Hamburger Bed

I am greatly amused by this! I love it when people create something cool or weird out of common items.

Check out the website here.

XBOX Soft Mod

My friend Matt had soft modded an xbox he got during my last year at school, at first I though it was cool, but did not see any use, however I quickly started to love the ability to stream any media to the big CRT tv we had in the living room. After I graduated I started to miss that ability, as well as having something to play Halo 2 on from time to time. So I went on ebay and found a good deal for an first gen xbox with three controllers, the advanced av pack(s video + optical sound) and the DVD remote kit. All for $33, which is not a bad deal at all. Then after waiting a week for it to arive, stupid ups ground, I finaly got a chance to have some fun with new hardware.

Fist off I read up on the steps to soft mod an xbox, check it out the tutorial here. I had no problem getting my kernel version and using ndure to build a installer, then packing it up and for burning a disk with xboxhdm. However that was when my problems started to happen, first off I could not get the drive unlocked by hot swapping the drive, it ended up not being a swap issue, instead it was a bios problem with the dell model I was using. After a few hours of poking I finally realized I had to plug the drive in first for the bios to know that there was a drive attached then do a double hot swap to the xbox for unlocking then back to the computer. I only figured it out because the drive would only show up if I plugged it in before starting the computer.



After getting the drive hot swapped, I ran into my second problem, the install failed due to lack of space. I am still not sure what was up with this, however after using the restore option twice, I finally decided to try letting it fail and see what happens. This turned out to be fine as it still soft modded the drive, which started up fine, however it was lacking any applications other then the basic dashboard. This was fine as I was able to grab a copy of ConfigMagic and ftp it to the apps folder and then use it to get the EEPROM off the board. This was my main focus as after I got the EEPROM I could always unlock/lock a new hard drive at any time. After I had it backed up I was able to breath easy.

My next step with to change the drive to a 200Gb so I would have plenty of room for movies and other files. This also gave me a challenge as well, as I did not have a DVD drive in the PC I was using, which meant I could not use xboxhdm to format the drive. I was stuck for a bit till I could out that there is a much easier way to clone the drive by using Chimp (Read more Here). I did a test on a 10Gb drive first and it cloned it perfectly. Then I tried the 200Gb, sadly it took three tries, but after stalling and eventually returning to the main menu a few times, it finally moved on to the next menu and I was able to clone it. The nice feature of Chimp is that automatically formats the F partition with the extra space difference between the drives.

Now that I had my drive all set and the xbox soft modded all I needed to do was install XBMC as the dash, which was simple, and then move all my files over to the hard drive, which took the longest till of all. After that I was playing with the built in skins. Matt had the xTV skin that I liked, but I eventually decided on MediaStream as my favorite skin, and I think it is a little easier to use for my family as well.

All in all, a successful and useful mod, now I just need to mod the stock fan, as it is loud and annoying at times.

Job Interviews

Hm.. not much to say. Just busy with interviews and applying for jobs. You meet very interesting people on interviews ^_^.

Crunchyland bot

Quite a while back I was having fun working on a javascript exploit bot for an online game called crunchyland, the game itself was rather simple you create a character give it weapons and fight silly monsters that you encounter. The entire game engine was based on flash files that where embedded in html and where linked through javascript. The problem was that I quickly got bored with the game, you click, that is it, not very entertaining past a level or two. However before I moved on, I decided to try to write a bot for it so I could at least get on the leader board. Because there was no way I was going to sit for weeks of clicking, like some of the obsessive kids on the site apparently do. (Get a job!)

It was not too hard a task and gave me a good refresher in javascript dom manipulation. The bot uses an open window and url testing to change and click elements in the window triggered by timers. I also went a step further and had it watch the size of the health bar to heal the player after a certain point. After a week of testing I quickly had my character self level up on my testing server while I did other more productive things, and after a few more days I was on the leader board, with little effort, past the coding, on my part.

I have been waiting a while before releasing it, one to not get kicked of while I was still on the leader board, and to to prevent hoards of script kiddies from also quickly leveling up with no work. Now it looks like the game it not being worked on, and my script does not work completely anymore, so here it is CL Bot (For Safari 3 maybe 4 only). Anyone with some javascript experience could take it further and fix the parts that do not work with the game updates, however I have better things to be doing. Enjoy...

Nostalgia while cleaning

As much as I hate having to spend the time digging through and tossing out old stuff, each summer I try to remove more and more of the random stuff I seem to accumulate over the years. Most of it is paper from school, life and other random things I did as a child but do not remember doing. As well as a ton of pennies and other random shiny things that I hoarded and thought would be good to keep, only to never use them again. However I do end up finding cool things. Like my first backpack, old toys, lost lego pieces and electronic/mechanical do-dads, which bring back memories or are fun to play with again.

The best things though would be my pumpkin and ghost pin, which is awesome for around the halloween season and my pocket watch. Both I was very happy to re-discover.

Braid for Mac

Although I am more of a casual gamer, I have always been a fan of indie game over large studio productions. Mostly because generally they are short, to the point and can take risks to try things professional games do not. I have written here about a few in the past, as well as a few of my own, so I am always happy to find another new title that perks my interest.

Braid is a strange game that focuses on change through time and forgiveness, and accomplishes this in that fact that you can not die, if you are killed, the game will sit and wait for you to rewind. This removes the dangers that other platformer games use to add challenge, so you may be left asking what is left to challenge the player? Instead they game uses a (some what cliche) search for puzzle pieces that come together to form the story. However to get to the pieces you will need to use your time warping powers, think 2D platformer now thrust into a 4D world, even though the lack of a Z plane makes it more of a different kind of 3D then ever seen before. Using the different abilities each world allows you will have to deal with time forgiveness, exclusion, branches and placement. Braid wonderfully pulls off using these separately and in a mix to give the player a rather unique challenge, which if you like solving puzzles that requires thought from different angles you will really enjoy this.

The story of the game itself is unique, you have Tim who is on a quest to save the princess from a horrible monster. This may sound familiar to Super Mario Bros and it is hard to not see that a lot of the game takes concepts from classic platformers. However it goes far deeper then the base story if you only look at the surface. What is reality? If you could warp the time that drives the reality that we see, could you truly say what we are seeing is real? The ending of Braid pulls this off with fighting perfection, which may leave some players rather confused. Combine this with wonderfully music and lush water color artwork and you have an amazing game.

I have always been annoyed with games in how you want to try things, but it would take too long when failures result in restarting, Braid removes this and pretty much can be described as one of the few games that always runs in sandbox mode. Of course some of the puzzles, and especially the hidden stars would be impossible with out this. Still I had fun playing through this a few times, one due to me poking at the game files and breaking it. Braid is available on xbox, PC and Mac, so there are a few ways to get it, but if you have a mac, support mac games and grab the mac copy!

For those who have played the game and want more depth on the story check out this article.

Epic Presentation

I was going through my files stored on the school server and found my Epic Game presentation. So I uploaded it to slide share so others can see it. Slide share messed up some text in my images, but other then that it is the same. Check it out...

Epic Presentation

View more presentations from efeion.

Tech Support

I hate to call tech support, especially for anything electronic as I more then likely already know what is wrong, as well as far more about fixing it then the person answering the phone. The worst being the recent fairpoint (aka failpoint) issues we have had at home, which after returning from school will finally be fixed, by switch to RoadRunner instead. I had spent over a half hour trying to explain that there was an issue with their service on their end which I could prove, yet still had to be walked through their flow chart for fixing problems, only to have the representative on the phone finally say "oh it must be on our end"...

To be fair I have been on both sides of the call, so I try to be nice to phone operators, as it is never their fault and they are tying to help, however when I did phone support for my school their was no flow sheet, we actually knew what to do to fix things, or would google it on the fly. ITS Help Desk FTW! Below are two Dilbert videos I stumbled upon that fit both side perfectly.

Dealing with tech support...


Doing tech support...

Senior Projects

One of the final highlight to my final semester was the Computer Science Departments Senior Project Presentations. I have been working on my SN Project like a madman, and was very proud to present my work thus far to my friends, family, colleagues and professors that came to watch myself and five others fellow CS students show off their work. So on top of my SN Project BETA 4 that is available to try out, you can also check out the slides below. I may upload a version with audio in the future.


If the movie does not let you click to go to the next slide, give it a bit more time to load. Otherwise it will only loop the first two slides till it loads enough.

Finally bought AwardSpace hosting

With my time at college dwindling fast, I though it was about time that I broke down and bought a domain and hosting. I have been using the schools hosting for almost 4 years and have gotten very use to being able to easily have web project or files online, so with that ability ending I needed to get my own.

I had been using the free hosting on awardspace for a while, which is fantastic for a free service. No adds and access to php and MySQL! But there is limitations on bandwidth and you only get a subdomain, so after I graduate, I will require a bit more then that. Yet, the basic hosting is more then enough for me and only costs 47$ for a year with a free domain. The bandwidth is 1000GiB a month which is around 32GiB a day, way more then I will need right now.

So I am now the proud owner of www.efeion.com!

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.