Archive for the 'Web' Category

Quick update 4/6/08

Published on April 6, 2009 in Holy Crap, News, Web and randomness. 0 Comments Tags: .

I’ve been slacking on the updates, but I assure you I have some articles/journals on the way.

I’ve been sorta busy here-n-there with faderwave, school, and pointlessly surfin’ around the web.

Yea you know where I’m coming from with that. Otherwise you wouldn’t even be reading my blog.

You slacker you.

I have a mix on the way, then an article or two, and then some updates. Maybe you’ve noticed (or maybe not), but just as I’ve put up a link to my MusicV2 profile the other week, the site has thrown in the towel. Sad times. Good thing I wasn’t a paying member.

Oh and we revived the inanity podcast.
http://inanetalk.com/podcast/

Check it.

NPC out. (…and back to “spring cleaning” out my room)

Another vinyl haul

Published on March 6, 2009 in Blog, Music, Vinyl and Web. 1 Comment

vinylmailers

Woot!
More Vinyl is here! (well I put away the vinyl in this picture… but I left out the boxes… you get the idea)

I got two of them on the same day, and another one today. I’ve still got one in transit from the UK, and a lot of 5 coming from the bay this weekend. The Ken Ishii CD “Daybreak Reprise -Sunriser Remixed” has started shipping from Japan… I don’t expect that any time soon.

Among these recently purchased records I’ve acquired two from Ibadan records – both of which I consider absolute gems. Deep house can be hard to “Get” for some people though, so I can’t really explain why I like them so much other than the fact I think they’re rich in musical complexity and awesomeness. You will definitely be able to hear me playing these two babies on Faderwave. What can I say, I like my house deep, chilled, and shaken – not stirred.

To my blog roll I’ve added Ben Turner (AKA: NTO) who’s a fellow “guerrilla faderwave DJ” as I like to put it. He mainly mixes drum and bass for all you DNB heads out there – so check out his mixes, bookmark his site, ect.

Now on the subject matter of my demo CD, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to (bleh). I’ve been slacking on coloring in my logo as well. I’ll probably just post up one of the mixes here in a few days and save the artwork for another occasion.

I’ll probably post it to SoundCloud which is pretty neat BTW.
Check out the demo video at:
http://soundcloud.com/
And my weak little tracks made with the DS-10:
http://soundcloud.com/npc

I’m working on learning reaper… sorta… I’ll get around to it.

First week of college

Published on August 29, 2008 in Music, School, Vinyl and Web. 0 Comments

It’s finally happened, I started college.
Well… Junior college… but for the most part it’s got all the same freedom and options as a typical college. The one I’m attending is called Sierra college and depending on how much you visit/read into my posts, you may have heard me mention it before. I’m actually more comfortable at Sierra College then I ever was at Rocklin high school. I’m taking interesting classes, all my teachers are very nice, and it’s not run like a prison!

On the subject of high school, I briefly met some ex-Roseville high students and they had an amusing play-on-words for their high school. They called it: “hoesville” for apparently it was filled with girls that were very hoe-tastic. I don’t care if I made that word up, I like it.

This week I haven’t played any video games thanks to school, but I have been playing records whenever I can. Yep, that’s right, the records I talked about last week finally came in! You can read the thread I made on the DJforums here for some details and pictures(lower post). It was worth every penny. One of my best impulse buys! I feel obligated to actually email Primal Records and thank them for giving me so many quality records for so cheap. As probably one of the first to respond to the ad I feel I received numerous records from the co-owner’s personal collection (“DJ Olivier Desmet”) – as the ad had stated some of the “grab bags” would contain.


One of the first Techno tracks: Derrick may’s classic “nude photo”. This release was touched up a bit and called “Nude Photo ‘88″.

There’s just sooo~ much quality here. So much to work with! I can’t wait to mix with these as soon as I become acquainted with all of them. Here’s a sample of a record I just played earlier tonight. It has this awesome break. I’ll let the sample do the talking(click).
-That sample is from “Brothers’ Vibe – Dub Plates 5″ track B1, called: “smooth ride” http://www.discogs.com/release/1306533

Discogs is a great site by the way. Now that I’ve been buying vinyl it’s helped me keep track of my collection, and helped me find the names of records that don’t have any labels. There’s at least 4 or 5 records with absolutely nothing written on them other than a catalog number which is (as always) etched into the vinyl itself. Here’s what my collection is looking like so far.

I’m thinking next week I might bring my DS to school as there is an hour wait between one of my classes(which I have been passing in various ways… like doing homework – whoa I know, that’s gotta change!:P )

Reboot

Published on August 20, 2008 in Music, School, Vinyl, Web and games. 0 Comments

Behold!

Though it may not look impressive to some, I’m quite proud of my new gaming “rig” (please excuse the lousy picture). I’ve got a 20″ Sony Trinitron with three game systems elaborately set up to it all at once. Which means if I get bored of playing Sonic 2, I can start play Super Smash bros. online with the push of a few buttons. Pretty sweet stuff though I must admit I haven’t played much of the Wii as I have Dreamcast and Sega Genesis. Playing Soul Calibur 4 at a friend’s house rekindled my love for the series so I’ve been playing the original on Dreamcast on occasion. Also, I tried beating Sonic 2 as I have always tried as a kid… but failed. You would think after all these years and extensive experience in action games I would have a better handle on… well… mainly the last boss, the rest of the game is easy as pie. Though there was this one pit in mystic caves… the one with the spikes and high walls… yea. Fun fun fun.

On this note I should… note. :|
-that despite my lack of updates (which I’m sure you are all used to by now and have stopped checking the site… all 3 of you) I have been quite active. Well, by my definition at least. Before making a blog update I set a few goals for myself which were: publish interview with GAMEINVEST, make an inanetalk.com podcast, and make the best mix I possibly could with the vinyl I have. It was the last one that I got hung up on. With a limited selection of vinyl I figured the mix I release has to be perfect otherwise I end up using the same tracks over for other mixes to show my progress and that takes away the “freshness” of my music. Yesterday however I made a bold move and ordered 50 records for a very cheap price. Primal records is abandoning it’s vinyl business and was practically throwing vinyl at me. How could I say no? Yes I suppose it was yet another impulse buy for me… Either was expect a mix here next week. DEMAND IT if it’s not here. :P

Oh but what about the other two goals?
-The GAMEINVEST interview can be read here at the ever awesome DS-X2 site. ;)
-While the first ever inanetalk.com podcast can be found here on this page. (we’re also on itunes… somewhere)

Korg DS-10 is mentioned in the podcast now that think of it, and I made a track using it and a sample from Ken Ishii’s new remixed album. Korg DS-10 is lots of fun to tweak and play around with and it’s of such high quality that one could use it in a professional production environment. I’m kinda lost when it comes to arranging melodies, (I will be learning some of that this year at Sierra college hopefully) so most of my creativity comes in the form of the drum machine. You can download this “remix” right here (right click->save as).

Here’s the promo video for Ken Ishii’s new album (where I took the sample from). I totally want this… sooo bad.

so bad

Minor Update 6/27/08

Published on June 27, 2008 in Demo, Linux, PC, Web and video games. 0 Comments

I finally got around to playing Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness – demo, in Linux. The demo/game itself was great, though a bit short. I pointed out to my friend the graphical drivers freaked out on me a lot when I tried to use higher resolution but it turns out running Compiz in the background at the same time was probably a major contributor to this. Oh well, it still looked great in 800×600. Penny Arcade’s artist (“Gabe”) has gotten progressively better over the years. To the point were you could marvel at some of his more artistic pieces. In fact right now they’re pulling off some weird 80s ping-pong movie and it looks amazing. True webcomic revolutionaries at work. The fact that they now have a game is further proof of their influence. Anyways, I’m tempted to buy the full game, but I want to start building a vinyl collection this summer instead (while maintaining a steady savings – did I mention I’ll have a job soon? :P ).

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do before E3 hits. Did you know Activision isn’t even attending this year? WTF is that about? Or are they back in it now? Shit, this is what I’m talking about. I’ve got a lot of reading(/watching (the 1UP show)) to do! Sometimes I grace something with the source of gonintendo.com and shutter. There were a couple of times I would be ahead of them, but now it’s just scary. Could I ever catch up to these people? Match their persistence? That RMC guy is one crazy M.F.-er. Alright, I shall scour the internet, tonight! I will hopefully be back on my shit before July… and get some daily DJ practice in somehow.

Rapping up Jan08

Published on January 28, 2008 in DS, PC, Web, Wii, games and links. 0 Comments

Sorry about falling off the face of the earth. I do that every now and then.


Picture inspired by Konbini life.

Last Wednesday I picked up Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, as planned. I cut it pretty close though, I bought the last copy at my local Gamecrazy. I ended up not preordering because… well… I had a feeling I could get away with it. :) Upon noticing the HUGE amounts of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass throughout the store’s collection I asked the guy at Gamecrazy just how many copies of Advance Wars they had received in total. They received 10, but 8 were preorders. Lucky me! For once being a “Senior” and getting out of school early proves useful.

Well, besides the fact I can go home and make my lunch. I love doing that.
In fact, I think I’ll have to blog about my love for sandwiches one day.
…man I love sandwiches.

Rewinding time even further, about two weeks ago, my dad walks in the door with a crap load of SCSI devices. He went all out: PCI controller, cables, “terminators”, various SCSI pin adapters, two SCSI hard drives, and some truly bizarre removable media drives. Unfortunately my computer is stuffed as it is(I’m totally out of molex connections), so I was only able to – with a lot of work – fit in one SCSI Hard drive. With some help of an XP disk I was able to get it formatted at about 17GB. Before that I looked at it with Linux and I could’ve sworn it was 40GB. Oh well, the important part is that I’ve set it up for paging like I planned.

Boo ya! (…I’m never saying that again)

If you look closely at that high resolution picture you can see the SCSI drive with a badass picture of a Barracuda. Oh yea, it’s a Seagate Barracuda drive. *thumbs up*

I’m not sure whether with has improved my performance in steam/HL2/games or not. At first it still crashed here-and-there and then… stopped. It has been running flawlessly ever since. So finally: Half life 2. Playable. Woot! I got all the way to where you get the gravity gun. Good times. The fan-boat action went on a lot longer than I expected. For awhile I was beginning to think they should have named it “Half Life 2: The fan boat adventures”. Ok that was a bad joke. But just think of the awesome boxart! I’ll spare you a photoshopping of that.

One thing I’ve been forgetting to mention is that the Nintendo Forums came back. …It’s not pretty. With the sale of Nintendo Power to Future Publishing, it seems the community aspect of the forums has been sold off with it. So now the Nintendo forums are nothing more than a Tech Support forum. Ironically they still kept it linked to “My Nintendo” account though. Even more ironic is that I actually wrote the first guide to Wi-Fi and networking on the original forums. Granted, back then I didn’t know everything I know now but it was basic enough to introduce many Nsiders with Wi-Fi for the first time. Wow that was almost four years ago…

Ending on a funny note. I was checking the 5 day weather on the Wii’s weather channel when I noticed it was predicting snow for Sacramento! It never snows in the Northern California valley, even if it’s freezing outside and rainy.

Surreal box of orange

Published on November 10, 2007 in PC, Personal, School and Web. 0 Comments

I really want “The orange box”. Hell I need the orange box(LAN next next fri in the works). It’s bad enough I’m falling behind the times(no next gen system!), but when I miss a release of three great games, for the price of one, on a platform I own(PC), it’s just sad. Sad it will be, since I’ll have to pass it up. Yes that’s right, I have to save up my money(read: very limited) for that blasted holiday. Sure I could spend it now all on myself and give nothing. However, capitalism class economics class(which I have been very busy with this week) has taught me to look at my opportunity cost. The way X-mass works is you give… and then receive. So the loss of spending all my money on myself and not others? Potential gifts baby! Gifts that would most likely exceed the amount of money that I have now – a value not worth even posting(though I’ve never actually withdrew money from my bank before… I might want to practice that one day lol). There you have it, NPC has a plan to get with the times! Woo hoo! I just won’t have the orange box until December or so…

Remember last august? Inane-talks birthday? Yea I lied, it’s actually tomorrow, here in November. I have a strange habit of mixing up the two months, and I’m aware how absurd that sounds but I’m just clumsy like that.

We’ve even got an Inane 2.0 thing going on since we moved from PHP to SMF. Funny thing is the new template was originally somewhat lighter but members said it was too bright for viewing at night (of all things) so we changed it. We’re looking to expand our membership everyday so feel free to join!

School has been kind of surreal lately, I think it has something to do with me being a Senior. Well… except what happened on Thursday. I was walking to my first class thinking about you-know-who, when all of a sudden she walked around a corner right in front of me! Freaky! We both kind of frightened each other and gave this “gasp!” look to each other. I don’t know what to make of it, I must admit I haven’t stopped thinking about her. Though I’m adopting the “Good things come to those who wait” philosophy for now. I figure the balls in her court now, it’s her decision to like me or not, I’ve done my part. “Though doesn’t she already have a boyfriend?” you might ask. I know her friends fairly well and I’m thinking about doing some investigative work by asking a few questions. Plain curiosity is forcing me too anyway. I have a feeling it’s someone not from my area because I never see her with anyone but friends.

Oh and I posted a story I wrote in English on my main blog. I think it may be too geeky for many people to understand.

Busy with nothing

Published on November 3, 2007 in PC and Web. 0 Comments

I did a lot computer work the later half of this week, ending with today(hopefully). Long story how it started, but I took advantage of the situation and am now successfully dual-booting Ubuntu! This is what? The third time I’ve had to back-up and reinstall this year? I’m just totally immune to it now, really the piece(s) of data I value most would have to be my Firefox profile. For those of you who may not be knowledgeable about the inner-workings of Firefox, all your cookies, history, bookmarks, ect. are saved to a profile. You can actually manage more than one, but since I’m the only person who uses this(my) computer I’ve never bothered experimenting with that. So as long as I have that backed-up I don’t really care about what programs I loose(being that all other types of files can be easily backed up and retrieved – even some programs!). Besides that I’ve been very busy with school as usual. My Mom(ok, I’m aware how teenage I sound right now) has been ragging on me constantly to: “stop fixing your computer and get back to work”. But I can’t really work on her stupid laptop… with that lousy keyboard… uhg. Then I remembered she just so happened to have brought me another KVM switch that day(in addition to the one before), and I got to work!


Her work, Verizon wireless, gave it to her for free
- in case you were wondering

This was only temporary until I got back from school the next day and finished backing up my Hard drive(pictured). After that I was able to ditch the nightmare of multiple KMV switches and format the crap out of my hard drive. And format the crap out of it I did. Lets see if you can follow this:
-Formatted and installed windows
-Partitioned and installed Ubuntu
-Windows didn’t like booting from the partition
-Killed the grub trying to fix windows boot, and got some disk read error at post screen
-Reformatted yet again and installed windows on it’s partition
-Set up windows and booted onto the Ubuntu live CD
-Fixed the grub and got both booting – YAY!

Ok It’ not that hard, but it was a pain. I booted off of the XP disc at lest 8 or 9 times during the span of this whole ordeal. Ubuntu live CD though is quite nice, might I add.

*insert picture of hot girl here*
“Man, I’d like to boot off her live CD!“

I had to do that. Sorry.
I blame the delayed daylight saving time(kicks in tonight, finally).

Ubuntu is awesome, download it!

Where in the world is NPC

Published on October 6, 2007 in Music, Nintendo, Retro and Web. 2 Comments

Some days I don’t know where I am. Figuratively of course. This weeks post was highly delayed because I planned on posting my broadcasting project, only to find it fairly difficult to export. Or actually I played back the exported/compressed file in windows[VLC,zoom]: Nothing. Played it back on a mac[quicktime]: Bingo! Screw imovie and it’s compression techniques(codecs..), my next project(which will be actual reporting – sorry) will have to be done in final cut. imovie is too… weak.

Continuing on my last post a bit, I opened up my last Nintendo Power(or as we know it). Sure there were obvious hints that the NP staff was being booted out the door(editor’s note) but I question how far in advance. I say this because there were at least 2 or 3 places in the magazine where they still encourage you to visit the Nintendo forums – which have been inaccessible for about 3(?) weeks now. I have a feeling we knew almost before they did! Quite sad.

Now let us celebrate Sin and Punishment finally coming to America! Yay! Ok, I still don’t have a wii. But if you have a wii I highly recommend you purchase/download it. Just remember: Change it to normal, and don’t bother with easy. The game leaves out some of the insane stuff if you put it on easy. Sin and Punishment is an easy game on it’s own – compared to most other Treasure games. If you’re not into Treasure games already this game(well, and Gunstar) will change that. I heard they even improved the graphics a bit. *insert “tighten up the graphics” joke here*

Ok, last on my list here for today is the fact I finally joined myspace. “ZOMG Nick joined MySpace!?” is what you’re thinking, right? Because I swore to never ever join MySpace, but I caved recently… I have my reasons. Blog will totally still be here, MySpace is a terribly designed website and is nothing compared to my little template-tweaked blogspot page. So anyways, here’s my page if you know me you can send a friend request or something. But if you’re some random internet-troll guy looking for more friends on MySpace don’t even bother. I’m very strict about approval of friends… and in case you’re wondering I sent a request to Ken Ishii – he’s a DJ and I like his music, so yea. If you have no intentions of ever joining MySpace, don’t have an account, ect. ect. – then I encourage you to click the link anyways for some awesome dZihan & kamien music.
Sliiiding~

Roots

Published on September 23, 2007 in Halo, Nintendo, School, Tokyo Game Show and Web. 0 Comments

Is this goodbye? My internet roots? Wiped from the internet for good? 14,503 posts gone up in smoke? This is where it all started for me, all my (geek)knowledge and obsessions spawned one way or another from here. I can only hope they’re making some sort of major move or upgrade, but seeing as Nintendo power(the main drive behind the forums in the first place) is now being sold to Future publishing I don’t hold out much hope. Worst part is I never liked Future publishing, I always hear about how many mistakes they make. Also, if(at least) my account isn’t linked to my subscription anymore I might just drop the magazine and support the good guys over at uncle Ziff.

I’ve got nothing on TGS here, in fact I avoided posting anything over at DS-X2 about it. The rule: post one thing, might as well post’em all – and I’m not doing that. I’ve got school to work on… :(

Speaking of school, I’m adding a few more touches to the video for broadcasting and so I’m not sure when it’ll be ready. This is pretty much a one man operation so I’ve got to take my time and make sure it turns out the way I want it to. Also, I promised I would take a video of the blue spark on my VGA switch for someone, but I filmed it and it didn’t seem to show up on camera very well(or really at all). Bummer really, but it’s nothing special, my VGA connector probably could use some grounding of its own. I’m not going to bother really…

Halo3 launch is upon us, and I’ve been invited by multiple friends to come over and play it(as they know I don’t have a 360). Bungie even admitted the second one was rushed and broken. As result they’ve taken their time with Halo 3 and I think it shows. Looks a lot better than previous versions by far(and I’m not just talking graphics), and I’m actually looking forward to it.