Much more than crafting Ice Cream.
We did it!
The first attempt to get the Geforce 4 Ti 4600 was a flop. However, I am not letting the second try go in vain. I want to give a special thanks to the owner of Mac OS 9 Lives, DieHard for selling me his spare Ti 4600 and making this second part possible. This was the final piece of the puzzle. With that, it’s time to share my first impressions of the card and some benchmarks.
Artist: 梓月綾
While building my Ultimate PowerMac G4, the Pentium III build wasn’t supposed to happen. However, it did when I decided to buy a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 PC version to flash. As you know, that didn’t quite work out as I shared in my previous post.
Thankfully, I managed to buy a Mac version of the Geforce 4 Ti 4600, which are not only rare, but usually go for over $200 on Ebay. While there are Mac part stores claim to have them, they don’t have any in stock. I managed to snag a working one for $150 plus $20 shipping from the owner of Mac OS 9 Lives. I will be sharing benchmarks once it arrives in the mail, and I get the chance to install it.
With that, since I needed a computer with an AGP port, I decided to build a retro gaming computer. As expected, my father threw out the Windows 98 computer from my childhood. Even if I have it, it doesn’t have an AGP port and it’s slow, so I needed to build a better one anyway. This computer is named after Haru Urara, a character from Uma Musume and the Japanese racing horse of the same name.
As expected, as the pandemic continues, although it’s starting to show some sign that it’s finally getting under control thanks to vaccines, I don’t plan to go back to the office anytime soon. Also, I don’t plan to attend any conventions or any meets until the pandemic is really under control. This means very low transmission.
With that, I decided to focus on technology projects with vintage computers since they are the rage these days. After all, you can’t get a Ryzen 5000 series or any good graphics cards because of the mining boom and the semiconductor shortage. After playing with Mac OS 9 on the Mac mini G4, it had limitations. The sound volume control doesn’t work, and some games just don’t launch.
Yes, we are doing the impossible.
Now that I finally done my training in VMWare VCenter, it’s time to implement it in my own home lab setup. So, here is part two of my home lab saga.
Yes, you can have a data center like this in your home.
The Mac Pro dream is now dead at least for now thanks to Apple switching to their own processors. I initially wanted to buy a Mac Pro to replace my unstable Hackintosh. However, Apple decided to ditch Intel. As a result, it would be completely foolish to buy an expensive workstation that would become obsolete in two years. With that, I decided to update my home network to not only have a hypervisor server, which will host various servers and home lab, but also the wired and wireless network.
As expected, it seems that this week is full of anti-consumer practices. Besides the Game Freak stating that not all Pokemon will be transferable in their new games, Twitterrific pulls an anti-consumer practice by forcing a major update and putting ads back in for users. Now, users who payed $7.99 to remove the ads are greeted with ads. To remove them, you have to pay a monthly or yearly subscription or pay $30, which is a 73% increase.
I understand that developers need to make money as development is not free. I’m an iOS and Mac developer for now. I rely on donations and App Store sales to cover development costs. However, there is no excuse to force an update and then put a ransom for users who paid to more money. This anti-consumer practice shows that you only care about money and you are willing to screw over paying customers. Even the excuses the owners said that they won’t be able to notify users to upgrade if they released the new version as a separate app as said in a tweet.
Again, the legacy unsupported app would simply *not* have been left untouched and you’re assuming it would have been. Banners and pop ups added to T5 to direct people to T6 would result in the same user experience that we ended up with – but without any of the new features.
— Sean Heber (@BigZaphod) June 15, 2019
The end result of that approach would have been *worse* than where we ended up. There is no possible way from a “continuing to stay in business” point of view that we could NOT have altered T5 to direct all those people to T6. Stop assuming T5 would have been frozen in time.
— Sean Heber (@BigZaphod) June 15, 2019
This is inexcusable. I have paid two different upgrades for Twitterrific for iOS during their heyday and now they want more. No, I will not accept this slimy business practice. If they don’t want this backlash, they should just release the new version as a separate app. Then put a dismissible one-time notification notifying users there is a new major upgrade. Then, you wouldn’t receive the backlash you are having now and you might have more people willing to pay. As a result of this, I switched my iOS Twitter client to Tweetbot.
Now they pulled this anti-consumer practice, I will be boycotting all applications developed by Iconfactory since they only care about money instead of making paying customers happy. I advise everyone to call them out of this practice as well and boycott their products as well.
For awhile, I have accumulated a bunch of physical manga when I started getting interested in reading them. I didn’t buy digital since I didn’t have a good tablet computer. Also Surface Pro 2 is cumbersome to use as a tablet due to it being heavy. When I finally obtained an iPad Pro 9.7 first generation, digital manga is now viable. It’s a lot more convenient to read on the iPad as I don’t have to carry the books around and risk them getting damaged. I find out that most of the Manga Time Kirara titles are available through CDJapan through their e-book service. Still, I managed to also set up EBook Japan as well so I can also obtain titles that is not on the CDJapan service.
With that, what do I do with the physical copies? In the past, scanning them through a flatbed scanner is just too inconvenient and slow. While automatic feed scanners give better quality scans, most don’t want to cut up his or her manga collection. This is where overhead scanner comes in. While they are expensive in the past, they have gone down in price. The Fujitsu Scansnap SV600 is probably the best, although there are cheaper ones such as Czur ET16, but malware concerns (software requires malware protection to be disabled and run in administrator mode, which is very bad), communication to Chinese servers and other issues is why I didn’t consider it. Also, having the finger removal and deskewing done automatically isn’t good. I would rather have some control if the software didn’t get it right.
[Read more…]
Back in early 2017, I decided to build a Hackintosh for some reason since I want something more powerful. I decide to take the x99 route. I considered building something around the Intel x99 platform back in 2016 since there is more cores and memory expandability.
Of course, installing it have become easier since the early days when you have to mess around with kexts and custom kernels while hoping a system update doesn’t break the whole system. Nowadays, it’s trivial and you only need to create a normal macOS installer to a flash drive on an actual Mac and then plop the Clover bootloader. Afterwards, you will have a working system, that is if you use a consumer Intel platform.
I’m at it again as Kirara Fantasia finally adds the remaining girls from the main cast of Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka.Aside from adding Chiya, there is also her childhood friend, Sharo which has a crush on Rize. She is my favorite character from the series. With that in mind, I wanted to summon her.
These are the official Gacha rates in the game. Note that there is no pity meter in this game. As always, a single roll is completely useless and you will only get results from 10 rolls, which requires 400 star stones (300 for the first roll on the banner). With a 10 roll, you are guaranteed to have at least one summon that is four stars or above.
Luckily, I got her on the 5th 10 roll. The results are as follows.
| Rarity | Count | Percentage |
| ????? | 1 | 2.0% |
| ???? | 5 | 10.0% |
| ??? | 44 | 88.0% |
| Total | 50 |
Note: Your milage may vary and it may take more or less rolls to get her.
In most instances, Gacha mobage games can become brutal with very low rates when it comes to the rarest cards. Sure, you may get lucky and pull a super rare card on the first try or be very unlucky and not get anything, requiring several rolls. I have to admit that I was aiming for Sugar in this limited time banner. I guess either one is fine since I don’t want to spend more time grinding and maxing out the girls’ relationship level, which will net you 120 star stones.
The official rates for this game shows as follows:
There is no pity meter in this game. As a result, one rolls are completely useless as you will mostly get common 3 star cards, which are pretty much useless, besides the beginning of the game. You want 4 or 5 stars since you can evolve them. 4 star cards can go up to level 90 after limit breaking and evolving. 4 star character cards are easier to get since they are given out for free in limited time events. For every 10 roll on a banner, you will at least get at least 1 4 star or 5 star card. The first 10 roll costs 300 star stones and 400 afterwards.
By taking consideration of statistics, for 100 rolls, you should at least receive 2 five star cards.
Here is the actual rates from recording each 10 roll. This excludes single rolls from summon tickets. I done 8 ten rolls.
The actual data is below.
| Rarity | Count | Percentage |
| ????? | 1 | 1.3% |
| ???? | 14 | 17.5% |
| ??? | 65 | 81.3% |
While Sugar didn’t come home, at least I got the other. I want to save the other potential earned stones for the next event if I had this bad of luck next time.
Of course, you can become really lucky, as I did with the Sansha Sanyou banner and getting a 5 star Nishikawa Youko on the first 10 roll.
| Rarity | Count | Percentage |
| ????? | 1 | 10.0% |
| ???? | 2 | 20.0% |
| ??? | 7 | 70.0% |
| Total | 10 |
