From the makers of Gran Turismo:
Is this great or what? It clearly is built on the Gran Turismo 4 rendering engine, and supports everything we’ve come to expect from Digital Polyphony. Arcade and Trophy mode, Photoshoot mode, a bucketload of (real life) tracks, and a truck load of different bikes to choose from!
Looks like my next addition to my PS2 game collection…
Party today! The rotor puller I ordered last month finally arrived after being in transit for over a MONTH, “thank you” United States Parcel Services! They probably sent somebody to swim accros the ocean with my parcel on his back. Judging by the shipping costs, the swimmer had enough food luxury during his trip. I really hope that Pit Posse selects a different shipping company for international orders soon. I took the torch and heated the rotor until water drops put on it boiled, to soften the retainer (lock tight) between the axle and the rotor. Then I re-tightened the rotor puller, smacked it with a hammer, re-tightened it, and so forth. The fifth hit did it, the rotor popped out. As you can see in the first picture, I had a fire extinguisher close by, because oil and fire do not play well together. I also used gloves so I could grab hot metal parts if needed, and I used aluminum plates to protect the magnet from direct heat of the torch.
Kawasaki KLR wrenching fanatics will notice the missing balancer chain tensioner (or “doohickey”, as they are sometimes called). Don’t worry, it’s still in one piece, I took it off to straighten it. It was bent and worn by the holding bolt, and I don’t want the bolt to sit or crawl to it’s former spot.
I also checked the valve fittings by putting petroleum in the head. They do not seem to be leaking, and show now signs of abnormal wear. Next week I will be checking the old oil for metal splinters, and putting it all together.
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| Nice little game, Bejeweled | The controller (has to be turned 90 degrees sometimes, confusing!) | Guess where we are? Travelling at 950km/h there 🙂 | Watched Chicken Little. It does not live up to it’s commercial by a long shot. |
Funny thing is, that my wife’s entertainent system actually crashed during flight. It got stuck for about 5 minutes, after which it automatically rebooted, and guess what? I saw a Tux! It is actually a Linux system. A bit of googling revealed that a few people even have seen the system crash on all monitors at the same time. Good thing they aren’t using this system for the flight controls yet. 😉
But it does make sense. It doesn’t cost anything, and being open source, Panasonic (the manufacturer of the system) has full controll on getting all the glitches out. Now they actually do need to do that still, but I bet they got a nice (remote?) update procedure for that. After all, they also need to upload new movies every now and then. Maybe they use the same connection as they use for email? 100% remote update would be nice. No “downtime” for the planes!.
I for one liked the system very much. It actually has games which let you compete with other passengers, but that didn’t seem to be popular on my flights to Las Vegas. I didn’t even had to get my PSP out of my bag 🙂
Now if they only could make those stupid headrests removable so I can put my head back when I want to sleep (like most normal people), flying wouldn’t be all that bad.
Now that a few school kids have proven that you don’t need oil to race, and several American race series run on methanol (no that’s not an oil product), can we please stop making cars that run on gasoline? And by the way, also stop pumping money into the super-dangerous liquid nitrogen cars? All that is purely to keep the oil companies in the same place: monopoly. Do you really think they do it for the environment? What if I told you that your current petrol car can run on bio-degradable methanol, with almost no changes? If you have a very modern car, the fuel system will even auto-adapt! But noooo, they won’t tell you that, because the oil companies and governements want to keep the monopoly intact!
Not that you can really do anything about it though. Except maybe not buying liquid-nitrogen or hybrid cars. There are better technical alternatives, although not on the market yet. Boycot the “environmentally friendly” car, force them into making a *real* environmentally friendly car.
Yes, I’m driving a diesel, and a motorbike. And no, I’m not worried about oil-shortage. It’s all bullshit from the oil companies, who could have come up with alternatives a long while ago, but chose not to. If there really was an oil shortage, we all would have been driving on methanol for quite some time now. And co2 emmisions would have been reduced to absolutely 0.
Recently my left headlight broke. I thought I’d change it quickly, but after half an hour of fiddling I decided to ask my dealer to do it for me, while I was looking. That was not a bad idea. It turned out to be not so straightforward after all, and you actually need tools (which you don’t get when buying the car) to do this! This lead me to write a “small” article on how to replace the headlights of a Citroen Xsara. Enjoy.
Read More “How to replace the headlights on a Citroen Xsara” »
Of all inventive minds, the religious mind must be the most inventive.
It can justify a massacre by refering to a book that essentially says “Thou shall not kill”.
… maybe the title should be “Two Stupidities A Week”, but since both stupid actions had to do with measurement, or rather the lack thereof, let’s stick with the proverb.
SELECT
'ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''' || sid || ',' || serial# || '''; --',
s.sid,
s.serial#,
s.osuser,
s.username,
s.program,
status
FROM v$session s
WHERE status = 'INACTIVE';
You will get a list of statements you need to execute (just copy-pase) to kill the inactive sessions. Don’t listen to the guys telling you to do intricate System Administrator stuff on a command prompt, just use any JDBC tool.
EDIT: Single query which also lists the kill command if the “alter system kill session” trick did not work:
SELECT
'ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''' || s.sid || ',' || s.serial# ||
'''; -- kill -9 ' || p.spid,
s.sid,
s.serial#,
p.spid,
s.username,
s.program,
s.status
FROM v$session s, v$process p
WHERE s.paddr = p.addr
and (s.state='INACTIVE' or s.state='KILLED');
Thanks Bas en Jeroen!
Last week I tried to pull the rotor by using a rotor puller, and a socket (from a socket wrench set) to block it. The socket burried it’s way into the first thread of the crankshaft. After realising this, I tried to fit the rotor bolt, and it wouldn’t go in. Since only the first thread was damaged, I carefully drilled it out (only needed to go 2 mm deep), and now the rotor bolt fits nicely again.
For some reason I’ve been selected my the google company to have the new interface of gmail, where you can use google talk without even installing it! Yes you’ve read that right. When I log in to Google, I immediately see a quick contacts list of people who are online (on googletalk), and I can chat with them as if I was using the actual application! Only voice is missing, but I don’t use that anyway (Skype fan), so I am really happy.Now I can google-talk with my friends on *any* computer without having to install plugins, upgrading MSN otherwise contaminating the host’s computer. I am really impressed and amazed (for the past 3 hours or so). Go Google! I feel like buying a t-shirt now 🙂
Oh yeah, and it works in both FireFox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. And I am not kidding.
Auch, and I just missed the scoop on Slashdot… I could have been a succesful submitter. so close, so close.