MYWAY

Not long after we discovered videogame emulators, my brother and I discovered MAME the “Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator” and we were mesmerised. You could play all your arcade favourites on your home PC (if you own or have rights to the roms you wish to use). Soon we were talking about how cool it would be to have a PC in a cabinet which looked like an arcade machine and run MAME on it to play games.

Neither of us did much about it for several years, until I had my own house, and a garage full of diy tools. One day someone I knew was getting rid of some MDF and it was the right size to build an arcade cabinet. I took the MDF, and started marking out a design for building a cabinet. Please note I am very poor at woodwork, so this was a real challenge but I cut out the design I’d drawn using a jigsaw.

Then I made some shelves to hold the PC which would run the project, and the monitor and speakers to add sound and vision. Then screwed the parts together.

I filled in the front, and put in a perspex screen cover. The screen was darkened with some black card with a hole cut out the size of the monitor screen. The buttons and joystick came from an arcade cabinet supply specialist online but were very reasonably priced, and made the cabinet look authentic. They are connected by a USB interface card which is designed for this purpose. They can also be used to control the interface by emulating keyboard functions.

The next pictures show the finished MAME arcade cabinet in use. It’s running a 1ghz AMD Athlon processor, with 512MB memory and an nvidia graphics card. All outdated equipment put in an old case, and running Windows XP and MAME of course.

This picture shows my wife playing on the MAME arcade machine…

Here is one which shows the buttons better…

That’s my MAME Arcade Machine Classicade.

Many years ago a few friends and family got together in the snow. When our friends and family get together things get a bit silly. It started with a home made sledge and a 4×4 vehicle in the snow. Add in some rope and you have fun with a capital F.

Then someone remembered we had a parachute which had appeared from somewhere a long time before. Paragliding seemed like a good idea, even though we didn’t know if the parachute was right, or anything about paragliding behind a car. So what we tried anyway….

There are other videos to come in the snowy day series. Just as soon as we digitize them from the old VHS format

In the recent local Council elections the current governing party in the UK, Labour, was given a bit of a pounding. It seems the people of Britain were ready to show Labour their lack of trust in the way they are being led. And rightly so.

The current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was never actually elected to office, he inherited a position from the previous PM’s departure. In itself that wouldn’t be a terrible thing as long as the core values and promises the original PM was elected on were kept up. There is no eveidence that they haven’t though, so what’s the big slap in Gordons face for?

My own personal belief is that it’s for politics in general. Sure someoe took the votes from Labours local councillors, mainly Conservatives, but that was just because the people had to vote for someone and they are the next big party to vote for.

No I think the slap is because the system is going wrong. The elected representatives are supposed to be doing the will of the people. Increasingly it seems that the elected officials of GB are riding roughshod over the peoples will, and foisting their laws and views on the voters against their wishes.

We all understand the need for laws, and the need to give the government some free reign, but the people in charge also need to listen to the people before forging ahead. For some examples of the complete disregard for public opinion, you only have to look at the EU Treaty, which the government of the day want to push through without recourse to a reluctant public.

Nanny state is a term bandied about and with good reason. Every day unpopular laws are passed through, and our civil liberties are eroded, usually in the name of anti-terrorism or health and safety. It seems the voters of the UK have had enough, although I personally don’t believe it will be much different under a different ruling party. It also won’t get anything changed back which has already gone through.

In retrospect the recent voting looks less like a slap for Labour and hopefully more of a slap for the whole of the political system. The people want to be heard, they want to be involved in the decision making which affects their lives. Who is going to give it to them?

Here’s some food for thought on liberty, and Unions between Countries

These Japanese commuters really know how sardines feel inside the tin. But you have to feel sorry for them when even the guards get involved in the fun. Watch and see how to make the most of every bit of space on the carriage.

Once again I am forwarding from http://www.funforever.net one of their finds. These wind powered lights from Firewinder make beautiful patterns as they turn and flash. Here is a quick video of them in action.

A couple of years ago the UK was sold on the idea of Chip And Pin for their credit and debit cards. We were all told the inconvenience was worth it to significantly cut fraudulent use of our debit and credit cards. As usual there were some valid arguments against the chip and pin, which the card issuers assured everybody were invalid, and chip and pin would stop card fraud.

Now the BBC news site reports a ” 25% rise in the fraudulent use of UK credit and debit cards” Yep the same cards now protected with chip and pin are being used fraudulently.

A lot of the fraud is carried out overseas where there is no chip and pin, or in online and telephone sales. Strangely one of the arguments against chip and pin was the fact that unless it was worldwide it wouldn’t be as secure as we were told. Score one for the naysayers, who also pointed out the online insecurity at the time.

It looks as if someone has the opportunity to give out a big “told you so” to the chip and pin companies.

Just one last thought from me, if they were so wrong about chip and pin stopping card fraud, what makes the UK government so sure that the proposed ID cards will really stop ID theft, terrorism, and illegal immigration?
ID cards have been proven not to work elsewhere in the world but when did that matter as long as you can convince the people otherwise, like was done with chip and pin.

As I sometimes do, I was browsing http://www.funforever.net which has some terrific posts on it. Spookily this week we had been making a cake for my daughters 5th birthday, and one of the latest posts on forever.net showed some incredible cake “sculptures” Including the following examples….

A laptop cake for the pc lover in your life.

This one is ideal for the old time music lover. Just look at the tremendous detail in that iced confection, sweet music to the tastebuds and the eyes.

You can gamble on this being a tasty treat too, the odds are in your favour here.

23 Red is the winning number, on more gambling inspired delights.

For more of these delightfully different cakes take a peek at http://www.funforever.net/archives/fancy-cakes/ where there are loads of examples of the bakers artistry.

Just when everything seems to be going well, there always seems to be something to jump up and bite you on the arse. For me this week it was my PC. This is always bad news for my family as I’m an addict. I use my PC every day for emails, blogging and just avoiding real life really.

So on Tuesday when the hard drive failed to whirr, and the PC sat looking back at me displaying a black screen with just the words “Non System Disk or Boot Disk Error, Insert bootable Disk Then Press Enter” needless to say I was not a happy bunny. It wasn’t for lack of trying that it wouldn’t boot, oh no. 27 resets, and a few swift slaps to the side of the case, hard drive removal, gentle coaxing, and even violent shaking of the errant hard drive were attempted.

YES I knew I was wasting my time, it was an ex hard drive, it had turned its last revolution and was in technical terms, knackered. But that didn’t stop me from trying to force it to work to get my hands on all the data it contained which I hadn’t backed up the last time I did a back up (ie never before).

My hard drive crashed and burned, with all my passwords, and website backups, and blog posts, some pics (I did back those up regularly thankfully or my wife would have sent me to the same place as the hard drive, only much more painfully). Luckily I had a spare hard drive, which has got me back online with minimal downtime, but still I’m annoyed.

The hard drive failed at 18 months old, for which I could blame the manufacturer. But worst of all is the loss of my data, and for that I have nobody to blame but myself, and that’s really made me angry.

The blame culture, it’s a festering sore on modern life. Somebody smokes themselves to an early grave in spite of 30 + years of warnings on packets and discussion of the damage to health in small groups in pubs, around the coffee machines, and on TV and radio. Blame the tobacco industry, it can’t be their own fault.

Somebody else takes drugs, and shuffles of this mortal core, blame the seller of the drugs, the police for not stopping it, anybody but the poor unfortunate who made the choice to take the drugs. Yes somebody dieing young is a tragedy, whether through smoking, drugs or being knocked down by the proverbial bus, but we make our choices and we pay the price.
Only in this modern world we don’t expect to pay the price anymore. We all expect to do as we wish, then blame somebody else.

Parents blame schools for their failing offspring, the nice people of the world blame society for hooligans, vandals, and robbers. Isn’t it time we went back to taking responsibility for ourselves?
It’s not societys’ job, or the schools job alone to sort out our wayward youth, it’s up to the parents. Arguing with headmasters and teachers when your brat plays up and gets punished, then blaming them again when little johnnie is not listening to anyone anymore is plain stupid. Take responsibility for your children, and help the school to instill discipline.

Tripping over in the street used to bring a tut, and self admonishment for being clumsy. Now it’s an invitation to sue someone because you didn’t pick your feet up and mind where you were going.

Suing a hospital because somebody died in their care won’t help to fix the NHS either, all you do is drain more money from the system. Blame never helps, and claim just keeps some greedy lawyers in champagne and ferraris.

It’s also because of this lack of taking personal responsibility for ourselves that lets our government exercise ever more control over what we do. If we’re all willing to let somebody tell us what risks we should and shouldn’t take, relieving us of our responsibilities we shouldn’t complain as our rights are eroded away.

We all have free will, but with it comes responsibility too. If we wish to do as we want when we want then we also need to stop blaming other people when it goes wrong too.