January 28, 2009

Easy Symbolic Links in OSX

From time to time you have to rely on symbolic links when Alias is not enough, such as re-mapping folders like your itunes library. You can always open terminal and use "ln -s target destination", however this can be annoying if you do not do it often or need one fast. So there is SymbolicLinker to help out, it is a handy context menu add on that give you a "create link" option when you right click an icon. It is handy to have for that random time you quickly and easily need a symbolic link.

January 24, 2009

SN Project Update




Well after a long hiatus, I am back to working on my SN Project. Now that I have a deadline to finish for the senior projects I will be working quite a bit on it. So to get caught up I have been programing like a mad man some where around 60+ hours all in one week, and from all that work I am about where I wanted to be going into the semester. So I am happy to have my 100th post be alpha version 2 of SomniumNexus. Grab the download here.

This version has quite a few improvements, the Item and NPC editors are almost complete and do save correctly. These can now be used in the Area editor. Also the graphics storage and buffer classes have been almost completely rewritten, which give a much better and easier to use fetching system. I also tweaked the FileBrowser, which now looks much better. All in all quite a few improvements, now the focus will be the game building function and finishing the Area editor, which will allow for the Engine to be worked on. It is a little hard to work on the engine before these when you do not know the final form of your data, nor do you have anything to test it on, so being this close is exciting!

January 14, 2009

Simple Rectifier




In one of my my side projects to do some research on alternative energy I had a bit of fun playing with a spare AC motor that was lying around. I have wanted to construct a wind generator for a while now, however still do not have the parts, sadly motors do not work well as then require high speeds and torque to get any decent current. Still I wanted to see just how bad it was.

I had hooked it up to my multimeter and spun it. However I was confused for a second as the meter was reading all over the place, somewhere from -47 to 38. Suddenly I realized that of course it would do this, it is AC. So off I went and grabbed one of the old dead circuit boards from one of my parts drawers and pulled a few diodes off. If I was going to be able to poke around further I would need a Rectifier to convert it to DC. So a little while later I had my rectifier build and hooked up. Now I was able to get a decent reading around 0.05V, which is rather small. Later I hooked up a capacitor so I could charge it up as well, not that you can really do much with 0.05V anyways. Still it was a fun little experiment and gave me an excuse to build a simple rectifier.

January 1, 2009

A million thanks

To start off the new years right, here is a million thanks to everyone out there!

Apparently it is a hallmark flash card. How long can you stand it, I got to around 7500 then needed it to stop.

Update: remove link as it want to a page with offensive advertising, now it is embedded.