Nearly Deaf

Well my favorite class, the Pyro was buffed significantly. Loving the flare gun - I use it all the time and only switch to the “backburner” for close quarters combat. Anyways there’s an achievement manager for Steam games so you can turn on milestone 1/2/3 and play with the new toys without having to grind for them. Steam Achievement Manager 2.1 (now with Vista support) download it now!

Instructions: Download and unzip both files to your steam directory. Restart steam, run the program, hit the in-program refresh button, check the medic milestone 1/2/3, check the pyro milestone 1/2/3, hit save, close program, play as upgraded pyro!

Unrelated, I found this while looking for that orange source image above. It’s called Ignus Solus, a machinama film that’s actually quite good.

Ok, Probably not. Perhaps it’s something that fell off the NASA Phoenix polar lander? But at first glance, it SURE DOES look like a bipedal alien that just crawled out of it’s hole that’s looking at the lander. Even in that light atmosphere, sound of retro rockets would carry an awful long ways. But it’s fun to wonder “what if?”. The “alien” even seems to be casting a shadow in the correct direction.Larger image below the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve been keeping tabs on the whole OLPC/Eee bit for a while now. Looks like the Eee 701 already has a few hardware revisions and that whole “market segment” is maturing nicely.  The original complaints were that 7″ was too small, keyboard was too small. Now the Eee has a 9″ model (901), but it still has the intel A100/A110 processor in it, which is basically a warmed-over Pentium M celeron.

Coming up in the next two months will be the release of the first couple Atom based “netbooks”. The Eee is expected to be released with an Atom processor by September at the latest to catch the back to school market. The hottest upcoming netbook is the MSI Wind, which looks like someone did a design study of the Macbook and Eee and made something in-between. 9″ (8.9″) screen, LED backlight, Macbook-like hinge (more durable, better viewing angle in the lap), and wider (adult) keyboard = Eee killer. It also runs about $580-650. About double the price of the low end Eee 7″, which is $300, but the display alone is worth the extra cost. Read the rest of this entry »

So I installed Ubuntu on my ‘gaming rig’ which runs XP since wine doesn’t support voicechat in TF2. Anyways, running XP SP2 and installing Ubuntu 8.04 goes something like this, burn cd, put cd in drive. Step 1. Click install. Step 2. ??? Step 3. Profit! Err.

This is the correct account of the install process. The short version: Zero Glitches. The longer version (behind the cut) Read the rest of this entry »

While I think Make Magazine is a pretty cool idea, the production values are about 20% of what they could be. I just finished watching their “first take” of a vacuum forming how to, which ended up being their final take. While I appreciate their desire to produce projects that anyone can replicate at home, they need to go a step further than just copy what’s on the internet and charge eight bucks for it, without experimenting a little and seeing what they can improve upon beyond what’s already out there for free. Read the rest of this entry »

Hows that for a wacky name? I got bored this Sunday afternoon and was browsing craigslist for cheap violins when I remembered this guy, who makes awesome violins. That got me to thinking about making an arch top guitar using his methods, which I think involve shaping a piece of foam, and then clamping to it a piece of balsa wood and gluing a support structure to the outside of the structure. The result is a very artistic, unique looking violin. If you ever saw a violin in a “neo-tokyo” manga, this is probably what they’d look like.

Anyways, so that got me to jonesing to build something. Fortunately the hardware store is just a five minute drive from here. I think the idea was to create a trapezoidal shaped, arch top guitar. I decided I wanted something I could play this week, and ended up buying a bunch of 1/4″ x 4″ x 4′ pieces of popular and a 1″x3″x6′ piece of red oak for the neck. And a bunch of (but not enough) 1 minute epoxy. 1 minute epoxy is only good for simple things, like making boxes. Coincidentally, that’s what I was making… More below the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

This ships sometime in February. This looks like a killer piece of hardware on Apple’s part. Not only do you get a wireless N router and the ability to hook up external hard drives, but it is a hard drive. 500 GB or 1 TB, your choice. 500GB model is $300, which considering a bare 500GB drive runs around $100, isn’t a bad deal, especially since it’s Apple Hardware, which by law, lasts forever.

Imagine, not only is this network attached storage (NAS), but it looks like a local drive to all your macs(!!) (and PCs(!!!)) This means central repository of iTunes, videos, pictures, etc. for the entire house/network, sans big noisy rack mount server or similar. Just the hum of hard drives in the closet now. Fantastic. Apple calls it a Time Capsule, no doubt in reference to the time machine app in 10.5.  Imagine an 8 port hub of external hard drives attached to this, added in pairs (raid 0 of course) over the years as your collection of data grows. All the additional drives look like internal, local drives to all your macs as well, even over wifi. More below the cut Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone has their favorite collection. Its a pain going somewhere and leaving your music behind. This is mostly for me, but smaller personal collections of tabs online tend to be of much higher quality and better signal to noise ratio. Likely that if the page turns up as a google result for someone, they’ll see some other tabs they might have been looking for. So here’s a link to my tabs page. Hopefully this ends up helping some people. Maybe down the road I’ll post a list of Cigar Box Guitar tabs with chordings…

Yay, my first tab. Tabbed a cover of the Obama speech-into-a-song by Will.I.Am, covered by Michael Campion on youtube less than a week ago. The cover uses barre chords, while the original uses open chords. Play it however you prefer. Basic Chords are G Bm Em C, and then bridge uses Am C G  with a Cm on the America after the “the  unlikely story”. Add drum machine and soul singers to taste.

Yes We Can Tab - By me.

The cover: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-clcNkm3M

The original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

I started this project back in August. The idea was that my friend moving back from china would disassemble his squier bullet, and leave the body behind, taking everything from the neck to the electronics to the pickguard. Rather than pay for wood for the guitar’s body, I sawed off the least cracked piece of 2×12″ spare lumber I found at a construction site near my house. Placing the neck, pick guard, and bridge on the piece of wood, we traced out vaguely what we wanted it to look like, and found that a Stratocaster is about 14-15″ wide.

More after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »