Given my reduced blog activity here, I’m letting go the domain name and merging this site as a subdomain of the Snert set.

http://nanozen.snert.com
http://nanozen.snert.net
http://nanozen.snert.org

I remember my youth during the video game arcade era: Space Invaders, Galaga, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, I Robot, Scrambler, and many others. Even after I bought my first computer, an Exidy Sorcerer, which supported many fine games (often clones of the arcades), I still would spend an AUS .20 piece or later CAD .25 in many a machine. Eventually home consoles would come to replace the arcade experience; arcades with pinballs and video games would slowly fade away.

I enjoy “retro” style games, even the ASCII graphics of NetHack , Air Traffic Controller, Empire, so when I saw on Kickstarter a campaign for a retro side-scroller shoot’em’up I was intrigued. After reading the blurbs, watching the vids, and testing the demo on a Android based Nexus 7 tablet and the promise of a Windows version I jumped in.

I’ve been waiting just over a year for Hyper Sentinel since backing it on Kickstarter. Today it was finally released on Steam and consoles. I finally got to install on my Windows laptop this evening and I played for almost a blasted (literally) hour. I’m love’n it. I probably spent the equivalent of 16$ in quarters.

Hyper Sentinel has almost the same intensity as Defender or Star Gate, but a little more forgiving; its not out to kill you at every turn in order to suck in all your pocket money. It doesn’t need too. While it is fast paced, challenging, and sometimes chaotic, its still fun. Its a game I can still play without needing the reflexes of a 16 year old. And combined with the visuals, it successfully has that retro arcade game feel.

Well done Huey Games! It was worth the wait.

I’ve known about and used ed(1) on many occasions. Can save you in a pinch when all you have access to is /bin in single user boot mode. Even learned a couple of new things I didn’t know like chaining g and s commands. Once found myself on one of those other *nix that had no ed(1) nor sed(1), but had an ex(1) that I could use in a script to automate some configuration file edits.

Certainly worth knowing the old tongue of editing along with the Charm of Making, “Anál nathrach, orth’ bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha”.

I bought an Ozobot and have been having childish fun with paper, markers, and bot all weekend. Hands covered in ink like kinder garden. Ah memories.

To understand more, see one of the early trade show videos.