Categories
Gadgetology Gaming

MAME a la MobilePro

Earl vs. MobilePro MAMEMost anyone who’s seen me in person in the past seven or eight years knows that I carry around with me, nearly everywhere, a slightly dated handheld PC that weighs in somewhere between the size of a modern netbook and what they used to call a “palmtop.” The NEC MobilePro, long out of production, was way, way the hell ahead of its time: it was a netbook, 5+ years before the concept of the netbook caught on with, if not the general public, then the general geek populace. It can get on the web via wi-fi with few problems. It has Word, Excel and Powerpoint on it, so I can write articles for my site while I’m away from my desktop, I can keep my inventory spreadsheets of my game collection on it, and so on. It reads PDFs, so I recently made it a bit of a personal crusade to figure out how to get it to play nice with my home LAN so it could access the huge number of ebooks I have on my home server. The MobilePros, at least the later ones, are touchscreen devices. You can use a stylus (provided with the unit), but you can also tap it with your fingers. I usually use my fingers, because how cool is that? To complete my journey to the dork side, I had a custom “DON’T PANIC” sticker made up for the “cover” (i.e. the reverse side of the flatscreen); admit it, if you had a portable device with a tiny screen that you could look stuff up on, you would do this too and you know it. The little machine has become something of a trademark of mine. … Read more

Categories
Critters

Moving the Kitten Kolony

One of the Tiger Twins says HIBoy, it got quiet in here. I went from blogging two, three times a day, replete with kitty pix, to nothing. The sad fact of the matter is that, as of Monday night, the kittens have gone “home” – they’ve returned to my sister-in-law’s place, where they have taken over a two-car garage (no joke!) as a training ground for stalking and pouncing and other kittenish activities. It was fun watching them get their first glimpse of a crawling insect – at first they jumped back, and then they started to pursue. And then they ALL started to pursue… one little beetle-esque thingie. Man, I wouldn’t want to be that bug.… Read more