New Series: Perks for pocket change

Aimless blogging will only get you so far, it turns out.  I seem to be growing tired of having no direction and just reacting to stuff that happens; originally this blog was made to chronicle the construction of The Flying I-Beam Electric Scooter and subsequent projects (which at the time seemed to be only electric scooters).  Having High-Functioning Autism I miss those days of order so I have decided to initiate a new series of posts based on projects that can improve people's lives by adding things like refrigeration, motive power and keeping toast warm long enough to enjoy it.  Without further deliberation I present:  Perks for Pocket Change

The Idea is as simple as it is frugal, I will set aside £30, or about the limit of what I consider trivial money, to make something which can be made with a reasonable collection of tools, that adds a 'perk' to the builder's life.  For example, look back to my spur-of-the-moment idea about elastic band refrigeration; this contraption adds cooling to an item inside it's box, can probably be made for under £30 (sacrificing the epicyclic gearbox :( ), and can also be made with tools like a hammer, chisel, power drill, files, junior hacksaw and epoxy.  Judgement will be passed on how useful it actually is - If it cannot keep a drinks can fridge-cool, it will fail.

Without the benefit of £30 to hand, I will use a slightly pre-cooked example of work I have done to a rubber band handgun:

Rubber Band Handgun

The Problem

This is a rubber band handgun, can be had for around £5, so I'll just assume the price since it was presented to me by my brother after he visited Japan.  Upon initial testing I found it presented these two problems:

• It was awfully unbalanced, aiming accurately really takes it out of your wrist
• The grip was angular and unergonomic, leading to an aching hand

Prolonged shooting with this weapon was out of the question, if only due to fatigue.

The Build

I lack build photos of the modifications so just imagine me chiseling away the ergonomic indents in the handle and drilling pits to fit gaming mouse weights (not a consistent source, but R/C and fishing weights can be found for £5, if you feel like adding some texture to your weight solution try Deluxe Materials Liquid Gravity).

The Perk

Evaluation will occur based on this scoring system out of 100 points:

• Cost - for every pound under £30, 1 point is obtained
• Looks - only 10 points since I am in less of a position to judge looks than Mike Jeffries is
• Practicality - 60 points, this is the heart of the matter

With that in mind, here are the scores:

Cost:  20 points

Can probably get it down to £7 total spend if you shop around, but I am assuming new items so £10 is the final spend.

Looks:  5 points

Fairly average bodging work, can be made better with varnish that I couldn't be bothered to buy; that would jack up the price anyway.

Practicality:  55 points

Aiming is dramatically improved with the balance allowing extended periods of accurate aiming and the grip indents stop soreness in it's tracks.  Also, those weights feel pleasingly cold in the palm of my hand.

Final Score:  80%

If you possess a rubber band gun, or even a cheap BB gun, this is a highly recommended job to do to this weapon especially when you compete.  You can probably get this job looking much better with skill and patience, but this is entirely optional with your own project.

Refrigerating rubber - mechanized edition

Inspired by this video by the Slingshot Channel (well worth a subscribe!), I had this bizarre idea for a rubber-based refrigerator which could be powered by a constant speed input like a Stirling Engine or a Stepper Motor:

The Eccentric Cam is driven at an exceptionally slow rate - up to 2 rpm at most, this being achieved by copious use of epicyclic gearing (my god am I a fan of that!).  At the extended position (top), the band heats up due to the fact that you have put energy into stretching it, and since nothing is 100% efficient, some energy is lost; in this case it comes out as heat.  This state is maintained by the shape of the cam (constant radius = no movement), letting the band reach room temperature.  The cam follower rides up the slope of the cam (sorry, should have given the follower it's own slide bar to keep it straight) to transition the band into the relaxed state (bottom), the band is allowed to contact the Storage Box, and since it relaxed at room temperature, the band reaches a new, sub-ambient temperature; in order to reach room temperature again the band must take in heat, in this case from the box which renders it cold :)

In principle it is simple enough, but I can't help but feel that a practical model will look relentlessly ridiculous, something not helped by my amateurish late-night drawing.  God knows how many reductions are required, the resulting gearbox probably looks like a Mongolian Death Worm as imagined by Dishonored.  I hope I left you with a mechanical nightmare ;)

Haswell hits home!

These are just a few things I have heard about Intel's next-gen CPU platform, Haswell:

1. It has been overclocked to 5GHz on just 0.904V
2. Another overclock took all 4 cores to 7.012GHz
3. Disable half the CPU cores, and 8GHz is possible!

Now, as someone familiar with CPU technology since AMD's Athlon XP days, I can tell that if you tried to do ANYTHING on these computers, they would gib and die; but this is the case with all these publicity overclocks: No.1 is self-explanatory since if it could run at that voltage at 5GHz, then there would be no question - it would be sold like that!  No.2 has an alarmingly low BCLK of 91.07MHz, which would completely fuck up the clockgen causing cascading failure of many system buses including SATA; No.3 runs at 2.259V, and the video is a parade of screenshots with no live footage, also the BCLK is suspiciously stable given how No.2 fared.  In spite of all of these overclocks offering no useful benefit to anyone, they still serve to lift spirits - anyone remember Sandy Bridge and how it wowed us with Stable Overclocks of 4.9GHz on air cooling?  Okay, not quite along the same lines, but I can make a conservative estimate that Haswell will allow 5GHz overclocking to become the rule, not the exception.

Another thing I would like to address is AMD, and it's Kabini (Laptop), and Temash (Tablet) CPU lineup; this is quite exciting for me, fondly remembering Athlon 64 and how it showed that the Emperor, Netburst, had neither clothes nor testicles.  Touted as AMD's final hope, these CPUs do indeed look quite the contender for Intel's godawful Atom (seriously, since when did a good CPU only ever only do things one at a time?), but the one that *really* caught my eye is the A4-5000, which is a quad-core at 1.5GHz, a GPU with 128 shaders at 500MHz, drawing only 15W; I feel the need to press that home:  This is a quad-core which can merrily power an 11in netbook!  Not only that, but this includes the GPU, so overall system power isn't likely to exceed 30W, ever.  I seriously hope AMD does manage to cling to life, and Haswell doesn't wreck it's shit for good, but then again that is just my inner 12 year old talking, change happens...

On the GPU front, Nvidia is prepping to release the GTX 780, basically a Titan for play-it-safe scrubs like me, not those rich-fuck-scrooge-mcduck early adopters!  Meanwhile ATi (not AMD!) has booted the HD 7990 6GB out of the door and taken the GPU performance crown back...  yep, I said I care not so much for graphics, funny since CPU performance is completely moot these days especially for gaming.  There is, however, one question I have - If GPUs are getting more power efficient, where are the performance passively-cooled graphics cards?  All we have are those silly little HTPC cards with crudely machined aluminium blocks for heatsinks, how about a passive GTX 760?  I'm sure that the concept of a PC with only 2 fans in the entire thing appeals to a great many gamers (I know I'd like to silence my GTX 560, but then again I bumped the clocks from 810MHz to 950MHz so why the hell am I complaining?), after all, the NoFan CR-95 found a market despite the fact that it is basically a GIGANTIC fuck-off block of copper (180mm diameter x 148mm height, frankly I'm surprised it "only" weighs 730g).  I wouldn't care if it took up 4 slots, If I had a silent PC in the works I would snap that mother up!

Well, that's my lot on the scene, I would love to know how you think the perennial CPU war of AMD vs Intel will pan out, will AMD finally be steamrolled despite it's ingenuity; perhaps comments on whether passive performance cards are a good proposition?  Your minds and mouths are weapons free...

Canals and Curious Carriages

Progress is slowly being made in Tawe_TMD - Bearing in mind that I am on a Student's income so leaps and bounds are not to be expected, at least not initially.  I have decided after many pilot runs uploading models of bunkers to my Shapeways Page, I have decided to get one step closer to my ultimate aim of locomotive kits and begin work on a Railway Carriage in N gauge:

Creo Elements/Direct is like Pro/ENGINEER without a price tag :)

This is a Metropolitan Line 8 Wheel Non-Bogie Carriage, originally working the aforementioned line on the fledgling London Underground until 1909 when they were sold to the Burry Port and Gwendraeth Valley Railway for it's own passenger service.  These had eight wheels with a total wheelbase of 28 feet or 8.53 metres which given the sharp curves of a line built on the route of an old canal (Wales' oldest one, no less) would have presented a problem if it were not for it's chassis; the inner 2 axles were fixed to the frames, but the outer 2 axles were mounted on radial trucks with their pivots above the inner axles, similar to locomotive practice.  Incidentally, these carriages had brakes on the inner wheels only as a direct result of this.

The model is far from complete, with side details missing and a lack of a chassis (this will be a seperate unit to allow fitment of an interior and to allow flexibility for future conversion to 2mm finescale); also the roof is a bit crooked at present so I will need to address that.  Other than that, progress has been good with me picking up Creo nearly effortlessly due to muscle memory and experience with Pro/E and I think we could have a physical model to show off by mid-June, early-July.

Hope you enjoyed that  :)

Sources:

1. The Burry Port and Gwendreath Valley Railway and its Antecedent Canals Volume Two:  The Railway and Dock
2. Wordpress:  The Basilica Fields blog

Metro: Last Light - The big picture this time...

You know the saying "Fail to plan, and you plan to fail?", that is exactly how I feel now after that previous post; I acted out on passion towards an unrelated subject, one which is quite personal to me being male, terrible-looking and subject to a lot of rudeness and sometimes outright hatred from women in my time as a result (Some group of girls whispered about pushing me under a train, within earshot, at Cardiff Central Station, lol).  I struggled to put my finger on why this was until this morning, when some dots connected and I realized:  This is the work of the game weaving it's immersive black magic so proficiently, that I am seriously pissed off that this part of the story is so goddamn uncooked!

To understand how this is so, we need to start at the bottom:  The Graphics - yes, I know that great graphics push GPU power to stratospheric levels which in turn benefits GPGPU apps which then thrusts forward knowledge in medicine; but I personally consider them trivial compared to what we will get to.  Even so, it seems that the engine, while gorgeous, runs generally well at 1080p full detail on my i5-2500K and GTX560 non-ti; minor lag happens when masses of lights are introduced, but this is tolerable.  While we are on the subject of trivial matters, the gunplay is also relatively generic; it works and it does feel responsive enough to carry the game along, but it's not a patch on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with it's bullet drop and extensive upgrade trees with trance-inducing detail on how a block of magnesium will make the gun 0.1kgs lighter or some shit, or maybe that's just me going aspie in you lot.  So yeah, not the most astounding in terms of basic gameplay, but trust me, the devil's in the details.

Let's be honest here, when we want big-budget FPS action, we leave Metro well alone and fly over to Gears of War or Halo or relentlessly fished species of piscine that usually ends up covered in breadcrumbs.  When you fire up a Metro title (or a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title for that matter), you are here for the wasteland, this is the entity that takes the show for all it's worth and doesn't let go until there's nothing but bones.  This is mostly down to just how unflinchingly brutal and primal the environment is not only on the surface, but in the Metro as well; humans are on the verge of falling back to instincts wherever you look with bandits raping lone females, nazis acting like gods over "mutants" and even a wife who slept with one of these devils to save her husband, who subesquently got shot anyway.  This is exactly how violence and sex should be used in a game, not to cynically draw in the lowest common denominator but to show us just how close we really are to nature despite the best efforts of Victorian moral codes and attendant suppression of animal urges.  Speaking of moral codes, the moral points system makes an ambivalent return with actions like listening in on the prostituting wife or saving the potential rape victim making a white flash appear; these count towards the ending which is not to be spoiled!  I say ambivalent because the ending I got (the "Bad" ending, but how the hell is that the case?) left me almost in tears and genuinely made me think about whether people would talk about me in such a respectful, beautiful way should I die (Answer:  parties will be thrown, as well as bricks... at my tombstone.).

Neatly, this lets me come to the "Relationship" in the game; the way the "bad" ending went forced me to imagine how elegant the romance would have been if more time was given to it instead of Andrei the Fucking Blacksmith, that oh-so convenient plot device who serves only to give you a car, A CAR!  For christ's sakes!  He only appeared to save you from buckshot to the face in the previous game and suddenly he's worthy of appearances for fan service?  You might say he was in the book, but game stories run much faster than book stories do; a trivial incident like this can punch well above it's weight in a book because you describe every single solitary detail and the reader can take it all in at his pace; games lose that ability to their own pacing, therefore it would be perfectly acceptable to cut him out and have him leave a note or something, saving precious development time for more pressing characters while you work in almost as much hardship as your metro dwellers.

To wrap this all up, don't think for a second that I feel in any way bitter about this game; there is beauty in the beast and a beast can be found in any beauty no matter how divine.  I feel that in at least one regard a HUGE opportunity was missed to produce one of the quirkiest and most inspiring "love conquers all" stories of our time simply because of a lack of framing for Anna's early misandric conduct, something to explain why she acted like she did and more relevantly something to account for why she suddenly fancies you halfway through the game beyond "I was often left alone by daddy, I need feel-good now".  Apart from that, Metro: Last Light really does shine like a lighthouse made of rubies towering above the sea of grey goo that is FPS mediocrity, it just goes to show that combining "cool" elements and pleasing the largest number of demographics is truly the path to hell when it comes to making a momentous piece of art... yes, art...

Formulaic Fucking: How to make it 'plausible' that a man will boink a chick with a proverbial dick

Been squirreled away playing Metro: Last Light since 11:30pm yesterday (okay I just set up the game for later, so I could come to it Friday morning refreshed and shit); game has blown me away... a bit, shut up I needed to rhyme!

Arrrrgh...  The passion raised by that one scene has completely gotten to me and being totally unable to focus, time for a valium shot to engage critical faculties *woosh* ahh, self control...

Allow me to detail the scene by first setting the scene:  You are at D6 (sorry, Д6) after sending the Dark Ones to hell since the "evil" ending is apparently canon now; once entering the briefing room with Ulman and an uncharacteristically hysterical Khan (edit:  I've changed my mind about khan, passionate is a better word; it's also a fantastic character development), Miller gives you a mission to kill the last Dark One and assigns his daughter, Anna, to be your lead.  What follows is a series of belittlements and cockteases ("Stop staring at my ass, it's well beyond your reach!") that will leave you bitter towards her half-hoping she gets humiliated at some point, preferably poetically.  Time passes, you try your utmost to forget her condescending ass until you reach the Church where, surprise, she gets captured and carted off the some communist's lair!

Now, I know what we are all thinking here - haven't we seen this shit before in other, less unique games and movies?  Well, we have; and you'll never guess what, she bangs you after you rescue her (well, she shows a tit and lies on the bed, what do you think?).  We've seen this so many times in B movies and adventure films, like that classic girl tied to the train track (with bullhead rails! ;) ), so what's the prob, bob?

Thing is, these films made the woman a ditzy, thoughtless bint because back then, much to the glee of cushy middle class feminists, we can admit that men wanted this type of woman; materialism in western culture was much more respectable and trophy wives were a big part of that.  Regardless of women's rights however, this was appealing to men since they very much LOVE to be respected by their women ("My hero!"), in some films the extra mile was travelled and the woman would indeed have been a tough, dependable sidekick with a cuddly inner persona; I think back to the 1940 Charlie Chaplain film "The Great Dictator" and that woman, Hannah, who helps the Jewish Barber stand up to the Stormtroopers but for a modern reference try Alyx Vance of Half Life 2 or Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite.

Metro: Last Light does none of this, you are pretty much expected to like this harridan, well, because she's fit!  Sorry, but male brains don't work like that; we are not going androgynous on you and claiming to like cuddling more than sex or some other nonsense, but only the biggest loose cannons among us actually think like the trendy left believes we think, i.e:  "All boys want is sex, tits and ass!"  And before you bring up how Elizabeth had moments of anger towards the player, keep in mind that you tried to bring her back to New York so she can be locked up and studied all over again, so her anger was more than justified (seriously, I felt hurt after she attacked me not to mention stupid).

In closing, gaming writers need to address this godawfully out-of-touch issue with their writing if they want their lovemaking/affection scenes to have any impact beyond "well, this is hot"; before I go as well, that scene with Citra had a similar effect on me, but Far Cry 3 was a cheesy 80s adventure flick with superb open-world gameplay tacked on, so I expected yet more politically-correct cheese like this; Metro however has actual depth to it with themes about mass movements and their effect on fearful, anxious populations, so this shit sticks out like a gigantic boil on the nose.  It's not on!

Now excuse me while I blow off steam by hitting the strip bar in Venice like the godforsaken, sexist pig-dog I am...



Also, let me direct your attention to an oldie but a goldie:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/6662-Wet

Shapeways: Incidental thoughts on my new faith

The arrival of my stunning new items from shapeways has prompted me to post about it...  nope, that's a lie - what actually prompted me is a stray thought from my grasshopper mind which goes like this:  Many women say there are no good men left, equally many men claim there are no good women left; so what is stopping us from outright saying "all people are bastards and that's all we are!"?  The answer may be obvious, but hold that thought...

Anyway, onto the matter at hand, my reception of my first 3D printed objects from Shapeways, my new temple :)

Yep, that clear plastic bunker has fire ports and stairs!

I won't go into too much detail about these objects since I have them for sale on shapeways here:
http://www.shapeways.com/shops/Tawe_TMD
Nevertheless, I feel it necessary to divulge my future plans for Tawe TMD in terms of 3D printing:

Short Term Goals

1. Add many buildings to my site - at 10% markup a €15 building fetches around €1.50, though stock does not present a problem since the storage is digital and models are made to order, so even I can eventually build up quite a collection of 'stock'
2. Add some actual train models - this is where I really want to go with Tawe TMD, producing locomotive body shells at first, moving on to making chassis parts and eventually entire kits, which will probably be sold though my Ebay shop
3. Add R/C aircraft parts - I have an idea for a side business where I make plans for R/C aircraft costing around £5-10 inc P&P, perhaps even free to download; then I can host the detail parts on Shapeways so that model builders may, if they choose to, add detail to their aircraft

As you can see, I fucking worship 3D printing now, I think of the days when we can print our own stuff like bicycles, cars, houses, perhaps even lovers?

Yeah, lovers which we can print out around an android shell with the body type and assorted features we fetishize.  This brings up a bizarre and potentially dangerous thought:  What will happen to human sexuality when love-droids become both ubiquitous and fully customizable?  Will we stop mating with real humans and send our gametes to an organization which not only births the children, but raises them too?  Blimey, that is a terrifying thought, especially when politics wade in...

Told you I was grasshopper minded ;)