but then is it ever otherwise 🙂

I’ve been doing a lot of house related work as we get the upstairs and kitchen floors updated. Got to shingle the catio roof and deal with a few hanging details in the finished part of the basement as well.

I have been updating a couple of wargames that I’ve very much enjoyed playing in the past. I’ve bought the latest edition of Federation and Empire, a Star Trek (the old series) themed strategic board game that I owned the original version of, but never got a chance to play as it came out towards the end of my time in college and I never found the time.

I’m in the process of buying the updated pieces of the tactical game from the same company, Star Fleet Battles which I played extensively in high school and occasionally in college. I love the game though it is rather complex in its full form.

I’m hoping that as an ’empty nest’ parent I may find time and locate opponents for games like this in the relatively near future.

I also want to see what sorts of things I can put together as networked, computer managed games inspired by these old board war-games. I’ll probably do something completely crazy and impractical like building a virtual game table in VR as a sandbox project. Stay tuned and if time permits, things may happen.

Haven’t been doing any significant photography as there have been too many other things going on to eat up time and energy. I still need to post process photos from the British Isles cruise and many other things. I will get back to that stuff, just not likely any time too soon.

I have created a free level team DropBox account for team ‘NineCrows’ as a way to exchange larger items with people. Some friends we met on our UK cruise asked how to send pictures our way and, while I know it is possible to get them on the site here or email them, both can be limiting in terms of size and/or messy to set up. This DropBox may make hand-offs easier.

I still need to figure out the details involved in adding people to this team account so that shared access works as expected. Stay tuned on that front.

Lots of ways to move things around the web and I seem to be winding up with one from every column 🙂 Not a bad thing really…

We went to the 4:30 showing and the place was not particularly packed.

The movie itself seemed a bit confused about its plot and direction. The pacing was horribly uneven. The characters weren’t engaging and the direction of the plot was telegraphed far in advance and very clumsily.

There may be spoilers below the break.

Continue reading We saw Suicide Squad today and it was a bad as the critics claimed →

Things have become a bit busy lately, but just saw a review of the book at ars-technica (that I’m currently about a third of the way through) and clearly I need to finish it. Charlie’s stuff is generally a lot of fun and this one has a very nice set-up.

So our old Wii has died the death without resurrection (at least no time soon) and we’re looking at choices to replace it.

Alyssa is interested in Manga/Anime/Japanese games. I’ve been out of the gaming world for a rather long time and never had much to do with consoles but enjoyed casual FPS playing and some of the older RTS games back when I was buying them for the PC.

Options appear to be

• XBox One: This keeps things in the Microsoft camp (we all have PCs of some sort. Being able to play multiplayer with one person on a PC and the other on the console (if this is possible) would be nice. I’d love to try out TitanFall and Halo and so far the mix of games on the Xbox looks interesting. Alyssa heard from someone that Anime games are mostly on the PS (though Steam on the PC seems to have more than we found on the PS4). I think Lorna might enjoy games that use the Kinect for active gaming. It is though rather clearly the second place in terms of popularity in the US behind the PS4.
• PS4: Seems like the clear leader in terms of popular, current gaming consoles. As this is the current PS machine Sony is pushing it should be more future-proof than the PS3. I have the impression that it may not be doing as well in Japan as the PS3 and the list of Anime-ish games we could find that ran on the PS4 wasn’t that much bigger than what showed up for the Xbox One. It has a kinect-like accessory, but the camera is optional and expensive and I’m suspicious that this will mean that there aren’t many games that mak use of it.
• PS3: The PS3 seems to still be available online. The list of Anime games for PS3 appears to be much larger than what is out there for the PS4 or the Xbox One. It is a ‘last generation’ console though and even at the lower price I’d worry that new stuff won’t be written for this console and we’d be trading lots of current titles agains a dearth of future options.
• Gaming PC: I have most of the hardware to make this happen in hand already. The cases these systems are in aren’t the most portable (19″ rack mount chassis with full sized motherboards) but the systems are reasonably capable and with a small video card update can be very capable. This would cut us out of all of the console exclusive titles though. I’m no longer familiar with the sales chain for PC games either. I know that they’re no longer on store shelves. I have a steam account and there seems to be a lot of material there (and lots that is reasonably priced) so I’ll probably do something down this line in any case.

Opinions and advice are welcome. So far, every time we thought we had a clear choice made we came up short.

…came in the mail yesterday. I’ve loaded up the OS (one of several available Linux derivatives) and booted it up free standing.
Next I need to find the driver code I need to get the USB WiFi module I bought for it working with the RedHat derived OS that I loaded.

The module is from a company called ‘EdiMax’. The source from the provided CD failed to build last night (just a quick make to see what would happen) and a few web searches suggested that the chip vendor site had better drivers available. I’m going to take a look at lunch time and see if I can locate that reference again and download those driver sources.

The board looks like

and the adapter is tiny thumb drive sized

I just read a few more comments and it looks as if the quick road to getting this up may involved wired ethernet (which I cannot connect to here) and so tonight may be the earliest I can try this out.

I’m hoping in the long run to get moving on the RepRap build and perhaps use this board as the control computer for the thing. The Arduino handles all of the ‘fast twitch’ work and the R-Pi for WiFi and high level control. That could give a mostly free standing device which could be pretty cool.

Long first day. Aside from the HR stuff, found out that they use Macs for most desktop stuff. They hit the one OS that I have not had a reason to become even the least bit familiar with. Now trying to familiarize myself with the environment and basic system behaviors so I can get to the really hard stuff. Interesting times, gonna be some hard work in the near future, but should be interesting.

and looking at things I can do this coming week that will help with my Linux and Java refresher activity. I’m certainly hoping that there are no more surprises lurking before I can get started though.

I’m going to try to do some Java coding on the CentOs box that I’ve got running now. I also want to get it running some sort of RDP type protocol (VNC maybe) to allow remote access within the house (and perhaps from outside if I decide to open a firewall forward rule).

Still deciding what would be worth doing, still reading and getting things configured a bit better at the moment.

The state of New Hampshire has been slow in returning my background check information to Amazon and it looks like the ETA is next Tuesday so I’m likely to be waiting another week before getting started at Kiva.

I’m going to try to find out what version of Linux and Java they’re running so I can focus my pre-start investigations. If things don’t come through at the last moment, I’m going to try to spend next week doing some aggressive mucking around with Java on the Linux install I’ve gotten up and running here (CentOS).

Today I’m tidying up the office and getting things ready for some serious coding…