Did anyone else notice that the awards music at the 81st Annual Academy Awards sounded an awful lot like the opening to “Belle” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast? You know, the part where it goes, “Little town, it’s a quiet village. Every day, like the one before…” Out of curiosity I superimposed audio clips from the two sources, one thing led to another, and I ended up making this video. [download avi]

Some things to note. The awards music at the Oscars is in E flat, while the Broadway recording of Beauty and the Beast’s “Belle” is in D, and the song in the actual movie is in D flat. I used Adobe Audition to transpose the awards audio down a half step so the music is in D flat while keeping the same tempo, since the original tempo matched the tempo in “Belle” pretty well. For the “remix” of the awards music in the second half of the video, the tempo was a bit faster, so I had to slow it down some. In the end, I added some animation from the movie, but remember I was using the Broadway cast recording, so the lip syncing didn’t match up precisely.

Code Geass is an anime series set in a future time where the kingdom of Britannia has colonized most of the world including Japan, and a Britannian ex-Prince tries to lead the oppressed Japanese people to freedom through brilliant military strategies and tactics. It’s an entertaining series with interesting characters, motivations, plot twists, and of course, futuristic mecha battles. However, the anime fails miserably in its attempts to draw analogies between the protagonist’s military genius and his mad chess skills. This leads to one of the most hilarious scenes ever. I swear the screenshots below were not edited by me in any way.

Check it out, the two kings are attacking each other! And on top of that, the commentary at this point claims that the two are at equal strength. I guess an extra knight and three pawns are inconsequential, especially in the end game. ;)

Sometime between the last screenshot and this one, black summons two pawns out of nowhere, and now white moves his king forward to checkmate black’s king!

The players are so skilled they can actually keep playing after one of them has been “checkmated”.

Now I can finally play Japanese Wii games like Bleach. Although there are several different modchips out there, such as DC2Key, CycloWiz, Wiinja, and Yowii, I chose to go with the WiiKey because canadamods.ca was (and still is, at the time of this post) selling it for a really cheap price compared to other chips I’ve been seeing elsewhere.

The longest part of the install process was waiting for my tri-wing screwdriver to arrive in the mail. Why does Nintendo insist on using tri-wing screws in their devices? Anyway, once my $4 screwdriver ($5 shipping) arrived from Florida, I was able to finally take apart my Wii and isolate the DVD drive, which is where the WiiKey needs to be installed.

I used a 15 Watt soldering iron with rosin-core solder and 30 AWG kynar wires. I’m too cheap to buy flux, so the soldering itself took longer than expected. I haven’t soldered in quite a while, and modchip jobs make the soldering from Princeton’s ELE 302 look like toy LEGO projects (no disrespect to LEGOs; they’re awesome). I found it useful to cover up the area around the soldering points with electric tape. At least this was easier than the soldering for my PS2 modchip– that one was just insane. There are more pictures in my photo gallery.

After I finished soldering, testing connectivity with a multimeter, and putting the Wii back together, I popped in my Jap Bleach game and… nothing. It couldn’t read the disc. My first thought was, “Crap!” Then I popped in a normal US game, and it played, so I thought, “Whew! But still…” So, I moseyed on over to the Internets and asked my friend Google what was up, and found out that by default the WiiKey doesn’t have region unlocking enabled (I assume because of the danger of bricking a Wii with automatic foreign firmware updates). I then downloaded the WiiKey configuration ISO from mininova, burned it, used it to enable region unlocking, popped my Jap Bleach game into my Wii again, saw it play, and shouted, “Yatta!”

Two trips, GXC, and work as usual have been keeping me preoccupied lately. Sometimes I wonder if I should just stop blogging. The appeal of working on this site has been slowly waning on me.  Anyway, my latest distraction has been the GXC Ivy League Risk Tournament. It’s an online risk game between Princeton and the other Ivies. With over 10,000 students and alumni registered for the game, it can be pretty engaging, but also tiring and quite time consuming.

I hacked my PS2 a long, long time ago to play games off the hard drive and use the SNES emulator. Because it’s not often that I install new games, each time I want to do so, I forget what I need to do and end up spending 30 minutes searching for files and instructions. Well, enough of that– I’m going to write down some notes here to help me remember what to do, even if the PS2 is so last-generation and I may never want to do this again. (Read on …)

It’s been quite a stressful week at work, so here are some flash games to lighten the day. Tabuto is a reaction game involving your mouse and falling tiles. You just have to hover your mouse over tiles as they fall, and you have 20 misses till it’s game over. I got to level 5 with a score of 144,290 on my first try, then level 6 with a score of 337,080 on my second, then level 7 with 896,860 on my third.

Tontie is a cute game like those games at the arcade where you hit groundhogs as they pop out of the ground, except here you hit your number keys. Not recommended for laptop users.

And then there’s What a Fart, a Korean flatulence game where the goals is to pass gas silently under the cover of passing cars. If you can’t read Korean, just press [Space] to pass gas whenever a car is going by, or press the Left Arrow Key to pass gas silently. The goal is to both not let the guy next to you hear it, and to not let the gauge fill up. It’s fun the first couple times, but gets boring after you hit 20000+ points.

Pekkle pointed out a very entertaining article from the NYTimes about how manliness is correlated to the ability to find parking spots in lower Manhattan Chinatown. One of the funnier quotes from the piece:

Sons in many cultures learn how to behave as men by observing their fathers, often in rituals that may seem odd or even fetishistic to outsiders. There’s a tribe in New Guinea, for instance, where the fathers gather together and masturbate into a river while their adolescent male offspring watch. In a similar way, I learned from the back seat of my father’s 1977 Chevrolet Caprice Classic that Raskin men find good parking. Quickly.

I actually laughed out loud.

The Japanese are known for their whacky inventions and whatnot, but this Capsule Inn in Akihabara is definitely not for the claustrophobic. Even I wouldn’t stay there, even if it costs 4,000 Yen per night (approximately $40 US). Well, maybe if it was the only room available in Tokyo.

Pekkle sent me a link a while ago to an article at AMS about how Google determines the importance of a page, also known as its pagerank. It’s actually a very interesting paper and a pleasure to read, especially the first few pages where the author takes you through some elementary logic to arrive at an elegantly simple representation of the entire world wide web’s pageranks as the eigenvector of a square matrix described simply by the number of links on each page. If you’re like me and derive gratification from seeing real world problems reduced to abstract mathematical constructs, you’ll have a blast with this one. I also found this short review of eigenvalues and eigenvectors helpful, as it’s been a while since I’ve touched any linear algebra.

I don’t normally post about anime on this blog, which is weird because I used to be a big fan of the genre. Anyway, in honor of anime otaku cult culture, I have to announce that today is a big day for the recently rapidly rising haruhiism movement. The Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu ED Special Version has been leaked on YouTube two days ahead of its official DVD release. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you are not “one of us.” ;)