Gundamaniac

Ever since the forced upgrade by wordpress, the RSS feedlist plugin on my wordpress blog has been acting funny. folks who often visit this blog might have noticed the syndicated blog entries from Danny’s site would often bleed out codes right out unto the sidebar.  this has been a source of countless mind numbing attempts of php code reading, and plugin testing. It wasn’t until I noticed that the RSS feedlist wasn’t allowing any Japanese blog feed, did I found out that I was in fact looking at it from the wrong direction. the problem wasn’t the plugin, it was because wordpress had trouble reading Japanese characters. apparently some idiot developer set the default for the wordpress SQL database to Swedish instead of UTF-8. For folks using wordpress and having problems with other languages, this might be the remedy for your woes. The solution, click on over to your phpMyAdmin from the Cpanel and change the database collation set in ”latin1_swedish_ci” to “utf8_unicode_ci“.
original “how-to” step by step guide from Japan it UP! 

1. Back up your database. by using the backup wizard on Cpanel
2. click on phpMyAdmin
3. Choose your database on the left
4. Under your database on the left, click on the first table available (mine would be wp_categories)
5. On the right you’ll see Field, Type, Collation, Attributes, etc.
6. For the Fields that have Collation set as something other than utf8_unicode_ci you should tick the check box.
7. After you ticked all check boxes in that table, click the pencil icon at the bottom (When you mouse over it there should be a tool tip that says “change”). When you click this you can edit those fields.
8. Using the drop down box on each field you can now change the Collation with entries set to latin1_swedish_ci to the bottom selection in the drop down box which is utf8_unicode_ci.
9. Hit Save
10. Click on the next table and repeat steps 5-10  for each table.

Finally got myself off my lazy bum and did some repainting on my White Zaft Strike Freedom. I sort of ruined it a while back by unwittingly using Mr Super Clear spray on a humid rainy day. (sorry for not pushing through with the diorama).  

I also got Envious of Kimura San’s “Photo Compositions” when I first saw it on Danny Choo.com. so I decided to do some photoshop compositions of my own.

Looks like they still got to do battle on snow. ^^ Background from an old image at Lake Louise, Banff Canada.

Battle at the Coast of Orb… or along Highway one. ^^;

Battle over San Francisco.

Finally I wanted an Image of the battling above a space colony, but I guess one of Danny’s Image of the sky over a building at Maronouchi works just as well. Background stolen from his Wallpaper Tool. and edited a bit by rotating and adding some more of the bulding on the edge. ^^

Dan of Uneasy Silence found a way to install the Mac OS X on the EeePC, check out his blog for more details.

Looking for a brand new laptop for under $500usd? The Asus EeePC just might be what you’re lookng for. sure, it isn’t the $100 laptop, but still it’s one cool piece of hardware. and like the $100 laptop, this machine uses flash memory instead of a hard drive. and runs on Linux. installing Windows XP can also be done as an option. however the operating system might turn out more expensive than the actual laptop.

anyway, I went down to the regional distributor to check out the laptop. and to my delight, I got to try one out for myself. the laptop is increadibly small and light, about 92kg light. ^^ the machine had 3 usb ports, and an SD card reader. The Linux graphical interface was easy enough to use. The Linux OS runs smoothly on 512mb of ram with an intel celeron centrino processor. however I don’t know if Windows XP would run just as good on it. But if you decide on using the default Linux software, you need not worry since it has a number of software bundled with it as well, including open office for those word documents, excel worksheets, and powerpoint presentations, a number of Games, and some internet softwares like skype, messenger and firefox browser.the only thing missing IMO is a photo editing software like photoshop. (imagine editng images using MS paint). ^^ The tiny 7 inch screen don’t do the laptop any favors as well. then again it is a minor concern given the price you pay for the laptop. This laptop retails for about 19000php or $422usd, but folks would probably be able to find one for a lot less. the cheapest I found was about 16200php, that’s $360usd.

Looks like Cosmic Region Gundams aren’t the only ones who get the GFF treatment. this time around it’s the Gundam 00’s turn. the Gundam Exia is scheduled to be released in April of 2008. I believe they’re retailing it for 4000 yen. available soon at your favorite local hobby store or online store. Available for online reservation now at Wasabi Toys.