I went to the Toranoana main store in Akihabara today and picked up some artbooks as well as the CD catalog for Comiket 76 which I’m going to, hopefully… I decided to also take pictures of other things I got recently, like my new subnotebook. You can pretty much tell what the artbooks are by just looking at them (yay English.) The two games that don’t have English titles are Ryu ga Gotoku Kenzan and Nobunaga’s Ambition Kakushin.

Your eyes fool you not. That is indeed the Samsung SCX-4500. If you really want to know how much of a price I paid for that thing, you can look here. Yea, I’m such a whore ;___; It’s a good scanner, at least. Pretty fast and can do up to 4800 dpi (although, Windows won’t let me since it can’t allocate more than 4 GB of memory ;___; ) You can see an example below (resized from being scanned at 2400 dpi.)

Remember when I got my laptop back? Well, even though they replaced the sound card, motherboard, wireless Ethernet card, and a whole bunch of other things, they forgot about the one thing: the graphics card. You know, the thing that I originally sent it in to get fixed.

Of course, I called them up and after a while, they decided to just give up on fixing the computer. In exchange for my laptop, they will be offering me store credit up to the cost of the laptop. That may sound nice, since the laptop I originally got was bought a year ago (almost.) Unfortunately, Alienware hasn’t really been keeping up with its laptop lineup. Look at their current laptops, all three of them, there is no way that I can get a laptop that is completely better or on-par with mine. I either have to settle for a worse processor (and AMD Turion) or one with a worse GPU (X1400 or a Geforce 7600.)

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I finally did it; I finally beat Dragon Quest VIII two days ago. I hardly know what to say. I was so surprised when I won since I thought that I was losing the battle. Aaah, such a sense of achievement. I think I’m going to become a DQ fanboy. Word on street is that Square Enix is going to go on a DQ remake releasing rampage. I can’t wait if its true (please, be for the PS2 and not the DS so we can get a nice orchestral soundtrack.) I didn’t record myself winning the game (haha, one of the few times I didn’t record the battle,) but I’ve attached the finally battle with Pisaro from the PSX version of DQ IV.

In other news, I think I’m going to get an actual monitor soon. It would suck to own PS3 games that I could only play at 480i (haha, I don’t own any yet, for now I only play PS2 games on my PS3.) Unless I find something better, I think I’m going to get the BenQ FP241W. From the one review I read (seriously, I couldn’t find anymore,) ghosting was near nonexistent and the display quality was top-notch.

The thing about this is that the court ruled it was an infringement of copyright even though the users cannot download the music into any cellphone other than their own. The reasoning behind the ruling was that by uploading the files onto a central server, the users were distributing the music files to the company that owns the server, even if the users were the only ones that would be able to access the files.

I must ask, what is becoming of Japan? I mean, that doujin thing is bad enough (perhaps worse for me than this Internet server business,) but this is just kind of ridiculous. That kind of practice would probably fly in any other country. It seems that businesses has litigated their way through common sense in the courts again.

*sigh*

This news comes courtesy of Canned Dogs.

It’s been less than a day and it seems as though the PS3 has already surpassed the performance of Windows-based machines on protein folding with about 4% of the active CPU count. Impressive.

Well, I should say: I got it again. The first time kind of sucked. I used the thing once before I did something to break it (hmm, I don’t remember dropping it or anything.) Good thing I had warranty on the thing. They sent me a replacement rather quickly. I just got it yesterday.

The drive itself seems pretty good. The only thing that I’ve done with it is to back up my entire laptop (which needs to be sent back, grrr.) I should probably just move some stuff from my D drive, which has like less than 8 GB, to this HDD. I did a benchmark on it and compared it to my 120 GB Western Digital portable HDD.

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Buy.com is having this deal on a Cavalry External USB HDD. For $157, you can get a 500 GB. From the reviews I’ve read about it, the drive is pretty fast, but it also runs pretty hot. I’m sure that that won’t be a problem for most of you people (do any of you touch your drives regularly?) I’ll probably be picking this up sometime soon. You can find the deal here.

According to DailyTech, ASUS introduced the first external graphics card hub-thing (I’m not sure what you call it.) It’s called the XG station and connects to the notebook via the ExpressCard slot and provides a PCI Express x16 slot. Pricing and release date haven’t been confirmed at the moment. I think it’s pretty cool, especially with people with laptops that only have integrated graphics (yuck.) It looks kind of expensive, though.

Firefox 3 Alpha release (Gran Paradiso):
It seems as though the alpha 1 for Firefox 3 was released with me not knowing about it. I’m not sure if there’s that much difference between this version and Firefox 2 that users will actually notice. It appears that most of the new features are aimed at developers, not end users. The graphical capabilities of the browser are apparently enhanced. Seeing as I don’t notice that much of an improvement yet, I doubt I’ll use Firefox 3 Alpha 1 as my main browser, unlike what I did with Firefox 2 Alpha 1.

Truthiness voted as the Word of the Year:
If you refer to a post I made earlier in the month, you might catch that I mentioned Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year poll. Although haruhiism probably didn’t get close to getting on the top ten (I would be surprised if it got ten votes,) at least truthiness is a interesting word. I was afraid that the word would be boring again.

Yea, my computer crashed yesterday night. I was playing a bit of Half-Life 2 when suddenly my computer froze. I restarted it, but I would get an error after logging on to my computer, which is kind of strange because I would have expected the error to pop up during the booting process. Anyway, it seems as though some files in the Windows OS got corrupted somehow, so I basically reinstalled Windows, this time making sure to partition my HDD into two parts, one for the OS and one for everything else.

I’ve been keeping myself busy installing all of the drivers that came with my laptop (most importantly, the wireless driver since that’s the only way I can connect to the Internet right now.) I’s a good thing I still have the Viao, along with it, most of my precious files. I’ll have to remember to reinstall all of the Asian fonts as well, before trasnferring my files. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post something good soon…

It seems as though the first release candidate for Firefox 2 was released without me knowing about it. It’s a good thing too, since I was unable to use Firefox 2 Beta 2 on my laptop because it was somehow more unstable on this machine the old Viao. I had it uninstall it and install Firefox 1.5 in its stead. I could really feel the difference from 2.0 and 1.5. I really missed the close things on each individual tag and the automatic spell-checker. You guys can check it out here, too.

In other news, it seems as though some hackers have revealed to the public some critical flaw in Firefox’s implementation of Javascript with enough information for other people to take advantage of the flaw. It seems as though they did this, instead of using Mozilla’s bug bounty program, for the “for the good of the Internet.” Yea, I’ll certainly believe that when my computer gets compromised because of this. Thanks guys!