Idea of the week, formulated:
It is very common to see CRPGs dominated by so-called FedEx quests — “Take this package and deliver it to X.” or “Go to X and tell him Y.” These are commonly considered bad form, since the characters are supposedly trying to save the world from the Bad Guy, which are also the two foremost RPG cliches. Saving the world and the Bad Guy, that is.
But why not do it the other way round? Let the characters actually be delivery agents. Let them go on missions for their delivery agency, picking up side jobs and saving the world not because they’re noble heroes, but because failure to save it will mean a definite loss of business and they just happen to be in the way, being delivery agents who poke their nose everywhere where they’re wanted and not wanted. Let alone all the possibilities of suspicious, malicious and otherwise infamous packages to be delivered, people taking their anger out on the messengers and other interesting things. And just imagine this sort of scene:
The Great and Terrible Miderian was preparing the last step for his world domination plan — the summoning of the evil daemon Arklezijuba. His loyal minions were ready for the ritual, the magic circle has been drawn, the sacrifice spread on the pentagram shaped table, the sacrifical dagger sharp and clean. Only one thing was missing.
Suddenly, someone knocked on the door.
— Federal Expresss delivery service! A delivery of one magic crystal for mr. Miderian, sign here please!
Don’t you like it already? :) I think I’m going to try it.
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You’d think it would be easy to have perfectly synchronised time. After all, time’s all around us. 28 sattelites do nothing but shout it out into the ether. The GPS sattelites, I mean. Expensive atomic clocks floating above our heads meant to do nothing else but tell time so we could tell the place.
It is kinda easy. All you need is a GPS receiver and ntpd, right? The NTP daemon knows about the GPS receivers and can get time information from them. Wrong. You also need a serial port, and these days, it’s a rare commodity, at least on my server motherboard which only has one. And it’s taken up already by the UPS too.
And you also need to actually connect the GPS to the serial port and make sure it’s supplied with power cause batteries will only last it nine hours at most.
So in the end it comes out to:
- A serial GPS cable with a car lighter socket plug for power. ($35)
- A USB to serial converter ($20)
- A car lighter socket, from an extension cord or something else. ($10) (it might not be optimal, but I’m too stingy to cut up a $35 cable, so it’ll be necessary.)
- A 12 volt power supply ($10) (actually, Garmin eTrex wants 3 volts and not 12, but see above)
$75 just for cables. And that not counting that I have the GPS receiver already. It’s either that or making my own Garmin connector, which is not that easy since they use a highly unorthodox plug, unlike anything I’ve ever seen on any other device. You literally have to cut one out of a brick of plastic and set up holes for contact springs.
Grrrr…
- Make a poll script which would be embeddable into a Wordpress posting. (easy to do with current filter functions)
- Make the script react to trackbacks and pingbacks, treating them as votes according to a predetermined protocol. (like ‘the posting must start with “I VOTE YEA”‘ or something)
This is probably going to need it’s own table in the database to prevent fetching the -backed postings over an over, but it could be the next killer app.
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Косплеить конкретных персонажей мне похоже бессмысленно, это верно.
Но у меня в голове копошится интереснейшая мысль — косплей персонажа абстрактного. То бишь — правильно — униформа!
А в Full Metal Alchemist она очень красивая… И хорошо смотрится на нескольких совершенно кубических персонажах. Следовательно сшить ее под меня можно вполне.
А еще я вспомнил про часовой завод Молния который берется изготовить часы с крышкой по желанию заказчика. Интересно, если я вложусь в маленькую партию часов, ее у меня раскупят?…
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Sunday, February 22, 2004
Способ 1. Прочитайте с экрана GPS-приемника точное время. Используйте деления на компасе изображенном на экране приемника для определения высоты солнца точно в полдень. Это даст вам широту. Метод вычисления долготы оставим как упражнение для читателя.
Способ 2. Идите к ближайшей автотрассе. Поймайте первую попавшуюся машину и предложите водителю GPS-приемник за то, что тот доставит вас в ближайший пункт назначения, местоположение которого заранее известно.
…
Еще способы есть? :)
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Sunday, February 22, 2004
Seeing an electronic workalike of the original Enigma machine reported on Slashdot, I wonder…
It’s certainly totally useless as it is, since you wouldn’t be encoding messages you’d transfer through paper or email. For this purpose you would probably use something like PGP/GPG - even for paper messages it works just fine by printing and scanning ASCII armored text segments.
But there is one area that I’d find a different encryption method much better - that being SMS messages. We know for a fact they get registered, most probably logged, and most probably studied. Securing SMS messages could be important for me, but most important would be being able to encode and decode them in my head. And handling all 33 letters of the cyrillic alphabet while getting encoded into the 26 letters. Distinction between uppercase and lowercase could also be used to store information.
It doesn’t have to be public-key, but it has to be strong encryption. Hmmm…
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Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Imaginary girlfriends for sale on Ebay. More on the site that does this fulltime.
I wonder. I suppose that a conversational AI to replace that kind of a relationship is well within reason. After all, I’m sure it’s made of a library of form letters anyway, isn’t it? The only problem would be the girl with the webcam, ‘both clothed and nude’, but that’s also solvable one way or another. A single server could run hundreds of such accounts!
I smell a business.
But I always like to make computers work instead of me. :)
P.S. Update after a little thought: What a way to get ready to Valentine’s day, huh.
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