Continental Circus was not a mistranslation

In 1987 Japanese arcade game manufacturer Taito released a racing game called Continental Circus. Internet legend states that this was a mistranslation and that the game should have been called Continental Circuits, and indeed for its US release the cabinet artwork was changed to use this name.

Was this really a mistranslation, or could it perhaps just have been a misunderstanding or a marketing strategy?

Humble Indie Bundle 8 Review

The latest pay-what-you want, charity supporting Humble Indie Bundle has been released and will be available for the next fortnight or so. Is it any good? Well here's my round-up of the games included...

I'm sorry console gaming, I'm leaving you. We've grown too far apart.

Today marked two things:

1) The reveal of Microsoft's forthcoming system, the XBox One.
2) Something I've long suspected coming true: my relationship with console gaming is at an end.

Given Sony's lackluster introduction of the PS4, concentrating as it did on 8GB of RAM!, I had hoped Microsoft's reveal of the next XBox would do something to rekindle my interest in console gaming.

Improving PlayStation 2 Picture Quality on HDTVs

Recently I decided to pull my trusty old PlayStation 2 out of the cupboard to re-play some of my favourite games from the early-to-mid 2000's. Whilst I was initially very pleased that the machine still worked after 6-7 years of inactivity, I was surprised how poor the picture quality was on-screen and started wondering whether or not all these years of HD gaming on the PC and 360 had altered my memory of how good graphics really were back then (rose-tinted glasses syndrome!).

Happily, after a bit of research and tinkering, I managed to improve the picture quality quite dramatically. So here I present some handy-dandy tips on improving your PlayStation 2 experience on an HDTV!

Why Britain Sucks: Fuel Taxes

Welcome to the first in a new series of posts, Why Britain Sucks... And What We Can Do To Fix It. In this post I'm going to tackle the question of why fuel in Britain is so expensive. 

Fuel in Britain is expensive. Very expensive. A 2012 article by This is Money placed Britain as the 7th most expensive place in the entire world to buy fuel, calculating that more than 10% of people's income is spent at the pumps.

But why should this be the case? What is it about Britain that makes fuel so expensive? What are the implications for the wider economy? Why does Britain suck? What can we do to fix it?

Problem restoring a database to a SQL Server 2012 LocalDB Instance

I encountered a bit of a weird one today, which took some creative thinking to sort out, involving restoring a database into a SQL Server 2012 LocalDB. I am still not entirely sure what the root cause of the problem really is, but I'm sharing my solution just in case it proves useful to anybody else.

Match a user's username to their SID

If you've ever poked around in the Windows Registry on a multi-user machine you may have noticed that user settings are stored against an SID such as  S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-500.

Often it's useful to be able to match an SID up to a user name and here's how:

1) Open a command prompt.
2) Type: wmic useraccount get name,sid
3) Press enter

You'll then see a list such as the following, giving you the user name and the associated SID:


Name            SID
Administrator   S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-500
Guest           S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-501
HomeGroupUser$  S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-1002
Martin          S-1-5-21-2827067247-3228746870-1612205067-1000

Simples!

Pulp-O-Mizer!

Here's a fun pulp magazine cover image creator - the Pulp-o-Mizer!

http://thrilling-tales.webomator.com/derange-o-lab/pulp-o-mizer/pulp-o-mizer.html

And here's something I knocked up...

Windows 8 is a terrible tablet OS

Regular readers of Pieces o' Eight may remember my critique of Windows 8 as a desktop operating system last year. I still stand by those criticisms, however even at the time I had thought that the OS might fare better in a tablet environment.

It turns out I was utterly, staggeringly, badly wrong.

Logitech Unifying Receiver Lag - Solved!

I'm a big fan of Logitech's Unifying Receiver technology - I have the Performance MX mouse and the K800 Illuminated keyboard, both of which are excellent. One problem, however, seemed to affect the mouse particularly: Intermittent lag. Every so often the mouse would stop responding, do something weird or behave in a temperamental and highly frustrating manner. Happily I have managed to find a solution to this and resolved all of my lag problems.