2014

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“Lego Friends” comic and Finals Week

Published by on December 15, 2014 | Leave a response

I love this comic.

Some boys like giant mechas and some girls like dolls. Conversely, some boys like dolls and some girls like giant mechas. I don’t get why companies (and some people) have such a hard time grasping this.

Maybe I should get a Tumblr account or something, I don’t have much more to say that hasn’t been said in the comic. Seriously. Go look at it.

In other news, it’s Finals Week. It feels like the semester just started and now it’s over. I’m simultaneously happy (I have projects I’ve been putting off in favor of studying), relieved (the computer science senior project is stressful even with the best of teams), and thoroughly in the dumps (I had to say goodbye to my third class of students). Fortunately, there’s a product that can alleviate all of these: ice cream.

With lots of chocolate syrup.

On Recent Events

Published by on December 7, 2014 | Leave a response
On Recent Events

I don’t have words to describe the events in the nation of the past few weeks, which is strange, because I usually have words for everything. Feels. I have them. But I don’t have words. I’m too upset for words.

I saw this earlier today:

I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or to cry, so in the end, I did both. But mostly cried.

MicroTik Routerboard 411 + OpenWRT: Update

Published by on October 31, 2014 | Leave a response

The ailing Routerboard 411 in one of my previous posts has been sitting in a plastic tub under my bed awaiting replacement capacitors, a sudden level-up in my soldering ability, and a dramatic increase in my level of confidence in not destroying things by jabbing at them with a giant heating element. I still have none of the three; however, one of my friends donated his time and effort and replaced the four dead capacitors for me. (Thanks, Will! I owe you a gift card.)

Now that the capacitors have been replaced, I’ve put OpenWRT on the device for good. The instructions here are dubious. I did things the manual way according to this blog post, starting from the point after I had booted into OpenWRT’s ramdisk image as detailed in my previous post about this router.

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Intel Developer Forum 2014

Published by on October 15, 2014 | Leave a response
Moscone Center West

So, this is more than a little late, but I’ve been wanting to make this blog post for a long time.

I went to IDF2014 this year. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. The Computer Science department sent out an email to all CSC and CPE undergrads offering 1) A free one-day pass for any student who signs up (worth $499, I found out later!) and 2) Free bus transportation to the first 56 students that responded.

I responded, and I’m very glad that I did.

I ended up being one of the first 56 people to respond, which meant I got the free bus pass. I wouldn’t have been able to go without it–the price of gasoline and all that. Waking up early enough to get to the bus at the campus by 7AM was a small price to pay. Skipping classes was more painful, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go to San Francisco.

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Fun with routers, part 1: MicroTik Routerboard 411 + OpenWRT

Published by on July 11, 2014 | 1 Response
Routerboard running OpenWRT Attitude Adjustment

My father uses a WISP for his Internet access. His equipment malfunctioned recently and a technician came out to examine the antenna. He discovered that the circuitry inside it had failed; instead of throwing it away, he offered it to me.

Meet the MicroTik Routerboard 411.

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Station 15 – Upgrade release

Published by on July 9, 2014 | Leave a response
Station15

Several years ago, I made a map called Station 15 for the open-source game Tremulous. To my surprise, it has since become a popular Tremulous map on the game servers. I’ve been slowly upgrading it to take advantage of the new capabilities featured by the Unvanquished game engine. This includes higher-resolution textures and lightmaps.

Station15

Station15

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Spacetracks – Upgrade Release

Published by on July 9, 2014 | Leave a response

Okay, dirty little secret–this version of the map has been in Unvanquished since the last release, Alpha 28. But I haven’t had time to blog about it since fixing it up. Like Station 15, Spacetracks is a map that I made some NaN years ago for Tremulous and turned out to be popular on the game servers because of its gameplay. This is very puzzling because I’m a decent mapper (well, I’m okay) but a horrible Tremulous player. Spacetracks r1 has been included in Unvanquished* since day one, but compared to the other stock maps, it looked dated. Now it looks shiny, because everybody loves shiny it has higher -resolution textures and lightmaps.

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Getting near that time of year…

Published by on May 3, 2014 | Leave a response
Auxilliary cooling
Auxilliary cooling

Auxiliary cooling

When stock cooling won’t suffice and you can’t afford a case with better airflow…it’s time to improvise.

I know, I know. Why isn’t the orange case fan plugged in? It’s not plugged in because it so happens that it’s not actually a case fan, it’s really a jet turbine with aspirations. Unfortunately, its aspirations aren’t so much of the “move hot air out of the case” variety, they’re more of the “make noise than all of my other equipment put together” variety. The desk fan is quieter and moves much more air.

It’s almost summer, yay! Time to start cleaning heatsinks.

Not much new to post.

New hardware: Mac Mini

Published by on March 30, 2014 | Leave a response

I have a Mac now. I’d say that it was my first Apple product ever, but that would be a lie because there’s a Mac Classic buried in my closet somewhere. Well, close enough, right? A friend was offering his Mac Mini (2012-ish) for a reasonable sum and I decided that my life would be forever incomplete without at least one silver aluminum unibody device sitting on my desk and driving up my electricity bill, so I bought it.

The specs:

  • 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
  • 8GB DDR3
  • 80GB Intel SSD
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • 802.11b/g/n wireless
  • Bluetooth
  • SuperDrive (DVD/CD writer combo)
  • HDMI
  • Lots of USB ports
  • Mini DisplayPort
  • HDMI

All of this hardware is packed into a sleek 7.76″ x 7.76″ x 1.4″ silver case, which has a large, sturdy plastic cover on the bottom that twists off to allow access to the memory sticks and the single laptop-style cooling fan. Note to computer manufacturers: unfettered access to the fan for cleaning? 11/10 five stars A++++ would buy again. I don’t know where all the dust in the house comes from, but I certainly know where it all ends up: in my computers. Every spring and fall I have to grab my screwdriver and go on a rampaging marathon to coax out the dust bunnies that have taken up stubborn residence in my heatsinks and power supplies. Having the fan exposed for cleaning without even needing to remove a screw is a nice perk. Of course, the trade-off is that the hard drive is much more difficult to get to than one might expect. Win some, lose some.

So I unpacked the Mac Mini, went about hooking it up, and immediately had a Eureka moment. You know those little white dongles that every Mac-toting professor has to fiddle with to connect their Mac to a digital projector? I didn’t know what those were for, because I’d never owned a Mac and had never bothered to ask. Well, now I know. (Insert Bill Nye audio clip here.) One of life’s greatest mysteries, solved! Turns out, they’re kinda important, and by that I mean I couldn’t connect my shiny Mac to any of my monitors because none of them grok Mini DisplayPort and I didn’t have that Mini-DP to DVI/VGA dongle. Oops.

Turns out, they’re also expensive, or at least, the ones from Apple are. For a company that markets to college students, they seem not to know their target demographic very well. (Sure, not all students are strapped for cash, but then again, not all students can go out and spend $30 on a passive Mini-DP to DVI dongle when $30 can be stretched out into a decent amount of basic groceries.) Or maybe we’re not the target demographic. Maybe the Apple Store on campus is less of a store and more of a carrot dangling from a stick. Or maybe the power of a brand name is much more compelling to other people. Or maybe Apple sells more product at expensive, private colleges, and the store here is just an afterthought. I don’t know. No matter what the rationale, I wasn’t going to pay Apple prices for a DVI dongle. Monoprice sells a cheap imitation for about $10 with shipping. It gets the job done and hasn’t broken (yet), so I bought that instead and now I have $20 left over to spend on more important things, like ice cream.

So I booted up the Mac, logged in, and started exploring. I was expecting another Eureka moment here. I was expecting at any minute to find some fundamental way in which Macs differ from their PC counterparts, but I haven’t found one yet. Yes, Mac OSX is odd, but it’s odd like a new keyboard or a different brand of peanut butter; it’s something that doesn’t take very long to get used to. The operating system is very easy to learn, especially if you grok another UNIX (or UNIX-like) operating system.

Some thoughts:

0) Mouse movement is so smooth!

1) I found out later that it uses only about 10W of power when idle. Whaaaaaaaaat. It also runs very cool and quiet. I can’t hear the fan unless the Mac is doing some serious number crunching.

2) This was the most powerful piece of computing hardware I owned until I put together my Windows 8.1 PC a few days after I got the Mac.

3) I have to question the wisdom of putting a 802.11 wireless card and a Bluetooth receiver inside of a metal case. Yes, the bottom and back of the Mac Mini are plastic, but if you’re like me and you set it on top of a metal desktop tower in the corner…oops. Fortunately, I don’t need the wireless capabilities. I just jacked it into a gigabit LAN.

4) I feel like I now own a status symbol. Not the Mac itself, but the dongle. It forever brands me as a Mac user. Sure, a few other manufacturers have started using Mini-DP, but by and large, they seem to be associated with Macs.

5) This is the first time I’ve ever owned all three of the “modern” desktop/server platforms. I have Windows PCs (7 and 8.1), Linux servers, and now, a Mac desktop. Embrace the diversity! When Skynet comes and takes over all the PCs, we’ll be able to fight back with the Macs!