MaW’s Blog

Clare, Soph, Chris and myself are gathered at Clare’s flat in Warwick. Need I say more? Probably not.

It has been a sad weekend. My Powerbook’s hard drive is ailing, spawning bad blocks and bits of lost filesystem all over the place. Thankfully I’ve got most of the data from it, but it seems that it’s been doing this for a while and I hadn’t noticed. Why hadn’t I noticed? I put the effects of the I/O errors down to various other things which I shouldn’t have. It was only when my iTunes library started getting corrupted and it gave me an error message which indicated the actual problem that I realised what was going on. Booting from the OS X install CD, Disk Utility is unable to repair the filesystem and suggests that I try backing up and reformatting it to isolate the bad blocks.

So I currently have four options:

1. Send it to Apple to have the hard drive replaced, probably costing an obscene amount of money
2. Buy a new hard drive and attempt to replace it myself, probably ending up with a few screws left over (the previous Powerbook models had easy to replace drives, the AlBooks don’t)
3. Reformat and reinstall the drive and hope that it’s capable of keeping the corruption confined to its current extents
4. Buy a new Powerbook

Of course, option 4 doesn’t really leave me a way to sell the current Powerbook, which is otherwise fine. I’m currently trying option 3, because it doesn’t require any money spending on it. Option 2 is quite realistic but very scary. I’m tempted to take this as a sign from on high (or somewhere, possibly from inside my head) that I should buy a new Powerbook, but I’d like to pass on one that’s in reasonable working order if at all possible.

We shall see how things go. The procedure for dismantling the thing is rather involved and involves lots of little screws of different sizes, so I’m not particularly hot on doing it myself. It’s a nervous time here at my desk at the moment.

Well I’ve had it a while now, and first impressions aren’t borne out. When I got it I thought it was great. Now I think it’s brilliant. The changes to Mario 64 over the N64 version are fairly profound even if apparently minor, and the entire game seems to play much less frustratingly than it used to. It’s a bit bizarre having 3D on a handheld, but with the PSP as well we’ll just have to get used to it, as it’s definitely here to stay.

The hardware design isn’t perfect though — the shape could do with some attention, and operating the touch screen using the thumb pad results in a very greasy screen. There needs to be a better thumb pad design, as that method of control is fairly important for Mario 64. You can play with the stylus, and in fact it’s the only way I can handle the slide in Cool Cool Mountain, but it’s tedious to play like that all the time. Also highly impractical on the train. Still, the basic concept is good, and the gameplay promises to be a lot of fun. The Mario 64 DS minigames aren’t bad either.

I’m now waiting for them to do a Zelda for the DS. I’ve ordered The Minish Cap, but that’s a GBA game (they play great on the DS of course, its screen appears to be of higher quality than that in my sister’s GBA SP). I wonder if they could do a cel-shaded Zelda on the DS hardware, as that would look fabulous. Failing that, I’d be happy with a port of The Ocarina of Time, as I never got to play that seriously on the N64.

In the mean time, I shall of course be getting Yoshi’s Touch & Go (controlled entirely using the touch screen and the microphone but although this sounds quite dodgy it appears that it’s actually a work of genius), and Wario Ware Touched!. The latter at least is out for the UK launch on the 11th of March.

Ivan Noble has died

Ivan was a BBC journalist who has been writing about his battle with a brain tumour since he was diagnosed in 2002. Reading his columns has always been a strange experience; today I read his last one knowing that he was already dead, and it seems that at the time he wrote it, he knew he wouldn’t be doing any more. Certainly, he had made the choice not to write any more columns, but he wasn’t expecting to be well enough to write another one again.

It is difficult to be excited about anything in life when you know there’s a wife and two children who just lost their father.

I’ve just installed the Spam Karma plugin in an attempt to deal with comment spam which has suddenly kicked into high gear. Hopefully people will still be able to comment legitimately, I’m using an alpha of Spam Karma with a nightly of Wordpress so it may not be the most stable or reliable of systems.

I should probably update the Wordpress install actually.