Maps

This post will be about maps, in particular, maps that are featured in action adventure games, puzzle games, RPGs, etc.

The reason why, believe it or not, is that sometimes you don't have time to make a throughout check to find collectables and other things when you do a second playthrough.

For example, say you wanna play Super Mario 64 DS, say you forgot where every single red coin is and you don't feel like looking out for them (even though they're all over the place), nor you want to watch a YouTube walkthrough or read a detailed description of the locations, etc. 

This is where maps kick in. Using our previous example, take a look at this:

Bob-omb Battlefield map from StrategyWiki

Now you can go on collecting all the coins and not a single goomba was given about everything else. In the same spirit, just made this:

Based DeSmuME

There are many iterations out there worth looking for depending on what you need, so good luck in your own quest!

Dreadful day to start a blog...

If you're familiar with the Mongolian Taijitu (broadly known as yin-yang), you'll agree that the world has good and bad stuff, like everything, some things just "are", right? Well, today's one of those days that the line dividing both is blurred out, but in general, at least the way it seems, this is a terrible day.
Since it's a terrible day, why not start a blog that nobody will read, cause seriously, just writing stuff to calm myself seems to work wonders in me! You know, sometimes we just need to vent out stuff, whether it's in mall full of people, a tacky post in your facebook wall, a tweet; albeit if you're not into unwarranted attention from strangers like me, you might prefer the edge of a lonely cliff, or a blog on the edge of the internet.

So, what's up? Toshiba, that's what.
Just google "toshiba recovery error" in the search bar near you and enjoy yourself a parade of complaints (if you click either of the autocomplete alternatives, cause yes, it's not just one isolated error we're talking about). What are these about? Well, those lousy customers always making it hard for the company by complaining about their dirty products; i mean, how dare they! Right? No, it ain't right. It ain't right that your hundreds of dollars computer doesn't come bundled with recovery media because it's cheaper for them to cramp it all in an obscure partition in a cheap Hitachi drive. It ain't right that said partition fails to initialise properly, wiping out your storage device without restoring it to an out-of-the-box state like they claim. It ain't right that even if you made spare recovery DVDs in the wake of a massive crash, the computer you spent hundreds of dollars in fails to recognise them... And it dafinitely ain't right that you have to pay Toshiba again if you want a spare set of recover media; i mean, why not just hosting it in their website together with the drivers and other rubbish?

Now, not only Toshiba does this, the worst of all has to be HP.
In case you don't remember the NVIDIA-gate, go search it. In short, it was a massive uproar after graphics chips in notebooks around 2007 and onwards begun to split from the motherboard due to faulty heat dissipation (yes, heat was so bad it basically melted the thing away from the logic board). Yes, you're reading the post of a happy owner of one of those doomed lappies.
A little background, there's something called motherboard "tattoo" which is basically just tag data like model, PID number, etc. Now, the thing is that without that "essential" information, the recovery media has no way in telling your system is legit, just so every time you insert the recovery DVDs a prompt will pop up and say "bitch, your discs are incompatible".

Anyway, if i ever bother to order recovery discs from Toshiba and pay for them, the first thing in my mind would be to rip them and upload them to the internet, where they should have been available for free in the first place. About HP, i'm planning to embark on a DIY fix journey somewhere in the future, but first i need to learn more about these "tattoos" (quite ironic, since i never really liked tattoos of any kind in the first place).