January 4th, 2008

Yay! I finally did it today! I 1CC’ed Under Defeat! Ok, it might only be 1LC depending on how you look at it
I started with some practice on stage 5 and the stage 5 boss to get warmed up. Then I had one go and that was it! This is one truly amazing game – perfectly balanced. When I die I always blame myself and never the game – just the way it should be but seldom is. It is probably also one of the reasons the game time currently is at 183 hours! They are not all mine though.
The dynamic difficulty works really well and the way you getter higher scores by killing bosses and major targets with your “option” adds a bit of strategy too.
Now I think it is time to move on (back to) Ikaruga. I have a score to settle with a friend of mine…
Posted in arcade, games | No Comments »
September 10th, 2007
I finally managed to clean up my geotagging tools! Read more and download them here
Posted in code, gps | No Comments »
July 30th, 2007
The cell architecture is really cool and you can even code for it at home using a consumer PlayStation 3. There is not a lot of memory on the PS3 for Linux and stuff – being able to compile on your OSX machine would be a lot cooler.
I made a Cell cross compiler last night. Here is how to do it:
First of all you need to download and install libgmp3 and libmpfr.
When configuring libgmp3 you need to do it like this:
./configure –host=none-apple-darwin
Then get the toolchain snapshot (or get it from svn) from ps2dev. I used ps3toolchain-20070626.tar.bz2 for this article. You need to fix two scripts in the depends folder:
check-libgmp3.sh and check-libmpfr.sh
Simply change /usr/include/ to /usr/local/include/
Run the toolchain script:
./toolchain.sh
That’s it! It should compile without problems.
Edit: You don’t need libgmp3 – newer versions of libgmp will also do.. Also the toolchain script requires wget. Compile it yourself or use MacPorts or something.
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July 9th, 2007
I finally got around to process all of my pictures and gps logs for my latest Japan trip. We visited Tokyo, Osaka, Himeji, Kyoto, Hiroshima and a small onsen resort up north called Ikaho – it was near Shibukawa station.
It was only 7 months since my first trip there but Japan was just as cool and fun as the first time!

Posted in gps, photography, travel | No Comments »
June 17th, 2007
After checking out both Adobe’s LightRoom and Apple’s Aperture I decided to go for Aperture. They are both very cool programs but Aperture is just that little bit nicer..
That was until I found out about its jpg export bug! When you export jpgs from Aperture with metadata it actually produces corrupt jpg files! This means that I can’t use either exiv2 or ExifTool to geotag my images!!
Instead I had to first export my images without metadata and then export them again without. Then I run a script that copies all the metadata from the corrupt jpgs and applies them to the metadata-less ones. And THEN I can run my gps scripts! This is pure pain!
Apparently this bug is not just an Aperture one but a general OSX one – the Preview application also corrupts images if you add keywords to an image! Strangely enough the jpegs are fine if they have for example a GPS Exif tag already before you import it into Aperture or add keywords in Preview.
Apple needs to fix this.. now!
Posted in gps, photography | No Comments »
April 25th, 2007
I finally got the route for my trip to Japan in 2006 plotted on a map. For some reason GPSVisualizer didn’t really work with satelite images this time around so I settled for this old-school map:

Himeji castle to the far left. Tokyo far right and Kanazawa at the top of the route..
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April 18th, 2007
Last year I was on a 5 weeks vacation in New Zealand and Japan. Since I am a camera freak and take a lot of pictures I thought it would be fun to use geocoding to organize the thousands of pictures. So I bought a Garmin 60Cx GPS and had it record our movements at all times.
First of all I used the tracklog to geocode all the pictures using a Ruby script I wrote. Since we brought 4 cameras and we travelled between several time zones and even had daylight savings time during the trip, we didn’t really had the right time on all the cameras at all times. So some pictures needed time correction. After a lot of tedious work I finally got that fixed.
Then it was time to run the script! It worked fine except that the tool I use to actually add the gps info to the images can’t write to RAW-files! So only the jpgs have gps coords at the moment.
I also wanted to have a complete route on a map or some sorts. I thought about doing something with Google maps until I found GPSVisualizer. That does more or less everything I wanted and more.

GPSVisualizer also outputs KML files for Google Earth. I used gpsbabel to trim down the track log which was rather large. Auckland complete with a cruise around the harbour:

We had a helicopter ride around Mt. Cook and had a quick landing on top of the glacier! Here is the trip is all its 3D glory: 

Now I just need to process the GPS logs from my Japan trip…
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April 4th, 2007
Yay! This monday I finally got my first arcade cabinet! I have been looking for one for some time now but I really wanted a Taito Egret II since it has a mechanism for easily rotating the screen.

So when the guys at Killercabs arranged a group order I didn’t hesitate. It is in pretty good shape only a few scratches here and there. The worst thing was some rust in the control panel but I think I can get rid of most of it.
The screen is a trisync so it will accept 15/24 and 31KHz resolutions – so I can connect basically anything. It will be a Dreamcast for starters. I bought 2 extra Dreamcast controllers I need to gut so I can hook them up to the control panel.
Next up is putting in a 220->110V transformer. Later on I probaly want to replace the buttons and balltops. Green, orange and purple don’t really go well together..
Oh and I need some cool stools!
Posted in arcade, games | No Comments »
March 25th, 2007
This blog is supposed to be the home of my various software projects – if I ever get around to finish any..
My ancient homepage can be found here. Hand editing html got really boring around 2002 I guess..
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »