised though when I entered BIOS to see that it had an HDD installed. I didn’t realise that it was going to come with one. Not wanting to spend more money than was necessary, I was planning on using a 40GB laptop HDD that wasn’t getting much use, but I was sort of considering buying a larger capacity HDD since 40GB is not much for a PVR system.

That’s why I was happy that the thing came with a 160GB HDD. I tried to format it with gparted but it kept saying it couldn’t find any disks. I tried to use DBAN and got some cryptic error. I tried to format it using an Ubuntu installation disc and got some other error. I tried to use an XP install disc but that just hung indefinitely at the disk partitioner screen. I then boot into BIOS and tried to do some HDD self test diagnostic feature that this laptop seems to have. No problems found. Tried the Ubuntu disc again, got same error. Oddly enough the Windows 7 installation disc didn’t complain at all, so that’s the OS I’ve got on it right now. Don’t torch my house, pl0x.

Anyway, once I had an OS installed I realised eventually that the screen wasn’t broken; it was just really, really, really dark. It was so dark that you really couldn’t tell it was turned on at all unless there were some very high contrast images on the screen at the time. I set the following image as the background and could kinda sorta see Nino’s left eye if I placed my face close enough to the screen so that my nose nearly touched it. If you didn’t get that close, you probably wouldn’t notice that it was displaying anything at all.
Nino

So that was a great discovery. It meant that the screen was probably fine; the backlight was just out. That’s easy. Hell, I thought, it might just be a loose cable somewhere. I open it up and have a look-see. I cut my left thumb trying to open it. The damn inside corners of the screen enclosure are sharp. That was not the encouragement I needed. I disconnected and reconnected everything I could find, reassembled the computer and powered it up, not expecting it to work. It didn’t.

Now I was determined. This was a nice computer. I bought a compatible screen, installed it, tested it and was disappointed. No luck. After installing the new screen I had the same problem as before; image was fine but very, very dark. Being naïve and never having done this before, I thought the screen would come with an inverter, but it didn’t. Since the problem was exactly the same with the new screen as with the old screen I put the old screen back in since it was now pretty clear it was actually perfectly fine.

So I went ahead and bought a new inverter from Hong Kong for USD14, 1/18th of the price some US-based online stores were selling for (I kid you not, one site listed the exact same part number for USD252). I was disappointed since I had spent about the same amount on a new screen as I had on the damned computer. But as I said, I was determined now, having cut both my thumbs by this point.

The inverter arrived surprisingly quickly for Hong Kong Post SAL. On a related note, I bought an item from ShopTemp on November 30, 2010, had it shipped by China Post Registered Airmail and didn’t get it until two days ago. They shipped it within a day or so, so ShopTemp gets all the praise in the world for that. ShopTemp did everything right. I am sad they are no more, since this was the very first purchase I had ever made from them and it was a great experience as far as ShopTemp was concerned. On the other hand, it was a terrible experience with China Post and I would caution said post that they should prepare to feel my wrath. Hell, the tracking number still said it was in Beijing on the day I received it in my mailbox. My experiences with Hong Kong Post have been mostly good though, with items usually arriving within 1 to 4 weeks.

Anyway, I receive the inverter and install it. Same problem as always. Now I was utterly baffled. I thought this must mean it was a bad CCFL. That’s something I don’t know how to replace. Perhaps it’s easy, but I didn’t feel like learning anything after my ordeal.

Just before giving up I decided to triple check all the connections inside the computer and screen enclosure. While doing so, I noticed this:
backlight cable

THAT’S THE BACKLIGHT CABLE! IT IS COMPLETELY WORN THROUGH! I NEVER NOTICED IT! I MUST BE THE LEAST OBSERVANT PERSON WHO EVER TRIED TO FIX A COMPUTER.

So I bought a replacement cable and the screen works fine now. Beautiful too. Not a single dead pixel. The only thing is that while I was replacing that broken cable with the new one I cut my left thumb again. I suppose the lesson here is that you should buy broken electronics even if you don’t know how to fix them because the solution is often as simple as replacing a broken cable. Whoever sold this laptop really lost an opportunity to make a fair amount of money since, as I said, the thing is basically brand new. The screen and one small brownish stain on the speaker were the only imperfections.

Now I have one brand new screen I’ve got to resell.