As I am going back through the Star Wars games from Jedi Academy, I watched the last three episodes of Mysteries of the Sith and it is really terrible. The "BAN" of weapons in these episodes, combined with extremely unintuitive lightsaber combat and unintuitive and useless Force abilities, is really painful.
So after getting to the end of episode 12 and defeating Dark Mara, I got to the beginning of episode 13 and then cheated my way straight to ep. 14 and then closed it and I would never play it again. It is absolutely unplayable.
So, having already played the standard Dark Forces 2, the only "series" game left on my list was Dark Forces 1. However, Republic Commando came back to me. I saw some reviews and videos, but I did not really like the look of this game. However, I was persuaded to give it a try. So I decided to get the original version and install it on one of my old notebooks, but it is almost impossible to find the unremastered version. Luckily, one of the players in the Retro Gaming Community offered me an .iso so I can run it as it was meant to be. ...
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I made last Sunday a photo day. I visited a LEGO exhibition and a safari park and took some photos. The weather was not the best, but offered some nice moments, so I still managed to get some excellent pictures.
But for better shots it would be better to wait for spring.
Here are some of the better ones
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I finally finished the feature I had been planning for a long time. The images on this blog are now clickable, meaning you can enlarge the thumbnails in the articles.
It was such a simple task as I was so bored to do it. However, I forced myself to do it and now it works, so you can enjoy the pictures.
The next step is to make a section where all the latest comments will be displayed, but I guess I have enough time to do it, as there are still no comments :(
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As part of my annual battery care process for my mobile phones, I took my Nokia 5230 out of the drawer. This model, in a white case with a blue back, was my first touch phone.
While the battery was discharging/charging, I decided to install a few more games, as I found an archive on archive.org that seemed to contain many games of various genres that would fit on the screen and fully support touch controls. The only thing I really hated was that these Symbian 5th generation phones supported playing older games for classic keyboard-based phones by displaying a sort of virtual keyboard across half the screen. Nice feature, but completely unintuitive controls. I can understand that there might not be a better solution for this, but honestly, playing these games with touch arrows is absolutely terrible. In these games, you usually make quick moves, clicks and combos using the keyboard, and this is simply not possible on a resistive (one-touch) screen.
So I was expecting a really good portion of fun with this, but unfortunately... it is really boring. There were only a few good games for this platform, including all five or six of Polarbit's ...
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I bought this retro game console two years ago in a sale for 500 CZK. It came in parts, and the plastic had to be separated into actual parts, but it was quite easy and took about half an hour.
However, the machine is absolutely fantastic. It can run emulators for dozens of devices. Personally, I mainly run Nintendo 64, NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega MegaDrive, PS1 and PSP.
So what made me take it out of the drawer and play? I read the article about my favourite game, The Neverhood, and there was a mention of the second part of the story of that game. It is called Skullmonkey and it is only for PS1. So I remembered my retrogaming gem, grabbed it and set up the ROM. It is a platform game and I will definitely give it a try.
Anyway, back to the device I will be writing about. It runs OpenElec, which I found to be the best.
It should be able to run at least PSP games, but with some tinkering it could even run PS2 games. Unfortunately, I still have not managed to get a single PS2 game to run smoothly on it, as it ...
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I got a new glass last week. And it is a really nice Tamron 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3. The aperture is not really great, but the lenses are really universal, so it is a compromise.
I've been wanting a lens like this for a while, to carry with me when I don't need anything more important, to be able to take just the camera and not the whole bag of lenses.
It is used but in really good condition. The lenses are clean, just some kind of scratch on the plastic around the lens, which is not really important. Now I have to give it a few tries to get used to it, but I think it would be really good for general photography.
I took it for a walk, so here is a sample photo of a freight locomotive I took.
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As I wrote in a previous article about this notebook, the cover for the hard drive was missing, leaving a hole in the bottom of the case, but that was not the biggest problem. With the cover missing, the HDD was held only by the SATA connector, and when there was plenty of space underneath it, it would swing and possibly slowly destroy the port.
So I decided to make a temporary solution until I could find a replacement cover or 3D print a new one that would fit perfectly. And yes, I am a bit afraid that this temporary solution might be the permanent solution. We know...
However, I have been going through my storage of model railway material, and I still have some plastic sheets in 1mm and 3mm thickness that I got and stored many years ago when I was working in an advertising/printing company during school.
So I used a knife to cut the approximate shape of a 1mm board and tried to fit it over the hole. As it was not just smooth, but a bit rounded, I took a lighter, heated the corners a bit and gently formed the rounded shape.
The end result is not very nice, ...
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I found this piece in storage and thought it is dead. When i tried to measure battery voltage, i got someting around 300mV, and it dropped to clear zero in couple of secconds. So i thought it is dead. Howevere luckily i was able to revive it by gentle pulses from power supply. So it still has some capacity and the phone is able to boot with it.
Unfortunately, although I have two different old wide Samsung chargers, I do not have one that fits this phone. So now that I know the phone works, I need to find the right power supply for it so I can add it to my collections. So if you have a spare charger for the S3110, please contact me.
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First of all, I would like to say that at first I thought it was just some kind of usual HOAX and didn't care too much about it. However, as more and more articles came out, I did some research on the app.
And I have to say that I do not want it. First of all, I really do not like the way it got onto my phone... without asking, even without notification. Definitely a subjective thing, but I hate the behaviour of the process, doing things with my device without asking me.
So. Google doesn't give much information, and even the official Play Store page for this app is... strange? Bizarre? It definitely does not look serious, even though it is made by Google.
The app is said to provide some kind of "mystical" added security, but reverse engineering shows that it scans outgoing and incoming communications and, among other things, sometimes filters "explicit content". First of all, I don't need someone telling me what to see and what not to see, and for the second part, the detection of these things is definitely not done locally, and I don't need another channel that ...
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When my Motorola G32, which I really liked, died in a very strange way, I got the Redmi Note 9 Pro as a replacement from my friend Tom.
It came with LineageOS 21 already installed, which was fine. Today the update to LOS22 (Android 15) arrived, I was a bit nervous about the data and the backup. And here it is... article about how it went... Here is the screen of the freshly updated phone.
So when I got the announcement of the new main release, I was just afraid to back up all my data, because I am still used to the idea that upgrading the custom ROM means wiping the data and rebooting to a clean phone. However, after reading some more info, those days are back! And I am really happy.
To lower expectations, I still had to use my phone to upgrade to the higher version. However, it was really easy and it was just two/three commands and it was done.
So all I had to do was download the latest build and new GApps to be safe, restart the phone from ADB, sideload the new lineage, sideload the gapps and wait for the ...
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