Showing posts with label Anime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anime. Show all posts

Friday, January 5, 2024

Anime to Start the New Year - The Apothecary Diaries

For the first post of 2024, I'm starting with a positive review of The Apothecary Diaries.

Originally a Japanese light novel and then a manga before being released as an anime starting in October, 2023.  The Apothecary Diaries takes place in a fictional imperial China and follows a young Chinese girl who loves studying and making medicine.  With a pragmatic acceptance of realities of social norms of feudal China, the protagonist nevertheless ends up rising in prominence within the imperial court.

I enjoyed the characters and mysteries surrounding our heroine and the relationships she establishes with members across the social spectrum.

Unlike many modern anime, The Apothecary Diaries immediately secured not just a one season but two seasons of episodes (24) and as of this writing is half way through the initial 24 episode run.  I've been fully enjoying the anime and would recommend.


Monday, January 16, 2023

Nier:Automata Ver1.1a Anime Reaction

Nier:Automata is one of my favorite games of all time.  It was a game that at the conclusion of the game, I just sat there staring at the screen thinking and FEELING the experience that I just went through.  Yeah, I loved the game.

When it was announced that there will be an anime adaptation to be released in January, 2023, I was excited but also worried.  I wondered if the anime can really capture the same feeling that I had while playing the game?  



So far two episodes have been released.  Episode 1 tried to be very faithful to the game and creates many of the scenes, but I still walked away more worried.  The game just felt more epic and the computer art felt more aligned with the tone of the world so the anime failed to match.

Episode two diverged from just trying to recreate the game and that felt much better.  The story of the second episode felt like it can fit within Nier:Automata and I enjoyed.

How will the rest of the season go?  I'm not sure.  I will continue to watch and I hope they utilize the music of the original Nier:Automata more since it is a beautiful soundtrack which fans and newcomers will enjoy.  I can't imagine anyone being disappointed if they don't hear original new composition in the anime.


Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Mounting Shared Drive on Linux and Headless Bittorent Daemon

There are a number of different ways to automate the download of bittorrent files.  Many bittorrent clients have the ability to "watch" a directory and if a torrent files get added there then the bittorrent will automatically begin to download.  Some even don't need to download the file as it can subscribe to a feed directly.

GUI Way

What I did before was to log into a machine, connect to a shared drive and then open Transmission which was configured to look at the shared drive for any new torrent files.  I even wrote a program that grab checked and downloaded new torrent files every 24 hours.  Setting this up was extremely simple.  As part of my login items on OSX, I had it connected to my shared drive.  Then I would start Transmission and have it point to the shared drive to automatically download the torrents.  I used watch to execute my torrent downloads:

watch -n 72000 <program to download torrents>
I didn't use cron or anything because this was originally on a OSX laptop.

When I switched to a Linux machine that is kept on, I did the exact same thing.  The problem with this is that you're expected to be logged in to the system and keeping the programs running.  If someone else need to use the computer then everything stops since you'd have to log out.

Terminal Way

This similar to the GUI way described above except you do it in a terminal running in a tmux session so that you can disconnect without loosing your transmission job.  To connect to the shared smb drive without the GUI by using transmission-cli tool.

tmux
dbus-launch bash
gvfs-mount smb://<user>@<host>/<path-to-shared-drive>
sudo yum install transmission-cli
transmission-cli
You'd put in your user name and password as it prompts you when you mount the shared drive.  You'll need to configure transmission.

Headless Way

This doesn't require any GUI or terminal and can automatically starts at each boot.

Install the transmission-daemon

sudo yum install transmission-daemon
sudo systemctl start transmission-daemon.service
sudo systemctl stop transmission-daemon.service
The service file is in /usr/lib/systemd/system/transmission-daemon.service.

I started and stopped the daemon because you need to configure it through the /var/lib/transmission/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json and this gets created when you first start (for other locations of Transmission files click here).  This will also install the transmission user

Next you need to mount the shared drive in order for transmission to access and ONLY transmission:

sudo mount -t cifs -o -credential=<path-to-credential>,gid=`id -g transmission`,uid=`id -u transmission` <mount point>
The credential value points to a file that contains your username, password and domain for logging into the shared drive.  Make sure wherever you store it that it's not readable by others.

The gid and uid belongs to the user you want to be able to do read-and-writes to the shared drive otherwise it'll only be root that can do it.  For Fedora, the user is "transmission"

If it works and you can read-and-write, you can move this into /etc/fstab:

//<host>/<path-to-file> <mount-point> cifs credentials=<path-to-cred>,uid={user id},gid={group id}
and then reload fstab:

sudo mount -a
Once you configure the /var/lib/transmission/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json to your liking then fire up:

sudo systemctl start transmission-daemon.service
sudo systemctl enable transmission-daemon.service
This starts up the service now and also at each machine reboot.  The one issue is that transmission-daemon might start before the drive is mounted and then it won't look for the changes.  It needs to be told to wait.

Systemd will look at /etc/fstab and automatically create an unit that can be added to the service file to tell it to wait.  Running the systemctl command will show you an unit that can be used (it'll be something with a .mount suffix).

Add that unit to the After line:

After=network.target <mount unit>

Finally, set up a cron job to regularly check for new torrents:

crontab -u <transmission user> -e
With the value being something like:

0 23 * * * <path-to-program-to-run> >> /var/lib/transmission/download.log 2>&1
which says to execute the program every night at 11pm and store the out put in /var/lib/transmission/download.log.

Since the transmission users is disabled for an interactive shell, to execute commands as the transmission user, use:

sudo -u <transmission user> <command>

Sunday, April 9, 2006

Anime fest

Over the past two weeks, I've been doing some serious anime watching. ^^; Some of the anime were ones I've not seen before and some is just re-watching what I had already but finally got on DVD. What I've watched recently:

Samurai Deeper Kyo (full season)

Inuyasha (season 1 & 2)

Slayers

Maison Ikkoku

Marmalade Boy

Slam Dunk

Burst Angel

Slam Dunk

Slam Dunk was a huge manga in the late 80s and early 90s. If Dragon Ball was the hit of the 80s, Slam Dunk was the next huge hit. I remember seeing it everywhere, and I remember that I was skeptical about how good a manga about a Japanese high school basketball team can be. One day, I was bored and decided to rent the first two mangas and I was hooked. I eventually bought the entire series and even years later, I still enjoy going back and reading it. The anime came out around 1993 and there were some early fansubs of a few episodes and the movies (which were disappointing). At the time there weren't any LDs of the TV series so all of the fansubs were based on fairly poor VCR recordings with mono sounds!

I haven't kept up with the later fansubs, but then the domestic rights were picked up by Geneon. This weekend I picked up the first two DVDs of Slam Dunk. The anime was done very well and was exceptionally faithful to the manga even down to the art. If you read the manga, you will recognize the scenes except now they are animated. The subtitles are like close captions since it even describe emotions (i.e. "shocked gasp") and overall there weren't much extra effort put in to the DVD. There are basically 5 episodes per DVD and no chapter stops within each episode. There are no extras, no trailers, nothing. Still, the anime itself is very enjoyable and the translation is good.

For such a huge hit that it was, I'm baffled as to why Geneon does not promote this series at all. There's absolutely no mention of it on their site other then a press release and it's not listed among their offerings. Have they decided to stop releasing beyond the 4 DVDs that's out there?

Monday, April 3, 2006

Anime

I've been getting back into anime recently and have been catching up on a number of series as well as revisiting old ones.  This weekend I re-watched Samurai Deeper Kyo after getting the box set.  The first time I watched it, the translation was horrible and I couldn't quite figure out what was happening at the end.  With better translation, this series is definitely more enjoyable!  The voice acting for Kyo is pretty amazing.  There are a lot of famous voice actors that fans of anime will quickly recognize.
I've also been trying to catch up on Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha.  The first season turned out to be quite good and I enjoy the characters and story so far.

Both series are worth checking out but each is very different in feel to the other.

Monday, May 2, 2005

Popularity of Mangas

Instead of working on the linux box, I spent an afternoon at Borders. It's been kind of disappointing since it used to be that these "mega" bookstores would carry books that smaller bookstores wouldn't normally carry since they don't sell fast. Now it seems like Borders and B&N are the norm and don't put much emphasis on these books.

One area that is growing huge is mangas and each Borders I've visited have whole section dedicated to it. My only question is why did it take so long for the US to recognize the potential for these. My next question is why are they printing them as trade paperbacks and charging so much? (The answer is probably higher profit margin.)

I also saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and it was ok. They probably packed too much into one movie, but then again that might be better then the trend of making trilogy movies that makes you wait 6 years to finish a story.