Author: Peter Jones

On Saturday, I finally soldered this together. I was pretty eel happy with the quality of soldering I managed to do, which is to say the alarm works. I haven’t started to check it’s time keeping drift, bit I’m guessing it’s somewhere between good and poor. As it is, it probably won’t become my daily alarm. I’ll probably use it for something else.
Seeing as how it has these nice pads already to patch to for redoing is program, the sky is the limit. If I remove the speaker, and replace that with a transistor or relay, I could probably use that for turning on our off pumps once I get all aquaponic. I’m thinking of container alternatives seeing as how fish tanks are expensive. I could invert Jack Daniels bottles and cut the top of maybe? Slaving of bottles, depending where about the Wif and I are this evening, I might get to working on the BeerLite. Admittedly it will be a very brown light, but that’s what experimentation is for. I just want to make sure I carefully dip the LEDs in before I go to town and wire a sixer or something. I have caps at Los Parientes, and so will just need to figure out which ask bottles I have that are screw top (screw tops are balls for recapping I read somewhere). Ideally, I would embed a chunk of perfboard in each cap, with individual resistors. I think the final goal would be that at the controller end would be a constant current thingy, and a daisy chain of cables going from one bottle to the next. Adding in some addressing function would be dope as well. Maybe I should just look at addressable LEDs.

I’m at Wayward with the Wif. She’s studying her nursing (oncology right now) and in reading about the joy of C++, and here comes pointers. I understand the advantage of pointers versus not pointers. I just don’t understand why not design the language to handle not pointers. The only reason pointers are necessary, as far as I can tell, is that functions can’t handle more than one return value. It’s like saying the shoe is the best hammer ever, because we don’t allow people to use hangers in this town.

Just read about this and immediately thought. Servo, turning a (diastolic) pump, for pushing fluids to push actuators. I’m guessing that might be an effective way to transfer power without adding too much weight/inefficiency. If I added in a way to switch pumps with only a few servos, I could drop weight more.

But traffic. The problem with living on side of a big freaking lake and working on the other is the commute can suck. Oh, that and single occupancy vehicles. Of course, my bus not being on the carpool lane kinda confuses me. I’m pretty sure that twenty some odd people are more than two. Maybe they’re trying to get more good will from our misanthropic neighbours by allowing some Mercedes to pass us, some with two people in it even. Personally, I’d close down the carpool lanes, they only confuse people.
My goals for the weekend include such tasks as finishing my desk, root my phone, kill some aliens, get sdl up and linking right, laying my team to alien destruction, planning a couch using blender, and maybe start making burrito lunches. The burrito lunches are sounding good.
I’m pretty sure that if I dropped off the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I’d be feeling healthier. The only thing is, I hate cooking at work. I’m thinking some fluffy rice, beans, lettuce, maybe broccoli, onions, peppers and chicken. As long as I keep everything most enough on the inside, like when I bring leftover burrito to work, I’ll be fine. I just want to make sure this is something I could make on one day, put in the fridge and easy through the week.  I could also look at sine cold pizza alternative options. Start doing to mix it up. I’ll have to talk to the Wif to see what she thinks. For me of course, I’m sure she’ll think the entire idea is hippy and disturbing. I really don’t blame her. Almost off my first bus.

I’m also working on not swearing so much when I write. I prolly should edit for profanity, and in general for that matter, but not today. It’s not like yesterday was entirely useless. I started researching some vintage cameras at my parents; I looked up info on how I could build my own cmos on the cheap. I messed around with the Black Widow keyboard again.
Oh. I never mentioned that. Lady month we picked up a Black Widow for the Wif, but it doesn’t like her Mac. Just as well, she decided she didn’t like the caps lock either. The funny thing is that I think somehow it’s triggering macros because after a certain amount of usage it just starts freaking out. I’m thinking I’m just going to gut it. I want the switches, maybe the cord. The thing is I really want a squared of keyboard. I want letters to go in even columns and rows. I don’t want to need a ten-key as I’ll be able to get the numlock and use jkl… instead. How freaking difficult would that be? I have all these modifier keys and yet I’m supposed to need an extra six inches of real estate on my desk. The stitches are nice though, just got to remove the rest, differ them up and add a teensy. After that it’s just a matter of correct wiring.

Did the dishes which afforded me room to start doing some bottles. Unfortunately, I have close to another score to go. At done point I’ll need to go through the bottles and identify any screw top ones, as they are inherently of a weaker sort.
One of those oddities is that the more I write, the more archaic and formal my English becomes. Do I think in these terms but have them overwritten by the insane stuff I read?
I’m thinking of trying my hand at Nanowrimo again, even with the terrible failure of last year. Obviously out would be to late to start this right now, but an automatically narrated video game that was turned into prose could be beautiful.

The player controls Alice. Beth, Charles and Doug are employees on patrol with Alice. Alice and team come to a four way intersection, and Alice realizes that the squad needs to spread out. As they don’t want to get too spread out, using an abundance of caution, they split into two groups. Alice and Beth go left while Charles and Doug head straight based on the right hand path being the least interesting.
Charles, being fairly intelligent for the trumped up lackey he is, less himself and Doug on a quick jaunt down the path. At the end of the alley, once they’re out of immediate range of Alice, they’re set upon by half a dozen blackguards of a truly mean nature.  At the very beginning of the fight, Doug had his head staved in, which inspired Charles to fight with the rage of a thousand reindeer. After repelling his attackers, he checks Doug to find his skull a sunken mess. The trauma he just observed causes him to panic and try to find Alice, jumping at shadows all the way.
Alice and Beth also meet with assailants, but suffer no injury.
Charles hears the fight and moves to join in. He comes around the corner and encounters two of the enemy rushing at him. He fires his pistol, laying low Beth.
His trauma had caused him to mistake friend for foe.
When the team separated, the player was still controlling both groups. The challenge is that the non-players might be lazy, scared, hallucinating, or just dicks. A lazy npc will walk slower or not notice important items. Fearful actors might get turned around or jump at shadows. Hallucination will lead to all sorts of comedy. The dickish might get seperated from people they don’t like, shoot at friendlies, or sell out their companions.
At all points, as long as an actor has companions in line-of-sight, their will be a master and slave. The player themselves have mostly perfect control, within reason, however even then the actors will use common sense to prevent their vainglorious death. Unless it would make sense, no actor will volunteer to catch a bullet for another.

This following is based on my compete lack of knowledge.

The classes I’m going to need are:
Grid – handles the creation, management and age of blocks
Blocks – creation, saving, loading, bit rot
Buildings – procedural generation of buildings, minimum number of doors, room layouts, purpose, name, bit rot with error checking
Actors – name, purpose, inventory, feelings, status. I should be able to offload this one, I think, to allow for npc vs hireling
You – our player, really, I think that would be a special actor. Maybe do it as turn based where the player moves the hireling, with the fog of war of the hireling, but… the less direct supervision results in… errors

The cider has now been purged. Sadly, as I watched it spinning down the drain, I noticed it was fishy starting to smell pretty decent. If I was making the cider equivalent of Caliber. I could call it Caliderp. I even went so far as to have a Dixie Cup. It really wasn’t bad, just weak willed. Next time, I’m totally going to use my hydrometer so I can tell what I’m doing.
In future world, once I have the cabinet from my parents, I think I’ll start science-ing it. Maybe I’ll get an xbee kit from Sparkfun to add wireless. That sounds like some fun. I’m still thinking of how to do density change detection of a liquid, without touching the liquid. I think sound propagation will vary with density, but I’m really not sure, especially when bubbles of co2 are added to the equation.

Assuming I’m making this a 3d game, I think trees works be a good example of entropy. For a tree to be memorable, it needs to have a lot of variables. It needs a location, orientation, type and status. To be truly unique though, it needs to have the individual boughs follow rules on their formation without bogging down the system as a whole. If we create the tree using the location and orientation as a seed, and then run it through the creator for the individual tree type, it would mean each tree could be created and destroyed each time it was needed, reducing the burden of remembering each tree. If something were to affect the tree, that could be kept as a modifier in the grid database.
If we extend this to houses, now we’re getting somewhere useful. The seed is made of the location, which then is consumed by the constructor itself. Only when things change will there be a need for more info… no that’s a bad idea. Gah! Buildings nd to be able to change, but… I’ll have to think about this some more.