July 20th, 2021

Hey all, Alan here!

The other day, I saw a Japanese commercial I liked. I wanted to share it with people, but how? I did a simple solution to make it a Twitter bot.

I programmed it in Python and used the Tweepy library. It posts commercials six times a day. I throw in the commercials into a folder and the script uploads them. To prevent duplication, the bot throws the commercials into another folder. It only requests the commercials that were already posted again if there are no new commercials to upload.

I'm pretty happy that it's already off to a good start. It'll be a while before I stop updating it, I hope.

I should probably buy a Raspberry Pi. I have a Discord bot and this Twitter bot running straight off my computer and I shouldn't have it on 24/7. I'm not sure what model I should use. Do I grab the latest and not really get my money's worth, or should I buy an older model and might have it run pretty slow? Hopefully, I can have one setup and finally let my PC sleep, it's been running constantly since September.

Well, unless there was a Windows update. In which case, something will break. A month ago, a Windows update wouldn't make my system boot so it had to forcibly uninstall the update. Now, a new update wouldn't make my audio devices be recognized. I spent the entire day trying to fix it until a friend showed me a workaround video. It's totally absurd.

Windows wouldn't help me fix it either. It would keep telling me my drivers were screwed up and that it would update them to generic drivers that didn't work either. After that, it would tell me to restart my audio services which didn't work either!

It's a stupid fix too. I have to open the Settings app and then go to the audio settings. It'll tell me that it can't find anything. So I go to the Ease of Access, go back to the audio settings and it detects everything fine. Afterwards, I right click the audio icon on the taskbar and then Windows Explorer will restart and everything works now. I don't understand how this makes sense! This sounds like an early Windows secret.

So while I was playing pop'n music, I was clearing a lot of high ranked songs and then all of a sudden...

Stuck buttons... and there's two of them.

This has started to happen with my right green button a lot, then it started to happen with my left blue button, then another, and another... now atleast seven buttons have stuck that very day. Something must be up, it wasn't doing this before.

I suspected that it wasn't the buttons themselves this time, but the springs under them. I replaced them with the ones that came with the new buttons and it seemed alright, even though they required more force to push down. I hope this actually fixes the problem...

Here's this atleast. I played well enough this time. One miss though.

Something is going wrong with my PSone. In recent times, the reliability of it playing games seems to have been going down. I thought it was the modchip dying, but that couldn't be it, that sounds kinda stupid. I assume the laser is finally on it's way out.

Every backup I tried gives me an illegal disc error, every legal copies of games I tried gives me and illegal disc error, some discs don't even get recognized. As I type this, I am currently looking at aftermarket solutions. No way in hell am I paying 70 dollars for a geniune laser. That's more than what I paid for the system!

I heard adjusting the pot a bit might get some life out of the laser. I played with it and I got as far as the PlayStation logo, only a bit screwed up.

I guess a new laser is the only way to go now. Thankfully, I now know the issue on why this thing isn't playing as many games as it used to. I didn't play it that much in recent times because I would have to keep restarting for it to work.