Well, last night I went to sleep at around 7:30pm, man was I tired, I then slept till 4:30am.

Obviously it takes me a couple days before switching my sleeping schedule forward 12 hours feels natural.

"Skins"?, yeah, I was lying in bed at 5am, and I decided I'd play some Sonic Rush on my DS for a bit, maybe see if it could give me some ideas for Twinsen. (didn't really)

And as I loaded the game up, I recalled it had pretty nice presentation, it would at least translate well as a skin for my R4DS.

So I decided I'd make a sonic rush themed skin today.

9am rolled around, and I decided it was time to get up, so I went into the kitchen and started making some brownies for like the 4th time.

But this time I was going to use a cake of dairy milk chocolate instead of a bag of chocolate chips, and it turned out a lot nicer, by some coincidence they tasted a lot milkier and smoother.

My brothers ate a lot of them, my mother went to visit her brother, so she took some, and yup they're all gone.

After the brownies were all gone, I went back to my room to make that Sonic Rush themed skin I planned on making, I checked the scene/homebrew forums I go to, and a member "Zorgrage" made a fantastic program to edit part of the firmware for the R4DS.

One of the best things about the R4DS, is it's pretty much the card to get if you want one for DS, just about everyone has one and most things are being made with the R4 in mind, plus there are even R4 knock-offs in China and thats really saying something, I mean come on.. a knock-off of something primarily used for pirating? They've obviously done it right.

Back to this program, you can use it to decrypt the _DS_MENU.DAT that you put at the root of your microSD, this .DAT holds all the graphical data of the firmware, all the lines of text, the colours, the images, the icons etc.

The cool thing, as I might've mentioned earlier, is that the R4DS can have up to a dozen skins on the card at once, but since each skin is at least 4 .bmp's, 12 sets can take up a lot of room.

And if you put no external skins on the cart, you're left with the ugly default skin.

So I decided it would be best to edit the default skin inside the .DAT file, it's a lot smaller that way, plus I can edit all the text, icons, images etc to make it work really nicely.

After an hour or two, I had finished:

It's missing the detail's that get added once you put it onto your DS, but you get the general idea.

It didn't turn out quite as well as I was hoping, but I still like it, main regret is not hand pixeling the "Games, Media, Slot-2" buttons.

I also went and converted my "Wii Clouds" skin into the .DAT file, figured I might as well since its the skin I always go back to when I get sick of new ones, it only makes sense to have it automatically my default.

People seem to like this one, even my own brother had it when he returned from Indonesia with an R4.

Took Jazz for a walk today, just down to the dairy. (corner store basically)

Man do people train their dogs poorly, then again, the people themselves are probably trained poorly, there's always a few wandering my neighbourhood, and they run to anyone with a dog.

It's just annoying, they slow us down a good ten minutes.

Eventually came back home, played some fetch, helped prepare dinner, started writing this entry.

BYAAH!