Sunday, February 15, 2009

Grote Nete





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nikon d300 • tamron 17-50 f/2.8 • © 2009 Joost Yervante Damad

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Saturday, February 7, 2009

openMSX 0.7.0

A new version of openMSX has been released!

Important new feature is save-states. This gave me the means to finally finish the very first game I bought as a kid: Konami's Nemesis 2 for the MSX computer.

In these times games were usually hard. Nemesis 2 is even harder.  The only way to play it without save-states is not dying all 15 levels. Given that Nemesis 2 is a shooter this is VERY hard :)


nemesis2_stage_24_2.png



Each one of those red bullets and grey stones is fatal :)

But save-states wasn't enough. I also enabled "old-people" mode, meaning running the emulator at 75% speed of the original MSX computer.

After more then an hour of hard labour playing using alot of save-states I finally managed to finish the game.

Only 22 years late ;-)

P.S.: I checked with my MSX friends and no-one was able to finish this game without some form of cheating....

dell precision m6400 power brick

I'm really happy with my new Dell precision M6400.
The only thing most people complain about is the size of the power brick, and I can't agree more. It's a huge 200 Watt thing and it's really as large and heavy as a stone brick.

Luckily I still have a spare power brick of my old Dell precision M65: a 90 Watt  PA-10 family power brick. It has exactly the same voltage (19.5 Volt) so I decided to try it.
I've been using it now for a few days when at customer sites and it works fine.

(Try at your own risk!)

Thursday, February 5, 2009

icy little





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nikon d300 • 70-300 vr • © 2008 Joost Yervante Damad

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bones





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nikon d300 • sigma 300 f/4 • © 2008 Joost Yervante Damad

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Monday, January 19, 2009

a month

Last year I even did it for longer then a month, but this year I want at least to redo a minimal effort, thus I'm going for a month of sobriety, as a kind of cleansing :) (and no, I'm not religious).

These are my 5 daily checkpoints:

  1.  smoothie for breakfast

    This is something which we (me and my wife) do already anyway, have a fresh fruit smoothie for breakfast. Currently our favorite mix is 4 blood oranges, freshly pealed and parted, a seep of  Sea-buckthorn elixir, and a couple of frozen strawberries (or cranberries). Mix all in the blender, long enough to don't have any parts left. It is extremely tasty, and gives a serious vitamin boost for the winter. The idea is to have it for breakfast and then don't drink or eat anything else for at least 1.5 hours, to make sure it's (almost) fully digested.

  2. < 4 coffee

    This is a hard one; people who know me will know I'm a serious coffee lover. I have a special espresso machine, and typically serve single origin or special blend coffees. It's hard to resist :)

  3. exercise

    Just a walk with the dogs already counts.

  4. no sugar

    This is usually not so hard for me, as I'm not into sweets anyway.

  5. no alcohol

    This is tougher. I'll have to stick to coffee, tea and fruit juices.
This is all as much a physical as a mental exercice :)


Wednesday, January 14, 2009

brussels




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nikon d300 • tamron 17-50 f/2.8 • © 2008 Joost Yervante Damad

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