As a collector of arcade and video games, I am addicted to eBay and their evilness of stiffing people. Sometimes, I am happy to get stiffed that way, however. Today for example, when I won an auction of the game 1942 by Capcom for $20.5 (a total of $42.5 including shipping to Sweden). In order to avoid bid wars, I usually wait to the last few seconds of the auction before I place my bid, and when I do, I often bid quite alot higher than I really want to pay, hoping that nobody else have place a bid just some dollars lower than mine. If someone overbids me, I don’t care, as long as the bid is far higher than I am willing to pay for the item.

The technique I use to bid the last few seconds is called sniping. It is quite easy when you get used to it, but it requires perfect timing. You’d better not being at the local store as the auction ends, or asleep for that matter. There is a solution on this, however; automatically sniping services. Those are programs that just do the sniping for you. I used to argue against those, as I found them unnecessary, expensive and insecure. Well, I’m still a bit paranoid about using it, but the laziness always wins in the end.

Why snipe when eBay itself has a powerful auto-raising bid system? Well, when not sniping, but bidding when there still is time left to be overbidden, the one who has the current maximum bid still has time left to raise his bid. And he will probably do, if he has the chance. Don’t give him that chance! If you do, you probably have to overbid him again, and so it goes on… That’s the simple reason.

The service I have tried is called Bidnapper. Wonderful name, isn’t it? It is easy to register an account and start sniping auctions. It is not free to use, but it is not very expensive. You can choose to pay for a number of snipes, or for a time of unlimited snipes. Once you have registered an account, you can try it for free of charge for 10 days. One way to get more snipes without paying, is to recruit users to their evil service. That’s the reason to why I’m writing about it in my blog. I want to recruit you! Ooops… Did I say that loud? Well…

If you want to try this feature, just follow this link to Bidnapper and sign up for an account. That will probably help you winning more auctions, and it will give me another three free snipes. Good luck!

Ok, this time I am serious. I have decided to switch my default URL for this site from the old www.johan-svensson.se to the new johansvensson.eu. Note that there are three changes. First and foremost, the top level domain is now .eu instead of .se; secondly, there is no longer a dash between johan and svensson; and lastly, I have removed the www prefix.

The main reason for this decision is that I will eventually create a new site, dedicated to my Swedish music project. Yes, I know, I haven’t told anything about that yet, but that is because I haven’t had much time to work with it. However, I’m aware of the fact that it is hard to move a site from one URL to another. Therefore, I will let it run with a HTTP 301 redirect from the old URL to the NEW for some time. Probably a couple of months. Please, do update your bookmarks and links to the new one meanwhile! One day, the old URL will point to a new site, completely written in the Swedish language.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll repeat the essence of this post; Please update all your bookmarks and links to this site! Do the following changes:

1. Change the top level domain from .se to .eu
2. Remove the dash between johan and svensson
3. Remove the www. prefix.

Yesterday, a friend gave me a cool gadget. It is a two player coin-op soccer-like game, fed with Swedish “25-öringar” (SEK 1/4, which is approximately EUR 1/40). Those coins were canceled at 1985, but my wild guess is that this game is quite a bit older than that. The game is completely mechanical, which means there are no digital technology involved. Not one single IC chip. The gameplay, coin mechanism, score counter, timer and controls are completely mechanical. It looks like it should be powered with four batteries, probably 9V each. However, it looks like someone has been trying replacing the batteries with some external power source, but I wouldn’t bet it worked. Over all, most of the mechanics seem to work. The springs, however, seem a little weak, which is probably natural, regarding to their age. And of course, all agile parts want some lubrication.

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Date: 05/20/2006Views: 1621

The playfield is made of flexible plastic. You have a ball with which you want to hit your opponent’s goal cage. If you do, your score meter will increase by one (from 0 to 11 maximum). After inserting a coin, the ball is released and a timer starts counting. When the time is up, the middle line of the playfield will rise a bit, closer to the top glass. After that, when the ball is shot from one side of the playfield towards the other, it will get stuck on the middle line. When inserting another coin, the score counters will reset to 0, and the ball will again be released. You control the game with a shoe connected to a gun. You can rotate the gun to move the shoe about 90 degrees (45 to each direction from the straight forward angle). When pulling the trigger, the shoe gives a quite rapid kick. Enough to make the ball rolling to the opponent’s side, and hopefully hit the switch at the bottom of the goal cage.

I will definitively try to make this completely operational. It looks like it is supposed to have table legs, like a cocktail cabinet. This game would be a very nice piece of furniture, especially in working condition.

One funny thing is that I cannot find anything about this game on the Internet. Do you know anything about it, or can point me to some web page with relevant information? I’d like to know when it was manufactured, how many units were out there, how many units is possibly left today, information about other similar games, etc. All kind of information would be valuable. Thank you, Maetz, for giving me this nice object of geek culture!

Balluz is a small and simple puzzle game where you have to match pair of balls by their colors. I started writing it 2005 and eventually, I will extend it. There are indeed some lacking features. However, it is playable in current state, but not with any suger on the top. And no cherry.

The game board has an even number of colored balls, where exactly two balls share each color. These balls are arranged in one inner and one outer ring. When you start a level, the balls are randomly scrambled. Using different tools, your task is to arrange every ball so that each one in the inner ring has the same color as its corresponding partner in the outer ring.

Downloading and Installing

Download the source code of Balluz v0.01 pre-alpha (November 19 2005). To execute it, you need to have Python and PyGame installed. For help on installing Python and PyGame, consult the documentation of respective project. After having installed them, you can simply extract the Balluz archive anywhere you like. From a UNIX like environment, you can do it this way:

tar -xvpjf balluz-version.tar.bz2

where version is the version of the archive you have downloaded. If you are using Microsoft Windows, you can use WinRAR. Run the game by stepping into the program directory and execute the file balluz.py

GP2X Port

There is a third party port of Balluz for the GP2X handheld gaming device, made by someone who call himself “Barnesy”. You can find it in the GP2X file archive. Just to clarify, I have nothing to do with this ported archive, and I cannot give any GP2X specific support. However, I believe the game should run pretty much out of the box, since the GP2X has a Python and PyGame port. Maybe there is some resolution issue, as the graphics seems to be changed in the GP2X port.

My dear friend Jens and me are up to an interesting discussion. Jens claims that my site is not a homepage, because it is a blog. I claim that a blog is a homepage, but he strongly disagrees. I have asked him for a definition of “homepage”, but I cannot say I have received any satisfying response. However, he has provided a few examples of what he classifies as homepages. What they have in common, is that they are built of static HTML files and are note very often, or never, updated.

I asked him what I need to do in order to turn my site into a homepage, or more exact, what is missing on my site for it to qualify as a homepage. Surprisingly enough, he replayed “content”. Then I immediately asked what is wrong with the content of, for example, “Making gphoto2 Accessing Canon Ixus 700 Correctly“. Can you guess what’s wrong? It has a timestamp…

Dear World… I have always wanted a homepage, and now, when I finally have made myself one, I am informed that my homepage is not a homepage. Can someone please help me with the definition here, and tell me what the heck I need to do, in order to homepagify my site? Many thanks in advance… /A lost soul

Cryptic subject? I am sorry for that. It’s not like it sounds. Actually, I want Sweden to cancel their membership of EU. What the subject refers to, is that I have registered a .eu domain, that just points to the same location as this very homepage; http://www.johansvensson.eu. I have not yet decided whether I will make that one to my default URL, or if I will keep this .se domain instead. I don’t like the dash between my first and last name in the .se, but of course, someone else owns johansvensson.se (and boy, that page totally sucks). Oh my… Life is full of complex decisions, isn’t it?