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Thoughts and projects on Video Games and Computers

Entries in this blog

Pi Day

Today is March 14th. 3/14. Also known as Pi day.   Pi is one of the most important mathematical constants. So important, in fact, that Larry Shaw - known as the "Prince of Pi" - decided to celebrate the number by starting off the "pi day" celebration at San Francisco's Exploratorium. On this day you can eat fruit and pizza pie at the Exploratorium.   Pi is an irrational number. That means it is composed of a sequence of numbers that never repeats. Heck, it's more than that, it's a transcende

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More Fun with my Camera

Fun With my Camera   In my spare time I've been having some fun with my new $10 camera.     Since my last entry about the camera I've taken another 100 still shots and about 200 or 300 more action shots for gif movies.   Mostly goofing around stuff. I haven't come up with any plans yet. One thing I did learn is I should not be far from a computer with this camera. The camera eats batteries. Keep a battery in the camera longer than 12 hours and it's time to replace the darn thing. Take

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Cheap New Camera

On Black Friday I visited Walgreens to get a few groceries. While I was there I found this camera:     How much did it cost? Ten dollars. That's $10! Only ten dollars. OMG! Naturally, I bought it.   Back in March of 2006 I found a cheap $30 camera at Radio Shack (here's my blog entry about that. That was the cheapest camera I could find at the time and I had all sorts of cool ideas with it. One idea was to get a second camera and build a stereo camera rig: Blog entry about stereo rig wi

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Laptop Purchase Philosophy

Which is the better way to buy a laptop: Buy it fully loaded or get it in a standard (or cheap) configuration and then upgrade it later?   When I bought my very first laptop in 1993, I adhered to the later methodology (buy it cheap), mostly because I didn't have much funds and I didn't want to rack up a huge credit card bill. So I looked through some magazines and bought a laptop from a mail order company in Ohio. I ended up buying a Windows 3.1 machine that had a 20MHz 386 CPU with a B+W LCD

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Video Stuff with the Atari 8-bit

Who needs an expensive Avid system for video editing when you got an Atari? Recently I needed to put a caption in a video recording and so I quickly put together this setup:     On the left is an Atari 130XL and on the right is a simple video editing interface (color adjustment, audio mixes and video fade-in/fade-out). Underneath the video switch is an Astra dual floppy disk drive (the Astra drive on the left wasn't used - it was there just for show).   I regularly record the Survivor ser

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The Easy Way

Sometimes the easy way is, in actual fact, the painful way. As in the case with my efforts to install Linux on one of my computers.   Last week my dad gave me his old laptop. It had a 37 GB drive and only about 8 GB was being used by WinXP. My original plan was to Ghost the laptop disk to a second drive, split the laptop disk to two partitions, Ghost the WinXP data back to the laptop disk and then install Linux on the second partition. Pretty simple plan, although I was a little hesitant in re

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Random iThought

I was just wondering: if Apple came out with a game console, what would they call it? iGame? iPlay? iBox? iPS? iWii?

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The Equations program (Art via Programming)

In my previous "Art via Programming" blog entry, I talked about the Circles program which generated pretty pictures via the "X^2 + Y^2" equation. I added different equations to get different results and before long it was pointless to call the program "Circles". Therefore, I archived the original Circles program and created a new program called "Equations". The current version of Equations can plot up to 15 different equations that I either dreamed up myself or were suggested by my readers (Than

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More Photoshop: The Inside Joke

A significant amount of my Photoshopping time has been spent on the inside joke: jokes that only me and a small number of people would understand. Most of you reading this blog entry will not likely understand the jokes I'll be posting here but I thought I post them anyway to show off my limited PS skillz.   It Calm the Beef Min   If you are a member of the Digital Press forum then you should understand most, if not all, of the jokes posted below. If you are not a DP member of the DP forum t

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Sad day for old school computer geeks

Today I learned that John Backus, the "father" of the programming language FORTRAN, has died. Here's the article on his death.   I first learned FORTRAN back in 1978 when I went to engineering school. FORTRAN was the standard programming language for engineers at the time and students were required to learn it (many of the math and engineering classes required students to write problem solutions in FORTRAN). After I graduated, I wrote several major FORTRAN programs that generated 3D plots of e

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Art via Programming: Circles

So far, the basic algorithms of the art generating programs I've presented were in the following form:   for i = 1 to SomeNumber for j = 1 to SomeOtherNumber Determine StartPoint; Determine EndPoint; Draw a line or fill the region between StartPoint and EndPoint; next j next i My latest program, circles has a different basic algorithm:   for i = 1 to StageWidth for j = 1 to StageHeight DetermineColorToPlot(i,j); SetPixel(i,j) next j next i   Looks like a simple algorithm

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Art via Programming: The CircleLine program

When I finished the Visual Basic version of the Pattern program sometime back in the late nineties, my interest in creating art via programming waned considerably. I'm not sure why, I ran out of ideas or inspiration, I guess. Last year I took a Flash class at CNM and I learned how to program Actionscript. This inspired me to create more graphics programs.   The first idea that came to mind harkened back to my days in the ninth grade. Whenever I was bored in my mathmatics class (which was ofte

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Gallery of Pattern Program Images

I'm a sucker for completeness and so I decided to post links to the images created by the Pattern program. At the very least I'll have a convenient way of accessing the pictures when I'm away from home.   Line Box Weave Pyramid Fill Box Thick Radial Circle Box Plaid Filled Triangle Four Square Fill Areas Hexagon Galaxy Core of a Patriotic Tree Sinewave Windmill Starburst Mesh Web 3D Dual Web 3D Egg Eggs

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Art via Programming: The Pattern Program

I'm never satisfied with anything I draw or paint by hand. I'm not a very good artist and I know it. However, whenever I make my computer create art, I am usually pleased.   (Sorry about the long exposition that follows. No doubt I'm rambling here. However, I feel it is important to set the background of my interest in creating art via programming).   The first time I made a computer created art was in the early eighties when my dad borrowed a VIC-20 from his business partner. The computer

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Creative stuff: Photoshopping

I'm not very artistic but that hasn't stopped me from dabbling with Photoshop now and then. Although I did a few drawings on my Atari ST using Degas and Neochrome, it's with Photoshop that I've done most of my creative drawing. Here's a sample of my early works.   My First Photoshop   My first Photoshop drawing was inspired by a conversation I had with Pantechnicon back in 1999 when we drove to Las Vegas for CGE99. The Star Wars Holiday special came up in conversation and I had to admit my i

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The Game of REVERSE

For my next JavaScript project I decided to convert an old BASIC program I got from David Ahl's book BASIC computer games. It's a game called REVERSE and I first got it working on my Altair computer nearly 30 years ago. It was a text game but I was able to create a non-text version of the game (just use your mouse to play - no typing needed) in JavaScript. Here it is. I was able to complete a game in only 4 moves. Let's see if you can match or beat that. I hope you enjoy it.   With this progra

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New version of the Powerball Picker

I've completed version 1.2 of the Powerball picker. Here it is.   As you can see, I've made a number of changes. First of all I added more content by including a picture from the official Powerball site and a link to the latest winning numbers. I've also changed the look of the Powerball display.   The biggest change, however, is the ability to display new numbers without requiring a refresh of the page. A simple click on a button will now do it. This new ability is possible thanks to some c

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Javascript

Some years ago, just to keep in practice, I wrote a Visual Basic program that picked Powerball numbers. Here's a picture of the program I created:     (There was another reason I wrote the program: I knew this guy at my old job who was a Powerball freak and I wrote the program as a joke to "help" him out.)   The program needs some improvement: it would be nice, for example, if the first five numbers were in numerical order. However, it got the job done.   This past semester I learned a

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Old Calculators

I've never really set out to collect old calculators but it turns out that I do indeed have a modest collection of them. I attribute it mostly to my inability to throw things away. However, a couple of the calculators do have some sentimental value to me.   My interest in calculators started in the late 1960's when my sister and I would visit my father's office in downtown Duluth. My dad was (and still is) a CPA and the office he worked at had all sorts of office equipment: typewriters (electr

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Slowest. Connection. Ever.

A couple weeks ago my local PBS station broadcast a show about the very first transatlantic telegraph line. Mostly it was about the financing and cable laying voyages and very little about the things a geek like me was interested in: the electrical characteristics of the cable and how fast they were able to transmit messages. Only by reviewing the transcript of the show, reading a Wikipedia article and other articles was I able to get the facts I wanted (and more).   Here, then are some of th

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Some OVGE Picures - Part 2

Here's the rest of my pictures of this year's OVGE:   I didn't wander too far from my table but I was able to take a picture of mezrabad playing Guitar Hero while his son, on the far left, played some other video game:     Here's Flack at his table selling his new book "Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie". I bought a copy and he signed it! It's a good read and you should consider getting a copy for yourself; especially if you were into BBS's back in the day.     Alex liked Fla

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Some OVGE Pictures - Part 1

Even though it has been two weeks, I thought I'd share a few pictures I took at OVGE.   When I talked about bringing my Altair 680's to school back in May of this year - in this blog entry, Phosphor Dot Fossils thought it would be cool to show off my Altairs at OVGE and he invited me to come over. He even bought a six foot table for me to put my stuff.   Here's a picture of my planned setup for the show: Click here to see image (Sorry about the links, but I'm only permitted ten pictures per

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Power-up test

The graphics and the setup for my table at the upcoming OVGE this weekend is complete but I still have one very important task to complete before I'm ready: making sure the Altair computer works.   So, the other day I connected the cables and powered up the system. The fan started whirring and the lights flickered on:     Next, I need to run some programs to make sure it works. Although the Altair has Microsoft's Altair BASIC on ROM, there is no code to properly set up the serial port f

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OVGE Preparation

OVGE Preparation   The Oklahoma Video Game Expo (OVGE) is happening this year on August 19th and I'll be there. I'll also be exhibiting thanks to PDF who offered a 6' table for my purposes. What will I be showing? Here's a hint:     That's just one of the pieces I'll be displaying.   Today I set up the equipment in my den and it's looking pretty good. I still need to power up the machine and make sure it works. I also need to set up my laptop to upload programs to the Altair. However,

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Old Computer Magazines

I just about never throw anything away. As proof of this all you need to do is look through my collection of old magazines. I have at least nine large plastic crates full of magazines with perhaps more than a thousand issues. I have Sci-fi related magazines: Fantasy & Science Fiction,Analog Science Fiction & Science Fact,Astounding, Locus and others. I even kept magazines from when I joined various organizations including IEEE, The Planetary Society, the NAR (National Association of Roc

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