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You can get Arduinos for about $6: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=arduino+pro+mini

Or build your own for the price of a chip plus veroboard. Or don't bother with the veroboard, just use the chip.

On the contrary, I would have said that Japanese sites are most notable for the huge-wall-of-text-on-a-plain-or-patterned-background design style. For instance:

http://www31.ocn.ne.jp/~kabuky/kiminote1.html
http://www.geocities.jp/teikakaku_videocards/kako/1080732188.html

They`re a lot easier to find when I`m not looking for them. I`m talking about pages that are lightyears long and nothing but text (and probably not updated since 2003)

Where did you get SGM-V2.01.sf2 from? http://www.geocities.jp/shansoundfont/ says 209 MB! What the frak? Wait, I thought GeoCities died.

I found this somewhat interesting:

http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html

http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html

turning the pages and scanning is childs play

http://www.geocities.jp/takascience/lego/fabs_en.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/20/howo-make-a-300-high.html

You will have to be good enough that fans will send you money or buy something physical such as a book from you.

Irreverent. If the format provides a better, more useful solution for some, being in or out of current development makes it no less useful. FLAC being "in development" is a nice thing to brag about, but it's not everything. Based on Xiph's lethargic development of Vorbis, which sat idle for YEARS until it got help from people like aoTuV, support from them it's all it's cracked up to be.

http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/

what, that thing?

Is it a competition. Is it thanksgiving. 10 trillion reasons to play!

Not when this has been around for years...

This is a neat proof of concept, but to really see this sort of "hack" fleshed out, take a look at N. Chikada's PacMan and Space Invaders Excel files. Graphics are run using cell colours, but it also does neat things like storing the system memory in a worksheet array.

I use it as an example of "just because you can do almost anything in Excel, doesn't mean you should"...

anyone remember this?

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/29/165214
http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/

Ruby is slow, even by scripting language standards (in the main implementation, anyways).

Both of them aren't that amazing when it comes to Unicode (like Perl or Java)

don't have built in security-hardened modes (like Perl's tainting or PHP's weird data firewall thingy, etc)

aren't as portable as they might be (like EBCDIC, VMS, S390 and other places that aren't Unix or Windows)

and their package repositories lack sophistication and the ability to properly nest dependencies in a cross-platform way (like Perl, Fortran, R and Erlang).

I'm sure this won't help the Panty Machines make a comeback...

http://www.snopes.com/risque/kinky/panties.asp

http://www.herroflomjapan.com/2006/09/21/the-final-word-on-used-panty-vending-machines-in-japan/

But, there are BEER vending machines, too, not just cigarette machines. I wonder if the ID sensor will be set to deny beer to kids under 20, which I think is the legal age in Japan.

http://www.geocities.jp/m_kato_clinic/mini-age-alcohol-eng-1.html

http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2037.html

Here's a blog that talks about Pacman in Excel. And here's the link to the original Japanese page.

Diablo III: Excel spreadsheet edition

There are multiple implementations. There is a fixed-point implementation designed for use in hardware playback devices which is supported by some of them. Samsung, Rio, Neuros Technology, Cowon and iRiver support it natively in their digital audio players. Also, there is at least one other implementation. Given the free nature and high quality and ease of use of the reference libraries, most programs make use of those and there is little reason to rewrite the library since the original code is very portable and easy to use. It is widely used in a number of commercial software packages, notably games like Unreal Tournament, Grand Theft Auto and others, due to the lack of licensing costs. Many free software packages include support for Vorbis as well. According to Wikipedia there are other independent implementations of Ogg used in Real Player and DirectShow.

Note that there are two formats in use. Ogg is the container format and Vorbis is the audio codec.

It is also used by some commercial Internet radio stations and supported by Shoutcast. As I said, it's about as open a standard as you can get.

Except the PS3 is just as overpriced in Japan as it is in Europe, and Japanese gamers are mocking it just as hard as the western ones.

http://www.geocities.jp/route_219a/flash/ps3_exp02 eng.html
http://blog.wired.com/games/index.blog?entry_id=14 93740
http://dokoaa.com/ps3wii.html#hikaku

if you like a challenge and you like half life 2, try installing the japanese-made SMOD. It's highly configurable. it adds challenge with things like riot shields on combine, stealth camouflage, brutal weapons, very mean ai, more enemies on maps(all properly scripted and placed), new types of enemies, old xen enemies (remade), different coloured guys that take a massive pounding before dying, altered level layouts etc. If that sounds a bit hard you do get a bullet time feature and tons of new weapons, and you will probably need them.

it adds shaders and effects and all that stuff and makes the game look much better. It's much bloodier, you can gib enemies and eat the gibs to go over 100 health. you get a button to do an uber kick that just punishes whatever you hit. it adds about 20 very cool weapons like the stuff launcher, which absorbs stuff with secondary fire then blasts it out with primary fire, works well with striders and cars and hoppers and pretty much everything), the gravity grenade (complete with scary screen effect), bla bla bla

ok so you get it at http://www.geocities.jp/faster_down/smod_bak/ (the site is in japanese but the mod is in english), go down to the bottom and download smod36, and smod36b. Then extract smod36 to your sourcemods folder, so it looks like sourcemods/smod. Do the same and overwrite with smod36b, then restart steam. Look for half-life 2 SMOD in the games menu and enjoy probably the best mod for half life 2 out so far.

for too much info on smod, try http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php? s=fe60962945eb6aa9c68c4245ff45e2d3&t=70774

I've been using slashdot long enough to have a four digit UID, and I must admit that I have never during all this time seen anybody say anything more false. In fact, not only is your statement false, it is the exact opposite of the truth in an egregiously offensive and inciteful way.

Since you seem to lack even the minimal imagination necessary to envision why non-pirates would ever want to use an alternative codec, let me put it to you bluntly and in great detail. Right now, as of this writing, the aotuv vorbis encoder is widely believed to have by far the best sound quality of any codec at low bitrates. There are detractors who disagree, but the funny thing is, those decractors never bother to perform any actual listening tests, and if you bother to perform actual listening tests, you'll find that ogg vorbis not only wins the quality battle, it wins it by a metric mile.

We're talking stuff on the scale of "Ogg vorbis at 96 kbit beats the world's best mp3 encoder at 128 kbit and no other codec at 96 kbit even comes close to beating mp3." That kind of thing.

Now, before you get all up in arms about how portable players have unlimited disk space and file size is no longer a constraint, let me remind you that the iPod nano has a maximum of 4 gigabytes of disk space as of this writing, and no other flash player on the market has larger capacity. Thus anybody in the market for a totally skip-proof digital audio player is stuck with a maximum of 4GB drive capacity, and in this context, file size is important.

Therefore, people who rip their own CDs and play them on flash players have tremendous incentive to choose the highest quality audio format when ripping their CDs, so as to maximize the use of their portable player's limited disk space.

That is why a wide range of supported codecs is important. Coincidentally, Rockbox supports ogg vorbis on the iPod nano, which is exactly the usage scenario I describe.

But wait, there's more!

Vorbis may be the quality leader today, but this has not always been the case. In the past there have been periods where vorbis was not the quality leader, and in the future I fully expect other audio formats to surpass it in time. Hence, in order to guarantee the maximal utility of an audio player in the future, it is mandatory that the user must be able to add support for new codecs as time goes on, in order to take advantage of the high rate of improvements in the audio codec landscape.

Needless to say, the only way to guarantee the ability to add new codecs in the future is to run free software on your audio player. Coincidentally, that's exactly what Rockbox is: it's free software.

For all these reasons and more, a wide range of supported codecs is necessary to have in an audio player, ESPECIALLY if you rip all your music from your own CD collection and thereby possess total control over the choice of what codec to use.

lego

C'mon. There are some really exciting Excel spreadsheets out there...like this one: http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/

Why spend that much ($350+), when you can order a dirt-cheap shortwave radio for maybe $40 and just use a simple 455 kHz to 12 kHz adaptor?

SDR is a broad topic. Wide-band digital modes such as the 12KHz wide DRM or even narrow ones such as HamDream are a simple example.

SDR involves a variety of techniques, but the basic idea is using an A/D at an early stage, and performing operations traditionally done with RF components with DSP software instead.

In its extreme, an SDR has a broadband RF amplifier and a DSP.

Some systems use a tuned RF filter before the RF amplifier to improve dynamic range and reduce overload, and others put the DSP after the first analog mixer. Ham equipment that uses IF DSP does this, such as many of the ICOM radios.

Then there are devices that then mix down to somewhere around the audio range, at least to the 0-96KHz or 0-48KHz range handled by many popular PC sound cards. The RF signal is detected by a an I-Q detector, which produces two signals In Phase and Quadrature (90 degrees out of phase). You might notice that this is a decomposition of a periodic wave into real and complex parts, given v=cos(omega)+j sin(omega). Thus, DSP techniques such as FFT can be applied in the complex domain. If you're seriously interested in this math, look up the Hilbert transform. It lets you modulate or demodulate directly in the DSP, and as a result the transmit and receive software and hardware are very similar. (And wouldn't the Professor on Gilligan's Island like to know that you can make a receiver into a transmitter without using coconuts!)

Anyway, once you get the I-Q signals into the two channels of the sound card, you get a view of the RF spectrum all at once, up to the bandwidth of your sound card sampling. So, if you have a 48KHz sound card you get 48KHz of band scanned simultaneously, and can pick and choose what frequency you want to demodulate, and how you want to demodulate it in software (AM, Single-Side Band, FM, various digital modes such as the aforementioned DRM=digital radio mondial). See here and here.

The SoftRock 40 and its replacement, the SRv5, surface mount kits costing in the $30 range, do this. They're an excellent introduction to SDR techniques, without requiring DSP chip programming. People are doing fun things with them. It's not a transmitter yet, but it will be soon with another board and a ham license).

For software, among others, there is Gnuradio, and also SDRadio, a Windows app. And there's DTTSP, a SourceForge project that runs in Linux and also releases a DLL used by the FlexRadio people. DTTSP has a number of front ends in development, in Java and other languages.

A step up is the FlexRadio SDR-1000, alluded to above. It's a 100W transceiver that does the same thing that the SoftRock does, but does a better job, and also use a VFO that allows it to pick what frequency range it operates on, rather than being limited to a particular crystal-controlled band as the stock SoftRock does. It also costs quite a bit more, and they use a 96KHz sound card to get good quality.

http://www.geocities.jp/artanisjp/327tende.htm

At work the song "Tenderly" (Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, and others remaking) was on. I don't really like it, so over the eyars I made mild fun of it.

You took my lips, so tenderly. I got tired of it, so in front of my boss I said, "OKAYYYY, So he took your lips! What ELSE did he do?"

Then I searched Google for:

female artist jazz song "you took my lips" kksf

(which got no hits)

and whittled ti to:

female jazz song "you took my lips"

and finally got a few hits.

So, Dick, Rummy, Bushy and others... chew on HER lips. There's even mentioning of ages, a girl 12... when the song was sang.... ALL INNOCUOUS....

image Word: RAIDED

Do this?

http://www.geocities.jp/aonobb/mind.jpg

This is why fascism is inextricably linked with violence: When the individual and the fascist state come in conflict, violence is how the state achieves its aims.

When I played the original Castle Wolfenstein, or for that matter any of the games in his list, I wasn't enjoying it because I thought my political ideals were more righteous than the ideals of the pixel-people I was shooting.

I'll admit I've only played about half the games he lists in his (very cheesy) bit at the beginning, but to be honest my political standpoint comes into a game of Day of Defeat just as much as it does into a game of Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament; not very much at all. I do not play these games to silence my compentition, or win political arguments.

I play these games for the same reason I play Nanaca Crash for hours until I get a 10,000 meter score, and then email the link around to all my friends with a "Beat my 10,000 meter score!". It's fun to compete, either against humans or a computer opponent. It's the same reason I enjoy a good round of ultimate frisbee.

There are certainly games with political themes, such as Half-Life 2 where you're fighting an oppresive government, trying to "save the world - by force", as the author puts it, but this is really just window dressing. The story is interesting, but it isn't what makes the game fun.

I figured it was something like that. Mine doesn't say AMD on it anywhere (like most of them seem too) which is what threw me off. Looks most like this one.

As long as he builds cool carriers and solar sailers, and enslaves programs for the such enlightened purposes as videogames, bring it on.

It's a bit sad that Excel runs pacman better than xul.

Play the excel version! http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/

http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/ I'm not sure if its brilliant or just an incredible waste of time and effort...

If you have Excel 97 or later (sorry, not OpenOffice) then you can play Pacelman. It's Pac-Man written in Excel complete with sound effects!

Imagine being able to run one 25-year-old program entirely within another 20+-year-old program. That's computing with power.

You want that house in Cherry or Beefsteak red? ;-)

What about pacman?

Do people really "develop" in Excel?

With some Excel(R) scripting, you can create sophisticated applications that really boost your productivity.

Here are some programs I use daily:

• Pacelman
• Excellence(TM) (sorry to wh.+ my own product -- but hey, it's open source!)

I've seen a hell of a lot of spreadsheets but these ones are brilliant. Space Invaders and Pacman coded in Excel.
Each cell represents a pixel.

And ridiculously addictive (and mindless) games like Nanaca Crash
http://www.geocities.jp/lledoece/nanaca-crash.html
ZuBaaaaaan!

Late in their hardware-producing era, NeXT had a mouse which was like the hockey puck, except it had two buttons on sort of a wedge shape extending from the front of the mouse.

There's a picture at the bottom of this page.

I rather liked that mouse. The puck, though, I did not like.

Nor do I like the current Apple mouse. I use a Microsoft trackball with my Mac and my PC.

In fact, that is written in PSP's manual.
The manual says that SONY refuses to fix any dead pixels.

There are many report about dead pixels, but only in Japanese.
For example, http://www.geocities.jp/lagustar/koukan.htm.

Reminds me of Excel Pacman... another fine example of bashing nails with a screwdriver. Brilliant, nevertheless.

aoTuV is fixed version of Vorbis, that doesn't damage the high fequencies. It have been tested to be the one Vorbis fork, that sounds the best.

So why don't they back port it? It does break compatibility or anything.

Its previous hardware product from Jan 2003 was a fan.

argh
I use a program called No! Flash (version 1.5) to turn on & off java/flash.gifs/sounds/etc at will. There's only one javascript on that site and here's what was inside:

var TopSite = top.location.host;
var Site = self.location.host;
var Path = self.location.pathname;
if (TopSite != Site) {
top.open('j7xx.html?'+TopSite, '_top');
}
else if (!top.NavBar) {
top.open('j7xx.html?'+Path, '_top');
}

No.47,The Arrested
http://www.geocities.jp/yunbiu/flash24.kyodo.co.jp .htm

I wonder if any non-Microsoft®Office® spreadsheet program supports VBA scripting? Being able to run such useful Excel® programs as Pacelman and Excellence would be very important for the FOSS community. Apparently there has been some effort to make a Visual® Basic® interpreter for Linux, but the project doesn't seem to have made any progress.

Excel as a retro gaming platform.

for the love of god, stop misusing spreadsheets/excel as databases- They are for calculating numbers, not creating lists of things!!!!!!