hiidenkonttibeta

Marrasyö toi valkeuden synkän maan päälle.

I’ve started gathering (old) game consoles. Here’s the first one I’ve received:

It’s Neo Geo Pocket Color by SNK. Mine is Japanese “Pearl Blue” edition, a color which reminds me of a shampoo bottle. It has a 16bit CPU running at 6.144MHz, 160×152 resolution display without a backlight (runs 40h on two AA-batteries) and a built-in horoscope. So far I’ve got one game for it, Puzzle Bobble Mini.

I’ve acquired some tech toys recently. First, there’s Palm Tungsten T2. I’ve been playing a bit with Palms and Japanese dictionaries (PAdict with full EDICT database) & kanji learning programs and they feel very useful so I’m trying them out more seriously.

It’s a second hand device and the screen makes a high-pitch noise, and it’s quite loud. A quick search on Google revealed that it’s not at all uncommon for hi-res Palms. Luckily Lightspeed overclocking utility can reduce the noise dramatically – it can only be heard from 5cm away. Also, PalmOS 5.2.1 couldn’t talk to my mobile phone out of the packet – had to install a 3rd party app for it, but in the end, I can surf the web with the T2:

There’s also an OGG Vorbis (and mp3, too) players available for PalmOS 5 devices. I’m going to check them out, maybe T2 could serve as a portable music player as well – I’ve been looking for one which had removable memory cards (check) and support for OGG (check).

A lot of homeless bikes around the Ainola park, and usually there’s only bottles floating down Laananoja, I don’t know about other cities, but they don’t usually casually throw fire extinguishers away in Oulu:

They float, apparently. Don’t know if it’s empty or not.

Went to iaido lesson today, the first time in two months or so. Everything was even more clumsy than previously, but I remembered almost everything (excluding inyoshintai, the fifth kata, which I remembered only partially).

On a way back I noticed that there was a lot of frost around, and the frosty tree leaves on the ground looked so nice that I just swapped ぼっけん for a カメラ at home and headed to Ainola park. Shot almost a roll of frosty leaves.

In addition to their natural colourfullness some trees had received additional decorations:

And the water level in the river was very low. This part of the river is very much controlled by dams and they empty the river for the winter. For example, water flowed over this small dam during the winter – now people can use it as a bridge, as the person in the photo is doing:

Then there are the fountains, which shoot water a few meters into air during summer, and the small artificial rapids – all dry now:

Shouldn’t be a long time until the snow falls. A very autumnal park, with most of the trees having lost their leaves, making a layer of rotting leaves on the ground; flowers turn brown and black, ground to mud.

This unknown tree had dropped all its leaves, but it had all it’s berries. Probably very safe berries, they’re big and juicy and bright red and all the birds have left them alone. Must refuse the temptation to harvest the mysterious berries..

The short days are gray with continuous cloud cover. Would be good time to feel gloomy, but I’m too happy in general for that. I’ll listen to some goth music anyway.