H2Overdrive = HydroThunder 2

Sadly I have been too busy to work on side project, hence the lack of update. So I am very happy to be able to report that finally a developer is making HydroThunder 2! Raw thrills has released H2Overdrive which has everything that hydro thunder had, from the boosts to the drops to even the 3..2..1..go go go. But also makes improvements such as 8 racer at once and mid air tricks! Though I must say that that I do not favor the futuristic boats, but I can live with one minor complaint. From what I can tell it is only in arcades right now, but we all know it is only so long till it is ported. I only hope it looks as good as the arcade this time, because the ports of hydro thunder sadly never looked as good as the arcade. So while I wait for the console version, I need to find the nearest arcade with H2Overdrive.

Check out the Kotaku post here which is oh so accurately titled "H2Overdrive in videoh my god."

Also check out the videos below for a drool worthy few minutes of awesome.

H2Overdrive 'Hong Kong Buoy' gameplay

H2Overdrive 'Wild America' gameplay

Snow Architecture

After building my latest snow fort, I came to the realization that there was a method to my madness. When building I use a snow scale method I have grown fond of, this involves packing the wet snow within an arms radius into a scale like brick. Snow scale describes the way the snow brick has a hard external top layer with a soft inside layer, this also causes it to have a convex form as well. This is important as the convex shape allows for a strong dome shape. The full design uses two layers of scales for walls with a simple arch for a door. After these are built you use a keystone (handful of snow) to prop two scales leaning inwards together and go from there until the next dome layer is finished, then you finish with a final curved in layer held up by a few scales as a final keystone.

The interesting thing about this building method is how it very closely resembles to the structure of Geodesic domes because of the way scales are interlocked with a series of keystones. This distributes the force of the snow down the walls of the structure. This is why I have been able to create forts with a radius well over five feet, with walls that are only seven or eight inches thick.

Applet ProgressBar Flickering Issue

I had recently taken the the time to convert my EpicGame Code from VB to java, so I could make an applet that could be played online. (I was lazy and did not want to make it flash based) However after finishing it and testing on the mac side I though I was finished. Yet, later I started hearing complaints of the game flickering, I was confused as it worked fine for me and as usual I had double buffering setup, which in theory would prevent any flickering. Still, for some reason Window's version Java would flicker uncontrollably. I spent several hours trying different graphics buffering setups and also drawing to separate panels, but with no success.

Luckily I randomly stumbled onto the problem, it was the JProgressBars that I was using. When you update a value in the progress bar it calls the update method that then calls paint, which would happen concurrently mid screen refresh and draw a blank white screen, which was the rouge flickering.

So on Windows do not use JProgressBars with animation as it messes it up, or you need to extend the class and override the setValue method so it does not update the UI. Oh, and of course on the Mac side it all works flawlessly from the start.

Samsung CLP 500 Network Driver

One really annoying issue I have run into while working at CADY is that older Samsung printers do not have much... or any support, namely the CLP 500 series that is in the office. As it was my first job to get it up and running it took me a while to even find a driver for it.

For my own convince and others I now have it saved here -> CLP-500Series_1.84.exe.
Please click my ads if you find this useful, as it was a huge pain to find!!!

The next issue is that it does not have any network support, well not documented at least. The printer does have a network card in it, so it must work on a network. I have just been spoiled by HP as their network printers do the network settings at setup. So,to get the CLP 500 printer working on a network you have to do a few extra steps.

1. Install the driver, this will put a generic printer in your list, however it is set up on the wrong port.

2. Open the printers/faxes window then right click on the printer and select properties.

3. Click on the ports tab and hit "Add Port", then select Standard TCP/IP port and hit "New Port".

4. Follow the wizard and enter your printers IP, found by printing the printer config page in the printer information menu, and a name if you desire. Hit next...

5. On the next page leave it as Standard and Generic Network Card, then hit next and hit finish.

6. Check to see the printer is now selected to use your new port, which it should be. Apply and/or close the window. You should now be all set.

I highly recommend setting a static IP for your printer, otherwise you will need to update the port every time the printer gets a new IP.  (CADY Printer is 192.168.1.47)

UPDATE:
Win 7 steps...

1.  Use the add a printer option.

2.  Select Samsung instead of TCP/IP

3.  Update Printer Drivers from Microsoft

4.  Use the CLP 510 Driver

KavaTunes

Matt clued me into an interesting piece of software called KavaTunes last night. He found it on the Mac Heist website as one of their free software titles when you solve puzzles in one of their yearly heists. I was not interested at first, however after watching him for a bit, I quickly wanted a copy as well. What KavaTunes is, is a piece of software that builds a php page of your iTunes library, but to take it a step further, it even looks like your iTunes library! This may be the simplest way to get access to your music on a local network, and on the campus network it is a perfect solution.

Oh course my g4 server is my test bed for playing with things and has a custom apache and php setups, so unlike Matt I had quite a bit of extra trouble with the setup. (With Matt laughing at the issues I was having the whole time ^_^) First off was that KavaTunes always builds in ~/Library/Webserver/Documents/ however I have a custom webserv folder instead, so it took a while to figure out why it was not building in the right place, but a symbolic link fixed that. Then do not call your iTunes music folder iTunes as KavaTunes adds a another separate folder under this name with its required php files. And lastly do not mess up your symbolic links, as it just causes a general mess. After about 30 minutes of bug fixing, which would have been nice if it gave you some warning about these things, I was up and running. It even streams my movies and tv shows I have on iTunes.

If you are interested grab a copy from Mac Heist

Smallest CRT ever!

I was taking apart a Hi8 camera to start my next project of better night vision goggles. However after taking apart I was very amused to find that the small viewer was not an LCD, instead it was a tiny CRT! See picture above, with a quarter for size comparison. Yes that does mean that this has a flyback transformer that runs on 5v.

Behavioral engineering

It is always fascination to see how people will react to certain changes. In my case, it was people walking through the covered doorway to the apartment. Normally I would not be bothered, however there is a window there as well, so it is a huge loss of privacy. So my first attempt was to forge a side path, sadly it was nowhere near as convenient as the straight shot that was already there, so almost no one used it. Quite frankly I would not have either, so it was no surprise.

Thus, next was to cover the path to force them away. However I had to plan it carefully as if not done correctly it would simply be removed, or even worse get a large number of student angry. So step one was to change with out anyone noticing. This would leave the least impact and the confusion with the change would drive people away instead of taking action. Next was to make the pile just big enough that it would not be easy destroyed, but not large enough to show it was put there on purpose, physical plant was shoveling off roofs, and this would nicely blend in with that reality. So an early saturday morning shoveling some of the snow off the roof accomplished this nicely. Plus I made the side path the most visible choice to limit remembering that the other path was there.

All that was working against my carefully set changes was force of habit, which would be a big factor, people do not like change and depending on how I set this up, could get annoyed enough to remove the change, luckily I have laziness on my side, and with the side path available, I suspected that it would win out in the majority of people.

So my experiment was let to these possible and expected results...
1. People go the long way instead to avoid
2. People go the shot but not as convent side path I made.
3. People destroy the wall and go through anyways.

I expected 2 most of the time and eventually 3 to happen, however the worst that happened was simply a person climbing over it. I was quite surprised my wall survived, however it makes sense, as people are prone to laziness, so instead of taking time to destroy a large pile of snow and putting the effort in making the path again, resulting in the cost of wet and cold, people simple gave up and walked around. I was happy with the results and no one wrecked my wall, plus I rarely get a chance to test out social behavioral theories on so may people so I was excited either way.

It funny how with a little observing, planing and research you can easy change the way people will make decisions and shape how people interact around you.

UPDATE
Scratch that... two drunk girls destroyed my predictions, but lost a shoe! Argh.. outliers, that was not expected, I figured it would be guys.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Custom Projector Mount

Continuing with my attempts to improve on our family home entrainment system, after getting a very nice and almost too big projector screen, I had to figure out a way to ceiling mount the projector. However it needed to be not permanent and easy to remove. So off to the drawing boards I went, and after brain storming and coming up with a few concept sketches I had my design all worked out. Luckily the living room has pseudo support beams, not my family's decision they where here when we bought the house. I could use the one that was near center with the screen as an anchor point, and then build a brace around it that would hold the projector up. Later I went back and added extra sheet metal for preventive safety measures. It works quite well, and even better, this means no more coffee table alignment every time we watch a movie!