Category: Miscellaneous

Miscellania

  • July 9, 2007

First of all, Doctor Who was great. Season 3 is off to a good start…

This post is just to dump some of the stuff from my harddrive, such as this photo of the lego crane I made the other weekend. It’s much bigger than I thought it would be from the packaging!

DSC09659.JPG < Breakfast Crane This next shot is of some Star Wars minature's from the new 'Pocketmodel TCG'. Game packs are $5 apiece and come with rules, small dice, some playing cards and some small models of various ships from the SW world. I have little (no) interest in the game itself, but as a SW fan had to buy a pack to see the models. I'm quite pleased. The level of detail is high and the materials are much sturdier than in similar games (Pirates, Transformers). If you're interested in this sort of thing you could do worse than picking up a pack (I found it at Target): DSC09665.JPG < The base is about 2.5cm wide Lastly, I recently purchased (online, from the UK) a homebrew Gameboy Advance game called Blast Arena Advance: tealcartbig.jpg < Shot of the cart The game is extremely professional, but there isn't a great deal to it. The third of the following shots is a screenshot of gameplay, which consists of moving a target around the screen picking up the yellow squares. And that's it!
blastarena1.jpg blastarena5.jpg blastarena3.jpg

Extremely simplistic gameplay aside I’m happy with the purchase, both because of the overall slickness of the product and because of how cool it is just to have a homebrew GBA cartridge. Plus, the price (7 pounds, including shipping) was right 🙂

  • Posted in Games
  • Robert

Coinstar

  • July 1, 2007

Our bank recently stopped taking rolled coin (and they stopped taking loose coin ages ago). Which left me in a quandry, for what was I to do with all that pocket change collecting in jars in the kitchen?

There’s a machine called Coinstar, which is an electronic coin-counter redemption device at our local grocery store. I had dismissed it for years due to the outrageous 8.9% coin counting fee, but recently they started waiving the fee if you redeem your change for gift certificates at a number of online retailers.

One of these is amazon.com, so today I carried a plastic jug full of loose coin down to Price Chopper and dumped it into the Coinstar machine, selecting the amazon.com gift certificate option. It was a strangely entertaining process…

For starters, the machine is loud. For seconders, it is slow. So after I had finished dumping the change and the last coin had disappeared into the bowels of the machine, the updating display on the screen read only a measly $24 dollars or so. It took a good few minutes for it to finish counting, updating the display with each coin, until a grand total of $62.92 was displayed. It even has a nifty summary:

1 Half Dollar
122 Quarters
221 Dimes
111 Nickels
377 Pennies

In a slightly sneaky move, just before ‘checkout’, it is easy to unwittingly choose the ‘cash-out’ option and pay the 8.9% fee (even though when you start you choose gift certificate). But they didn’t fool me, and my receipt contained a code that I just used at amazon for $62.92 in credit.

Of course I immediately spent that credit. And what did I buy, you ask? The book Electronic Plastic and the DVD Yo-Yo Girl Cop (aka Sukeban Deka).

Summary: Coinstar is fun, and it works well. Never again will I roll my loose change 🙂