M635 J520

The other day I invested in the long awaited (in the EU, that is) Rocksmith music game. This lets you play with your good old electric guitar or bass hooked up to your PS3, instead of the plastic gadgets made infamous in the 00s. I haven't had/taken the time to sit down rock out much with the game itself, but I have had a quick try at something that I guessed might be possible - to use the included cable, the so-called Real Tone Cable, as an interface between my guitar/bass and my iPad. Plugged, played, and lo and behold, it worked! Amp modelling and recording in Garageband, analog modelling filters with Moog's filtatron, etc. Classe ! (I have not confirmed the sound quality , but latency wise it is not too bad.)

Sometimes I need to get data out of tables buried in PDFs, so I've written a tiny adaptable Ruby hack for when copying and pasting doesn't cut it - exploiting a couple of excellent libraries. Here's an example. Loading... (Admittedly not the most elegant of scripts, but hey! it gets the job done.) What I do first here is just load up the relevant libraries. (The pdf-reader I use is this one: https://github.com/yob/pdf-reader - installable with a simple command line 'sudo gem install pdf-reader' if you are using Ruby 1.9. (Drop the sudo if you're on Windows.)) Next up is to instantiate input pdf and output table. Straight forward enough. By examining the pdf I found the data I was interested in on pages 42 through 69, so a simple call to pages give me those -  pdf_reader . pages [ 42 . . 69 ] . I'll go through the text on each of them line by line and decide if they contain what I want based on regular expressions. These are my simple rules (in th...

Today I wondered how to add nice-looking gists to future posts here on my dynamic themed blog, and found the following solution: http://blog.moski.me/2012/01/gist-with-bloggers-dynamic-views.html  (Thanks Moski.) That's all. Update 10/12/2014: The script has now moved (Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24005430/moski-gist-blogger-not-loading-gists-in-chrome-for-gists-in-blogger-dynamic-vie ) Update 25/04/2020: This guide is better: https://betterstack.dev/blog/how-to-embed-a-github-gist-in-your-website/ .

I figured I should give the XCOM demo another shot tonight, attempting what I thought was another level - since the game lets you choose to do either a mission in the US or China. Turned out to be the same level. Only skinned slightly differently. Fair enough. Also, I thought I could change the difficulty level, but alas, no. (Afterwards I found a guide on how to do it though:   http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/655782-/64136437  (Not that I have tested it...)) Also, I figured I would try to capture one of the  Sid M  Thin Men alive. (Since the cute German scientist asked me nicely, but I just fragged them to smithereens last playthrough.) If I understand well, this is not possible in the demo, due to lack of things to stun things. Anyway - after two play-throughs I'm looking even more forward to the full game. Excellent. (If only it was delivered with a fair dose of time.)

I just played through the demo  of Firaxis'  re-imagination  of one of my all time favourite computer games: UFO: Enemy Unknown . Short, but sweet. Very very sweet! (But very very short... (Quite possibly the shortest 5864 MB I've ever experienced.)) I don't have/take the time to game as much as I want to/ should, but this is a game that I have been looking forward to since it was announced.

Inspired by the success of the new SSD in my Mac Pro (and puzzled by a weird HD error) I went ahead and invested in a SSD for my 2010 Asus laptop as well. To get everything up and running the way I wanted took a bit more hacking than with the Mac, but now everything seems great - dual-booting Ubuntu 12.04 (main OS) and Windows 7 (mainly for gaming - till Steam is launched for Linux). This is what I did. I went for a 128 Gb CRUCIAL SSD m4 2,5" with a noname external 2,5" drive case. I tore out the old 600Gb-ish drive from the laptop, put it in the external case, and fit the new drive in its place. "Klok av skade", I went for installing windows first. (The Windows 98 installer overwrote my SuSE back in the day...) Windows 7 Since this Asus doesn't have an optical drive, I couldn't generate the "Recovery disc(s)" needed to reinstall the operating system. (Clever Asus.) The way I got around that was to boot Ubuntu 12.04 from a USB-stick, us...

Vroom! Recently I have added SSDs to things around me. That is, at least to two things. My laptop and my trusty old Mac Pro. Both experiences were fairly hitchfree, but I would like to point out one or two things. First one out was my Mac Pro. I decided to add a 256 GB SSD drive and went for a OCZ SSD Vertex 4 Series 256 Gb 2.5" SATA III drive with a Pro Sled 2.5" SSD/HDD. This fit snuggly in the 4th HD bay of my machine. I also wanted to take advantage of this commotion for doing a clean install of the newfangled Mountain Lion. (After making sure using good old googling that Cubase and Lightroom would still work.) I bought the upgrade in the AppStore, downloaded the installer, and followed this guide to get it onto a USB-stick:  http://www.macworld.com/article/1161069/make_a_bootable_lion_installer.html  . Reboot holding down the alt-key, chose to boot from USB and got a clean OSX in zero point swish. Since I still have my old HDs in there somewhere, and some bigger, ...