sara doesn’t really read my blog. she doesn’t need to, since there’s not much i could post here that she doesn’t already know about. but! i read hers, now that she’s started bloggin’ on a regular basis. i know, i know. everyone but the kitchen sink has a blog (and that particularly unfortunate piece of kitchenware probably has one and i just don’t know it).

but what you don’t know is that she just got a blogtacular facelift. back a couple years ago when i originally coded the site, it was static pages and yadda yadda because we didn’t have time to make anything fancy, since the SCBWI conference was coming up fast and she needed a presence on the web pretty damn quick. fast forward several months and sara asked me if she could have a blog integrated with her current site. so i think about it a little, and then put her site into a blender with a bare-bones wordpress theme, and out comes the new site, which you may have seen previously.

fast forward yet again to at least a year later (now). the site was still in its ‘no posts yet’ phase, as sara hadn’t really taken up the reins yet. she said she was waiting until she really “had something to blog about,” which turned out to be seeing Joss “Is My Master Now” Whedon in person. i’d say that that’s definitely awesome enough. so when that happens, she comes to me and we decide that the site really needs a facelift. so, we increase the real-estate of the text area, move some of the images around, redo the graphics, and pretty up the stylesheet some, and voila — happy new blog. what’s more, now that she’s blogging and reviewing books and talking about writing, she’s actually getting quite a bit of traffic (well, not TONS, but it’s better than nuthin’). congratulations, sara!

so i got my M3 DS Simply the other day, and i’ve been playing with it a lot the past week or so. here’s a summation:

i paid $90 at themodchipstore.com for the M3 and a 2gb microSD card. i bought it as a package so that i could be sure to have a microsd card that would work error-free (see Scorpei’s DS wiki online for details). if i had been more brave, i would have bought the R4 (exact same hardware as the M3) somewhere cheap ($30), and ordered the kingston 2gb card from amazon (even cheaper than the $40 i paid). however, i’d just sold a bunch of stuff i didn’t need, so it was worth it.

setup is a little arcane, since the chinese english is so terribly bad, but once you get understand what files go where, it’s very easy. i even made my own skin, since the default one is pretty stark and ugly. now that i have it all nicely configured, though…

1.) DS Games: i have all the carts that i own (and maybe a few others) on the card, and gameplay is simple and awesome. i can even cheat, thanks to the M3. online gameplay doesn’t work for everything, but for most it’s great.

2.) DS linux: boot linux, ssh to home machine, OR run any of a multitude of precompiled apps. i use dslinux to ssh to my home machine and then connect to my screened terminals. \m/ very easy install, also.

3.) homebrew apps: a very nice irc client, a good organizer app, and even an xm tracker, among other things. running apps is just like putting a game rom on your card.

4.) homebrew games: one word: lemmings. playing lemmings was never so awesome. also, check out the ports of nethack and SCUMMVM for the DS.

5.) moonshell: this is a shell that launches from the m3′s boot screen, and it handles txt, jpg, and a lot of music files (including mp3s), as well as video (if properly converted). the txt viewer is about what you’d expect, and the jpg viewer is so-so (ComicBookDS is better, IMO), but there is very little that beats listening to NES and SNES soundtracks in their original form. i’m listening to final fantasy VI right now, and it’s freaking awesome. also effortless, since the tracks auto-advance (it ignores looping).

all in all, this is one of the best purchases i’ve made in a long damn time.