Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Madcatz EVO FightStick Pro Remora, ArcEye3, and ChimpSMD Mod

Thursday August 2, 2012

� My son and I went to EVO again this year and in addition to spending way too much money in general, I bought the MadCatz EVO limited edition FightStick Pro for myself. The clear Madcatz limited edition EVO 2012 FightStick Pro is a thing of beauty to begin with. But it is just begging to be modded. Of course, I had to dual-console-mod it so I could use it in the XBox360 and PS3. But I also had to add some Button LEDs while I was at it. The new ArcEye3’s, plus the new Remora board, plus a blue ball stick top and blue shaft and blue translucent Seimitsu buttons all combine to be the most beautiful arcade stick Read more…

Apples

In Search of a Decent Bluetooth iPad Keyboard

Friday June 22, 2012

I’ve been looking for a good external Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad for a while. While the on-screen keyboard is okay for typing a couple of words at a time, it is very much not acceptable for much more than that. A while ago, I managed to find an old iGo Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard and have been using it with my iPad for the last couple of years. The keyboard itself is absolutely wonderful. The keys feel like real keyboard keys and the build quality is very good. Unfortunately, it does not come with a dedicated number row, so to type the number 4, for instance, you have to hold down the blue function key and press “r”. To type Read more…

Life in General, Work Stuff

A Watch Band Fit For A James Bond Hacker

Sunday March 11, 2012

I finally found the first watch band I’ve ever been excited about in my entire life and I just wanted to share it. It’s the Ballistic Nylon Strap (24mm, 5-Ring, Black). The reason this is so exciting for me is that when you attach your watch to it, you end up with a non-standard watch band where the buckle is actually near the side of your watch instead of on the bottom of your wrist. This means that if you’re a programmer like me, you won’t have a bulky watch band buckle digging into your wrist all day! Now, first of all, this watch band is made from ballistic nylon, and while I don’t know exactly what that means, I’m pretty Read more…

Life in General

On Getting Unlarger and Unrounder

How many times have you heard something that starts with “it’s a funny thing when you start getting older” and then end up hearing things that make you cringe and silently vow to yourself that it’ll never happen to you. Yeah, me neither. But let’s imagine that we have. If “it’s a funny thing when you start getting older”, it’s an even funnier thing when you get older and work from home 100% of the time. And if you think that’s funny, it’s an absolute riot when you get older, have a sit-down job, have a wife and 3 kids, work from home 100% of the time, and have no reason to go outside your front door more than once a Read more…

Google

Trying Out This Here Google AdSense Thingie

I really should have done this years ago, back when I was syndicated on a couple of FOSS planet RSS aggregators. *sigh* Anyway, after talking to my good friend Scott Knaub, and hearing how much money he periodically gets from just putting Google ads on his pages (I mean, it’s not tons of $CASHDOLLARZ, but still, every little bit counts!), I realized that I really need to look into doing just that. Of course, that was several months ago and I’ve had it on my ToDo list ever since. But better late than never? So, it’s not like anyone reads my blog anymore anyway, but in the off chance that you do and you have thoughts about it, please speak up. Read more…

Video Games

This Isn’t My Street Fighter Any More

Friday December 30, 2011

I came across this article today on BitMob, titled “A characters’ history of Street Fighter 4“. I’ve been playing and loving Street Fighter since Street Fighter 2 came out in 1991. I spent untold amounts of money at the arcades during my college and growing up years, playing Street Fighter with my brother Josh. And I loved it. And through the last 20 years (WOW), I’ve loved playing it on the PC, SNES, Xbox, and finally with the release of Street Fighter 4, on the PS3 and Xbox-360. I used to play with my kiddos and loved teaching them how to do the moves and learn footsies and strategy and mechanics. And I loved it. But lately, I’ve been finding Read more…

Life in General

A Tale Of Two Tablets

I’ve been meaning to blog about the two tablets I’ve been playing with for the last year+ for quite a while, and just never found the time or motivation. Let me say up front that I’m not writing this with the intention of swaying anyone’s opinions or influencing anyone’s purchase. I’ve been mulling the goods and bads about these two tablets around in my head for a long time and I just want to put them down somewhere so I can keep track of them. My first and main tablet is my iPad (first generation) with 32 GB of memory and built-in GPS/3G networking. I bought it on May 11, 2010. At the time, we were just about to head Read more…

Desktop, KDE, KPilot, Linux, Open Source

Goodbye, for now at least, Linux Desktop

Sunday November 13, 2011

I’ve been an Open Source developer and hacker for a loooooong, long time. It has become far more than a part of what I do. It has become part of who I am. At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason. But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and Read more…

Apples, Linux

Logitech Marble Mouse and “auto-scrolling” in OS X

Monday August 23, 2010

I love my Logitech Marble Mouse. It’s seriously the best mouse I’ve ever owned. And it works really nicely in Linux, especially thanks to this excellent Ubuntu wiki page. And, reportedly, it works really nicely in Windows too, with Logitech’s mouse config software (which does me absolutely no good being that I refuse to run Windows). But I could not get auto-scrolling (where you hold down one of the smaller buttons and move the marble to scroll) to work in OS X. I almost broke down and bought a new Kensington trackball mouse like the Kensington K72337US Orbit Trackball with Scroll Ring for PC or Mac, Kensington Expert Mouse Optical USB Trackball for PC or Mac (this one still really Read more…

Apples, Linux

VLC patch for hfsplus partitions, yay!

Monday January 11, 2010

I have a 13″ MacBook Pro that I use for my personal and non-work shtuff. I resized OS X down, installed Linux (Kubuntu), and set up a shared partition so that I can keep files there that I want to access from both OS X and Linux. Things like my music and video collection, Snooker torrents, VMware virtual machines, etc. It appears that there are basically 4 decent options for a shared filesystem between OS X and Linux, but IMHO only 2 of them are worth trying and only 1 of them seems to actually work almost perfectly: The venerable FAT32 filesystem. Yes, it works. No, it doesn’t work like you’d want a UNIX filesystem to work. You can’t store Read more…