CDJapan just informed me that my copy of BD1 just shipped. Fedex says delivery on Wednesday.

I haven't seen a rip of it yet on the torrents. I really thought there would be one by now.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 01:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It isn't really a factor for me, since I have a share ratio of 11.5. But if you are not so blessed, you may be interested to know that BakaBT is running their annual Freeleech amnesty for the next week or so.

Which means you can download anything you want without it affecting your share ratio. And you can freely download even if your share ratio is already in the trouble zone.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:47 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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First one I've seen.

UPDATE: High School DxD sounds promising. Fallen Angels versus demons? And the demons are the good guys? Of course, it could be a trainwreck, but it could be fun. And the character art is appealing. (Jan 6) (UPDATE: I thought demons were fallen angels.)

And Mouretsu Pirates could also be fun. Based on a light novel which was titled "Miniskirt space pirate". (Jan 7)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:32 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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"Akutan Zero". Sounds like an anime prequel, doesn't it? Like "Aika Zero"?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 12:20 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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For the time being, I don't know how to rename it to be "mintaka". More on that later.

Installation of the new NAS is surprisingly easy. You plug it into the wall. You plug it into your LAN. Then you put their CD into the drive of your main computer and let it run.

It installs a package called "WD Discovery". You run that, and it searches the LAN and finds the NAS. The NAS is preformatted to run in RAID 1 mode, and it has two predefined main directories called "Download" and "Public". You click another button and it automaps those two directories. What with me doing some clicking, I ended up with Download as X: and Public as Y:.

But those didn't show up on Alcyone's "My Computer" window until after I rebooted Alcyone. Now they're there.

The comments on NewEgg's sites about speed are right. I copied 15 GB of large files onto it from Alcyone, and the sustained transfer rate was 13 MB/s. It's not impressive, but it is fast enough to be useful.

Another button on the "WD Discovery" tool supposedly allows you to configure the NAS. When you click it, the browser pops up and connects to the NAS.

And it asks you for account name and password. I don't know what they are, and so far I haven't found an answer in the documentation, so I'm not just sure how I get past that point.

Presumably once you do, that's where you could decide to switch to RAID 0 (which I don't intend to do) or whatever. It's also where you could change the device name. Right now it thinks it's named \\mybookworld and I'd like to change that to \\mintaka.

I'd also like to change its IP. Right now it's using 192.168.1.110, which is one of the IPs I'm managing with the DHCP server on Deneb Railgun. I'd rather assign it a permanent IP (192.168.1.4). (192.168.1.1 is Regulus, the Qube. 192.168.1.2 is Deneb, the WHS NAS. 192.168.1.3 is Railgun, the Netgear wifi/ethernet hub. And all my client computers have IPs in the range of 192.168.1.100+. Railgun DHCP manages a range of 192.168.1.110-150 IIRC.)

The problem is that if, for whatever reason, Railgun decides to change it, then all the mounts and links fail.

So now to do a more serious search of the documentation to figure out how to log in to the darned thing.

UPDATE: Aha! Documentation page 87 says that the default login account name is "admin" and the default password is also "admin".

Of course, once you're in you can change that, and I'm going to just on general principles.

UPDATE: Now it has a permanent IP. And the discovery tool knows that it's named "mintaka". However, the \\mintaka path doesn't work. The automatic assignments are to the IP directly. Which is ugly, but I guess it works.

I suppose I could add "mintaka" to that file which substitutes as a local version of DNS, but I'm having a senior moment and I can't remember its name or its path. I thought it was about three directories down in \windows\System32 but I can't find it.

I had to do that for Regulus (the Qube) too, so it's not really surprising. (And one time I added DotClue to it, which means that when I'm suffering from a complete DNS failure that's the only site I can reach.)

Ha! Found it! \windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

UPDATE: And one short reboot later, \\mintaka works.

For all practical purposes, setup is now complete. If I wanted to set up Mintaka to do backups, or stuff like that, then there'd be more work to do. But I don't. All I want is lots of disk space, and now I have that.

If I ever want Saten or Arcturus to access Mintaka, I'll have to install WD Discover on them too. But for the time being that's not needed.

UPDATE:

UPDATE: I'm pulling 391G off of an old WD USB drive and copying it onto the new NAS. It's been running about half an hour so far. Windows estimates it'll take 19 hours total. That turns out to be less than 6 megabytes per second. The difference between this one and the previous one is that the faster one was made up of huge files (50-150 megabytes each). This one is scads of small ones (less than a megabyte).

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 09:41 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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I missed this info, which came out at the end of November: the Strike Witches movie will hit the theaters in Japan on March 17. According to the web site, they'll start selling BDs on March 23.

There's a picture on the site of a whole bunch of characters in silhouette. 12 of them, 11 recognizable as the 11 main characters of the series, plus one new one standing in the middle next to Miyafuji.

She isn't the Idol from Africa; the hair is wrong. She also isn't Junko, commander of the Ardor Witches. So who is she? On this page there are pictures of Miyafuji and Sakamoto in kimonos (gad!) and a third girl I don't recognize. I think she's the one. I wonder what the story is about her?

Three months to wait. I don't know if I'll make it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:32 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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I think this is the most expensive item, by far, I've ever been offered in Master of Magic.

I didn't buy it. I didn't have any need. By that point I had completely pacified both planes, and the only opponent left was stuck in a single town, completely surrounded by my units (8 stacks of 3 griffins each), with his town under four curses (famine, cursed lands, pestilence, evil presence) and every square around his town hit with corruption. I sometimes do that to an opponent so they stay out of trouble, and out of my way while I conquer everything else and work on the Spell of Mastery.

What's frustrating is that even with all of that, he still had substantial mana income. I hate the way that the computer players cheat at the "Hard" level, you know that?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 10:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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In fact, it hasn't shipped yet, even though today is the official day it becomes available.

I think I know what happened. CDJapan doesn't want to get stuck with unsellable inventory, obviously. So there comes a point where they have to put in orders for a new release, and they'll order enough for all pending preorders, plus a few more for anticipated future orders.

I didn't put in my order until a week and a half ago, and I bet that there weren't enough copies to cover late-comers like me. They'll order another round of them, and then mine will get shipped -- next week, likely. They say "3-7 business days".

Oh, well. Them's the breaks. Probably there will be a rip posted before I get my copy.

The page at CDJapan says there's an omake. Wonder what it'll be?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So the NAS just got delivered, a day early, and thank you UPS.

But... it didn't require a signature. And the UPS guy knocked once on my door and left the package without waiting to see if I was here. This is an open stairwell shared by six apartments, and easily visible from the sidewalk, and he left a $500 piece of computer equipment where anyone could have walked away with it.

I'm not very pleased about that. As it happens, I was here and did get it immediately, so no harm. But it could have been pretty bad. It might have been stolen.

Anyway, I'm not going to open it until this weekend.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 12:50 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it.

Posted by: atomic_fungus at December 21, 2011 02:54 PM (VTkqk)

2 That's becoming standard behavior from all the shippers now, and frankly it is getting annoying.

Posted by: Tom Tjarks at December 21, 2011 03:24 PM (T5fuR)

3 at least your shipper didn't toss the gears over the fence, like the infamous youtube video.

Posted by: BigFire at December 21, 2011 08:11 PM (jSRcl)

4 Back in 1990, when I shipped some large boxes home while I was on vacation, I paid UPS extra to require a signature.  I was worried the boxes would arrive the day before I did, and get left in the rain.  The driver left them on the stoop anyway, but luckily it did not rain after all.  UPS insisted that the "X" on receipt proved that someone signed for it... 

Posted by: Siergen at December 22, 2011 03:11 PM (GcG9m)

5 It took me weeks to persuade UPS and USPS to stop hiding boxes behind the column in front of the house that was right next to a sprinkler head, and start hiding them behind the large bench that was placed on the front porch specifically to hide deliveries.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at December 22, 2011 04:38 PM (fpXGN)

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Why is it that when I do my laundry, all the pockets in my sweat pants poof out?

Laundry gnomes, maybe? Looking for spare change?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 02:56 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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