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Shapeways, Part II
Well, I got another shipment today (well, it arrived on Friday, I haven’t been home in a while). Ripping open the Shapeways box, I discovered the beautiful second half of my Riven Dagger Order: the steel and gold-plated daggers.
They’re gorgeous. The level of detail is amazing, even the tiny little loop I put on the top (for necklace-wearing!) is preserved.
My goal for the gold-plated dagger is to get some form of tiny gold chain, and wear it as a pendant. The steel one is just an awesome thing to add to my collection.
Unfortunately, the edges are a little more wobbly-looking than I would like, but I did violate the recommended minimum thickness to make them, so I was expecting it. It’s not really enough to even see unless you inspect very closely. The other problem is the bumpiness, which is very prominent, giving the daggers a rough texture. They feel like they had cheesecloth pressed into them when they were still ‘wet’. I know this isn’t at all how the process of printing them works, but it’s what goes on in my head.
That being said, I am extremely happy with these. The rough texture makes them feel a lot more authentic, actually, considering that the Moiety were the ones making these, and I’m guessing they didn’t have the technology to really smooth out their metal. Again, I’m not putting them up for sale, but if you’re interested in acquiring one of your own send me a message.
Also yes, I appreciate the irony of a Moiety dagger made out of gold, Gehn’s material of choice.
Shapeways, Part I
I recently discovered an absolutely awesome website, www.shapeways.com. Upload a 3d model, give them some money, and they will send you a printed out, real-life version of your object. The best part is that you can print in a number of materials, including plastic, sandstone, steel, gold-plated steel, and even glass. You can then open a shop and sell your models for a markup, and actually make money.
There’s some pretty impressive stuff on the site. Check out the impressive models (some mathematical, some just interesting) by Bathsheba Sculpture, some awesome D&D dice sets, and a thriving puzzle-building community. The opportunities afforded by a service like Shapeways are virtually limitless. Custom figurines for board games, inexpensive prototyping, you name it. It’s true democratization of the manufacturing industry, and it’s only going to get better over time (as the costs of production drop, as they always do).
Finding out about this service, I immediately did what any respectable Myst-head would do, and launched Blender. After about 3 hours of work (and a somewhat frustrating cycle of uploading, being told there were problems with the model, fixing the problems, and re-uploading), I got a respectable-looking model of my prize, and had managed to get the price down to under $15. I placed my order.
Now, about 2 weeks later, I finally received part 1 of my shipment! Take a look:
As you maybe can tell from looking at the photos, the resolution at which the models are printed is extremely high. You can see places where faces differed in height by a fraction of a millimeter, and the the outside of the ring is clearly segmented into faces. Additionally, the model has a very rough texture, and feels somewhat fragile at the tip of the blade (where a bit actually broke off in shipment, as I expected to happen).
The dagger isn’t going to be put up for public sale, due to copyright issues, but if you’re interested in acquiring one for yourself, send me an e-mail and I’ll see what I can do.
That being said, I am so happy with this model. It came out really, really, well, and I anticipate many bills from Shapeways in my future.
More to follow!
Pictures For Sad Children Game
Inspired by this comic, I decided to make a simple little Flash game. Check it out:
It Breathes “URU” Again!
Today, Cyan Worlds announced the return of Uru Live, now called Myst Online: Uru Live Again. It’s like MO:UL was, except that it’s being run by Cyan, and it’s now donationware (meaning totally free, but donations are encouraged).
You can set up an account and download the installer from the official site. The servers are being beaten into a pulp at the moment, but you should get in eventually.
MO:ULA is currently Windows-only, but initial tests seem to point to it being completely compatible with Crossover on Mac OS, as Uru:CC was. More on that in a later post.
Update: Yes indeed, the game runs smoothly in Crossover. Besides the obvious network lag present in all versions of the game, I didn’t encounter any sort of slow-down while playing last night. The one problem is that the audio doesn’t appear to work all the time, ambient noises end up as small buzzing noises and such.
Setup couldn’t be simpler though. Open the installer file with Crossover Games, and let it do its thing. Even the PhysX install goes smoothly.
Update: I’m hosting a mirror of the installer files on my server here to help Cyan out a bit.
- Basic Downloader (not recommended)
- Full Installer (Much larger, much more likely to work)
Longest Comment Ever
Now that’s a comment. Weighing in at well over 1600 words, this is the longest comment this site has ever received. It’s a rant about Apple, inspired by my review of Picasa for Mac. A word of warning, however – the commenter appears to be somewhat off their rocker, especially towards the end there.
I keep wanting to tweet that Twitter is down, and I have no way to tweet, but then I realize that since Twitter is down, I can’t tweet. Hence this odd little tweet-like post.
For those who aren’t following me already, I’m zib_redlektab on Twitter.
4 Years!
Today, in 2005, I wrote my first post on this blog. Basically a completely nonsensical post, simply a basic introduction for what eventually became this website. When that post was uploaded, this site was extremely different. Not only was it at a different url (mystotaku.blogspot.com), it looked entirely different, and even had a different title (Myst Otaku). The blog has been through a few different iterations since then. First, it moved to a different blogger site, with a different title – Love, Life and Linux, then eventually my tinkering broke the site entirely, and I migrated to wordpress. That site was extremely similar to this one, it even had the same title – A Series of Tubes. I eventually migrated here, where I plan to stay for a long time.
What ties all of these sites together is the actual content, which I have brought with me on each move, so I count this as the 4th birthday of my website, even though the title and url have changed many times since its inception.
Happy Birthday, Blog!
Silence
Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Not for lack of things to write about either: I saw Up in 3D (loved it), I played around with a Palm Pre (enjoyed it), there’s a new iPhone, etc etc. I’ve just been incredibly busy lately. That being said, school is ending next wednesday, so I’ll have much more time to post about fun things. In the mean time, check out Little Wheel, one of the best Flash games I’ve played since Samorost.
Bowtie and Coversutra – Match Made in Heaven
I’ve posted about CoverSutra before, specifically about its appearance. I didn’t like the default look of the search bar or desktop album art, so I found a collection of modifications that created an interface I liked.
A few days ago I discovered a program with similar abilities to CoverSutra, called Bowtie. It provides a window which one can use to control iTunes, and the bonus of Bowtie over CoverSutra is its skinability. It comes with 11 skins by default, but by looking around the MacThemes Forums, one can find many, many more great themes.
I was considering switching over to Bowtie completely, especially considering that it’s free, but it lacked a few things that CoverSutra has, which I think are very necessary. The first of these, and the most apparent to me, is the lack of a ‘hide from dock’ option, resulting in it always taking up space on the dock, even though it’s a very small app, and doesn’t really warrant a dock icon. A menu bar item, like CoverSutra uses, would be much better for this kind of application. This inadequacy can be remedied, however, with a small app called Dock Dodger, which can hide any application from the dock and cmd+tab switcher.
The other feature Bowtie lacks is the ability to search through the iTunes library, which is pretty much the core of CoverSutra. Upon this realization, it became clear that running Bowtie and CoverSutra side-by-side was definitely a viable option. Using Dock Dodger, I have Bowtie hidden in the background, so that I can use its interface instead of CoverSutra’s desktop album art (the Bowtie theme called ‘Wet Floor’ is really good for this usage), while I continue to use CoverSutra as my main music navigator.
As a final note, I feel I should mention that up until Bowtie, I still used my perennial favorite utility, Quicksilver, for my iTunes-related hotkey needs. CoverSutra’s hotkeys work great, but I found that there was no way to get the CoverSutra notification under the menu bar to appear when using CoverSutra’s own hotkeys to change the song, so I refrained from using them. However, Quicksilver hotkeys can be somewhat sluggish at first, and Bowtie loads faster at boot-up than Quicksilver, so I recently moved my play/pause and next/previous hotkeys over to Bowtie, and my increase/decrease volume & rating hotkeys to CoverSutra. This setup has treated me well so far, and I’m very happy with it.
A Winner is You! (‘You’ being anyone who uses the internet)
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said last wednesday that if he is elected to the presidency, he will reinstate Net Neutrality for his first year in office. If you don’t know about Net Neutrality, it is a movement to keep the internet a level playing field for everyone, meaning that internet service providers (AOL, Comcast, RCN, etc) cannot block access to certain websites and give faster access to others. If this were the case, big corporations would pay ISPs to have faster access to their websites, and access to websites that cannot not pay up would be blocked.
This is obviously something that any normal person using the internet does not want. It goes against the first amendment to the Constitution, and would make it very difficult for websites like Zibland to continue to operate, due to inability to pay for good service like a website the size of CNN.com would be able to do. Senator Obama is apparently a very strong supporter of Net Neutrality, just another reason we should all be voting for him tomorrow.
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