Michael Pavone

Transiteers On-Track Futures landing page with four people in high vis vests and hard hats

Ever dream of working for BART, helping move people around the Bay Area?

This summer, a group of BART interns developed an RPG video game that gives an educational, inside look at what it's like working for a transit agency!

Check out some screenshots from the prototype game 👇

Newegg thankfully lets you filter cases by whether they have the dumb window thing, but it's definitely slim pickings these days

Codecs can be patented (an issue with modern codecs), but anything from the Sega CD era should definitely be clear of any patent concerns by this point

Not a laywer, but: The codec itself is not copyrightable, but the playback code would be. If you write your own decoder/playback code you should be in the clear. That said, I think the likelihood that anyone goes after you for using some crufty old codec without proper licensing is almost zero

A table at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA with a banner hung above that reads “Keith’s Mac Hacks,” featuring a Twiggy Mac Plus, Lisa 2/10, Amiga 1000, Macintosh II, and two Bandai Pippin AtMarks.

If you’re in Silicon Valley this weekend (Friday or Saturday), swing by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and say hi. I’ve got a table near the front of the main hall where I’ll be demoing various “hacks” I’ve maintained over the past few years.

A photo of a black and white medium hair cat curled up on a fluffy chair next to an open window

A photo of a black and white medium hair cat curled up on a bed

Might be possible to extract it somehow. I took a quick stab at it over lunch by dumping the memory of the process while the game was running, but I wasn't able to find anything that looked like a ROM in my initial search

For anyone wondering, the Steam release of Earthion does not seem to contain the Genesis/Mega Drive ROM in any reasonably accessible format

Earthion is finally out on Steam today!
Thank you so much for your support from the very first teaser to this day.
We poured our hearts into this game, and we hope you enjoy it.
Get ready to fly and fight in Earthion!
🎮 Download now: buff.ly/1DrYi7m

Stopping duplexes but still allowing ADUs shows that this is just to appease NIMBYs and has nothing to do with fire safety.

Shame on Gov Newsom. He claims to be and has been celebrated as being pro-housing. But as on so many other issues, he does whatever he thinks will get him attention & praise.

I hate when national pundits opine about this stuff without knowing anything about what the actual politics are. The California governorship isn’t a tome about the future of the Democratic Party it’s the person who RUNS THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA.

The idea of @katieporteroc.bsky.social winning the Gov race would be a disaster for public transit, housing affordability, and meeting our climate goals. The last thing we need is to elect a consumer attorney from suburban Orange County. No one has a worse temperament to solve our concurrent crises

A screenshot showing BlastEm's emulation of the LaserActive main unit. Test mode has been entered causing a decent amount of text to be displayed via the character generator overlay and all front-panel LEDs have been turned on.

Not as exciting as having actual games working, but I've made a little more progress in my efforts to do LLE of the LaserActive hardware (what Nemesis released does HLE for all the hardware in the main unit). I've got IR input working, so you can now enter test mode

This guy ran on building 3.5 million new homes to address our housing shortage. The only time he's pushed the legislature on housing was on the CEQA reform measure (admittedly a good bill). Now he's weakening one of the modest bills that did pass.

Tastes like freedom ... and nerd sweat

Nemesis has released his fork of Ares and the dump of Space Beserker here if you want to try it out yourself: techdocs.exodusemulator.com/Console/Pion...

I'm not even talking about used batteries. You can buy 10 kWh of rack-mount LiFePO4 (i.e. the much less fire prone lithium chemistry) battery with integrated BMS from Amazon for $1720

It's been plenty useful for EVs which are more space and weight constrained than the home backup use case. The DIY options are actually getting pretty affordable. 10 kWh for under $2k. These aren't outdoor rated and don't have a builtin inverter though

Mid-day is currently pleasantly warm (mid to upper 60s or even low 70s in some parts), but it gets chilly at night (50s) especially if you're near the water. We have been getting a little more rain than is typical, but mostly overnight and pretty light. As others suggest, layers help a lot

I feel like a conspiracy nut when I get suspicious of seemingly popular reactionary posts in the local subreddits here. The Bay Area and even Berkeley are not political monoliths and reactionary attitudes to local crime are not that uncommon. Does feel like a fair bit of these are inauthentic though

For hours today, the top post on the Berkeley subreddit was what appears to have been an attempt to stoke black/asian racial animosity posted by a sockpuppet of a local MAGA chud. The OP deleted it shortly after I called out the things that were suspicious

The image has become a bit of a meme and is used to imply that survivorship bias is at work. In this case, the person quoted is acting like there were no consequences to not taking the COVID vaccine by ignoring all those that died or became seriously ill without it.

There was some statistical work in WWII to estimate how fatal hits are to various parts of the plane based on damage to planes that made it back. This image is not from the work itself, but intended to illustrate it. The parts with no holes are where shots would tend to completely disable the plane

One thing I find a little odd about our bike boulevard network is that there are some streets that are both low-traffic and DO have controlled intersections at major cross-streets that are not part of it. Allston between California and 9th is probably the lowest stress route across that part of town

I think Bowditch/Hillegass only has the one uncontrolled crossing at Dwight which is a narrow one way road at that point, so fairly low-stress. But it's also fairly short compared to the others.

I think so. 9th st. has the uncontrolled crossing at Cedar. Channing has uncontrolled crossings at Sacramento and San Pablo. Virginia has uncontrolled crossings at MLK and Shattuck. California has an uncontrolled crossing at Dwight (though the median thing is maybe a bit more substantial than Cedar)

This post brought to you by Fahrenheit for Sega/Mega CD which gets stuck in BlastEm after the Sega logo. Seems like both CPUs are waiting for the other to do something

The worst part of emudev is debugging why some random game doesn't work. You have to find the part of a potentially large program that isn't working and then you have to reverse engineer it enough to figure out what it's trying to do. Then you can finally debug what's actually wrong

Kind of embarrassed to admit that I only learned today that in some places in the East Bay, a "super" burrito is not just a somewhat larger burrito, or one with fancier filling. It is instead a two-tortilla, 15" monstrosity.

New York recently succeeded here, but they're not in the 9th circuit so the Berkeley case isn't binding there.