Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps.  He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer.  He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center.  Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce.  The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth.  I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map.  Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.

[caption id=“attachment_5709” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] Final Fantasy VII on pcsx-r[/caption]

Recently I was putting away my old video game systems into deep storage.  The Playstation 2 hadn’t been played in a year and I didn’t want to clutter up my entertainment console with unused systems.  So I started exploring the emulation landscape on last generation’s systems.  Would I be able to play last generation’s games on my computer if it tickled my fancy?  It turns out that, at least for Playstation 1 and 2, they work just as well as on the system for all the games I own.  When I first discovered emulators, I used them to play Chrono Trigger in the high school library when I was bored.  When I went back to them in college, it was to play arcade games from my childhood on MAME.

Recently I was looking at this old post and the screenshots of Amarok 1.4 reminded me of something I loved about that version of Amarok - the stats that would display when you were playing a song - like if you were playing a Five Iron Frenzy song it would tell you your three favorite (or most played) Five Iron Frenzy songs.  That functionality never made it back into the Amarok 2 series.  So when I was looking through the Amarok scripts in the script installer I came across Rating Statistics.  It basically gave me everything I wanted other than being linked to the currently playing song.  It allows you to search your favorite songs based on all kinds of criteria like number of plays, user-assigned rating, or auto-score.  You can also assign some weights to it and get your best songs based on that weighting.  Here are the stats about my library:

[caption id=“attachment_5677” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] The Walking Dead video game[/caption]

The Walking Dead (14 hours) - I played the latest episode of The Walking Dead.  Because you can’t just save wherever you want, I ended up with 14 hours of playtime.  I still haven’t finished episode 4.

Earlier this year I wrote about using xbmc to create your own private Netflix.  I thought I’d update my readers on how I like it.  Here’s what the current version looks like with the default skin:

[caption id=“attachment_5672” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] xbmc - default skin as of 20121031[/caption]

I have linked it up with trakt.tv to track my tv and movie watching (just like music scrobbling with last.fm) Using it has allowed me to catch up on shows that I might not have otherwise had the time to watch.  It was easy to start going through all the Buffy episodes while waiting to feed Scarlett at night since they were sitting on my computer and I didn’t have to go find the DVDs.

One always wonders if and when those classes you take in high school will be important.  For me, as an engineer, most of my high school classes were laying the foundation for the classes I’d take in college.  I’ve used plenty of those classes in my work and personal life.  One of the classes that has served me well all these years was Speech and Debate.  You don’t realize how long a minute is until you have to talk for a minute in front of class.  It has helped me with college presentation and work presentations.  Most recently, the following two video reviews were completely ad-libbed.  I didn’t even have any notes to go off of.  (In the AvX video I did take the comic with me to remember the name of the penciller)

[caption id=“attachment_5661” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] last.fm top artists[/caption]

This has been the configuration of the top eight artists on last.fm for a very long time.  Only Five Iron Frenzy and Weird Al have traded spots.  Everyone else has been secure in their position for years.  The Beatles might soon overtake Anberlin.  Both of them have a long time to go to unseat Fantastic Plastic Machine.  But the weird thing is how long Andrea Echeverri has been ther.e  I haven’t listened to her in at least three years.  There are two really close artists and a third not too far behind, but it is definitly interesting how quickly the listens fall off.  The 15th position is 300 listens less than Andrea.  We’ll see how things continue to evolve as the time passes and I abandon some artists that I no longer like and listen to others that I’ve newly discovered.

A while ago I wrote about my first ever useful GUI program.  And in one of the series of posts that followed I explained that the reason I hadn’t made a useful GUI program before now is because all the typical stuff has already been made over and over.  We don’t need any more tetris clones, word processors, or music programs.  Recently I had reason to create my second program.  A while ago I created a an amortization calculator in python which you can find here.

I started a new feature over on Dan’s blog since his blog is so focused on video games.  It’s called You Never Forget Your First Time and it’s about reliving the first moments with a game.  The first entry is here.

My most interesting photos from a year ago are from my Maine trip.