Category Archives: normal entries
capAbility Games on the News!
We’re on the news! It’s only two minutes long, but features consumers from the Albany Center for the Disabled playing our game, Professor Kathleen Ruiz answering questions, description via newscaster, and an awesomely vague one-line quote from me. Damn right I laid out those constraints!
Upgrade Complete
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve switched to a new content engine – Pivot, to be exact. Hopefully, it’ll be better than Drupal was. Everything isn’t quite finished yet, though; I haven’t finished the layout, and I have yet to figure out how to organize my content such that it’s easy to browse and read. […]
Spaceship Parts
When I built the Atropos, I learned the valuable lesson that it’s difficult to create props (read: spaceship components) that look realistic. Since then, I’ve begun hording what I casually refer to as “spaceship parts”, which normal people refer to as electronics surplus or junk. In an effort of organization, I decided to create a […]
Plastic Canvas
When I get tired of programming and engineering, I typically turn to hands-on activities – it took programming video games for 40 hours a week to get me started in blacksmithing and metal casting. Since I’m up at school now and don’t have as easy access to forging space (not to mention that it’s currently […]
Metal Casting Recap
I started doing metal casting about a month and a half ago after reading about it on the internet on and off for over a year. The premise is simple: melt zinc (~787F) or aluminum (~1221F) in a charcoal fed blast furnace and then pour into a mold made from a mixture of sand, bentonite […]
Short Sword
After returning home for winter break and building a new furnace more suited to blacksmithing (pictures to come shortly), I crafted my first real piece of steelwork – a short sword. Made from the same stock as the chisel, it turned out much nicer than I anticipated, and, while not designed for cutting, has a […]
Insight Studio
I made this a while ago, but never finished it – I wasn’t sure exactly where to go next, and, I guess, sort of lost interest. It’s got a bit of function, however, and thus I’m releasing it to the world! Insight Studio was designed as a tool to assist in reverse engineering filetypes, such […]
XVRM Manifesto
What is xVRM? My original plans for virtual reality, code named VRM (virtual reality for the masses), outlined a simple virtual reality system. Featuring a homebrew magnetic tracker and a cheap projection screen, it would allow full virtual reality potential while staying flexible and inexpensive. However, not everything works as planned; the magnetic tracker turned […]
Virtuality Manifesto
Update (02/27/08): It’s been over a year since I wrote this article, and I just stumbled upon the “Virtuality Continuum”, which, described in a research paper authored in 1994, strikes me as being fairly close to what I imagined in the “Barthian Virtuality Gradient”. A brief analysis of the paper leads me to believe that […]