Category: Uncategorized

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What is Your Most Favorite Sports Anime Series? (Anime News Network)
What is Your Most Favorite Sports Anime Series?

Anime News Network posted the following question: What is Your Most Favorite Sports Anime Series? I like to field queries here on site. Before I answer, I must ask a question in response to the question: Can I lie? I can? Great! Now that I can lie, I will answer the question as follows: “I love Cross Game more than any[ sports anime] in the world.” If my question and answer response to the question caused you to do a head tilt, I would tell you to watch Cross Game. However, that is difficult these days thanks to licensing limbo.

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Hyperkin's "No-Drift" N64 Stick Is Available Now by Damien McFerran (Time Extension)
Accessory maker Hyperkin has just released a Hall Effect stick for the N64, a "no-drift, GameCube-style" replacement that "requires zero soldering."

A new Time Extension news report about Hyperkin’s hall effect Nintendo 64 joystick mod crossed my feed reader. When I first read the article, I thought I had previously written about this in The New Leaf Journal, but it turns out that I had written about an 8BitDo hall effect mod. I happen to be a fan both of good hall effect controllers and the original, unique, Nintendo 64 joystick. The latter point gives me some pause about the Hyperkin mod. I quote from the Time Extension report: “Mimicking the GameCube’s analogue stick, you’ll be able to ‘feel the nostalgia and comfort of the GameCube era while dominating your favourite N64 games. This stick is designed for maximum comfort and a competitive edge, making long gaming sessions a breeze.'” While I prefer the GameCube controller to the Nintendo 64 controller, the Nintendo 64 had a more interesting (albeit less durable) joystick. If we are releasing mods, I would prefer one that preserves the feel of the original instead of replacing it with a more generic GameCube-style joystick, durability aside.

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I installed the Hum link shortener on The New Leaf Journal and I like it thus far. Now I just played around with the ActivityPub WordPress plugin settings so I am trying this post to see how it looks from Mastodon. Don’t mind me. (I should also figure out why my New Leaf Journal posts stopped showing up through the AP plugin but that’s another matter.)

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I have seen more than enough anime series in 2024 thus far to be reasonably (not absolutely) confident that the second season of MF Ghost will not be a realistic contender for my annual year-end top-six ranking. With that out of the way, count me as excited to watch the Chad-faced protagonist Kanata engage in some high-octane drifting, disappearing line attacks, and late breaking. As I noted in my 2023 ranking article,while MF Ghost missed by year-end top six by 2-3 spots, I often found myself looking forward to it more than my anime of the year choice, which happened to air on the same day. With luck, maybe MF Ghost season 2 will cut down on everything that doesn’t involve racing (its romance writing is on par with its predecessor, Initial D, and I submit for the record that this is not a complement).

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I occasionally check Ahrefs’ backlinks resource (the free version) to see if my articles received any fun new backlinks. One of my favorite backlinks was when a the Russian-language Wikipedia article (archived) cited to my early review of Pixelfed. We may have a better Russian-language backlink this time. Last year, I wrote an article about Thanksgiving in Grenada. Thanks to Ahrefs, I now know that it is footnote 32 in an article about Thanksgiving on a Russian wiki site (archived) I had never heard of. While I cannot read Russian (I don’t even know the alphabet), it seems like a good cite from what I gleaned from a machine translation. I am glad to see someone found the Grenada article informative because that was one of my more time-intensive articles of 2023.

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The video game magazine Game Informer was shuttered on short notice after having been in business for 33 years. I have written about reading classic game magazines around the turn of the century including Nintendo Power, Expert Gamer, and EGM. Sure enough, I also read Game Informer back in the day (I noted in one post that I remembered the great hatred of some of its reviewers for the early Mario Party games). While I have not been a regular Game Informer reader for about two decades, I did have a specific, self-interested take on the story. I eventually plan to write an article analyzing the Ai Ebihara social link from Persona 4 (idea previewed here). One of my inspirations for the post  is an excellent 2012 Game Informer article by Kimberly Wallace (Wayback Machine link). While all of these articles can be found in the Internet Archive, it would have potentially been annoying to dig up without the URL. Fortunately, I had already saved the URL along with a Wayback archive snapshot in Zotero. (Whew.)

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I have a Librebooted Lenovo Thinkpad T400. After swapping its spinning hard drive for a solid state drive (big improvement), I needed to install a new operating system. I went with the LXDE version of GNU Trisquel (in the spirit of it being a Librebooted Thinkpad T400 and all). However, when I tried to boot from my live USB, I ran into the following error:

graphics initialization failled
Error setting up gfxboot
boot:

I vaguely recalled having run into this problem before (maybe even on the T400), but I did not remember the solution. I performed a quick search and found a proposed solution posted by user utapyngo on February 8, 2014, on the Ask Ubuntu forum: “Just type help and press Enter. It will continue to boot normally.”

The solution looked vaguely familiar. I tried it and it worked without a hitch. I was able to boot from the live USB and install Trisquel from the live session. Talk about an evergreen 10-year old fix.

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My favorite writing tool is KDE’s Ghostwriter markdown editor. Back in 2021, I installed Ghostwriter on a computer running Manjaro Linux and encountered a segmentation fault when I tried to launch it. I eventually found a fix and described it in an article. Since then, I had no trouble installing and running Ghostwriter on multiple systems (usually Arch-based EndeavourOS) until I installed it on my new laptop running Fedora 40. After installing, Ghostwriter failed to launch. I had a bad feeling about the culprit and confirmed when I tried to launch from the terminal that Ghostwriter had segfaulted. You may be wondering where my solution article is. For my laptop, I uninstalled the Fedora package version of Ghostwriter and replaced it with the Flatpak, which works without any problem. One reason I did not do that in 2021 was because the Flatpak (note 2021 was before Ghostwriter became a KDE app) was out of date. However, the Flatpak is now keeping up with the non-Flatpak version, so I saw no reason to not just go with it and check again later to see if the issue with the regular version resolves itself in a future release.

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Qwant is a French-based privacy-focused search engine, albeit I have always understood it to be a front-end to Bing (similar to DuckDuckGo) for all practical intents and purposes. I have tried it on occasion but I generally prefer DuckDuckGo for my Bing front-end purposes (after not prefering anything having do with Bing when Microsoft blacklisted The New Leaf Journal without explanation). Back in 2021, I wrote an article on alternative search engines (most of which were front-ends) and praised Qwant for relying on OpenStreetMap for its maps, noting that DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps. According to AlternativeTo, Qwant Maps has been discontinued subsequent to Qwant being acquired by Synonfonium (I am not up to date on this change). Being AlternativeTo, AlternativeTo recommends alternatives to Qwant maps. I would personally recommend OpenStreetMap in browsers and Organic Maps as an app.

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A friend told me about the likely ill-founded rumor that Microsoft is preparing to make a serious offer to buy Valve. As I suspected, it does not look like it is happening. One might think in light of the fact that I use Linux instead of Windows, have general criticisms of and personal grievances with Microsoft, and qualified praise for Valve’s Steam, that I would be relieved. Not so! Microsoft buying Valve would make some things much more convenient. For example, I use OBS to record gameplay. If Microsoft owns Valve, I could count on them to do it for me. I also trust that Microsoft would take steps to take the guesswork out of which Steam games are DRM-free. Where do I sign up? (I hope readers see that this is a joke.)

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Integrating Koko Analytics stats by Mikko Saari (relevanssi.com)
It’s possible to integrate all kinds of external data to Relevanssi weights. Koko Analytics is a great analytics plugin. It collects stats about your visitors and stores them in the local database, which means those stats are available for Relevanssi. For some sites, this makes a lot of sense. For...

I have been using Koko Analytics on The New Leaf Journal since 2020 and I also use it on this site. Moreover, I use Relevanssi Light to improve on WordPress’s (sub-standard) default search after having briefly used the much heavier and more robust Relevanssi plugin. While I plan to stick with Relevanssi Light because it is good enough for my search-improvement purposes, I was still interested to read a 2022 post by the developer of the Relevanssi plugins about “[i]ntegrating Koko Analytics stats as a factor in the weight calculations [fior Relevanssi Premium].” In short, he demonstrates a PHP snippet that would allow Relevanssi Premium users to slightly favor popular posts in searches. This is very neat and I would definitely try it if I were running Relevanssi Premium. For those of you with less intense search needs or limited resources, however, I recommend giving Relevanssi Light a try — it is as good as it is simple.

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Telling Southwest I’m On Vacation · The New Leaf Journal by Nicholas A. Ferrell (thenewleafjournal.com)
I use a Southwest Airlines napkin to tell New Leaf Journal readers that I am on vacation in Texas until May 15, 2024.

A Southwest Airlines napkin. The top says in orange text "The best ideas are born on napkins" and below "What's yours?" In black ink, I wrote "Telling Emu Cafe Social 'I'm back."

 

This is the second time I am publishing this. I initially published it right before (1) rebuilding our server (2) before the daily backup had been taken. I had been in Texas from May 7 to 15 but I went on vacation without informing my many (self-flattery) loyal fans. I used a clever Southwest Airlines napkin question mark to break the news. Now I suppose this post shows both that I returned from Texas and my two WordPress projects returned from the (very temporary) abyss. I used the free and open source OSS Document Scanner to scan my napkin scribbles instead of taking a photo like I did for The New Leaf Journal napkin post.

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URL as a sentence by Adam Newbold (Neatnik Notes)
I wondered about the idea of a URL being a complete sentence, and I picked up the domain newbold.is as the basis for my goofing around with the concept.

I came across an interesting post by Adam Newbold about “the idea of a URL being a complete sentence.” He picked up a domain specifically for the purpose (name.is) and created some sentence-style URLs with note-length content. While this domain is not purpose-built for that, you will note that I wrote the URL of this post in the form of a question about URL sentences. The post made me think of one WordPress-related area where these fun sentence URLs could work well; I reviewed a simple extension for having a WordPress site produce a TWTXT feed (see it in use here and on The New Leaf Journal). By default, it each post is represented with the title and short URL. However, if one went all in on Mr. Newbold’s sentence URLs and modified the TWTXT plugin to make each feed entry the full URL of the post and nothing else, it would work very nicely (note that this could be done with non-WordPress sites, I am only focusing on WordPress since that is what I use for my two projects).

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Review: IPS 16Bit Pocket MD HD - A Genesis / Mega Drive Handheld That Plays Carts by Damien McFerran (Time Extension)
Back in 1995, Sega released the Nomad, a portable Genesis / Mega Drive which, for many fans, felt like the stuff of a madman's dreams. It offered the ability to play your 16-bit library on the move, as well as connect up to your TV for more traditional play. It was like the Nintendo Switch 20 years ahead of its time – and it was also something of a commercial dud, sadly.

Time Extension reviewed a new handheld device designed to play Sega Genesis carts. My first thought when I saw a modern Sega Genesis handled was the Sega Genesis Nomad, a 1995 handheld device created by Sega to play Genesis games. Time Extension, which is a game history site, unsurprisingly led with the Nomad, noting that it had many neat features but was ultimately a “commercial dud.” I actually had a Nomad back in the day to play my Genesis library on the go and I distinctly remember bringing it on a trip to Texas in 1998. It worked well and I must note for the benefit of kids these days who grow up with the Nintendo Switch and powerful phones that being able to play consoles on a handheld device was novel back in the 90s. But the first thing I think of when I remember the Nomad is not any specific gaming experience, but the batteries. As the Wikipedia entry for the device notes, the thing burned through six AA batteries in about 4 hours. One can chalk up many reasons the cool device was not commercially successful, but the battery life was unfortunately atrocious even by the standards of when it was released.

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I watched the second season of The Dangers in My Heart (“BokuYaba”) as a simulcast after watching and reviewing the first season. While I do not want to fully spoil my upcoming New Leaf Journal review of season two, I’ll note that the second season is was the strongest anime of winter 2024 and a very early anime of the year candidate (impressive in light of the fact the first season came in outside of my 2023 top six series). The second season finale aired on Saturday, March 30 and I watched it a little bit after midnight on Easter the 31st. It was an excellent final episode that ended on a very sweet note. But maybe it was too sweet. I was satisfied with the way the season concluded but I needed a change before a checked out for the night (or morning). I have been watching Initial D for the first time after being inspired to try it by MF Ghost (which aired in fall 2023). For those not in the know, Initial D mostly consists of street car racing against a Eurobeat sound-track. It is not at all sweet. It has some awful anime romance writing but the races are great fun. I watched the first two episodes of Fourth Stage right after the Dangers in My Heart finale. Just the contrast I was looking for — very satisfying.