Defocused Temporal Perception

Whew, well now that exams and that whole Christmas thing is done I have some time to kill and write something here.  In the process of cleaning up around the home here I found a rather fantastic relic of the past, an original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).  I remember having one but up until now had thought it had gone to video console heaven to join its brethren Commodore 64 and Atari.

A long lost source of fun and adventure un-earthed again.

NES - Bird's Eye View

However, now what to do with this iconic relic of the 80’s.  A Philips screwdriver and 10 screws later showed the NES in all its boxlike glory would make it a great enclosure for something.  What just what could that something be?  My first thought was to turn it into a hard drive enclosure for regular backups was a decent idea, however, seeing that some more ambitious people on the internet turn it into a retro media PC I decided I wanted to do that too.

The gutted NES in all its internal box glory. The power buttons are the only thing I left.

So here are my specs for the internals of this experiment:

• Intel DG41MJ MINI-ITX LGA775
  A small but flexible motherboard that can handle most of the Intel Dual Core processors (as opposed to just Celeron or Micro processor). It also has 5.1 surround sound and has a high resolution digital out that will give some HD picture quality.  Also the capacity to have 8 USB ports serves my purposes well.
• Western Digital Scorpio Blue 2.5IN 160GB
  Space to put stuff.
• OCZ Gold XTC PC2-6400 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-800
  Far more RAM than I could ever justify but hey it’s on sale.
• Liteon IHOS104 4X BLU-RAY Reader BD-ROM Drive
  Blu-Ray is the way of the future I hear.

More to come I will keep this place update as I progress.

– Niels

Huston, we have improvement.  Yesterday evening’s performance by Deadmau5 at the UBC Thunderbird Arena was pretty enjoyable (see I don’t hate everyone).  Mister Joel Zimmerman certainly kept the dance floor going solid base and good, although sometimes pretty pedantic, hooks and *gasp* melodies.

I do however have a few things to say.  Zimmerman kicked off the night with a pretty cool (and nerdy) Legend of Zelda themed mix, which was pretty universally much appreciated.  However, after that point, I found the show a little long to get going, there was a lot of “4-to-the-floor” default that really didn’t go anywhere.  The “real” music started sometime about 1h 15min mark with the track “Ghosts ‘n Stuff” and from there the show took a much more melodic approach.

Thundermau5

Now here’s an interesting and rather comical point.  Zimmerman discovered that people don’t know how to dance in 3/4 time.  The dance floors was noticeably more calm for about 5 minutes during this point.  People seemed to awkwardly shift back and forth, not really finding any natural rhythm.  I’m sure most people were relieved when it was over and they were back to “safe” 4/4.

This was the first time I had ever been in thunderbird stadium for a concert.  I have to say that its a pretty good place to hold something like this.  The ice arena makes for a massive dance floor.  However, my friend and I noticed that even though the concert was “sold-out” the whole place seemed rather empty due to the fact that no one was allowed in the stands.  I’m not sure if this affected the whole acoustics of the place, which I thought was very good.

“Shut her down Rick.”
The place must have strict rules on holding a concert, the ending of the show was rather kurt and anti-climatictic.  Zimmerman RickRoll’D himself and then basically just pulled the plug at 11pm sharp after he had only been playing for 2 hours.  Keyboard kitty played him off the stage with his “leat” going away message: “kthxbye.” Within 15 min just about everyone was escorted to the door, although there was still time to play around with the Mau5 masks that were left over.

The Iconic Mau5-Mask

Overall, I’d give the show a C+ or maybe a B-.  I enjoyed it but given another opportunity I may not be so likely to shell out 60 bucks for another concert.