Freshmark snacks

Conveniently, there's a convenience store called Freshmart just outside my metro stop. So I'll stop in there and see what snacks are left on the shelves on the way home. Here are two of their snacks that I bought a month or so ago.

I've posted before about yóu tiáo (油条). In this case, they've been made into a burrito. I seem to recall this tasting savoury, but nothing special.

And they also have salads which are more or less reasonably priced. This one actually looks quite appetising in the photo, not that it wasn't edible.

I can also pay my bills are Freshmart, so whenever the gas, water, power or whatever company pushes a bill into my mailbox I can just pop across the road and pay it with little effort. Speaking of which, there are two on my shelf at the moment I need to take over there.

A real Imaginary Realities mirror

Probably over a year or two ago now, Fred Clift replied to a message I sent to the a mailing list and mentioned he had a full mirror of Imaginary Realities. Up to this point, the best mirror was the text only copy hosted at this site. However, the full mirror was not really usable as-is. The index pages were missing and javascript redirected every visitor to the original now defunct URL of the site. So it sat on my hard drive until now.

I've finally had the chance to process the files and put them up for browsing in all their glory. Note that one author does not want their article published any more and requested it be removed from the old mirror, so it has been removed from this one as well. Both the mirror and the downloadable snapshot have had it removed.

Link: http://imaginary-realities.disinterest.org/

Download: imaginary-realities-2011-05-14.zip (13.7 MB)

Unfortunately, it is unlikely the forum threads associated with each article will ever be recovered. Both them and the rest of the forum contents. If someone else mirrored this, and happens to have a copy I'd like to find out otherwise though. But MUD forums come and go all the time, all the time and effort discussing things going to waste. Imaginary Realities, MUDMagic, ... Anyway, enjoy the mirror.

Roguelike MUD progress #6 - Chinese character sets

Previous post: Roguelike MUD progress #5

Feeling like doing a bit of programming, I decided to run my roguelike MUD code and see if there was anything that I might feel drawn to working on.

This must be the first time I have tested it since I bought a Chinese laptop. I have debug menus in-game which show me all four character sets, and they now show the following.

Windows Telnet looks better than Putty, but if Putty is what I have to use now, then that's the easiest path forward.

It looks like Putty is also not working reliably now. Going back to Windows Telnet, maybe there is some way to get DOS to display CP 437 without having access to the ability to switch operating system languages. And it turns out there is, typing chcp 437 in a DOS console does the trick. But unfortunately, it uses a different font and it also seems to break handling of escape codes.

Unfortunately, this is going to require a lot more research and work. I can't say I am enthused about it, as I would rather be just working on game code. But maybe I can detect Chinese Windows and use unicode characters, as they seem to be available.