This closed hand accepts a 1, 2, 4, 5, or 7 souzu tile.

If a 1 souzu is dropped, it’s 6 han and 30 fu for 6,000 points for a tsumo (haneman) and 5 han and 40 fu for 12,000 points on a ron (mangan). With the the ron, it’s a straight and a half-flush, but a tsumo gets you and additional han for the self-draw. It’s less points for the tsumo due to the lack of a ron basically.

Now if that hand is declared as a riichi, it’s an additional han and pushes it up to 18,000 if I get a ron and still 6,000 on a tsumo. The next best tile in lieu of a 1 souzu is if a red 5 souzu is dropped which should give 12,000 I believe.

If a 4, non-red 5, or 7 souzu is dropped, it comes out to a 8,000 point hand if you land a ron and I think 6,000 if it is a tsumo.

The south wind only has value beyond 1 han if you land a ron unless it is your seat wind and or round wind. If you are in south and you are sitting south, this hand becomes 24,000 points on a ron and 8,000 on a tsumo. It should be 18,000 on a ron for the red 5 souzu.

You basically want a 1 or red 5 souzu tile to drop from another player to get that hit. The only thing which makes the hand sweeter is if you hit someone on the last drop, you flip a kan on the south winds, get some closed and or open dora to make say the six or south stronger, and so forth. As an opposing player, this hand is an outright nightmare and if done early enough on, it’s likely a guaranteed win.

Calculating mahjong hands sucks a lot so if you see a problem with how I scored this, by all means provide a better calculation! That said, this was east 2 and my seat was west so I wasn’t going to get a lot out of my honour tiles.

I got a tsumo on it.

In 1997, Canadian TV show, Video & Arcade Top 10 listed off the following as the “Pioneer Top Five” for the best-selling LaserDisc titles:

• Godfather I Wide Screen
• Godfather II Wide Screen
• Godfather III Wide Screen
• Terminator II Collector’s Edition
• Evening Star Wide Screen

Considering DVD came out the year that Pioneer had created this list for a video game show targeted at youths, it’s pretty freaking wild.

Also, the Godfather movies were all released a decade before the average target audience were even born and would combined take about nine hours to watch.

This show is just really weird. Aside from the LaserDisc top-five which never seemed to change in a single season, the music prizes were odd and the “Top 10” of the show’s own title didn’t seem to matter much either.

Second place contestants were given both a bath time “Game Boy” toy and two compact discs: Slow Jams Volume 2 and Dance Mix USA 97 Canadian Limited Edition.

With Slow Jams Volume 2, the track listings included songs like Tonight I Celebrate My Love, Between the Sheets, and As We Lay which are all titles a tween would want to have in their music collection. I don’t have much to comment on the other album.

Aside from the interesting undertones presented in one of the two CDs, there’s also this egregious decision: why the the hell is it “V&A Top 3” when “Top 10” is in the show’s freaking title?

So here’s this listicle from a local website: Only a true Vancouverite has done ALL 12 of these things. Despite being born and spending most of my life here, I am not a “true Vancouverite” by this article’s standards.

Let’s go down this list.

1 - Complained about the weather

Sure. It rains for half of the year. However, is this really a Vancouver thing?

2 - Watched the sun go down at Kits beach

The only time I have been at the beach near sunset is to see the fireworks which happen around this time every summer. So maybe I have, but it wasn’t an aim.

3 - Tried to lay in the arms of the A-maze-ing Laughter statue

I have walked by this installation a billion times and not once have I ever considered this.

4 - Waited for the Steam Clock whistle to go off

I wrote about this already.

5 - Drooled over Lee’s honey dip donuts

Drooled? No. I’d rather go to Cartem’s or Lucky’s. I’ve had these doughnuts and they’re fine, but I am not going to rave about them.

6 - Accidentally took the bridle path back while cycling in Stanley park

Cycling through Stanley Park is an exercise in misery.

7 - Spent hours in Breka to “work”

No.

8 - Made friends with geese along the seawall

Listen, nobody in their right mind likes these birds.

9 - Sat in the streetcar inside the Old Spaghetti factory

I can lay claim to having eaten at most of their locations. I probably have sat in one of the streetcars they have in a few of their locations, but it isn’t a goal.

10 - Spent a huge chunk of your pay cheque on rent

There are many ways to discuss rent in Vancouver, but so far everything here has largely been tourist-y so… what?

11 - Shared your hiking stories with friends

Not really? I guess there is that story about finding fresh cougar tracks while outside of Ucluelet, but that is on Vancouver Island.

12 - Awed at the beauty of UBC Forest Sciences Centre’s study space

Despite having spent some time at UBC, I have not.

I’ve been working through playing all of the Ace Attorney games with having completed Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth just yesterday. About a third of them required me to use an iPhone to play based on some silly standard I have for my Twitch stream. So let’s talk about this!

What games are on mobile?

As it stands, this is a list of the games that required me to use an iPhone in order to play:

• Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice
• Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

The sequel to the last one, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is available for iOS, but unlike its predecessor, it has never been translated into English. A patch for its DS release is available and there were efforts to bring the patch to Android, but it hasn’t had an update since late-last year.

I bought a copy of the game and have already dumped the game and patched it already! It is likely I’ll write about how easy it was to dump my cartridge and do all this work myself sometime soon.

The first three in that list are available on 3DS and Investigations was on DS (Apollo Justice is on both). However, the 3DS and DS have resolutions that make the content appear pixelated and even though I stream at 720p60, I notice this. Additionally, I don’t have a capture-able 3DS and must resort to emulation such as the case with Layton vs. Wright.

So the iPhone version is the option I chose. Namely it’s because I am a heavy user of the Apple ecosystem and I have an iPhone 8 I don’t use much any more. Additionally, the games run at an HD resolution so downscaling them doesn’t end up looking bad.

Hardware and why AirPlay is not an option

To stream an iOS device, you can use an official lightning to HDMI adapter. This provides both an HDMI output and an additional lightning port so you can keep the phone charged.

This works really well and is plug and play. My capture card had no issues with the video output and while I did need to trim the unused space, it wasn’t at all a problem.

One problem with this arrangement is since the device is attached via a dongle with ah HDMI and power cord attached to that, my hands lose a lot of mobility with one side of the device being pulled down in a rather uncomfortable manner.

So you’re then thinking: why not use AirPlay? That way I can just charge the phone after the stream or just have one cable attached to it as opposed to two. This idea is great on paper, but testing it unfortunately led to problems.

With Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice in particular, the majority of the game content is 2D, but the moment you end up in 3D, AirPlay becomes a real nightmare. I have an Apple TV attached to my streaming set up, but the moment you encounter anything with 3D is when AirPlay just struggles. The frame rate from the game content becomes no better than a slideshow and there is not much I can do about it.

This problem is either a limitation of AirPlay or with using wireless networking (the Apple TV is attached via ethernet), but nonetheless it is not ideal.

Two games will refuse to run without a trick

Both Apollo Justice and Investigations share two things in common: the games are presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio and they both hate the HDMI connection.

When I would launch either game, it would show the game’s logo and then immediately crash. This was super confusing as the problem did not exhibit itself on my iPad or my iPhone XR. All of my devices are running the same version of iOS and the XR and iPad both have wildly different resolutions, so I was super confused to why the iPhone 8 was so special.

It wasn’t until when I was trying out things on my iPhone did I conclude the problem: it only happened when the dongle was attached. Sure enough when I launched the game with no tethering the game launch. If I killed the game, attached the dongle back in, and then launched again, it would crash.

The trick to fixing this was simple: launch the game and then attach the dongle. I have no idea why these two games in particular hated the attachment, but after launch they didn’t seem to care and I was able to move on.

I wish these games worked on my M1

There is no reason for why Capcom doesn’t permit these games on macOS. They’d run natively on my M1 MacBook Pro just fine, but alas.

That will be all 11 Ace Attorney games done in less than a year! I also plan to play Ghost Trick!

Since CRD’s post about two-port Ethernet switches came up, I was reminded about another technology: 100BaseVG.

100BaseVG is a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet standard specified to run over four pairs of category 3 cable (cable also known as voice grade, hence the “VG”). It is also called 100VG-AnyLAN because it was defined to carry both Ethernet and Token Ring frame types.

Compared to Fast Ethernet, 100BaseVG had a slight competitive edge as it was able to achieve 95% of its advertise speeds in real world tests compared to the 45% of its Ethernet counterpart. It was less susceptible to interference from outside signals and it was able to take advantage of Token Ring’s frame timing. On paper, this was pretty incredible as it was able to make use of the same cabling as 10BaseT.

So how did 100BaseVG become the Betamax equal to Ethernet? For one thing, like Betamax, only one vendor truly supported it and it was its creator Hewlett-Packard. To make matters worse, it required you to replace every single network card on any system you wanted to be part of your new fast network.

With most Fast Ethernet switches, you could have it run at 10 or 100 Mbps (and 1000 Mbps) without worrying about having to gut out the card on the other end. In 1995, this was seen as rather acceptable apparently:

Upgrading [to 100BaseVG from a 10BaseT network] is, in most cases, simply a matter of replacing existing hubs and network cards…

In the PDF I link to, it quotes AU$6,613 for a 20-port hub and AU$496 to AU$757 for a network card depending on either ISA or EISA. Adjusting for inflation and converting to US dollars, you’re looking at US$8,200 for that hub and US$640 to US$980 for the cards.

I think it’s pretty clear that you were better off keeping your 10BaseT gear and slowly upgrading to Fast Ethernet where necessary. It was pushed starting in 1995 and then died a silent death in 1998. If you have never heard of this before until now, it is no surprise.

When I was a teenager, I was given a 100BaseVG network switch from a school which used it briefly and then ditched it in favour of Fast Ethernet. I eventually realised it was absolutely junk and traded it for a Macross Plus DVD, so I think I got the better deal here.