The Insomniac Coder

And this is why I don’t play on XBL.

According to this website, there are no less than 19 Turd Fergusons around the country. It is on the Internet, so it has to be true:  

My new project, glass domed park with four mall wings, three stories each, and a two-level train station. MCEdit schematics at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/591961/minecraft/schematics/mall.schematic

(Many thanks to CJN85 for helping me with this) Get MCEdit here . I am going to build a 21-block diameter hollow sphere. This method only works if the diameter is an odd-number.   1. Make a column, this one is 31 blocks tall. 2. The insertion point for your round brush, set to 21 blocks and with a different material than the column, is the next empty block above of the column. 3. Here's your 21-block solid sphere with its center one block above the original column. 4. I have extended the original column so it punches through the sphere. I also added two more columns through the centers so I have three columns that cross at the center of the sphere. This is why I picked an odd number for the diameter. These are also handy for moving it around later. 5. The center of the sphere, with the three columns touching. 6. I have deleted the center block and one above it. 7. This is the anchor point for my second sphere. Notice that the brush is now 19 instead of 21, which ...

From Secret Insignias From the ‘Black Ops’ World :

For laughing at this:

If you are having trouble with the flash overwhelming your macro shots, cut off the bottom of a Dixie cup and shoot through that. You will be shocked at the effect. Here are a couple shots of PJ’s favorite train, which is also the most painful thing I have ever stepped on (protip: never walk barefoot in a house with a resident die-cast toy train addict): These shots were taken in full automatic, handheld. The train’s face is about half an inch in diameter. The numeral 1 is about half an inch in height.

The newest addition to my Minecraft map from hell are four Obsidian monoliths using the same proportions as the anomalies from 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Made Contact. As I was finishing the third monolith I was wondering what to name the area. I was leaning towards two choices: 1. AT&T Plaza 2. The Arthur C. Clarke Memorial. Alex Esoterica was quick to point out that it was no longer possible to call it AT&T Plaza because it already had three bars, which is unheard of in the AT&T network. I guess I’ll be naming it the Arthur C. Clarke Memorial.

Image by danielhedrick via Flickr Almost everyone eventually buys some kind of food container that is designed to be heated in a microwave oven by first removing a metal cap, then placing a perforated plastic cap on top of the container. This is intended to allow the contents to boil up without blowing up the cap. This almost never works, which means you end up warming the item in phases to avoid it to blow up and splatter its contents all over your oven. Some genius, which I simply can’t find so I can give him/her proper credit, figured out a way around this: I am seeing a new cap design in some 2-cup portion microwaveable soups that has pressure latches molded into the perforated plastic cap. This gives the cap a much better lock than simply snapping it into place. It is a beautifully implemented idea, and their only cost was probably having to retool the molds used to make the caps. There are no moving parts, there are no other changes needed for the packaging. The problem...

Image via Wikipedia I just received a birth certificate that I ordered back in June from the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico . It took these paper pushers five months to laser print and stamp a piece of paper. They still owe me one for Ivette, I am convinced they will never send it. Worse, I was able to get the same piece of paper through their “expedited” service. That only took about three months for a ton of money more. Fail: I was able to file and receive a brand spanking new US Passport in a little over 5 weeks and without paying for any kind of expedited service.   I filled my application online, downloaded it as a PDF, printed it, took it to the local post office, they took my photo and collected the fee. 5 weeks later I had a passport book,  a passport card and they even returned my original documents.  I don’t understand how it is possible for a government under US jurisdiction to perform at levels only expected in third world countries . It is simply horri...

I had to go to my local (suspected) nazi war criminal practitioner of the dentistry arts to subject myself to a periodic lecture, torture session and tooth extraction . Lucky me, Dr. Szell was busy (and I joke, I love him to death, but 99% of our encounters involve a lot of pain, so I always relate our interactions to Dr. Szell in The Marathon Man asking Dustin Hoffman if “ is it safe? ”), so one of his associates took care of me. No lecture, no torture session, the man has the hands of a saint. On my way out, I saw this: Not exactly what you want to see right after a tooth extraction.

From http://sixrevisions.com/infographs/web-designers-vs-web-developers/ : Yup, it seems I picked the right side.

Image by pvera via Flickr I have a very simple rule for video games : I need to get no worse than $2/hour of entertainment. Above that, it is approaching the cost of a matinee movie ticket around here, which is already too expensive. What this usually means is that regular releases at the $60 mark need to give me absolutely no less than 30 hours of entertainment. Any game that does better than that, especially if it hits the $1/hour mark, is a complete success. I have games I have put 100s of hours into: Fallout 3 Fable 2 Oblivion Grand Theft Auto IV Saint’s Row 2 Forza Motorsport 2 and 3 Tiger Woods 2007 The Orange Box Dead Rising Borderlands Those games are the keepers, you just leave them around because in a worst case scenario of boredom you can pick one up and replay it once a year or so. 30-hour games are different. At that mark, either I have played through twice, or I played through once and there’s no incentive to go back even to finish the achievements. I kep...

Image by pvera via Flickr   Ages ago I had so much crap connected to my TV that it was an ordeal to find the right remotes and click on the right buttons in the right order just to say, watch TV or play Xbox 360. I picked up a Logitech Harmony 510 (middle remote in picture) for about $80, and after maybe 10-15 minutes of setup I was able to switch between modes with just one button. One button would switch the TV Input , turn on the right device, etc. The only device that never played along with this was the AppleTV , everything else I tried worked beautifully. That remote was great because it was simple. The device was simple, setup was fantastic, you simply specified the model number of your TV and whatever else you have and it did the rest. If it couldn’t do it automatically, it walked you through every possible option.  The Harmony lived a long and illustrious life, but its USB port died, and there is no way to program one of these except through the USB port. Al...

The damn box has been on the road for FIVE frickin days with no updates. I am expected to believe that a UPS drone picked it up at my local UPS store and it was swallowed by a special quantum teleportation device that spit it back out in Florida 5 days layer. Which is funny since their tracking/notifications engine is called QUANTUM. Seriously, UPS? What is worse is that the way that UPS charges for shipping, they had been too happy to offer me next day delivery for about 50% of the cost of the shipped goods.

  The main reason laptops are a bitch to tear apart is that laptop case design falls along two very common groups: The laptop has to look pretty (the Apple school of design), which means exotic manufacture processes that may make it very hard to design it for ease of tear down. The laptop has to sell really cheap (the ultra super mass produced generic design laptop), which means very common manufacture processes and parts designed to assemble easily. This means lots of plastic tabs and funny plastic overlays that you can break. Almost every laptop that you will run into will neatly fit into one of these two groups. The industry knows this, which is why any laptop sold with more than two USB plugs will have more ad copy dedicated to brag about ports than about performance. ExpressCard slots were expected to be the fix to the lack of expandability, but the problem is the cards are expensive when compared with their desktop counterparts. And now most new laptops sell with so...

  Lots of changes to the rail network, many in part to my sudden discovery of TNT mining in minecraft. There’s enough to justify expanding the first train station, plus almost all of the main lines are now run through tunnels instead of through the elevated walkways. This is also the first time I try to run a line all the way to the bottom of the map, which also reminded me what happens when you try to step off a mine cart with less than two blocks of clearance above (don’t try it). Now that I have a decent transportation network I can start planning on heavier development of the wide open areas on the west side of my map.

From: To Cheat or Not to Cheat? | CraftHub This is an argument I have been having with Alex Esoterica for over a week: what constitutes cheating in Minecraft ? I wasted a lot of time mining for resources, which after a while it simply becomes annoying. If you are playing in peace mode, and you are playing offline, and the game doesn’t have a goal, or any kind of achievements, then who cares? The whole idea is to have fun! The picture above is my first train central, which already has 6 out of its 8 rail lines up and running. Had I tried to do this by mining for coal/lava and hauling sand, it would easily take me an extra week that I simply don’t have. Using an inventory editor means I can concentrate in CREATING things in Minecraft, which is what appeals to me so much about this game. Except for using the inventory editor, I am playing the game as is except for two mods: better grass, and hacked trains. The better grass thing is simply aesthetical. As for the trains, I mastered...

From: Ducati Builds a Devil of a V-Max | Autopia | Wired.com This one is for Karla: Related articles Ducati Builds A Devil of a V-Max (wired.com) Ducati Diavel: Italian For 'V-Max' (ridelust.com) Ducati Diavel: bad to the bone (hellforleathermagazine.com) Ducati Diavel gets early unveil (autoblog.com)

  … and this is why people that write code for a living can’t stand posseurs spewing out nonsense about the next great web technology out there. Thanks to @morgajel for finding this video.

Image by pvera via Flickr From: Slashdot Entertainment Story | Has Christopher Nolan Turned the 3D Argument? This is actually a big deal because 3D was seen as the technology that would light a fire under people’s asses and force them into prematurely upgrading all of those HDTVs and Blu Ray players that were purchased during the analog TV phase-out. The problem here is that the powers-that-be had a great sales tool (the digital switchover ) but that now is officially over. So how the hell do they get people to buy more TVs if almost everyone has a new TV? Easy, convince them of the next must have technology. In this case, 3D. The problem is that 3D is nowhere close to a must have technology. Most of the people really couldn’t give a shit about it, at well not enough to tempt them into ditching their brand new TVs. Some movie studios went a bit batshit over the whole 3D deal because they thought they could keep driving people to the theaters, and to buy more TVs and Blu Ray ...

I am watching this really good (as in “Brilliant yet Cancelled”) show called Persons Unknown . Probably knowing that the show got canned is making me take a more critical look on the show, or maybe it is just annoying me. One of the things that bugs me is that the writers seem to be really good, but they keep falling short on the simple things, like for example things that would fall under common sense. For example: two people are in an apartment, two more people are pointing guns at them. One of the gunmen screws up (perfectly acceptable, they are after all criminals, and obviously not smart enough to “manage” crime instead of dealing with it hands on) and one of the victims manages to overpower one of the gunmen. The second victim uses this distraction to overpower the second one and right at the same time, a Deus Ex Machina : a third party walks in, with a gun, and ends the confrontation. What annoyed me is that when victim #1 whacked gunman #1 and almost split his skull, she di...