Author: Krunk

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The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Been playing The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap for the past few days. It’s the real cause of why I haven’t updated my blog much recently. The game sells on Amazon.com for $30. I first played this game at Best Buy sometime my senior year in college and fell in love with Link (he’s so cute!!!). Zelda is cute too, but Link is cuter. This break, I decided to ask my brother to let me borrow his gameboy and I’ve been playing pretty much non-stop. The only reason why I’m blogging right now is because the battery died when I was in the Ice Dungeon so it’s recharging right now.

zelda

zeldazeldazeldazeldazelda
(from Video Games Media Network)

zelda
(from Ganon’s Tower)

zeldazeldazeldazeldazeldazeldazeldazeldazelda
(from Nintendo-Difference)

Did I mention how cute Link is?

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Munich

Went to watch Munich with Antegra, DNG, Glendia, LilSneezy, PhatFreeza, and Chheang. You can watch the trailer here. IMDB users rate it a 8.0. The movie didn’t have much action, but told a very strong story, though it could’ve been shorter and it felt dragged out every once in awhile.

munich

Spoilers:

The story revolves the incident that occured during the 1972 Olympics held in Munich, Germany. This was when the Israelites’ (Jews) and the Arabians’ conflict was in full fledge. The Arabs had killed off 11 of the Israel Olympic contestants. Israel decided they needed to fight back, but they couldn’t do it openly, so they created a team of 5 which will have no governmental connection and will complete 11 assassinations or as many as they could until the Arabs get the message.

Most of the story talked about the process and what went on their minds at that time. One of the most powerful thoughts was the fact that new people replaced those who got killed and the replacements were usually worse than before. The leader of this team could not see an ending to this and when 3 of his teammates died, he gave up on the rest of the mission.

The story was powerful, but does require somewhat of an understanding between Palestines and Israelites.

I didn’t know the movie was directed by Steven Spielberg until the credits started rolling. The cinematograpy was great. DNG noticed the shot of the twin towers at the final scene which was quite symbolic.

Went to Noodle World afterwards and Sueon joined us. We chatted stuff ranging from intelligent design to Microsoft’s Windows Live Local. It was quite fun.

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Full Metal Alchemist – Conquer of Shambhala

Just watched Full Metal Alchemist – Conquer of Shambhala (劇場版 鋼の錬金術師 シャンバラを征く者). The subtitles were pretty horrible. Badly translated, missing translations, very bad timing, and tons of typos. However, the story was so good! I don’t want to spoil anything here, but you can read about it in the spoilers.

full metal alchemistfull metal alchemistfull metal alchemistfull metal alchemist

Shambhala, according to Wikipedia is In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Shambhala (also spelled Shambala or Shamballa) is a mystical kingdom hidden somewhere beyond the snowpeaks of the Himalayas. It is mentioned in various ancient texts including the Kalachakra and the ancient texts of the Zhang Zhung culture which pre-dated Tibetan Buddhism in western Tibet. The Bon scriptures speak of a closely-related land called Olmolungring.

Spoilers:

The TV series left much to be desired with Edward and Alphonse seperated. In this movie, it starts off with Ed telling his stories about his world to “another” Alphonse. So let me back track. Ed apparently found an Al-look-a-like in Romania and this Alphonse researches on rocket science. Apparently, physicists exists in Ed and Al’s world too, but their parallel universe followed the route of Alchemy instead of Physics.

Somehow, the Germans and Nazis were involved, as well as the Thule Society. Adolf Hitler (or as called the Fuhrer in the anime) also appeared trying to resurrect Germany after World War I. So that’s the time frame I believe. The Thule Society was trying to connect to Shambhala, this mythical parallel universe and acquire their power to fight the war.

Later on, you find that this new Alphonse is making a rocket to help Thule Society arrive at Shambhala safely. Apparently it needed to reach 11km/hr (or maybe the subtitles were wrong). Tons of duplicates from the original world are also shown in this world, but completely different such as Hughes is stil a police officer. Scar also showed up as a truck driver. I can go on and on with the list, but lets get to the interesting parts.

MAJOR SPOILERS:

Al has been trying to figure a way to find his lost brother and when the Thule Society attempted to open the gate between the 2 worlds, he was able to send a armer with part of his soul attached into the other world, finding his brother. So he attempts to connect to the world from his side. Wrath and Gluttony were sacrificed on that side of the gate while Envy and Hohenheim were sacrificed on the other side. After Envy went through the gate in the last episode, apparently he became a big snake (also known as a dragon) in the other world.

After the gate was reopened, Thule Society sent it’s rockets through. The 2nd Alphonse realized that such another world exists and sent Ed through it first. The reunion of Ed and Al and Winry was quite bittersweet. Why I say bittersweet, you’ll find out shortly.

Someone the story ties into the fact that people who you don’t associate with are monsters. That’s why humans somteimes see humans who are different as monsters and would do anything to eliminate (think Nazis and Jews). The Thule Society saw alchemists as a threat and believe they needed to destroy that world at all cost.

Al and Ed team up to fight this invading army which was cool since both of their alchemy skills were superb. Mustang also arrived to help. After they defeated the ‘boss’, Ed knew what he needed to do. He had to bring this army back to the other world because they didn’t belong there. He also needed to close the gate from the other side. Al begged his brother to stay, but he wouldn’t listen. Winry already knew what Ed would do, but she was still sad to see him go, after only seeing him briefly.

After arriving back to the other world, Al pops up hidden inside an armor suit. It was so cute that these 2 brothers get to reunite!

Seems like the DVDRip has finally been released! I just saw PsyKE‘s release and from what I saw, it was pretty good. Did a quick skim and and the fonts, timing, and translations were all pretty decent. Enjoy!

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White Elephant

A White Elephant was held over at Glendia’s house last night. White Elephant Gift Exchange is described as:

Traditionally, a “White Elephant” is something lying around the house that you don’t want (some horridly ugly item that someone gave you as a gift or some other item unwanted for some reason). I am of the belief that in most parts of the country, if you tell someone to bring a White Elephant gift it will almost certainly be a gag gift and not something genuinely useful or desirable.

The type of gift exchange that you have described, I have always heard referred to as a “Yankee Swap”.

THE GIFTS:

  1. This party’s gift theme is XYZ.
  2. The gift should be valued as close to $xx.00 as is reasonable.
  3. The gift should be something someone would actually want or use. It should be in new or good condition.
  4. The gift should be wrapped or in an envelope before arriving to the party. Gift bags are OK only if a wrapped item is inside.
  5. Gift certificates are OK only if it is accompanied by some other item as part of the gift. For instance, a $xx Starbucks gift certificate, by itself, is not OK, but a $yy Starbucks gift certificate together with a coffee mug is OK.
  6. As guests arrive to the party, the gifts should be placed in an area where few people can see who brought which gift. All efforts should be made to hide who brought which gift.

THE GAME:

  1. Each guest who wishes to participate must contribute a gift. Everyone sits or stands in roughly a circle around the pile of gifts.
  2. Prepare slips of paper equal to the number of gifts with clearly written numbers. Be sure to distinguish 6 from 9, 1 from 7. Each participating guest draws a number and holds onto that slip of paper.
  3. On the first turn, the guest with paper slip #1 chooses a gift, opens it, and all admire it.
  4. On the second turn, the guest with paper slip #2 gets the choice of “stealing” any unwrapped gift (#1’s) or choosing a wrapped one. If #2 steals #1’s gift, then #1 must open a wrapped gift.
  5. On the third turn, the guest with paper slip #3 gets the choice of “stealing” any unwrapped gift (#1’s or #2’s) or choosing a wrapped one.

The game continues based on the following:

  1. If a gift is stolen from you, you can steal a gift (within limits, described below), or open a wrapped one.
  2. The turn proceeds until a wrapped gift is chosen.
  3. A gift cannot be immediately stolen back from the guest who just stole it.
  4. The fourth “owner” of a gift gets to keep it. The gift is “dead” after it has been stolen three times.
  5. “Owners” of “live” gifts must keep them visible and hold them up when requested.
  6. The gift exchange ends when the last wrapped gift is opened. Usually, guests are encouraged to perpetuate the gift stealing as long as there are “live” gifts, but no one is obligated to do this.

The set price for our gifts was $20 and I got something from the Microsoft Company Store before I left from Seattle: Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000. It sells on Amazon.com for $37, but with employee discount, it was a lot closer to the set price of $20.

While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, Glendia being the host, made baked some cookies and put ice cream on top of it which was really good, but also super sweet. She also busted out the IceWine (Eiswein) which she brought back from Germany and shared it with us. I declined since I didn’t like wine either. Ohfuee was toasting to every hot actress he could think of.

We modified the rules a bit since there were only 8 people: Antegra, Glendia, JoeHK, LilSneezy, Ohfuee, DNG, Chheang, and I. Also, THE GIFTS RULE #6 was completely violated because almost everyone knew at least what one other person brought. I think the only 2 people who did not know any other gift was Chheang and me. Quite a few interesting gifts showed up and I ended with the Puzz3D Empire State Building which I stole from Antegra.

Some needed to leave as midnight came along because they wanted to open presents with the family. The rest of us stayed to play Taboo. There weren’t really any teams, we just went around in circles guessing. There were moments that were so funny when someone would say something like: “Lily is BLANK.” or “What you do when you’re bored.” or “Heang does this to me.” Glendia had to drive to Vegas the next day, so we left around 3am.

LilSneezy was hungry so we ended up at ABC Cafe. Almost everyone ordered their $2.29 wonton noodles. Cheap. Cheap. Ohfuee also ordered a warm milk with raw egg drink. I didn’t dare to try it, but supposedly it wasn’t that bad. Suddenly out of nowhere, Kalekkos shows up. Apparently, it’s the thing to hang out at ABC Cafe at 5am in the morning on Christmas.

Check out the photos I took.

lily and earl
PhatFreeza would be happy to see this.

heang, anthony, and chheang
Guys awaiting for the present stealing to begin!

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Kyle’s Birthday

Kyle’s Birthday was this past Saturday the 24th, but we celebrated with him on Friday. A bunch of us guys got together cand chilled at his place. Antegra and DNG had set it up, but apparently most of the people had other plans already, so only a few showed up. In fact, besides the 2 who setup, only JoeHK and I accepted the Evite. JoeHK was going to arrive later, but the rest of up met up at DNG’s place before we headed off to Kyle’s place. Just when we were about to leave, Chheang gave us a call and asked if he could join. Of course! The more the merrier.

We went to Ralph’s to buy some booze to celebrate Kyle’s birthday. It was suppose to be international beer testing, but no one really knew what beer tasted good. So we did a coin flip between hard alcohol and and beer and hard alcohol won. We ended up with Smirnoff Vodka (green apple flavor) along with some coke. JoeHK being a party pooper called us and told us he might not be able to make it because his company’s Christmas party was extending to karoake.

Antegra, DNG, and JoeHK had chosen a gift certificate from Sports Chalet since Kyle’s really into fishing and they didn’t really know what fishing equipment he needed. Chheang and I chipped in later. They also got him a “Would Rather Be Fishing” license plate holder, which Kyle was able to guess immediately without opening the wrapping.

Kyle busted out his sister’s Grey Goose and Absolut Vodka which they did shots with. I didn’t join in since I didn’t particularily like the taste, but they convinced me to do Coke and half a shot of vodka, which basically tasted like bitter Coke with a hint of green apple.

We talked about a bunch of things and Kyle’s parents are so cool. We played with their cat Zion (yes, the last city of humans in The Matrix). We got Zion to jump between the car and the boat back and forth with a catnip toy. Well, I never got it to jump, but DNG and Kyle did. I guess cats just don’t like me.

Kyle had these really cool BB guns. One was in the form of an assault rifle with semi-automatic shooting. However, the battery was low. We also played with his glock which was powered by CO2 and we were shooting into cardboard boxes.

JoeHK and N0rybic finally showed up and we decided to play some poker. Buy in was only $1 so it was basically a friendly game. They had just gotten a whole poker set with card shuffler, chips, and table. The shuffler didn’t really work, so we basically shuffled on our own. Not really going to get into the details of the game, but Kyle ended up winning with me as #2. The payout was $5 for 1st place and $2 for 2nd. Hehe. I doubled my money. ;p

and once again:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KYLE!

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AIM Triton

So for some reason AIM wasn’t installed on my computer when I got home. My dad’s been using my computer for some time now since his laptop stopped working, but that turned out to be a fluke. For all this time I thought his hard drive had died since that’s what both my brother and my uncle who I learnt how to build computers and troubleshoot them diagnosed it as. So my dad was pressuring me to fix his laptop this break and I was just about to order a 2.5″ notebook hard drive for him, when I wasn’t sure if a height of 9.5mm was small enough to fit.

I asked my dad where the laptop was and just before I started to unscrew the laptop, I decided to give it a whirl to see what the problem was for myself. The battery was all out of juice, so I had to find the adapter to plug it in. The laptop booted, but froze at first screen. There were several options such as getting the boot list or going into setup. I hit ESC for something and it showed me an extended memory test was being ran. It was really slow. Maybe 10MB/sec out of the 512MB of installed RAM.

I went into bios setup and the hdd was detected and nothing seem out of the ordinary. I rebooted the machine, the extended memory test took a few minutes, but then afterwards, Windows XP loaded and I was able to login to his account and all his data was intact. After a reboot, the extended memory test was no longer there and the system was booting up quickly.

Now back to AIM. Since I don’t use this computer often, it usually has the unfiltered unhacked software. Well besides Firefox, which is needed in all computers I use. So I download the newest AIM. Apparently, they’ve dropped the old AIM client and even changed the version # back to 1.x. The new AIM is called AIM Triton. It’s actually quite bloated and I was on the verge of uninstalling it immediately, however I gave it a little bit longer and it actually has some interesting features. By default, all IMs are sent to 1 window and history is stored. Finding someone on your buddy list is a lot easier too and you can enable aliases to be shown instead of screen names. One thing they removed from Triton is the ability to only play a noise when you first received. However, switching between chats is a bit difficult. There is a less bloated version: Aim Ad Hack 5.0 Beta 17 (from Rayalome). I never did get it to successfully installed because ads are still showing, but you can feel free to try it. I got some help from Rayalome. Apparently there’s this extra menu in Preferences which allows me to disable the ads, which isn’t enabled by default. Sweet! Other stuff it gets rid of includes the AOL Explorer and the Viewpoint Player and tons of other junk. It still feels bloated, but it doesn’t have all those secondary programs installed.

There’s a few extra icons next to people’s screen names now such as the water droplet which I have yet to figure out.

Feature creapage (from rayalome) – interesting info regarding the new AIM Triton.

Some of the stuff that I’ve found annoying include the fact that the coloring doesn’t always transfer to the old AIM. Such as my default green color font is showing up as black. Another annoying thing is that when I’m away, messages get queued in a completely different window and won’t show up in the main chat window unless a chat window has already been opened. Rayalome also noted that the direct connection functionality no longer works (where you can connect directly to any other AIM user and send images and have have no limit on the amount of text to transfer through).

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Windows XP MCE (Media Center Edition)

First of all, I’d like you to know I’m sitting in a comfy chair sitting in front of a 55″ projection big screen tv with my IBM X31 on my lap, typing this post and watching 24 – Season Four on my Media Center PC. My analysis on Season 4 will come later, since as this title suggests, it’s going to be about MCE.

As I stated in one of my previous posts, I was really impressed with my friend Derek’s Media Center PC. So I decided one of the projects I’d work on this winter break was to upgrade my HTPC (Home Theater PC) to Windows XP MCE 2005 (Media Center Edition). As a Microsoft employee, we’re allowed to “test” the software for free. I also dropped by the Company store before I left and picked up a Microsoft Remote Control for MCE for $25. Supposedly, the Logitech® Harmony® 880 Advanced Universal Remote (which Amazon.com is selling for $230) is a much better remote, but the price tag is a lot more than what the market price for the Microsoft Remote Control is. I was also thinking about getting the Micorosft Remote Keyboard for MCE for $45 (which Amazon is selling for $80)

Installing the OS wasn’t bad. I didn’t really have anything to back up on this system since all the videos were stored on a network drive. However, since my hard drive in this Shuttle XPC SK43G is a SATA and there’s no floppy drive in it, I had to ghetto rigged a temporary floppy drive from my brother’s desktop to be able to load the SATA drivers. The setup was rather simple and like all the other XP installations I’ve done. The only difference is that XP MCE 2005 has 2 CDs and somewhere in the middle, it prompted me to swap discs.

After the OS installed successfully, everything was fine and dandy. Media Center started without a hitch and the setup process went through smoothly. Adding folders to “My Videos” was also easier than expected. The remote control did wonders. However, the moment I tried to play a video, I hit problems. I would get audio, but no picture. The screen would go completely black. After some searching online, it turns out apparently some video cards are compatible with MCE. That meant the onboard video on my Shuttle XPC SK43G which is a S3 Graphics with Via KM400/KN400 isn’t compatible with MCE. I tried a bunch of things like updating the drivers and even trying to look for bios/firmware updates, but there were none. I’ve tried playing with the video settings, but that didn’t get me anywhere. The only thing left to try was sticking in another video card and trying, but it was already 7am and I was tired. Do note, this was my first night home.

So this afternoon when I found some time, I once again borrowed something from my brother’s desktop. I stole his Rosewill Radeon 9200SE and plugged it into my Shuttle XPC. However, S-Video was giving me trouble. The screen was black and white and it was scrolling down continuously and wrapping back at the top. I didn’t really know what this problem was. Was the video card having s-video problems. Was the card loose? I even brought out my 19″ LCD to diagnose, updated to the latest Radeon drivers, and played with the display settings. An initial search resulted people with a black and white problem, but not the scrolling problem. There wasn’t really a simple answer on fixing the problem and at this point I was getting frustrated. While trying to look for updated drivers/firmware and playing with display settings, I was googling for what may be the cause of this problem. Then I hit a thread talking about PAL and NTSC problems and having seen PAL VHS tapes in my NTSC VCR before, this was exactly the problem when a PAL signal is sent to a NTSC device. But there’s no way to configure that setting through software. The user manual wasn’t much help and the online threads were saying something about DIP switches which didn’t exist on my video card.

However, the card did have some jumpers. 4 in fact: J1, J11, J12, and J13. The only jumper that connected the 2 pins was J13. I’m not exactly sure why this card was set in PAL mode since I bought it from NewEgg. The user manual didn’t have any information regarding these jumpers, so I ended up taking a risk and unconnecting J13. Bam! No, that wasn’t the sound of my video card blowing up, but it worked! Color and no more scrolling!

Once Windows loaded, the problem came back and I’m like, oh no! WHY!?!?! Then it hit me that the problem may be because of the drivers I installed. I uninstalled them and reinstalled the drivers (same executable), rebooted the machine, and it WORKS! If the driver could control the PAL/NTSC setting, why the heck couldn’t I change it? Grrrrrr.

Anyway, I loaded up Media Center and the videos play fine. w00t!

Now, my brother’s system doesn’t have a video card. I searched Anandtech and Fatwallet for some deals on cheap AGP cards and found that mwave was having one for sale for $15. They also had one with DVI for $2.50 more. So I chose that one instead. I also had a $10 off coupon. After tax and handling fees, it came out to be $13 for a FIC A92 Radeon 9200SE, which is basically the same video card. Hehe.

You can read the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Review. The Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 Review is also available. Here’s the official What’s Hot with Media Center. There’s still so much to play with like the online gaming and music which I haven’t had time to check out yet.

I happened to find this link: Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP Media Center Edition which includes Tweak MCE for Media Center Edition 2005, Alarm Clock, Media Center Soltaire, and Playlist Editor.

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Alternative Codecs

Hate have 3 different players to play all your media. Needing Apple QuickTime to play .mov files and needing RealPlayer to play .rm and .rmvb files and Windows Media Player to play everything else. Even if you have Media Player Classic, you’ll need both of those respective players installed to get it to play .mov, .rm, and .rmvb files in it.

Unless…

You have Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative. After installing these files, you won’t have to download the corresponding players and be able to play those files in any media player that you choose. I’d recommending either Media Player Classic or VLC media player. Actually, I’m not too sure that VLC media player will play QuickTime and RealMedia files since I never really tried. No more gunk from these bloated players. The reason why I was looking for these today wsa because I was trying to get MCE (Media Center Edition) to play all the video files I have. MCE is pretty sweet and I’ll be getting into that story later.

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比武 Beimo

The long awaited Schwartz production has finally been released:
比武 Beimo

Well, long awaited for me since I’ve been seeing clips every now and then whenever sschwartz puts it up online. I’ve got to say, this piece was beautifully done. All of the conversation is in Cantonese, though I’m not sure if that makes it more authentic or not.

Spoilers:

This film starts off with the scene where Japan invades China during WW2. However, the context seems to show that the Japanese were attacking Beijing and northern China, which I don’t believe speak Cantonese. However, the survivors later moved to Hong Kong, or so the story goes as they held fights on rooftops.

The story follows the life of a boy whose parents got murdered in front of his eyes. As he grows up, he can’t control the rage he has against the Japanese and always gets into trouble for getting into fights. However, he knows the anger inside of him is not good and asks for help trying to get rid of it.

The choreography was done really nicely and the story flowed well. The video editing was superb! The one thing I do miss is that many of johno’s scenes were removed, including my favorite falling to the knee scene. But I guess since you’ve never seen that one, there’s no point in trying to describe it for you. Another thing that would’ve been nice is a higher quality release. It was a bit hard to see everything at a 320×240 resolution. I was surprised of the adults that took part in it since this is the first time I’ve seen adults in it. By adults, I mean people who look like they’re fathers, but I’m guessing one of them is their Wing Chun master and the other could be a father of one of the actors.

Check out a more indepth review at Kung Fu Cinema. They’re actually on the front page as I type.