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General blog entries

Power Consumption

Because now and then I wind up in a discussion about power consumption of random electronics I decided to measure the power needs of some random appliances around the house. These are the results:

  On / Powered Standby / Sleep
19” CRT monitor 85W 0W
17” CRT monitor 37W 1W
@Home Digital Cable Decoder 6W 6W
CRT TV 59cm (23”) 60W 6W
LCD TV 26” (66cm) 112W 1W

Please note that these are just an indication, a similar device you own might have different power needs but this gives you an idea at least. Also the TV’s I measured are relatively old (CRT, 15 years, the LCD 7 years) and modern LCD TV’s use less power but are bigger (so the Watts per inch are lower but the total power usage is larger).

Categories
General blog entries

MoveableType Plugin Joomla! enhanced

Joomla can be used in a blog like manner using the XML-RPC interface. Unfortunately, Joomla only provides a Blogger API plugin which is rather limited.

Luckely, some Japanese people created a plugin which improved the supported XMLRPC API’s. It’s called MoveableType XML-RPC Plugin and can be found on the Joomla site.

Technically this is not only a MoveableType implementation as it supports all functions needed for MetaWeblog and Blogger as well as Google Docs (since version 2.1.0).

The only thing driving me nuts is the fact that some blog tools refuse to work because the plugin refuses to return a list of supported functions (most programs just assume everthing is supported, which is wrong as almost everything is optional).

Fortunately this is solved quickly by adding a few lines of PHP to the plugins/xmlrpc/movabletype.php file. Find the following section (around line 790):

function mt_supportedMethods()    {       return (new xmlrpcresp(new xmlrpcval(array(), "array")));    }

Replace this with the following:

function mt_supportedMethods()    {       global $xmlrpcString, $xmlrpcArray;       $functions = array();       foreach(array_keys(plgXMLRPCMovableType::onGetWebServices()) as $function_name)          $functions[] = new xmlrpcval($function_name, $xmlrpcString);       $struct = new xmlrpcval($functions, $xmlrpcArray);       return new xmlrpcresp($struct);    }

And voila, there you have it, a fully working function listing enabling your favorite blog program to do its job properly…

Categories
General blog entries

Review of Ergo Proxy

Last week I finished watching Ergo Proxy, an series of 23 episodes and I just can’t resist to put up a small review about it.


Click for full version

The story begins in a futuristic domed city called Romdo, built to protect its citizens after a global ecological disaster. In this utopia, humans and androids coexist with each other peacefully under a total management system. For some reason, some androids go on a killing spree. Re-l Mayer (see image) is assigned to investigate some of the murders with her android partner Iggy.

Ergo Proxy has it all: dark, sinister surroundings, animation which is far above standard – I dare say most of the time on par with Ghost in the Shell 2 (which I consider the ultimate anime style, a mix of computer generated and good old hand work). The main character has a gothic like appearance and she is just plain hot. During the series we get a few shots of the female lead in her undies, even a short flash of some under-boob but nothing more than that: kiddy-save and not even close to the ecchi category.

So far, its all the ingredients far a kick ass show… But wait, it gets even better. During the series we get some awesome action scenes and all of the eye candy is accompanied by a truly awesome soundtrack. Actually the production team of Manglobe did pretty much everything right to create a truly fantastic series.

So here comes the ‘but’. The animation, sound, characters – all great, but the story just blows… Its horrible: the first half of the series everything slowly becomes clear and everything is peachy – no even better than peachy as I was sitting on the edge of my seat. But after 14 or so episodes you get this uneasy feeling that something is off.

I still can’t pinpoint it but by the time it goes really off the rails you have been watching for some time while having this suspicion that its all wrong – just plain wrong. I still had high hopes right up until the end – I mean, a show which has such outstanding looks can’t just suck, right?

Unfortunately the ending does not safe this sinking ship. I have to applaud the creator of this masterpiece of an ending: it was certainly nowhere near what I would expect. I’m still pondering if I think it makes sense – so far I concluded the beginning and the end must be the product of different writers while a 3rd attempted to link the 2 together.

To be honest, this show is one of my biggest disappointments: I randomly ended up with Ergo Proxy and after 2 episodes I was hooked and expected a treat like GITS was (which one? Pretty much all GITS series/movies) but was seriously let down. I’m giving the show a 5 out of 10 rating for the simple fact that it was cool to watch (most of it anyway), but for the shear lack of a decent story it doesn’t get a single point more…

Rating:

  • Animation: 9 / 10
  • Sound: 8 / 10
  • Characters 7 / 10
  • Story: 3 / 10
  • Overall: 5 / 10
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Categories
Japan Blog Study Tour

Anime music

After all is said and done… well I just had to post some anime music videos. I picked some soundtracks from my favorite shows and found the video clips. (I’m gonna be so broke if I find a music store in Osaka or Tokyo ;-))

For starters, lets begin with Origa. The song is called Rise and is the first opening tune for Ghost In The Shell: the 2nd GIG. Note that I couldn’t find a video clip of this song so this is the opening itself: {flv}demo/Origa_-_Rise{/flv}

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