One of the traditions my friends have is the annual visit to the Fanime convention in San Jose. Since most of us only live half an hour or so away, we generally all pile into two cars and head down for a weekend of games, anime, and laughing at unwashed otaku.
My sister recently got interested in the Warhammer 40k universe, and talked me in to making a Space Marine outfit. However, I don't believe in doing anything by halves, so here I am working on a computer to fit in the backpack that will let me play sounds and support other functions.
I've heard a lot of suggestions about what features to add. Here a few of my personal favorites. Keep in mind that I don't think even half of these are feasible, but they're still fun to dream on.
- Backpack computer. This one is definitely going in, as I already have it and it's running.
- Arm-mounted touch screen for controlling the backpack computer.
- Speakers for audio out. Pretty sure this one is going in there, too.
- Webcam to record cool things / everything.
- Lights. (Would completely destroy my battery life, but whatever.)
- Blue cold-cathode light tubes to give the backpack a kind of "Cherenkov Radiation" glow.
- Wireless. The computer I'm putting the backpack has exactly ONE PCI card, so I could theoretically stick a wireless card in there.
- Bend sensors for the main joints, with the data output piped to a synth on the computer. Would
allow me to make dynamic "whir whir" noises when I move. Awesome, but hard to make.
- Accelerometers in the feet to detect footfalls. Sudden acceleration changes would make "thump" noises.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Solaris
My father brought home a 500GB SATA hard drive he had kicking around his office. I've been toying with the idea of installing Solaris on my desktop for school / programming purposes for some time now, and this supplied the necessary push. I am currently writing this post from a fresh install of Solaris 11 (build 81, fresh out of the bit mines.)
The install process was relatively painless compared to previous attempts to install this OS. I ran into two significant errors - one, the partitioner seems buggy, and will fail if you attempt to do anything besides letting it use the entire drive for the Solaris install. That's fine for me, since I intended to do that anyway. There were also some problems with the DNS configuration after install, but they were sorted out fairly quickly. I'm told they'll be fixed in the next build.
Now, I am a fairly avid fan of the combination MMORPG / CORPG game called Guild Wars released by ArenaNet. While I play a fair number of other games, I don't mind dual-booting for them, as I only haul them out when I have friends over for LAN parties. Guild Wars, however, I play on a fairly regular basis, and I generally like staying logged in to keep track of anything important going on.
This causes a problem - while Guild Wars does run under WINE, sort of, WINE does not run under Solaris. I am left with the unhappy choice of being forced to dual-boot or abandon Guild Wars, a choice I am loathe to make.
I'm looking into virtualization (I hear VMWare has 3D support now, and even runs on Solaris!) as a possible alternative to WINE, but I don't hold any great hopes for this working out. Still, maybe I'll get more programming done if I'm not moderating guild drama all the time... heh.
The install process was relatively painless compared to previous attempts to install this OS. I ran into two significant errors - one, the partitioner seems buggy, and will fail if you attempt to do anything besides letting it use the entire drive for the Solaris install. That's fine for me, since I intended to do that anyway. There were also some problems with the DNS configuration after install, but they were sorted out fairly quickly. I'm told they'll be fixed in the next build.
Now, I am a fairly avid fan of the combination MMORPG / CORPG game called Guild Wars released by ArenaNet. While I play a fair number of other games, I don't mind dual-booting for them, as I only haul them out when I have friends over for LAN parties. Guild Wars, however, I play on a fairly regular basis, and I generally like staying logged in to keep track of anything important going on.
This causes a problem - while Guild Wars does run under WINE, sort of, WINE does not run under Solaris. I am left with the unhappy choice of being forced to dual-boot or abandon Guild Wars, a choice I am loathe to make.
I'm looking into virtualization (I hear VMWare has 3D support now, and even runs on Solaris!) as a possible alternative to WINE, but I don't hold any great hopes for this working out. Still, maybe I'll get more programming done if I'm not moderating guild drama all the time... heh.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Java Projects
I decided to start brushing up on my Java skills a few days ago, and to start off, I thought I'd work on a dice rolling program for my D&D games. After a few hours fooling around with Swing, which is fairly easy to use, I hammered out a small program. Doesn't do much, but hey, it's only a few hours of work.
Holy hell, is it really 4AM? I need to start posting at more sane hours.
(If you want to see the program, you can grab it and the source at http://smaalders.net/brian/jdice.zip)
Holy hell, is it really 4AM? I need to start posting at more sane hours.
(If you want to see the program, you can grab it and the source at http://smaalders.net/brian/jdice.zip)
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Hello, World
*cough*
FRIST PSOT!
*cough*
Ok, I've always wanted to do that. Moving on... this is a web log. I intend to use it to keep track of the things I find important in life, or interesting. If you share my tastes, you may find them interesting as well.
FRIST PSOT!
*cough*
Ok, I've always wanted to do that. Moving on... this is a web log. I intend to use it to keep track of the things I find important in life, or interesting. If you share my tastes, you may find them interesting as well.
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