So, 1988 give or take and our Commodore 64 with its old cassette system instantly got shoved into a corner to start gathering dust. Hi and welcome to floppy disk land, we bring you double density, 880K goodness (eat that 720K IBM PC floppies)! 512K RAM which was later extended with another 512K of slow RAM through the trapdoor at the bottom of the device. A 32-bit Motorola 68000 CPU running at 7MHz, 16-bit data bus and 4 channel 8-bit audio. The A600 came with 1MB of RAM out of the box and, except for being a lot smaller, was technically pretty much identical to the original 500.

I still feel bad (and sad) about giving both systems away when I moved. Out of all the computers I’ve used in my life the Amiga ranks up there at the top of the list (even beating Apple, yes). Maybe it’s just nostalgia speaking, I don’t know, but it was and in my opinion still is an amazing system. So the past two days I finally took the time to mess around with E-UAE and the Amiga Forever Plus edition. E-UAE definitely isn’t as elegant, full featured and stable as its Windows counterpart (WinUAE), but it gets the job done. I’ve currently got 4 systems set up:

• Amiga 500 with 2MB RAM booting Workbench 1.3
• Amiga 600 with 4MB RAM for games (not auto booting)
• Amiga 1200 with 8MB RAM booting Workbench 3.1
• Amiga Forever with 64MB RAM booting AmigaOS 3.9

The last one’s a custom machine set up to boot Workbench 3.9 from a hard disk image instead of floppies and comes with a TCP/IP stack and a set of networking tools ready to go. Not exactly the A500 I used to own, but it’s fun to see what became of the platform after I was stupid enough to get rid of my hardware. Really makes me want to whip out the VISA card and order myself a nice little 1200 with 100Gig HD, AGA scandoubler, network card and AmigaOS 3.9. Instead I’ll just save myself some cash and mess around with the emulator for now. I really don’t want to go and throw away my sole new year’s resolution of cutting down on impulse buying two days into 2010.

Anyway, I’ve been stuck here the last two days playing Speedball 2, Cannon Fodder (anyone remember sucky sucky and supah doopah missile boostah?), Dune 2, Syndicate, Rick Dangerous, Hired Guns, Desert Strike and Alien Breed, which has actually been rereleased for Xbox360 by Team17 (more on that in a later post). I also need to mess around with ARexx again and check out some old demos and see if I can find a copy of the Ultimate Soundtracker, oh and I do hope there’s going to be a good old fashioned Guru Meditation error in there somewhere! Oh yeah, the memories are definitely starting to come back :)

Having multiple blogs, a Facebook, Flickr & Twitter account isn’t easy. Especially the multiple blogs part. I love writing, but it doesn’t come all that fluently for me. So keeping myself motivated to maintain more than one blog has become a pretty big burden. And ultimately the solution is easy, just ditch all but one. Done deal. Yay! Easy! Let’s get on with it!

During 2009 I kinda got sidetracked with photography and even started blogging. Ultimately I got bored with that though. It happens with a lot of the stuff I do really. New and shiny things tend to grab my attention and make me lose interest in all the other stuff. But now that photography isn’t taking up the majority of my free time anymore and with 2010 around the bend I decided to kick things into gear again around here. You know, New Year’s resolutions and all :)

So what’s the plan? I don’t want to simply start posting again. The site’s in need of a bit of an overhaul and I’ve been meaning to play around with Winston (a UI Library with a lot of potential) for quite some time now. So, a redesign then? Yes, very much so. Besides, I’ve never been very good with graphics heavy design work. A minimal design based on the Winston defaults sounds like a good idea. Even if it’s only to make sure I don’t give up on the project halfway through.

So except for the temporary case of online apathy, is there anything else worthwhile happening in my life? Let’s see. Noah’s growing up damn fast. He’s almost two years old now. God knows where that time went, flew right by. Joke’s as awesome as ever (but still hasn’t started blogging). As for me, I’m still collecting Shirow artwork, still addicted to gadgets and I’m still the same procrastinator as always. Same old same old to be honest, which I don’t mind too much.

Well, I guess this is as good a time as any to get cracking. Let’s start with updating WordPress and just take it from there…

LISTEN U *******!!!!!!!!!!! TOKIO HOTEL IS LIKE THE BEST BAND EVER!!!!!!!!THEIR MUSIC IS SOOOOOOOOOOO GREAT!!!!!!!WOW THE LEAD SINGER DRESSES SOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!YES OK I LIKE THEM……..THEY HAVE LOTS OF TALENT!!!!!AND AS FOR ALL OF YOU NO-TALENT LOSERS U CAN **** OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!THEY STARTED WORLD WIDE WHEN THEY WERE TWELVE OK!!!!!!OH YEAH AND YOU STUPID BLAZIKEN PERSON WHY SHOULDN’T THEY BE ALLOWED TO DRESS LIKE A WOMEN HUH????!!!!!!WHY ARE YOU ALLOWED TO DRESS HOW U WANT TO DRESS???!!!!OH YEAH BECAUSE IT’S FREE WORLD GO AHEAD PEOPLE SAY WHAT YOU WANT BUT TOKIO HOTEL HAS THE BEST SONGS EVUR!!!!!!!!OK YOU WHAT THE FIRST COMMENT ON HERE JUST SOOOOOOOOOO PISSED ME OFF I CAN’T BELEIVE U!!!!!!!SO WHAT IF HE’S GAY!!!!!!!IT DOESN’T MEAN HE’S NOT A PERSON……..U STUPID FU** FACE……..I HOPE YOU DIE
LISTEN OK BILL,TOM, U GUYS ARE THE BEST DON’T LET THESE STUPID PEOPLE GET THE BETTER OF YOU OK JUST LET IT GO…..I CAN DEAL WITH THEM………HE DRESSES GREAT,SINGS GREAT PLUS I WONDER HOW MUCH UR STUPID HEAD WILL COST ONCE IT GETS CHOPPED OFF……..THEY ARE NOT CHILDREN ANYMORE SO LEAVE THEM ALONE AND GO ON AND LIVE UR STUPID LIFE WITH UR STUPID MIND OF A 4 YEAR OLD STUPID A**
I LUV U TOKIO HOTEL UR THE BEST KEEP WRITING THOSE SONGS AND KEEP UR STYLE…..IT’S GREAT:) P.S. I THINK BILL IS REALLY CUTE,LUV HIS HAIR!!!!<3
P.S. I LUV MONSOON,DON’T JUMP,READY SET GO,SCREAM,THOSE ARE MY FAVES…
<3 B.C.

aiiiiiiiiiii eu te amoi biiiiiiillllllllllllllllllllllll
toooooooommmm gatiiiiiiiiinhooooooooo
billlllllll gostosooooooooooo
te amooooooooooooooooo mais que tudoooooooooo
by: meryyy

something like fagets, looking awfull. totally sux, GAY SHOW! WHAT CAN I SAY? NOT CALL HIM GAY?! WHAT IS IT THEN? FIRST I SAW IT I THOUGH IT WAS A WOMAN LOOKING LIKE A MAN.:) WORST! WANNA BE WOMAN FAGETS, FUCK’YA ALL! U CANT BE A REAL WOMAN, U ARE NOT A REAL MAN. WHAT IS THIS THING? HERMAPHRODITE? PLEASE TELL ME!

Teenagers eh? Entertainment at its best I tell you! In any case, Tokio Hotel still sucks and the lead singer still looks like a total douche, so there :)

As a sidenote, looks like the Aspire One noisy fan post is getting a lot of attention. I guess I’ll have to start specializing in Aspire One tech now :)

Xbox360 – 1/125s, f/22 (work aperture f/8 + 2/3, light fall-off < 1/3 stop), ISO50

Xbox360 – 1/125s, f/32 + 1/3 (work aperture: f/22 + 2/3, light fall-off: 2/3 stop), ISO400

I’ve recently (well, a couple of months ago really) started a Dutch blog about photography and I’ve been thinking of merging n00.be with it. Merging in the sense that I’d be posting my entries both in Dutch and in English over at blog.thomasbouve.com. The upside would obviously be more frequent updates. The downside of this is that I’d be focussing heavily on photography (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing).

Other than that things have been quite peachy. Noah has just turned 8 (months that is :P) a couple of days ago and he now has 2 teeth with a third on the way. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that he’s constantly happy and smiling. Aren’t babies supposed to cry from time to time? I guess Noah missed that memo. You also got to love the fact he sleeps 12 hours straight from 7pm to 7am. Ok, getting up at 7am doesn’t exactly qualify as ‘sleeping in’, but it does beat getting out of bed in the middle of the night :)

So yeah, chances are that n00.be will start redirecting to blog.thomasbouve.com soon (depending in how much time I can spend trying to figure out the multi language stuff). In the meantime I’ll try to keep you all up to date on the situation!