benzwu

A provoking design that will make you think *for a while* about energy consumption but no real life implementation value.

Blood Lamp
2009

What if power came at a cost to the individual?

The average American consumes 3383kwh of energy per year. That’s equivalent to leaving the light on in 4 rooms for a whole year. The simple flick of a switch allows us to power appliances and gadgets 24/7 without a thought to where it comes from and the cost to the environment.

For the lamp to work one breaks the top off, dissolves the tablet, and uses their own blood to power a simple light. By creating a lamp that can only be used once, the user must consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is.

Hey, its come with Kirk Cameron on his side. The growing pain’s Mike Seaver.

Behold! Tremble in fear!

Today I was asked by a fifth grader whether I have a facebook account or not and asked my email address. err… What? I guess these things adopted very fast on nowadays generations. I guess I should start creating facebook account for my first grader now.

Religion is a set of tools to make you feel safe and “right” in spite of it’s truthfulness.

.benzwu

I mentioned La Brute in my old post several months ago. It’s quite fun, daily fights with random skills and weapons for few minutes break time. The main problem is it’s in french. Don’t know for sure the description of each skill obtained.

Recently, I just found out that La Brute incarnate into english named My Brute. The concept is just the same, 3 daily fights (for initial after join you got 6 fights), random stat bonus-weapon-skill at level up, pick your “enemy” from the list and sit back watch the fight. They now have “clan” feature too. You can join any clan and create your own clan at level 10.

If you want some fight at break time, you should try this out. Click here to create your character now and let’s rumble, hiiiyaaaaaa *warcry*

ps: don’t forget to add password to your brute.

Last saturday was my daughter’s “eating day”, I let her choose her favorite food to eat for that whole day. She was very delighted and enjoyed her food very much.

Seeing her like that bring big smile, joy and warmth to my heart. To exaggerate, I can almost have my tears at the corner of my eyes. Rejoicing her happiness was happened back there.

Rejoicing to see what “yours” is common, like parents to their child. Rejoicing to other that entirely not related to you when they are happy is the a whole new level. To rejoice of your enemy’s joy is supreme. To do that, you require universal and altruistic love that became part of your nature.

Most of humans are, of course me too, have egoistic attitude towards all aspects of our lives. Shifting to the universal and altruistic attitude requires practice and letting go our ego. Many social activities are manifestation of such a practice. You won’t be able to change your point of view and your ego in one night, it requires gradual practices.

Conflicts are clash of egos. I don’t know whether conflicts are still there or not if we all able to rejoice to other’s joy. But I have deep confidence that at least the will be less conflicts exist.

When we all have such an attitude? Will we start? Why don’t we start small by each of ourselves first? Will you?

It’s all started when I play PunchOut. That game asked me to do system update the wii and it ended semi bricked my wii. I can’t access system setting anymore but luckily all setting was set including connection to my wireless router and all game still works fine. Looks like it upgraded the system to 3.4 from other region. I can’t even identify the current version, the system setting page ended to Opera error screen. But I still recall I have 3.3U before.

Few days ago It happen that I have to get another Wii Sport to replace the worn out old disc due to scratching. Go figure, when disc meet toddlers what could happen. So, using a launcher from external media should be the best solution for this. Luckily it’s possible now.

First step I must take is to downgrade my system to 3.2U or at least 3.3U. To do that, I follow the steps given by EmperorOfCanada in Wiihacks. Works like a charm but some glitches found on the way. Maybe I install and replaced some of the IOS before but I works, downgraded to 3.2U now. You can get the required files at the link on that page after you register but I cut the step for you, get it directly here, the steps are included in a text file inside.

Next, you do some mod described in here. I don’t follow all the guide verbatim, I use wii cover flow loader instead. It’s looks better and it can download your game cover automatically. Pretty neat. Go download it and use it instead in place of the regular usbloader.
Update: Cover Flow is not up to my expectation. Frustating input feedback and unable to copy/install some game to HDD. I switched to Ultimate Boot Loader.

Please note that the HDD involved here is in WBFS partition. There is a tools recommended by the above guide, WBFS Manager, but I can’t manage to install dotnet framework 3.5sp1 on my two windows machines. So, I just remove all partitions in it and create a raw partition using window’s disk manager. When I plug it in to my wii and run the cover flow, it will prompt you to format the HDD to WBFS. It happens that cover flow able to copy the disk to HDD too, so WBFS Manager is not necessary at all.
Update: I using WBFS for Mac now so the downloaded ISO doesn’t have to be burned first. Go pick which one suit you on this wiki.

So far looking good, I’ll update some more if more findings found. Hope you can enjoy the faster loading, no disc changing/scratch/unable to read disk and cool looking cover flow after following those steps.

ps: don’t forget to lock the add/remove game button to prevent you or your kid accidentally remove the game. It’s A+B+1+2 for coverflow usbloader.

I was one of the victim of Opera’s April Fool but luckily I haven’t try it by my self. Opera said they launched face gesture feature into Opera 10 Alpha. Here is the hillarious known issues using face gesture,

Beards and hair styles
Face Gestures is compatible with most types of facial hair and haircuts. But if your face is covered with more than 25% of facial hair, recognition errors may occur. Please note that handlebars and goatees are compatible independently but if combined recognition will decrease. At the moment soul-patches crashes the browser and it refuses to relaunch, we are looking into this problem. Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.

Adult Web sites
Users visiting Web sites that contain adult content sometimes make unconscious facial expressions. If Opera keeps opening Speed Dial and Zooming In and Out, please be aware that this not a bug. It may be useful to disable Face Gestures for a better experience. Also remember that wiping your cache is recommend after visiting untrusted websites.

Financial Web sites
For compatibility reasons Face Gestures auto-detects financial news services and disables itself. The current version of the recognition software is unable to adapt fast enough to the sudden change in the users expression map. As soon as the new version is available you will be prompted to install stimulus_package.patch.

Watch the demo here,

I rarely watch TV but I came across a commercial that really catch my attention. Not because it was unique, good or something but I felt a deja vu. I saw this similar commercial few years ago by one of Japanese famous idol and singer, Aya Matsuura.

It was a commercial of a chocolate snack from a famous food manufacturer with an eagle logo. Having an idea from others work is ok but reproducing almost exactly down to mimic and song level is a copycat. Let you see for yourself whether you ever saw this copycat commercial on Indonesian local tv or not.

and another version,

and there is another “adult” version similar like the latter one minus the towel that aired midnight. And it’s not censored. *cheesy grin*

I’ve been installing 64 bit Intrepid Ibex on a desktop. The NIC detected but it was detected as r8169 instead of r8102e. It’s working but not stable, hiccup along the way.

Been trying to find about it, I found out that it was purely luck that r8102E detected as r8169 and working. Then I get the driver directly from the manufacturer’s website here.

After download and extract it, you’ll found readme file. In short the main steps as follow,

# make clean modules (as root or with sudo)
# make install
# depmod -a
# insmod ./src/r8101.ko (or r8101.o for kernel 2.4.x)

You can check whether the driver is loaded by using following commands.

# lsmod | grep r8101
# ifconfig -a

Happy ending then but not for long. After restart, the eth0 was loaded as r8169 again. To remedy the situation, type this in the terminal

#modprobe -l | grep r8169

That will show you where the real driver is reside, mine is in

/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.ko

go delete that file and r8169 won’t be loaded by modprobe process for good *even though it still listed in modprobe -l.

That should do the trick.