Diving Expert 39

Anyone who sees me whining every day probably knows my mental state hasn’t been great lately. The kind where you can’t fall asleep at night and you wake up early in the morning, to the point where I have to go find some uncle-and-auntie counting-sheep audio on YouTube to actually pass out.

And right at this critical moment, my bed earbuds, the Earpods, kicked the bucket…

The K314P was actually my backup, but when I saw the K314P I bought for 90 yuan had gone up to 1000 yuan, I decided to put it away for now and grab something cheaper. That’s when I spotted the 39-yuan model in the Diving Expert line.

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Swapped a Pebble strap onto my Moto 360

I’ve been using the Moto 360 for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve swapped the strap. The stock one isn’t bad, supposedly real leather and all, but I wanted to mess with it anyway, and this matching strap wasn’t that expensive. The Moto 360 is theoretically compatible with most mainstream watch straps, but I don’t know that market — hell, I’d never worn a watch before the Moto 360.

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Gracefully Nuking the Entire Windows Family and Migrating Data...

First, a quick rundown of my previous drive situation:

240G SSD + 2T HDD + 1T HDD + 500GB HDD

The 240G SSD was split into 80G and 120G, with the 80G given to Windows as the C drive and the 120G as the root for the Linux system. GPT + UEFI dual boot.

The 2T Seagate drive belonged entirely to Linux, EXT4 formatted, used for storage, with a few symlinks inside pointing to Home/User/ to replace the default Download, Document, Picture and other directories.

The remaining 1T + 500GB HDDs were for the Windows environment.

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Yukikoi Melt (ゆきこいめると) Review

One big reason I play visual novels is that I want to see all kinds of stories. Light novels and anime rarely give you that kind of strict storytelling — most of the time they hand you a premise, an opening, and then it’s expand, expand, expand, and just as you’re getting into it you realize you’ve caught up to the release schedule. So you’re stuck following weekly updates while the author drags it out until the end of time, drags it out until you sprout body hair, and when the ending finally limps in you either get an open ending that says absolutely nothing or a shit-tier rushed finish. I went through that with two manga and I never want to do it again.

Most visual novels at least have a clear main thread. Even if the front half is all tea-drinking and slice-of-life, you need a proper main plot and climax to carry the ending. That’s why a lot of the moe-ge I’ve played still has a bit of story development at the end — quality aside, it at least makes the gesture, tells you the story is over, and wraps up on a Happy End.

So… Yukikoi Melt (ゆきこいめると) is a total outlier. The whole game has basically no obvious main plot. It’s a pure slice-of-life work, so slice-of-life that there’s nothing but slice-of-life.

How pure are we talking? Have you seen GJ-bu? Have you seen Non Non Biyori? Have you seen Yuru Yuri? Aside from a premise and a world, do any of them have a main plot?

Right? So Yukikoi Melt is that style. If anything, I think calling it “4-koma manga” style fits better.

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Shining Faith

Back in my second year of high school I got 500 yuan in New Year’s money, and I wanted to spend it on something.

While poking around TomPDA I spotted a Sony Walkman E505 — listed as an industrial-pack unit, bare player only, just over 500.

50 hours of battery life, and it looked good enough. So… I bought it without a second thought.

Honestly, when I first bought the thing I didn’t care much about the specs or the sound quality. I mostly just thought it looked nice, and that 50-hour figure was tempting. Sure, I had an iPAQ Hx2410 at the time, but its battery life was a tragic 5 hours. This was 50. Even with the thing stuffed full of 320 Kbps MP3s it still played for 20 hours, which meant I basically never had to worry about charge — one top-up and I could screw around for a week. High school was miserable day after day, and getting to listen to music a bit longer was straight-up heaven. To use a phrase people throw around now, this was one of those “massive happiness boost” gadgets.

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11eyes: Resona Forma Review

11eyes: Resona Forma is the fan disc for 11eyes. I actually played this one a long time ago, but I only did Minase Shiori’s and Kikuri’s routes — it was a partial translation back then and I couldn’t read Japanese, so everything else got dropped. Picking it up again now, turns out there’s more translated than before, and I’ve got just enough Japanese to muddle through by ear and guesswork, so here I am.

I’m pretty attached to 11eyes, honestly. It was my first visual novel with gore and blood spray and dimension-hopping magic battles — before that everything I’d played was pure romance, mostly pure moe. And I do think 11eyes has a lot of genuinely original stuff in its setup and structure: the fight scenes, the rich magic descriptions, swordplay and sorcery and the later scientific magic, plus hand-to-hand combat. It’s got all of it, and none of it really falls apart.

The most fun bit to me now is the Void Boundary chapter bundled with the Xbox version, and its ideas about modern magic — magic chant code stored server-side, mages connecting their phones to the network and downloading curses remotely to cast, with magic duels that include big-data affinity analysis and attacks and counterattacks at the network layer. Even now I haven’t seen another battle system written with that much imagination.

“For friends and tomorrow” is 11eyes’ theme, and it was clearly popular enough that a fan disc was inevitable. The fan disc is called Resona Forma — Latin, for Resonating Form, or you could read it as “resonance mode.” It refers to the various resonances between the Eye of Aeon and whoever holds it, and also to the game being an IF, a Before, an After — a set of what-ifs.

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Clover Heart's Review

Clover Heart’s is an old 2003 game. As an early Alcot work, it got a memorial sequel ten years later in Clover Days.

Looking at it now, as an old 2003 visual novel, Clover Heart’s has a surprising number of strong points, and some of its content actually runs ahead of its time.

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Fixing Lost WiFi After Installing a New Kernel on Ubuntu 14.04.2 on the X250

The X250 is a bit of a pain on Ubuntu 14.04 — the touchpad doesn’t work right. Besides the mode tweak I mentioned before, the other fix is upgrading to a newer kernel.

Kernels are everywhere; you can just grab one from Ubuntu’s Mainline and install it, like the latest 4.0.2:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.0.2-wily/

But after installing, you’ll find the touchpad works fine and the WiFi is gone. So here is a fix.

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Xiaodu WiFi on Windows and Linux

Short version: I bought a Xiaodu WiFi for 9 yuan, using a JD free-shipping coupon.

Even so, the kaomoji on my keychain cost more than this thing…

So, according to the official site, you’re supposed to install Baidu’s software, which bundles a one-click idiot-proof driver. One button and your current network is shared out.

It’s really just a wireless adapter in hotspot mode. Which means there has to be a way to use the Xiaodu WiFi as a plain wireless adapter, because that’s what it is.

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