Windows wants an upgrade? Not on my watch.

Just an update to say yes, I’m still here and that I’m currently working on a tool that helps defend your Windows 10-based device against the horrid mess that is Windows 11. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that eventually Windows 10 will be obsoleted as with any other operating system over time but from…

RIP fxtwitter: fxtwitter shuts down

Before we start: I do not condone any harassment to any entities listed in this post. Please do not harrass anyone. A friend alerted me to the fact that fxtwitter, a service that helps people post Twitter links on Discord, has just gone belly up. It was revealed that the entity behind it was doing…

Dialup Internet? In 2022? Coburn, are you nuts?

Telephone companies hate him! Find out how one Aussie makes his own ISP with some weird shit and magic! Thanks to a Cisco SPA112 being the real MVP in creating your own home-grown dial-up ISP, I have successfully managed to get a Pentium II with MMX machine online in 2022 using a 24Kbps connection via…

Modern Combat 5: Call of Duty meets Micro-transaction Greed

A few days ago – or possibly last week, I can’t remember – I finally finished Gameloft’s Modern Combat 5 running on my iPad Pro. I had played the game quite some years ago when it was really popular, but that hype has fizzled out and after seeing it in the App Stores’ Recommended bin,…

Repurposing Telstra Gen 2 Smart Modems

From time to time when I’ve completed client call-outs I end up with old equipment that I’ll either send to eWaste (which is a electronics recycling service) or I may refurbish the device in question and later use it for my own purposes or sell on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, et al. So it just so…

Unity, why fail a build if the build directory isn’t empty?

When building a project using Unity 2020 LTS (probably 2019 as well), if you build a Mono project inside a directory that has a IL2CPP build of the same or different project, you’ll get an error saying that you shouldn’t build a Mono/IL2CPP project inside a existing Mono/IL2CPP build directory. And that fails the entire…

It’s almost half-way through March already…

I thought 2022 would be a slower paced year but it seems that time just seems to go down the drain way too fast. Anyway, I’m still here. Busy with work, trying to get game development projects underway and currently fighting an eye infection which isn’t a lot of fun. At all. More updates later….

Still alive. Time for an update.

It’s been a while since I last updated the journal, but things have been like the usual – a rollercoaster with some pretty steep climbs and descents. I was pretty glad to see 2021 roll over to 2022. 2021 felt like a paid DLC for 2020 in all honesty… while there was some good things…

De-Taitoifying a Taito TypeX4 Arcade Base Unit

In a little experiment involving a potentially dangerous BIOS flashing operation, I grabbed a copy of the latest version of the Supermicro X10SLQ-L Motherboard BIOS and flashed it to my unlocked Taito TypeX4 unit. Things happened. Flash goes the BIOS… After creating a BIOS update USB by using the wonderful Rufus formatting utility and then…

Taito Type X4: Playing around with the Built-in BIOS Developer Mode

This is something interesting I found while playing around with my Taito Type X4. Normally, Type X-series arcade base units do not allow booting from USB/LAN or even show the Boot Menu. However, if you’re like me and like to play around with settings that you shouldn’t, then if you have your hands on a…