As seen from the Everglades to the west of Miami
Category: cool
Comet NEOWISE
Posted by Kristian Golding on July 26, 2020
Goldfinger – “Here in your bedroom”
Posted by Kristian Golding on April 13, 2020
So glad a colleague at work pointed me to what Goldfinger were up to – making the most of social isolation in times of Covid-19! This video, “Here in your bedroom”, is a nostalgia trip.
https://www.facebook.com/goldfingermusic/videos/231918244594308
Will this still be available in 10 years? God knows, but I might go check out what some other great bands have been doing online during this time.
Gameboy and music
Posted by Kristian Golding on February 9, 2020
I recently got my music bug again, and with my recent trip to Australia was able to bring back my original Gameboy. Combining the two, I thought I’d check out what music-making capabilities the Gameboy had. The most popular software was “Little sound DJ” (https://www.littlesounddj.com/). I purchased the full version of that, and while I could run that on an emulator, I wanted to run it on the real deal. To do this, I purchased a Gameboy flashing cartridge, “Flash BOY” ( https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/223590080458). This came with few instructions however. I was able to plug it into my laptop’s USB and see that it displayed as a FTDI device, but would need drivers. I installed some from here: https://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm but after more googling for flashing software, found that this also provided some drivers: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gbcf/
Starting up that tool, I put the flash boy cartridge into the flash boy itself and was greeted with this:
TMNT3? I put the cartridge in my gameboy just to check and – yep! There was TMNT3! I guess they used it as a test ROM.
Anyway, that was soon replaced with the LittleDJ software. I first hit “Erase FLASH” and then “Write FLASH” which gave me a file choice dialog box, where I chose the little sound DJ .gb file. It took a few minutes to flash. I put the cartridge in and was greeted by the text “”CARTRIDGE TEST SRAM FAIL TRY CLEANING PINS OR REPLACE BATTERY”.
I didn’t really know how to fix this, so I reset my FLASH size to be 2048 KB (16 Mb, which is what the Flash BOY supported), and upped the RAM to 32 KB. I did a full erase FLASH and RAM, then reflashed the DJ file, and read back the results:
Success! (Previously I was getting a bad game logo signature and a “Flash chip manufacturer name” of “Xilinx”).
…. or was it? Although this now wrote to the cartridge correctly, the ROM was not that of the DJ software. Looks like I will be needing a part 2 to this post!
The very hungry caterpillar
Posted by Kristian Golding on December 28, 2011
I recently couldn’t help but notice that one of the shrubs in our back garden had been reduced from something like this:
To this:
I thought that my mind had wondered while spraying for weeds a few days prior, and I’d accidentally killed most of it. However, while out watering I noticed something about the size of my little finger clinging to the side of one of the newly bare stems.
It’s the caterpillar of an Io moth. I was fascinated by the spines (which are actually poisonous, but not greatly) and the brown and white stripe running along the length of the caterpillar. Luckily it was early enough in the morning and wasn’t in a rush for work, so unpacked the monopod and macro lens and set to taking some shots. It ate most of the shrub, the least it could do was pose for me.
A few more shots can be found here.
The interesting part is that I currently don’t know where it is. I did see it on an adjoining shrub at one point, although it hasn’t left a trail of destruction. My only guess is that it has made a cocoon down near the base of the new shrub. I’m sort of hoping it is a male, as it will fly away to try and find a mate and then I won’t have to kill offspring. The female however tends to remain in place, waiting for a male to arrive (in moth form life lasts for only a day, so things have to happen fairly quickly), and that means things could get messy when I bring out the killing spray. Â But I’ll try and get some more photos first.