Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Ocean’s Twelve

Friday April 15, 2005

So, I just spent a good couple of hours with my lovely wifey watching Ocean’s Twelve, and I can recommend it for your viewing pleasure, and thanks for asking. I will say, however, that the first twelve minutes of the movie (pun intended) had me cringing. It sure seemed to me that the movie starts off trying to use as many cliches as possible, and doing so many of the things (The Whole Ten Yards, anyone?) that are done in sequels, which totally and completely ruin the movie, for me at least. One of the most offensive of these aforementioned “things” is the frequent use of the title of the first movie interspersed in the characters’ dialogs. *twitch* But I Read more…

Life in General, Music

The sad state of music

Wednesday April 13, 2005

I found this ExtremeTech article looking at where the state of the state is for online music. I was very impressed with the approach they took in the article. Most reviews like this are completely Microsoft or Apple-centric and ignore the fact that there is a large user community that refuse (or can’t afford) to use these two operating environments. Flexibility Where can you play your downloaded songs? Does the service offer playback support in digital media adapters (DMAs)? Can you play your tracks on other PCs on your home network? Portable Device Support Can you play your downloaded tracks on your portable player? Are there restrictions as to which players are currently supported? Platform Support Does the service require Read more…

Life in General

How to do server-side e-mail filtering with cpanel/exim

Thursday April 7, 2005

I finally figured out how to do this, YAY!! This forum entry has more details, and I’ll blog more about it later, especially once I get all of my filters set up. For the time being, I only have my kde mailing list e-mails being filtered. Hmmm. Cool!! This means that I don’t have to set up filters in all the possible e-mail programs that I want to use (the list contains Kmail, Opera M2, Thunderbird, and evolution currently). Oh, and as another aside… I simply cannot speak highly enough about Justin and vortexhost.com. I dealt with another web hosting company before and was totally frustrated from their support. If you’re looking for a REALLY good, inexpensive web host, you’d Read more…

Life in General, Video Games

Yet another PS1 DualShock Series-H hack

Tuesday March 29, 2005

I’ve posted some new pictures from my latest mod. Thanks to John from modeverything.com, I’ve successfully modded a PS1 Series H DualShock controller for the brains of my second-player arcade stick controller. It was REALLY tight soldering, and I don’t claim to have done it well. In retrospect, I should have probably tinned the contact points on the PCB before I started, but the space was so tiny that I didn’t think I could. Anyway, now both arcade controllers have PS1 DualShock controllers for their internal circuit boards, and both work perfectly well with the PC games (PSX->USB Radio Shack converter) and the Xbox (Dreambox PSX->Xbox converter from LikSang.com). Whee!!

Life in General, Video Games

Updated arcade stick mod

Saturday March 26, 2005

So, I’ve done a bunch of research and question-asking and reading and cursing and gamestopping and some more reading and some more question-asking, etc. When I originally built my custom arcade sticks, I used the PCB’s from old PSX digital-only controllers, since they were the easiest to hack and solder. These worked really well for me (in combination with some PSX-to-USB converters I got from Radio Shack for $10) with PC games. Both Linux and Windows see the arcade sticks as regular joystick devices and they work perfectly fine with M.A.M.E. and the TOTALLY cool Killer Instinct emulator. Anyway, as I’ve blogged much about before, along came the Xbox and Street Fighter Anniversary Collection into my life and with it Read more…

Movies

Signs: I love and hate movies like this!

Saturday March 19, 2005

So, I finally rented and watched Signs, the uber-freaky, scary, funny, thoroughly enjoyable, “make my heart beat really really fast and make me keep looking behind me to make sure the door is closed and aliens aren’t going to grab me” movie. Holy smokes. What a great movie. First, I had gone into the movie thinking that surely, something other than aliens would be the explanation of the crop-circles, but I was obviously wrong. And I LOVE how the movie was completely unapologetic about this. From the first glimpse of the shadowy clearly-alien figure on the roof of the house, the movie made it very clear about what was coming. The brilliant part of it all was that that only Read more…

Life in General

My internet connection is better than yours is

Tuesday March 15, 2005

… or at the very least, my internet connection (now) is WORLDS better than my internet connection (last week). I’ve made the jump back from Verizon DSL to Comcast Cable modem (which, I must say, feels kind of dirty). $19.99 for 3 months, and then $58/month after that. Not great, but not horrible. And the speed alone makes it worthwhile, at least until I start getting the $58/month bill. I tested my connection with Verizon DSL before I got cable and it reported 700k down and 124k up. Suck! I just got the cable-modem installed yesterday, tested again, and got back speeds of 3.5M down and 364k up. ROCK! =:) Anywho, the whole reason behind this was the fact that Read more…

Life in General

Seriously disillusioned

Saturday March 5, 2005

I am, dangit. I waited 2+ weeks to get my Dreambox converter from Hong Kong so I could use my PSX-based custom-built arcade controllers with Street Fighter Anniversary Collection. They arrived today. I was SO excited, as was my son. We plugged them in, anticipating great times. We watched the joystick working correctly. Excitement mounted. I pressed the “start” button on my controller. The game started. And then it asked me to press “A”. And that’s when I discovered that my controllers don’t work with the converters with the Xbox for SFAC. Crap. Another $50 down the drain.

Life in General

New ways to waste time!!!

What in the world??? Also, as noted previously, I’ve broken down and bought an Xbox for the fam (well, okay, and largely for me too =:) ). I also have purchased the VERY cool Street Fighter Anniversary Collection, and with it Xbox Live for a year. I have discovered several new and exciting things since then: It is un-healthy for several key areas of your body to play for 5 hours, hunched over, trying to keep your head perfectly still so as not to move your Xbox Live headset. One or more of the following is sucking badly and causes terrible lag: the Street Fighter game itself, the server it’s connecting to, Xbox Live server, my Linksys WRT54GS router, Verizon Read more…