Will's Blog

I found a copy of Sim Ant at the local landfill today. Complete with the original box, 4x 5.25" floppy disks, 2x 3.5" floppy disks and the manual, with a whopping 178 pages. One of the requirements on the box actually says "Requires hard drive". Click the photo for some more.

When I saw this fine piece of electronics at the landfill I knew it was special. Not only did it have a plethora of nice looking knobs and various shiny areas, but it also had a wooden enclosure. Although stamped steel cases are nice, its a little impersonal, not like this finely crafted device. I had already thrown it in the trunk before I even noticed - the thing was an 8-track player. Click below for more pictures.

I like to stream audio and video content from my Ubuntu box to my tv and I have a PS3. The PS3 has Universal Plug and Play support. I tried a handful of UPNP servers including Vuze, GeexBox, uShare and MediaTomb. I stopped at MediaTomb because it worked for all my needs and had a snazzy web ui for the server. There is a problem however. MediaTomb's development version has better PS3 support and some extra features which are nice (video thumbnails, dvd iso navigation, watched markers, probably others). Building MediaTomb from source was a huge hassle the first time I did it due to ffmpeg and its various dependencies. When I built it yesterday however I found THIS guide. Which was almost perfect, I needed to modify the "nut" Makefile to compile with -fPIC, and ffmpeg has moved from libamr to libopencore-amr, so I needed to install the opencore libraries from source as well. Other than that its a GREAT guide and now I have a MediaTomb 0.12.0 build.

I haven't had a lot of time to work on my Ant application thanks to a new job, but I have high hopes that I will start working on it again soon. I've been running the last iteration of the program a couple times a day, cursing the ants for not following the trails the way I expect them to. To get back up to speed with DS / Devkitpro development I started working on a simple Logging program that I've wanted to make for a while. Essentially it will take down point of sale information for things like Gas Station, Restaurant and Shopping, then allow display / calculations based on the information. In other news, HERE (youtube video) is a Nintendo DS project my brother has started in the past couple months. He has a rom file available here: ROM FILE