It has a light and a whistle

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on June 9, 2008
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I’ve just come back from a one day business trip to Dublin. I will give you my itinerary:

6:55AM - Take off from Southampton Airport

8:20AM - Arrive in Dublin

9:00AM - Meet with colleagues and commence meeting

1:00PM - Travel back to Dublin Airport

4:30PM - Take off from Dublin to Southampton

6:20PM - Arrive in Southampton

HOWEVER

What actually happened was that my flight out was delayed by 2 hours meaning I didn’t get to the meeting until about 11, left at about 1. When I got to the airport I noticed my flight was canceled. So I spent 7 hours today in Dublin Airport including a 4 hour ’sunbathing’ session in a shirt and trousers - sitting on some grass covered in a hard plastic mesh. I fell asleep on this mesh for some time and received a red glow on my face. Anyway, time went quicker than I thought and I was soon at the gate to take my flight, only to find that this flight had also been delayed by an extra hour.

There was a collective cheer when the plane finally arrived at 9:25PM.

Anyway, as for the title, It’s my favourite part of the safety announcment, I noticed something today - smaller planes don’t carry oxygen masks yet the larger ones do. Now, I’m pretty sure if you need it in a large plane then you’re also going to need it in a smaller one, so what’s the crack with that?

First an apology…

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on May 29, 2008
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First an apology, I’ve failed to update you with a compilation of my favorite cracktro tunes, but this is because I have something bigger in mind (Not Earth-shattering, but something a bit more than a simple mp3 with a few MODs). What I have done for you is started a youtube channel and I’ve whacked a few recordings of the better cracktro’s on there - That will have to do for now!

Anyway, The main reason I’m posting is because I want to tell you about a movement to stop the use of ‘www’ on the internet @ no-www.org. I consider myself to be a fairly early adopter since I usually try to save myself the typing of the www. with every address that I visit. Some sites (www.novatech.co.uk) actually don’t work if you enter the URL without the ‘www’s, but most do. It seems pointless to me, just more characters to type.

Maybe you’ve noticed the new button to the right, it’s proudly explaining that this is now a Class B site, if someone tries to get to www.swizeet.net it’ll just politely redirect them to swizeet.net.

This whole thing may come across as really geeky and pedantic, sorry about that, it’s just how it is.

ANSI and Cracktro’s and Chiptunes, Oh My!

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on May 21, 2008
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You’ve probably noticed the buttons on the right hand side of the page linking to ‘demoscene’, perhaps you already know about it, perhaps you don’t care. If however you were drawn in by the pretty animations and pixel art on those tiny buttons then you may have caught a glimpse of what the demoscene is. Really, if you don’t already know, the best thing you can do is visit http://www.pouet.net and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene (for a quick rundown). If you’re too lazy, I’m going to quote wikipedia:

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations run real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

So this is one of the things that I’ve got an interest in and I’ve spent many fine hours watching excellent technical demonstrations on a wide variety of platforms.

Cracktro’s

A cracktro is a small piece of software added by the ‘warez’ group when they release/repackage a game or an application. In the time of the Amiga and the SNES every game would have a cracktro tacked onto the front of it and you could use this to easily identify the group responsible. It was a nice way to promote the group and possibly poke fun at rival groups.

Vision Factory

I don’t care about this crap. Why is he telling me this?

As I’ve mentioned before, no one is forcing you to read, but the question is valid, why am I telling you?

Because the use of cracktro’s is in great decline and I think it’s a real shame, I was hoping perhaps we’d discuss this in the comments, though the fan-base isn’t exactly sky-high. Why are the groups no longer including cracktro’s? Is it because it takes too long? Is it because games no longer include their own bootloader? Personally, I think it’s mostly down to time and lazyness now, people in the ‘warez scene’ seem far less interested in tradition, preferring raw speed of packaging over quality of releases, now don’t get me wrong, more releases is great, but wouldn’t it be nice to see some nice technical flair and some nice (?) music?

I’m planning on creating a little compilation of music from some of my favourite cracktro’s, It’ll be my next post, if this post has interested you, probably the best way to see more is at http://www.flashtro.com, it requires you to sign up, but it’s worth it, the creator has produced remakes of a wide range of cracktros from the Amiga in Flash format for easy viewing.

Their two pennies…

Published
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on May 15, 2008
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I’ve just gotten back from a business trip in Edinburgh and my parents are away in Wales for the week, so, as expected, there was a lot of mail sitting on the door mat. One of these letters caught my eye, it was in a window envelope and there were two pennies stuck next to my address.

I took it upstairs, and opened it (It was clearly junk, addressed to my mum). This is what it said:

Dear Mrs Knight, I sent you these two pence because children like Tamba are in the greatest crisis of their young lives.

Is anyone spotting the flawed logic here? Why would a charity send money to me? It continues…

I am praying that you will help us feed one of these hungry children with anything you can possibly spare…even just two pence

Insane. This makes no sense, this charity has just sent me two pence and has now asked me to donate it back?

This probably does sound a bit like a rant, but it seems so ridiculous, lets assume at bare minimum they’ve sent out 100 of these letters, that’s £2 they’ve spent without factoring printing costs. This £2 could probably have bought some rice? Maybe even a tool or something else that they claim they provide.

I wont mention the name of the charity because I’m sure they do some good work too, this however, is way off the mark.

Welcome

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on May 5, 2008
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If you were around on the internet in 2001 then you may remember the E/N phenomenon, if not then I’ll give you a quick rundown. E/N stands for ‘Everything/Nothing’, Basically, an E/N site would be a personal blog with a (usually) teenager posting about their daily lives and problems. The undisputed Queen of the E/N scene was Nay of mija.nu - A pretty looking 15 year old with a web cam and too much time on her hands. Nay reportedly received thousands of dollars worth of gifts from her Amazon.com wish list, undoubtedly from aging men that enjoyed looking at her in web cam pictures of her in little more than a bra and knickers. Anyway, this sort of thing was interesting and it hadn’t previously been seen, young people talking about issues that were relevant to young people and I suppose it made the world feel a bit smaller.

Armed with this knowledge, I decided to attempt to recreate the success of mija.nu by creating my own E/N site and hopefully earning a few things off of my wish list from men of a different persuasion, thus, swizeet.net was born.

That was 2001, we’re now well into 2008 and it’s been about seven years since my last recorded post and about the same since the domain expired, so after this break, I am now pleased to invite you to swizeet.net (2.0 no doubt). Blogs these days have a wide range of topics and aren’t limited to teenage angst and I don’t intend to bore you with too many tales of woe, I’ll write about things that interest me, and if you find that interesting, great! If not, then there’s plenty of other things for you to read.

Are you still with me? I’ll now take this opportunity to thank my host, long-term friend and kind sponsor, Kyle of mson.org.

And no, not one single perverted man bought me a gift from my wish list….