Squid risotto
Originally uploaded by sangsara.

At the Edgecombe Brothers winery in Perth’s Swan Valley. The most exquisitely fresh and well-prepared squid I’ve ever had. Exsquidsite.

#1 reason not to sell my Sony T30
Originally uploaded by sangsara.

Awesome macro mode.

I bought the Fujifilm F30 afterall. I’m gonna come out and say it’s the best digital camera I’ve ever owned (out of 6). It’s slightly bigger than my old Canon IXUS 400, which prior to the Sony T30 I would not have found acceptable at all, but the photos it takes are spectacular. Noise reduction hardware aside, it just kills at color reproduction. Where most consumer digital cameras over-warmify or cool, the F30 seems to never need more than the auto white balance, keeping everything neutral. Every shot I’ve taken this weekend hasn’t needed more post-processing than a little exposure bump. Most shots are ready to use straight out of the camera, which is a first in my experience.

Anyway, I found the money to buy it by giving up smoking until at least Christmas’ Eve. It will be paid off by then. My other friend could afford to buy a Macbook in 6 months if she gave it up too, but she won’t. There’s seldom a real tangible reward for someone to quit, health reasons aside because we never really think about it that way, but I think this could do it for me. After Christmas, I’ll buy myself some other enjoyable gadget (one suspects it may be another camera), and postpone smoking by another few months. Everybody wins.

HaikuLog is back and taking names.

For the last two days, I’ve been battling an irrational urge to buy a 3rd digital camera, the Fujifilm F30. It looks fantastic, and I blame Peishan for this, because she asked my advice for a cheap digital that takes good night shots. In this regard, the F30 is unparalleled in the pocket point & shoot category. Some of the sample pictures I’ve seen are unbelievable; results are exposed so well that they look post-processed straight out of the camera. It can be had for about SGD$590 with a 1GB XD memory card. Unless someone wants to take my 2-month old Sony T30 off me, I hope to win this battle. Nobody needs 3 similar cameras, right? Yet every morning and free minute I think about it.

The truth is that I’m just in constant need of new things to fiddle with. I felt a little unfulfilled today upon realizing that beyond my DS Lite, GBM, and PSP, there wasn’t much left to buy as far as portable game consoles go. I considered getting a white DS Lite to take turns travelling in my bag with the current blue one. Jesus if that’s not a cry for help, I don’t know what is.

I always thought it was a need to keep spending money, but it isn’t. It’s a need to have new buttons to push or things to click. After I decided to restart with a new HaikuLog site, and went about setting up Pixelpost and configuring it, the urge to buy that new camera faded. Maybe if you have this problem too, my handy cycle below will be of some use.

1. Buy “cool” domains
2. Wonder what to do with them -> set up new sites.
3. Don’t actually finish/launch them.
4. Install new software to organize your life with.
5. Wonder why that new software hasn’t organized the development of above projects.
6. Try more new software.
7. Give up. Buy expensive electronic items in lieu of, but in the hopes of promoting, productivity/creativity.
8. Grow disgusted. Repeat.

Perth was very nice, and I took a couple hundred photos in between wine/beer tastings in the valley, but none of them are much good. I will upload them to flickr over the course of the week.

It’s been increasingly hard to maintain a good work/blog balance, but I’m not about to let this sucker die easily. Not since 5 of you still read the RSS feed!* But the side projects will have to go. I’m thinking I won’t renew haikulog.com this year, and 1minreview.com died a death sometime back during the server move. Side projects are really just that; a distraction and sapping of one’s energies.

But I learnt something from writing the haiku log anyway; it will sound obvious, but you only really learn from trying it out yourself – quality is more desirable over quantity any day of the week. It’s nice to be able to say that you’ve written about 300 haikus in the last 10 months, but I know I’m only happy with about 10 of them, so I’m just going to try and write 10 with the remaining months of the year.

Developing the t-shirt store will now be my main project after this blog, which needs a redesign and redirectioning. There are many things I would like to direct at many disparate audiences, but this no longer feels like the place where it might happen.

*Not actual number.

I’ll be in Australia till Sunday and not reading any email. Maybe I’ll come back and start writing again. Maybe!

Here’s an update. HopeBuy delivered, my G6 Lite is the English version, and all seems to be going good so far.

The world of DS flashcarts is a little confusing right now for n00bs (or GBA flashcart owners) to jump into. Here’s what I’ve gathered after a few days of research:

– “NeoFlash” brand products are shit. Everybody on forums everywhere says the same thing, so it’s probably not worth taking the risk to find out. Build quality and compatibility seem to be the main issues.

– The Supercard brand is not too bad. Decent for the prices you pay, but ROMs must be patched with included software before “burning” or copying them over to the card. I’m not sure how long this takes but it sounds like a hassle. However, they make a SuperKey product which should work fine.

– Superkeys, EZPasses, Passkeys, Nokeys, Max Media Launchers… these are all the same thing. A new NoPass/PassMe exploit that allows code to be launched from a GBA (Slot 2) card, and run like DS code. Put simply, run copies of DS games from a GBA flashcart instead of the top DS slot where they are supposed to be. Earlier ways of fooling DS machines required an ugly and bulky attachment to stick out of the top. Now these are the exact same size as regular DS cartridges.

– The M3 product is highly regarded in most circles, and the G6 line is made by the same company. The difference is that the M3s use removable memory cards, and the G6 uses internal flash memory which is supposed to be faster.

– Only a couple of months ago, I met someone who actually had a CompactFlash Supercard in his old phat DS, and even then it stuck out 2 centimeters or so. I’d just gotten my DS Lite, and thought that I would never buy a flashcart since I don’t like things to stick out, and with the DS Lite’s GBA bay being shallower than the old DS’s, it seemed I would never get that chance. Goddamnit if the Chinese pirates aren’t hard workers. All the major manufacturers now have designs that fit into the DS Lite. Incredible.

– EZFlash products like the new EZ4 Lite have a rather good reputation, but there are fakes out there for some older models so be careful where you buy from. That said, the EZ4 Lite looks like a missed opportunity. It uses microSD cards (Transflash), and sticks out of the DS Lite about a half-centimeter. And it has no Real-Time Clock or battery inside, so old GBA games like Pokemon probably won’t run. There are reports that the PassKey3 (made by the M3/G6 company) and SuperKey devices don’t work with EZ4 Lites. I guess that leaves you with the Datel Max Media Launcher.

– There are next generation products on the way, using only a single DS cartridge with onboard memory. The two contenders now are the Ultra FlashPass and the NinjaPass. The latter isn’t out yet, winsunx.com seems to be collecting pre-order money to get it made, and the former is plagued with supply and quality problems. See the forum at their site, ndsgba.net, for examples of unhappy customers.

– Both of them come in the maximum size of 512Mbit (64MB), which is half that of a real DS game cartridge. You’ll be able to fit most game backups onto there, but not some like Resident Evil: Deadly Silence. So while this is a great idea, and the closest solution to the original GBA carts, it’s too early to take a chance on them now. There really seem to be technical issues with memory and savegame handling that is beyond them. One guy said his USB reader device fell apart and is now being held together with rubber bands.

– My conclusion has been that the best thing to do now, if you want an NDS/GBA flashcart with maximum compatibility, speed, and optional features, is to buy a G6 Lite 4Gbit card. Even then, it’s a little bit more complicated because there are 2 versions, English and Chinese, that seem to have different hardware configurations preventing firmware flashing between them. So if you buy a Chinese language version, you’re stuck with Chinese. And it seems that the company has switched over to producing only English versions now, and future drivers for the Chinese version may be slow in coming.

Howeverrrr, and I’ve wasted several days of net-surfing time to determine this for your benefit, you can sidestep all the issues by buying a now extremely-hard-to-come-by English G6 Lite from HopeBuy.com for about USD$80. Pay them via PayPal and not the credit card option (it uses a buggy system through the Agricultural Bank of China), and use one of the brand-name courier options like DHL (only USD$13 to Singapore). The girl there who does customer support in English is named Celery, and you can’t ask for more than that. Mine should be arriving next week. I’ll report back on whether or not the box was filled with nothing but sawdust.

The forums over at MaxConsole.net are a great place to get more information about everything. And that’s it for this utterly-useless-for-99%-of-readers post.