FremLog

Yes, you read the title correctly. It is indeed possible to “spawn” Brood War for LAN games. This is a bit kludgey, and it won’t work over Battle.net, but it falls under the “good enough for me” catagory.
Continue reading ‘StarCraft Brood War Spawn Howto’

A word of explanation about this one.
At Camp Woodruff 2005, Sam and myself came up with four skits. Sadly, three of them but one were vetoed by the leaders. Quality control and all that.
Every morning at assembly, the campers were allowed to challenge either the staff or another troop to a game. The funny thing is, as the week went by, many of the sports started getting banned. It was ridiculous, even soccer was forbidden. (Some kid got run over.)
To protest and parody this turn of events, we created a small poster. At assembly on the last day of camp, I would read it in a loud, deep wrestling announcer voice.

Troop X challenges the staff to: DEATH ON TOP OF THE ADMIN BUILDING!
The wrestling event to end all other camp activities!

Watch in horror as Troop X hero “The Scoutmaster” takes on all challengers - and throws them to their doom!
Tickets purchases are available online and at the lower water buffalo campsite.
Tonight! Eight thirty! On top of the administration building! Be there!

Needless to say, when I ran it past the leaders, they were less then thrilled. Hope you enjoy it, but please don’t preform it!

Windows Live Mail is the new, “cool”, Ajax buzzword enabled interface that will soon be replacing the current 1999 era Hotmail. I got a beta invite, so I decided to try it out. Ahem.
To put it nicely, Gmail continues to roxxor hotmail’s sockzors.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, have a few thousand words.

Seriously. Look at that. What were they thinking?!

I did some rough estimates based on that screen shot, and this is what I came up with.
total pixels: 618246
wasted pixels: 374248
pixels in message area: 173853

Lets do some rough calculations…
374248 divided by 618246 equals about 0.6053… or about 61% of the screen. 61% of the screen is unneeded whitespace, a huge logo and a huge banner ad.

173853 divided by 618246 equals about 0.2812. Roughly 28% of the screen. Think about this for a moment. Only 28% of the visible website is displaying the content you actually want to see.

I don’t know about you folks, but I’m sticking with Gmail. At least there, I know that the people behind it actually care weather or not their client is usable.

About the same time I obtained my UNIX book, I also received a suitcase. But not just any suitcase. The inside is padded, it has two locks, and the outside is covered in dull aluminum. If this case was in a movie, a gangster would be carrying it. And he’d like, put it on a table and open it, and it’d be full of guns or money. And then the cops would burst in, and there would be a big gun fight. It would be a long, hard battle, but the police would finally win, arrest the crime lord, and confiscate the case. Not for the money inside, of course, but because the police chief had always wanted a suitcase this cool.
Seriously, if I sent it though airport security, it would probably set off three different alarms. I’d be asked to open the case and then detained as burly officials speculated about the chances of my laptop being wired with a bomb.

I think I’ll line it with lead.

I was given an old copy of Sam’s Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 hours (1st edition) a few days ago. Upon perusal of said book, I was shocked at how much of it is still relevant today, eight years after publication. Eight years!
Even now, you can pop open a terminal on OS X and follow along with the book. While obviously some of it is a bit dated (The author said the most popular shell is csh and that X11 is not very usable in it’s current state) 90% or so of the material is still current. The great thing is, a lot of *NIX manuals are probably still good. Think about it. How many of the non-UNIX computer manuals you bought eight years ago are still relevant and/or even remotely accurate about modern systems?
I think thats just cool.

A interesting website that has popped up in the peer-to-peer file sharing debate is theThe Piracy Calculator.
It allows you to calculate how much money the RI/MPAA would accuse you of stealing. Not terribly accurate, but interesting, nonetheless. Particularly the two paragraphs at the bottom of the page. Continue reading ‘Is piracy theft?’

The sad truth of the matter is, people can’t read. I don’t have any Guild Wars keys. The free offer ended over a year ago. Stop bothering me about it. Just go and freaking buy the game; it’s only like $30 now. Thank you.

– Teh Management

Longtime readers of my old blog (and I’d like to thank both of you for reading that long) may remember when I talked about the World Preview of Guild Wars. Pretty much, they let everyone run loose for a weekend in a few areas of the game. It was a lot of fun, but it was over pretty quickly and a lot of people missed out. Well, now that the first Guild Wars expansion pack is coming out, there’s another weekend of free fantasy insanity. It’s the weekend of January 20th.

So, anyway. There’s more info on the website, but heres the quickie version. Apparently, everyone uses the same key, and ArenaNet is urging people to “distribute like crazy!”
American key: 888D9-H27PG-NM72D-PLHJ1-2HG11
European key: 66DG9-C4RHB-9FKD6-287BJ-LRGCJ
Download the client (Only like 80kb. Fits on a floppy!)

I will likely be lurking around some place as Frem Underhill, so be sure to ping me if you read this!
Have fun!

Huzzah!
About Augustish, Ben gave me a laptop with a dead disk. I immediately set to searching for a new hard drive for which to use in this wondrous machine. But then, I ordered from The Josh. He’s so cool, it only took him till January to get the thing to me. Ahem.

But now the thing is up and running. It’s a Compaq Prosignia, model number PP2060. Apparently, only 12 were ever made. Or so I assume, since there exists no useful information whatsoever on the ‘net about them. But now that its up and running, I can give you my specs.

OS: Debian Linux Sarge
Processor: Pentium III (Copermine) 450MHz
Ram: 64 Mb
Hard disk: (Old, corrupted) 6.4 Gigs.
Hard disk: (The one from Josh) 20 Gigs.
Sound card: ESS Maestro M2
Video card: ATi Mach64: RAGE™ Mobility. (8 Mb) Tag on card: “XPERT 98 AGP 2X”
Cdrom: (Guessing) 24x. Removable.
Floppy: Standard. Also removable.
Note to self: Don’t put the battery in the floppy slot, even though they look nearly identical. Even though the battery actually locks into place. Bad.

So. I now have a laptop that can play low-end 3d games in Windows, has more storage then I’ll ever use for at least the next six months, upgradable (and cheap!) ram, a sound card that works in Linux, and a halfway decent very low-end processing speed.

And, last but not least, I can now watch Homestar Runner, in Linux, on a portable device. I have reached nerdvana.

It’s January. Spring is in the air. And we all know what that means - a new FIRST robotics season!

We at Vex team #40 are still getting our act together, but soon, like a phoenix (Or maybe a FireFox), we will rise from the ashes, our strength renewed, our numbers doubled, and our purpose the same: build lots of cool little robots whilst spreading randomness and nerdy jargon.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, heres Vex in a nutshell.

RadioShack sells Vex kits. These kits contain everything you need to build a basic robot. Every year, there is a big competition. Hundreds of teams build mostly-breadbox-sized robots to compete in a sporting-event-like-game. It’s loads of fun. If you haven’t seen one of these things before, you need to. If you can’t find a Vex event, try finding a Lego League playoff or a FIRST Robotics Challenge tournament. Seriously, these things are a blast, even as a spectator.

The highlights this year, for me at least, include:

• The C programming module! Seriously, it’s about time.
• Small(er) robots. This year, the smaller, more efficient robots have an advantage. Good thing, this means we’ll have no shortage of leftover parts. Also, I think any driver will agree with me: A small, zippy ‘bot is much more fun to maneuver then a tank.
• Bigger teams. More of my ingenious friends can help. More people == more ideas & randomness.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have some brainstorming to do.

Update: Woah, check it out. Photos of our last robot got linked to on Slashdot!
Shot 1 (View 1)
Shot 2 (View 2)
Shot 3 (Ball grabbing arms open)
Shot 4 (Adjusting the team number. Bonus: incudes the top of my head!)

Ok. First, an explanation. I get called over to the houses of random people a lot, because I have developed a reputation for being good at “fixing” computers. Really, it’s not nearly as hard to fix these things as most people think, but that’s another story.
Anyway, I have this “kit”, a set of software programs on CD that I load onto every computer I fix. It includes a firewall, a virus scanner, a few spyware scanners and Firefox. There’s other stuff I load occasionally, but that’s the main set. 90% of the time, all I have to do is load up my kit and start stuff scanning. When I leave, I tell people that if they don’t use FireFox and/or disable my tools, their computer will get broken again. Every single case, this has been true.

Enter Google. This weekend, they released Google Pack. Its pretty muchly the contents of my personal computer security kit with some fun Googley apps thrown in. Most people will download it for the fun stuff, but they get a secure computer in the bargain.
It’s a great idea, because it allows even a novice to do something a computer repair shop would charge $100 for.
This is amazingly clever and long overdue.
My single complaint is that they don’t include a firewall. Quite honestly, the one that comes with Windows XP is (without using stronger words) lacking. All in all though, this is nice.

So, if you don’t have Google pack yet, what are you waiting for? Go download it!