My corner of the Internet

Rebuilding batteries and saving the environment, at a seemingly cost effective rate! I wanted to make a little entry about a small business located a few hours away from me, they go by the name " CHANS Battery Rebuild ".  These folks are actually the ones who told me about the battery issue regarding the Libretto ff series and how the cells (at least new & genuine) are no longer possible to acquire.  While I was disappointed (but entirely understanding!) that they couldn't rebuild the Libretto ff battery, I did know that they should have some sort of CHANS (see what I did there?) at rebuilding the battery for my NEC VersaPro NX, which contains 18650 cells.  Wasting no time, I sent them my battery pack along with some info regarding the cells within the pack. From there I patiently waited.  After about a week I received an email that had me a little bit confused. It basically said that while they were able to replace the cells (sweet!), they couldn't communicate w...

  A quick little entry regarding the NEC VersaPro NX I got a couple weeks back.  I was browsing around and happened to find the CD-ROM base for this NEC laptop on mercari. For less than 10$ it was a no brainer to pick it up. No idea if it worked, though... NEC offered 2 or 3 "bases" for this laptop. One of them was a battery base, and then there's this CD-ROM base. They are incredibly hard to find, so I got quite lucky. Buyee even had a intl shipping coupon for mercari at the time, so I got "free" shipping.  Fast forward a week or so and look what shows up at my door (packaged in an envelope of all things! Seriously!?! This is why I hate Buyee!!) Thankfully just a little cosmetic corner piece chipped off... No further damage.  It was at this point however, that I realized I had a bit of a problem on my hands... If we look to the left of the base, there is an AC adapter hole... And no AC adapter came with the item. I looked back at the mercari auction and as it w...

  A little snow fairy Sugar : Desktop Accessories Preamble This was found the same night I found my NEC VersaPro NX. I saw this software and immediately clicked it on it because it looked very cute. Some quick reading revealed that this was a suite of "accessories" for Windows that were based off a (seemingly very popular) 2001 fantasy slice of life anime called ちっちゃな雪使いシュガー. To be honest, I had never once seen a piece of software like this before here in the west. Anytime we had software branded after TV shows or toys, it was ALWAYS games. Take for example Hot Wheels. I have countless Hot Wheels games, some of them had bonus software on them like a comprehensive showroom of all the Hot Wheels cars released for that year, but still always at least multiple demos on the CD, if not one full game. So to see a piece of software like this was really cool and exciting. At this time I had just finished ココロ図書館 and was feeling quite sad from having finished it and being so emotionally...

  I love browsing Yahoo Auctions. I end up stumbling upon some really cool stuff, and this time was no exception.  This is a little 11inch NEC laptop, and what really caught my eye when I happened across it during my occasional search for cool old software on Yahoo Auctions, was that it has the exact same specifications as the Toshiba Libretto ff1100, but with a curious little slot that, upon further research, was confirmed to be a standard memory upgrade slot. It's also adorably thin!  No one was bidding on it, probably because the opening price was "expensive" starting at 45$ CDN. Nevertheless, it included the original power supply, looked rather decent cosmetically, appeared to at least start into the BIOS. I had no idea what else to expect but I was really interested, especially when I later noticed something in the PCMCIA slot.  With my limited self control, I went ahead and placed a bid. A couple days later I was informed that I had won the auction.  Why d...