Over the years, “Nerd Central”, as my office was once known, has slowly gone from 3 computers, 2 monitors, 2 printers, a television, surround sound receiver, a small mixer to manage the sound output to one set of speakers, and a huge random assortment of other electronics down to just a single desktop computer and xbox with a single monitor and computer speakers, and the 2 printers (one inkjet, one photo)

and now that setup has been slimmed down to pretty much the bare essentials.  computer, monitor, printer, and 360.

Since this pic, some books and other assorted stuff fills in the empty shelves, but its working well so far.  When I work from home, I can pull out the shelf above the keyboard, put the laptop there, and plug it into the monitor and network, and use the laptop keyboard and mouse separately from the desktop.  It would be nice to have a usb+dvi kvm switch so I could use just one keyboard and mouse…It also looks like I could get a much bigger monitor to fit inside there, that would increase my productivity immensely!

There’s also a small shelf up against the wall (behind that door) that has some other assorted stuff, including the photo printer.

The nice thing is that when it is all closed up, it looks rather clean.  I’m sure it will get a lot messier inside, but at least I can close it up and keep little people fingers away from all those tempting buttons and blinking lights.  At this point, it doesn’t lock, so I’m thinking about adding a little lock to the top, so that Easy can’t open it up. 

I also had to go back into the crawlspace yet again to run cat5 to that wall so that I have wired network access there. Wireless is fast, but it isn’t gigabit fast like everything else wired in the house.

So where did everything else go?  Over the years, a lot of the “headless” stuff, like the webserver and the home media server have migrated to the garage, where the fiber comes into the house.  The old CRT television was recycled years ago.  A bunch of the books went to my office at work, I’ve kept some, recycled a huge amount, and have 2 stacks to go donate either to the library at work, the library, or whoever will take them.  A lot of the other stuff is still in the process of being thrown out or being recycled. 

About the only thing we don’t have a plan for so far is the huge collection of bobble-heads we have.  There are shelves along two whole walls that are full of mariners, brewers, and assorted other bobble-heads.  There hasn’t even been space for the 2 we’ve gotten this year!

Updating my office, again! was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Friday night planning session. just me, some notebooks, a tape measure, and a roll of thin mints.  the little notebook is my construction projects one, the big notebook is one I do other stuff in.  The metal template is for drawing phone software user interface elements, but I was mostly just using it as a ruler and straight edge.  I originally designed it without a center divider and having fixed shelves, so I’m glad I slept on it before starting it.  I think this way turned out a lot simpler.

The carcass, and the face frame on top.  The carcass is 3/4” birch ply, the face frame is whatever oak home depot had.  the back cleat is cut at the center at 45 degrees to make it a “french cleat”.  You screw one half of the cleat onto the wall, and then other half of the cleat gets attached to the cabinet.  that makes it super easy to install and remove.

tongues and grooves! grooves and tongues! this always takes forever to set up, but once everything is ready, things go pretty quick.  Getting the dado at the exact right height to make those tongues exactly centered and the right size took forever.

done!  the windows are plexi, with the back sanded to make them semi-opaque.  The inside of the cabinet is stained, the outside painted “sweatshirt gray”, the same color as the walls of the theater room.  We decided on the gray color, as it would hopefully make the shelf blend in and seem smaller than it is, instead of black (to match the other furniture) or white (to match the trim.) Painting is always my least favorite part of these escapades.  I’d much rather be doing the rest of the project than any of the painting.  I used to dislike staining things, but now that is sooooo much simpler to me than painting.  And I think that most of the stains smell better than latex paint, too.

You can’t see it, but the sides and center have shelf pin holes for adjustable shelves.  I had to buy a jig to do that, so the jig and the self centering big that went with that were the one new tool I ended up buying for this project.  I kindof wish I would have gotten the shelf pins that have the fancy sleeves, as the holes aren’t super clean in the plywood.  Next time

here it is, installed.  I still have to make some shelves to go into it, but that’s just a bunch of straight cuts, and maybe some biscuits.  If I’m feeling fancy, I might use the router to route little slots for the shelf pins to fit into so the shelves can’t slide out.

I might also have to find some super rough sandpaper and scuff up the windows a little more, as from the picture above you can still mostly see into them.  With the overhead lights off (they’re on for the picture), you can see a lot more than normal, but it’s still a little too clear. 

I also have to find some hardware for the doors.  I was originally looking for knobs the same size/shape as our entertainment center, but since this cabinet is a different color, it doesn’t need to match exactly.  With the really tall doors, it might need some thinner, taller pulls instead of knobs too.  we’ll see what I can find around… With the area in the corner, I’m thinking about putting some hooks/hangers on the left side, to hang xbox/ps3 controllers or something in that hidden space between the cabinet and the wall.

Project: Theater Cabinet was originally posted at John's Random Review.

If you see somethinng missing or broken, let me know!

Hardware upgrade, websites (mostly) back to normal. was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Before:	After:

For more details and more pictures, follow the jump!

We’ve never liked the “gold” look of the old mirror doors, and once we repainted the room and put in new carpet and trim, they just didn’t look right. So we started looking for some frosted “by-pass” doors, as they’re apparently called. We found some we liked at a door store, but they were about 1 1/4″ thick, heavy (solid wood+glass), and $449 a piece. We would need 4 (thats 1796+tax!), and special mounting/install because they’re so heavy. While looking at them, i told laura that i could make 4 doors myself and it would be cheaper even if i had to buy tools! She was doubtful, but she at least let me try! So while off at Lowes one weekend for some other thing, i bought a couple pieces of 1″ (3/4″) select pine boards, and a small piece of plexiglass to see if i could make some prototypes and see if i could actually do it.

I tried a couple different ways of making fitting them together:
1) a groove down the entire length of each side, with rails with a tongue on each end. It worked ok, but i didn’t like how how it looked and how i’d have to fit the glass in.
2) mortise & tenon, with a rabbit along the inside edge of all 4 pieces to set the glass into. I didn’t have a mortiser or a tenoning jig, so for the prototype i just used the table saw and dado setup to cut a quick and easy tenons, and used the drill press and router to make the mortices. it was a little more complicated than just a groove, but i liked it a little better.

I was was going to try to do a third, using matching router bits like you’d use to make cabinet doors, but i’d have to buy a better router (i probably should do that anyway if i’m going to make more stuff).

Prototypes

I settled on the mortise and tenon route. I bought a tenoning jig for the table saw to do that a more correct way, although mine were simple enough that i probably could have done it by just using the dado and lots of different passes. I don’t know that it would have been any less work, and plus its one more tool i learned how to use! I was looking for a mortising attachment for my drill press, but it looks like most of them are made for either specific drill presses, or the generic ones work with bigger/floor standing ones. So for the mortises i ended up making a little jig and using the drill press for the start/stops of the mortises, and then my little router table with a straight cutting bit take out the space between. Which technically makes them not square mortises, but hey! i tried squaring them up with a chisel, but it was going to be a lot of work that nobody would see, so i quit that. Although if i were to make more things like this, i’d probably shell out the cash for a little dedicated mortiser.

Nothing about making the doors was that hard, but because i was making 4 doors, and each door had 2 pairs of pieces that were mirrored images of each other, i did have to do everything 16 times. But that was a good excuse to set something up, run a test piece until it was right, then lock everything down with guides and clamps so that it was like a little assembly line. It was basicly just busy work, repeated over and over and over. I swear i spent all day one saturday running pieces through the table saw on the tenoning jig. 8 pieces x 2 ends x (2 cheek cuts + 2 shoulder cuts + 2 face cuts + 2 side cuts) and i don’t know how many that is, but that’s a lot! Then its just some gluing and sanding!

The windows are giant pieces of plexiglass that i sanded on one side. Which is where new tool number two comes in: a random orbit sander. On the prototype i used the little mouse sander we have, and for a piece that’s only 14×20, but the windows were about 69×20 and would take forever with that little sander! The belt sander went too fast and made obvious sanding marks in one direction, so i needed a random orbit! Cutting the plexi was a little complicated because the sheets are pretty big and bendy, and i didn’t want to break one accidentally. I used masking tape and cut through that to avoid chipping/cracking the plexi and it worked great, but man can a cut edge of plexiglass be sharp! i had lots of little nicks and cuts from doing the windows. After cutting it to the right dimensions i removed the plastic backing from which ever side looked worse, and then sanded it a few times with 120 grit, wiped it off, then sanded a couple times with 220 grit. it worked pretty good. it was interesting how much static electricity sanding the plexi generated, though. after taking the plastic of the other side, it would pick up almost any dust that was in the air, and you could feel the static just holding your hand near the plastic.

To hold the windows in i had some 1×2 pine that i rounded over the edges, then cut off a 1/2″ strip to make trim. and then i rounded over the edges again, and cut off another 1/2″ strip off of each side again.

Painting sucks

and then came an insane amount of painting. the painting was the worst part of the whole project. There was only room in the garage to do two at a time, so i sanded everything, then primed one side of each door. then let them dry. then flip them over. then prime the other side. let that dry. then stand those 2 up, and get the other two down. then prime one side of each, blah blah blah. then sand everything again, then paint everything. then sand everything again. then paint everything again. yaaaaay! Then after they’d dried again i did a very light sanding to clean up any little things here and there.

Then it was just a matter of dropping in the plexiglass window, and cutting the trim pieces to fit, nailing them in to hold the plexiglass in place. The mounting hardware was pretty simple, screw a track piece to the closet door opening where the original doors were, screw some brackets with wheels onto the doors, and hang them.

Done and Done!

All in all, including the supplies for prototypes, new tools, wood and plexiglass for 4 doors, and paint, i spent less than $500. It took me about 4 weekends, although it wasn’t full weekends, it was a few saturdays, couple hours sundays, etc. And about half of that time was painting, but even my hourly rate would still cost less than what the tax and install costs of those other doors would have cost!

Project: Closet Doors was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Before	After

You can’t really tell much from those, but its much better!

What i did on my Labor Day Vacation… was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Before	After!

For more pics and stories, follow the link!

When i bought the house, there was a rickety red deck off the back of the yard, partially surrounding an old hot tub. The deck was not in very good shape, in fact, the house inspector recommended having the owners replace it before the sale. Instead, they cut some price off of the house. The deck survived for almost 2 years, although you could make it rock and bounce if you got enough people to stand in the appropriate places.

At one of the parties when we had a fire in the fire pit, a group of us actually broke the stairs off and started burning them. That was the beginning of the end for the deck. Later that summer, my brother came out and the two of us took the old deck off the house and cut it up, and threw it into one of those huge construction dumpsters. We found a LOT of old concrete underneath, basicly buried under the deck so nobody could see it. We also found a towel and a volleyball. Jimbo, being Jimbo, wondered aloud what would happen if we were to hit the volleyball with the sledge-hammer that we were using for demolition. He bet that it would pop, i bet that it would make the sledge bounce back up and hit me in the face, so he should get ready to run inside and call 911. I was the closest to being right! It did bounce back, but i figured that would happen, so i kept it from rebounding all the way to hit me in the face. Ah, good times. This kind of thing was just one of the reasons that i wanted dad to come out and help build a new deck. after all, the volleyball is still sitting on the ground in the back yard!

Before jim and dad came out, i took measurements, did some drawing on paper, took a picture of that, and then mailed it to Jim. He then used his M4D CAD SKILLZ to turn it into a 3d rendering. He did a real final drawing here with autocad, i still need to get that version from him.

Mad Skills

Jim and dad arrived on sunday night, and took a look around. We plotted and planned, and dad had some really good ideas of how to start and what to do and what we’d need. I had to work monday, so while i was gone they pushed the old hot-tub off the slab it was set on, took measurements, put up some strings, and did some general planning. Jimbo took that info and started doing cad, to figure out precisely what materials we would need.

Tuesday morning we went out and started collecting materials. We got all of the pre-treated lumber, joist hangers, etc we would need for framing from Chinook lumber, piled it up in pops’ truck, and then headed home to start working. framing went pretty quick, and by the end of the day the framing was all done, and we started planning the stairs.

Taking a break while framing

Tuesday afternoon dad and jimbo started making stair stringers for the stairs. Wednesday was devoted to building stairs.

Lotsa stairs

Thursday was all decking. For the decking, we went with 1 1/4″ x 5 cedar decking. we got it all from the hockey rink at CedarBrook. Yes, they have a real hockey rink, and thats where a lot of the lumber is stored. Apparently back in the 90′s they had a roller hockey league there, and it paid for itself but didn’t generate enough money, so they started making cedar sauna’s and selling lumber instead.

we could’ve gotten more in there, i swear!

We also got some 1 1/4″x6″ decking from lowes for the stairs. we’d planned those out at 6″ width before we realized that not many places carry it. So the decking was 5″ instead of 6″. Thursday we got the stairs finished, and started the first couple rows of decking on the real deck.

Friday was all laying decking. I had to work friday afternoon, so i only got to do decking for about half the day. Friday night i had to go pick laura up at the airport, so i worked that afternoon until i had to go down to SeaTac. On the way back from the airport they called and said they were all done, and to pick up some brats/burgers for dinner. They started the grill, we hit central market and got some of the biggest brats i’ve ever seen. We had a nice little cookout, then hung out by the fire to tell stories of decking and hear stories of Oz.

The END?

How I spent my wife’s summer vacation… was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Construction? This weekend i did my first real carpentry project ever. I built shelves and drawers for our kitchen pantry. If i wasn’t a huge fan of the New Yankee Workshop i don’t think i would have even known where to start! I never took a shop class in high school, but i did help my dad build some things back in junior high/high school (i tried to get out of that as often as possible though!) I wish i would have paid more attention then! I think i used almost every tool that i own this weekend!

The one thing that you never see on tv is how long it takes to set up some of these things to get them just right. I’ve seen good old Norm use a dado blade on a table saw a billion times, but i’d never actually used one until this weekend. not to mention that my table saw didn’t come with an insert (throat plate?) for a dado blade… so i made one! I had some 1/4″ plywood for the drawer bottoms, and i traced out the shape of the insert onto some scrap plywood and used a skilsaw to cut out the shape. I then sanded it to fit, drilled a whole for the screw that holds the insert down. Then i installed the dado to the size i needed, lowered the blade all the way, put in the new insert, screwed down one end, mounted a 2×4 to hold held one end of it down, then turned on the saw and slowly raised the blade to cut out a perfect new insert. I’m not sure how many safety rules that violated, but it worked!

For the 1/4″ cuts i needed to make, setting up the dado was a breeze, as its just the two end blades and a shim. But for other cuts, i needed to do 5/8″, which is an end blade, shim, 1/8″ cutter, shim, 1/8″ cutter, shim, another 1/8″ cutter, shim, and outer blade. getting all that stuff to stay properly aligned was a pain. the bigger pain was that the shims were just thin enough to sit between two threads on the arbor..so you couldn’t move the next blade flush with the previous one. And after doing most of the dado work and going back to a standard blade i realized i had a couple more 5/8″ cuts to make… and somehow after putting it all back on, one of the shims i used was a different size, so the 5/8″s was like 1/32″ off, so i had to take it back apart to find the thinnest shim and replace it.

The old pantry, full of stuffs	The old pantry, destructed
the beginning	with some shelves

The final product!

I now know why the projects on the new yankee workshop have a little segue like “a little more sanding and i’ll finish up tomorrow…[fade out]…[fade in]Welcome back. I just started this morning by….”. Because projects like this take a lot of time! just setup and measuring and cutting and test fitting and setup and on and on! I made a few mistakes here and there, a couple bad cuts (the saying should be measure 11 times, cut once!) but we had plenty of extra of everything i needed so the mistakes weren’t trips to home depot or anything! For my first real project i think it turned out well!

My first REAL constructioning! was originally posted at John's Random Review.

I built my first thing over the last couple weekends. I use the term “built” very loosely, as in this case, “building” meant routing one edge of a piece of oak, painting it, and screwing some brackets into the wall.

I was originally going to make the brackets, in fact i used the jig saw to make one, but then couldn’t find any keyhole anchor things that were the right size, and while looking for those at home depot, i found metal brackets that match the brushed aluminum style of other stuff in the office.

Having the table saw was nice though, as it gave me a large stable work area to clamp the piece down to route it! So now i have a nice shelf on which to put my growing collection of bobbleheads. 4 Favre’s, 3 Ichiro’s, 1 Cecil Cooper (another on the way!), 1 Yount, 1 Uecker, 1 Sexson, and 1 Dwight Shrute.

Click the pic to go to the flicker page for my bobblehead panorama shot. Here’s a link to the whole set with a couple other pics.

Bobble-shelf was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Since the FIOS guy was going to have to, in all likelihood, drill a hole in the wall to install our super high speed innerweb, we were going to have to move everything in my office. Since we were going to have to move everything in my office, we decided to paint my office, too. Once the office was mostly empty, we saw how horrible the carpet was, so we looked into redoing the floor with new carpet, or maybe some laminate floors. We settled on some blue colors to match the world map on the back wall, and some “hemse” laminate “click” flooring from IKEA.
To see how it all went, follow the link!

Before Carpet Bare floor fiberboard layer new floor stuff!

At first I was a little hesitant to try to install some wood (woodlike?) flooring ourselves. I’ve heard stories ranging from “it was easy” to “oh my god we screwedup so bad and had to pay soemeone else to fix it!”. I got all the good information you can find from google, and found some interesting results, and a couple other blogs that installed flooring and had lots of good tips. We also saw that IKEA sells flooring, and not only is it cheap, but it is made by Pergo, so it isn’t cheaply manufactured. Apparently, the guys at IKEA tell us, that Pergo makes it in their specific colors/styles to match their furniture, so you can only find those colors/styles at IKEA. We also were fortunate to be at IKEA while they were doing install “demonstrations”, so that was helpful too. It was a 10 minute or so demo of installing it, cutting it, etc, and it answered a couple of my questions without even having to ask them. They bang on the floor with some tools to show that you won’t scratch it or ding it without really trying. They also have their flooring all over the store with signs on it that say “50,000 people a year walk on this floor” to advertise the durability, so it couldn’t be all bad. At 99cents a square foot you can’t really go wrong! One strange thing is that this “Hemse” flooring we got does not appear anywhere on the IKEA website. At the Seattle store, they told us that they have a lot more items in stock in the store than the website shows, and more than what is in the catalog. In this day and age, that seems a little odd. I can see IKEA not wanting to ship most of the stuff they make, but you’d think it would all be on the website for reference! So we bought about 140 square feet worth (the office is roughly 11′x10′ plus a small closet), and we figured that would give us some extra when we screwed up. We also got some cardboard underlay stuff, and some foam padding. The cardboard is optional, but they recommended it since it was on a second floor, it would reduce some sound. What they didn’t tell us at IKEA, but was on the packages of flooring, was that the flooring needs to sit in the room for 48 hours before you can install it. So once we got it all home, we couldn’t really DO anything with it. The fiberboard didn’t say anything about 48 hours, so i put that all down, leaving space for the edges. wasn’t real hard, just lay it down edge to edge, leave gaps for the walls (they sell these little spacers at IKEA too, how handy!), and cut the pieces on the edges and at the end of the room to fit with a boxcutter. Was really easy. So monday night it was finally 48 hours, so we went to start installing it. We were really surprised that the fiberboard had curled up and was bubbled up everywhere. We tried laying down one row of the flooring, but with the fiberboard curled up, the floor bubbled up too. So we took all of the cardboard stuff and tossed it in the recycle bin. So we layed down a layer of the underlay foam stuff, and started laying down flooring. On monday night, we got through about a third of the room. On tuesday night we had a slow start. The first row we were going to do was the one that started inside the closet that had to have a notch cut out, and inside the closet it was narrower, so it had to have a long section cut out of it. So that took us a while to get perfect, then we got rolling… Until we got to a whole box of flooring that was misprinted. All 10 pieces (about 30 square feet) had a stripe down one edge, the long way. Hypothetically we could use 3 of the pieces for the last row, where we’d have to cut some off, but we still needed the other 7 pieces to do the rest of the room. So we used up the rest of what we had, and scheduled another trip for IKEA for wednesday after work. because any new stuff we bought would have to sit in the room for 48 hours before we could put it down….Thursday we had kickball, so we didn’t do any work, and friday we went out, so we decided to finish saturday. So we’d recommend that you open up every box of flooring you get and look at all of it before you start (or before you leave IKEA!) so that you don’t have to go back. All saturday we worked in the office, putting in the rest of the flooring and putting in new outlets, trim, etc. The last row was a big pain, as you need to cut it lengthwise, but we managed! having a table saw would have made it take like 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes, though! Putting all of the furniture in took a long time too. Since i had everything out, i could re-arrange, clean up, rewire things, and maybe get rid of some of the junk that used to be in there! Now that everything is back in there, it all looks so much better!

Updating my office! was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Specifics after the jump! bonus points if you know what “famous person” HiroProtagonist is. :p

I would have used my own xbox live gamercard, but i don’t have a 360, so i don’t have any interesting status to see.

I got the idea from xfire’s mini profile and seeing live’s gamercards all over the place. I like the xbox live look better than xfire’s default profiles, but i’m hoping stuff like this will make the xfire crew look at a couple little things it could do to make this easier for users. Especially since the xfire client has skinning support, why shouldn’t the mini profiles? If they turned the profile site into an xml / soap / something service, this would be super easy, and nobody would be wasting bandwidth downloading the whole profile page and parsing out stuff.

I got the code for scraping the xfire profile page from Jason Reading at http://customsigs.free.fr. He has a whole bunch of utilities there to make profiles and all kinds of cool things from your xfire data. The code that i wrote is now hosted there, since i started from Jason’s stuff.

The gamercard driven by your xfire stats from your profile page. My code uses same setup, syntax as the xbox live one does. Unlike the microsoft one, there are only links to your xfire profile and not to the games themselves, because the xfire profile site doesn’t have any info or urls for games. The icon mouseover does indicate your week/alltime playing times for each game.

Examples

Parameters

script:

• xfire_card.php.
  See CXS Custom Xfire Sigs for the official source and README

required:

• username – xfire username

optional:

• style – either “gold” (default) or “silver”. this goes with the gold/silver status of live members and changes the color of the top.
• avatar – url to image to use as avatar. note that this is in a url, so special chars should be url encoded.
  the code sets this image to 64×64, so smaller images are scaled up by the browser(like your xfire standard avatar, game icons) or large images scaled down to fit.
• css – url to cascading style sheet to use. by default, uses microsoft’s standard gamercard css. again note urlencoding
• link – url to where you want clicks on your avatar to go.

Possible Improvements

• Make the script output as an image. Many people have complained about live’s iframe gamercard,
  and many online solutions exist to get image versions or flash versions to embed into websites, sigs.
  This is probably pretty easy, as the background is an image in the css, all that is required is drawing the text parts.
  Images remove most hyperlinking, so that’s a downside there. I think thats why the flash versions exist.
• Make more things clickable. right now clicking goes to your xfire profile, but externalizing the link would be trivial.
• get xfire to publish this stuff through xml or soap or something so we don’t have to parse html. thats
  just wasting bandwidth for us AND for xfire.
• get xfire to use bigger images for games. the 16×16′s are getting scaled up and look goofy.
  alternately, write a small script in php/etc that would smooth scale on the fly and cached the scaled versions
  alternately, get bigger/custom images for all the games, and use those instead of xfire’s

My XFire “Gamercard” hack. was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Our paper mache Bobblehead halloween costumes were the best halloween costumes EVER! About 40 hours of work, several weeks worth of newspapers, 2 giant balloons, 20 little bottles of paint, 5 lbs of flour and some hot glue make a pretty good costume! More details and pics inside!

We got the idea after seeing some guy in a giant Ichiro bobble-head costume on Ichiro bobble head day at a Mariners game. He was wearing a giant one that looked awesome!

I spent a LOT of time and made a huge mess doing the mache. We used some giant balloons to do the head, and around 6-10 layers of mache on the whole thing. We had one minor/major problem, though. Since the balloon was so big, we had some problems with the size of the balloon changing with the heat in the house. During the day when it got a little warmer inside, they expanded a little. This is where the problem starts! Since part of the balloon was still wet, the dry part did not expand, and kept the balloon in the round shape there. But the wet part of the balloon stretched out to allow for the expansion of the balloon! So they would have one weakspot that stuck out and made a goofy bubble. we had to let some air out of the balloon, get the stretched part wet with mache, and smooth it back down. I even popped one of the balloons inside by accident, so i had to blow up another one inside the partially dried shell and then continued mache’ing over the original shape. The first picture i have of the mache process is this one, where i’ve put plastic wrap on the top part so that i can add a removable hat made of mache that will fit perfectly. It is also the first pic that gives you a good sense of scale, with me holding it up in front of my body.

Here you can see the ears mostly done, and the nose in progress. The ears are cardboard from cereal boxes cut into the ear shape, with rolled up newspaper taped on to make the ridged shape. The ears had a flap edge that was then taped onto the head. Then the whole thing was mache’d over. The nose is all paper. Newspaper folded into thicker paper, then folded to make that shape, taped on, them mache’d over. You can also see the hat, mostly done. the hat layers are all there, as well as a button on the top made from lots of paper mached and shaped by using a cut down sour cream container to make sure it stayed round as it dried. Note to mom: there is no “news” in this picture! The “huggies” box in the background is for one of laura’s projects: diaper cakes

After the heads were dry, we then started painting them. I hung them in the garage, and used a couple cans of white spray paint primer that we had around the house. Having a flesh colored spray paint would have been awesome, but we didn’t see any. We didn’t look real hard though! Its amazing how much spray paint a couple newspaper balls will soak up!

After priming, we then painted them with those tiny little bottles of acrylic paint you get at the craft store. We didn’t get any big bottles because we had no idea how much area the little ones would cover, and if the colors would be good. The skin tone colors we found turned out pretty good, though. The bottles seem to cover a large amount of area when you don’t need them to, and like 5 square inches when you only have one bottle! All in all i think we used about 20 bottles, many flesh/hair colors, and a handful of assorted other colors for eyes, lips.

After painting up the heads, it was time to finish the hat. This is the original Mariner’s hat. The front has the M’s compass rose logo, but for some reason, the compass is printed at a slight angle though. The back has another compass rose overlayed on the with the Seattle “S”. The side has the new era flag logo on it.

The hat is made from the paper mache’d base, then with a large piece of cardboard to make the rim. i got the cardboard wet with one layer of mache, then bent it and taped it to the base. I then put several layers of mache on the rim and the edge to make sure it became one big pice. Painting the details of the hat were pretty complicated. It took me probably about 4 hours total to do the whole hat. And working with something that awkward shape and size, while sitting on the floor can be killer on your back!

The almost finished hat. This was before i did the red threads. With the red threads on the ball it looks pretty awesome.

The finished products, complete with costumes!

At work, as part of our annual halloween party, i won the prize for best costume! a $50 best buy gift cert! The best part was that most people didn’t know that the hat was removable. I had it on forwards for most of the party, and then took it off because it was getting heavy (and its impossible to drink a beer with that thing on your head!) When the prize part started, i had to put it back on, and this time i had the hat on forwards. At least one person remarked as i passed by, “Wasn’t the hat on the other way before?”

Paper mache Bobblehead halloween costume was originally posted at John's Random Review.

I have written 3 plug-ins for Asheron’s Call using decal; one which tracks monsters you kill and “trophy” items you recieve, and submits it to a website (Trophy Hunter), another which acts as a shopping cart when interacting with players who are running special “Trade Bot” plug-ins to act as vendors (Bargain Hunter), and one which tracks Player vs Player kills (PK Hunter). This article covers some design and implementation details that third plug-in, PKHunter.

Background

One feature that exists in almost any form of multiplayer game is some facet of “player vs. player” gameplay, or “PvP”, where players directly attack each other. Commonly, it is also known as “player killing”, or “PK”. In most games this aspect is optional, meaning that players cannot attack other players unless that player has flagged themselves somehow, by completing a special quest, or checking a checkbox somewhere in the game’s interface. However, most of these games also have specific servers where player vs player is always on, so that players have no choice. In Asheron’s Call, this server is called “Darktide”, abbreviated simply as DT. Because players who are “PK” appear as red dots in a player’s radar, the players are commonly called “red”, as well as servers of the PvP only type being called “red” servers.

Unlike many games with PvP, Asheron’s Call has no in game rating or ranking system of player killing activities. Because I had already written one plug-in which tracked player vs monster (PvM) activities, i decided to expand that out to another plug-in that tracked PK activity and would attempt to assign some kind of ratings to players.

How it works

Security details omitted

Figure 1: client side details

The plug-in uses various facilities within Decal to watch the network stream going from the client to the server. When it sees special “Player Killed” message go by, it looks at the UID (unique identifier) for each person involved. If both of these UID’s resolve to player characters, the plug-in adds that time and those two user UID’s to a list. Every few minutes (or by pressing button in the UI) and when the player logs out of the game, the plug-in submits that information to the PKHunter website.

Figure 2: PKHunter UI

The client plug-in also has a few other functionalities, including a list that shows the players own kills and deaths, as well as other player vs player kills that they witnessed. “Witnessed” is used lightly here, as a player may not have actually watched a player kill another, he might have just been near enough for the AC server to send the “Player killed” packet to that player. The AC client itself may filter that out, so the player might never be informed of the event. To see some details about the AC protocol, as reverse engineered by players, see Example these (out of date) insanity inc protocol docs. You might want to right click and “save as” that baby, as it’s around 675k!

Figure 3: server side details

The website does more than just serve up pages to users outside of the game like a regular website. It also has several scripts which are used by the plug-in to validate users, submit results, and retrieve player info to display in game. The website is written in entirely in PHP. Some of the PHP scripts are used by cron jobs to regularly generate static html that is used for the front page and some other high traffic pages to avoid them going to the database for no reason. The PHP scripts that handle submissions do the bare minimum of work, doing some very basic security checks, and then dump the rest of the submission into the database and immediately return to the client. This attempts to minimize any delay within the AC client itself.

The service is a java application which runs 24/7 on the database server. The service processes the raw submissions from the client at its leisure, parsing the xml, validating them, and culling any duplicates that were submitted by other players. The service takes each submission in turn, looking up each player involved, computes the rating change based on each player’s current rating, and then updates each player.

The database is a simple MySQL database, with only a few important tables: One holds submissions, one holds processed and validated kills, and a third holds player details and statistics. A few other tables are used for bookkeeping, site statistics, service stats, but aren’t interesting enough to be discussed here

Technologies used

Client side:

• “Decal” plug-in: c++

Server Side:

• Web site: PHP
• Service: Java
• Database: MySQL
• OS: Currently Mandrake (now Mandriva?) Linux. Because the rest of the technologies used are cross platform, I can set up the server on almost any operating system, though.

Some statistics

Original Release: PKHunter 1.0.0.1 10/20/2002
Number of Releases: in just under 3 years, only 5 updates, the last of which was 11/24/2002.
Number of “Characters” in the Database: 186,152. This does not imply “users” of the plug-in, only people who have been witnessed as a killer or victim.
Number of “Plug-in Users”: 73,519. This is player characters who have submitted results.
“Unique” Users:15,203. This is the closest to actual “users” that i can get with the information i track. I don’t track anything specific enough to identify people having multiple accounts or anything like that.
Users submitting results in last year:4100
Number of kills tracked:3,334,216
Number of kills in the last year:1,108,350
Website hits per month:235,485
Website bandwidth per month:1.61 GB
Website hits YTD: 1,539,861
Website bandwidth YTD: 9.74 GB
Electricity consumed by servers: 1.21 GW. kidding. thats from back to the figure. But probably a lot!

Future…

The current system only tracks killer and victim, but a lot of people have complained that the person who gets the “killshot” is not necessarily the “killer” that has looting rights.

What i’d like to do is add extra stuff, so that the system can find the corpse created when a player dies, get details from that (text on the corpse indicates who was the actual “killer”), and have the system track both “real” killer, and also have an entry for the “killshot” player. This would allow some more statistics like kills:killshots, to see if people are real PK’s or just are ganking people at the end .
I’d also like to switch back over to an actual “ladder” style rating system instead of using the “modified” glicko system i’m using now.

PK Hunter architecture was originally posted at John's Random Review.

It all started with this macintosh plus that i got off of ebay. I had seen things online with
people turning macs into aquariums, which i’d seen online, and in the book “hardware hacking
projects for geeks” by scott fullam. The plus i got on ebay was still functional, and it came
with 2 keyboards, 2 mice, and 2 external hard drive enclosures (if you want one of those, send
me an email, because i’m only gonna hack those up for some random thing too!

Here’s a shot of the insides of the mac. Since the case is the only thing i need, this all has
to go. but i don’t want to do too much damage, as i want to mount a new monitor inside of
this, i need the screws and screwholes intact.

Since putting another motherboard into a mac case has been done like a billion times
before, i wanted to put a whole computer into the case. I want people to think
it is a working mac! Well, people who wouldn’t know the difference anyway. But i’m not
going to leave a tiny little 20 year old monitor in there! I’m wanted to go high tech!
so i found this nice little 7″ widescreen lcd to put inside!

But since the new monitor is not 4:3 like the old, it doesn’t fill up the entire hole left
by the previous monitor. So out comes the plexi! I disassembled the LCD, took the face frame
off, and cut a matching hole in the plexi. I then epoxied the frame in, and sanded everything
down to prep for paint.

Here it is prepped, and after a few coats of paint. Not an expert at the old spray paint, so
if you look real close you can see the eggshell thing going on. Most of this frame isn’t
visible when it is attached to the case, so it isn’t too bad. I thought about cutting out just
a hole the exact size of the LCD, but i’m not enough of a modder to relocate all the buttons and leds
on this thing!

Here’s the monitor mounted in the case, and all of the stuff that is going inside! hopefully
those boxes are mostly packaging, because it doesn’t look like all that will fit… Here’s the
parts list:

• motherboard: MB GIGABYTE GA-K8S760M SIS760 RT (newegg.com)
• cpu: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Newcastle (newegg.com)
• heatsink/fan: oem stuff that came with the cpu
• power supply: ENERMAX EG285SX-VB(W) SFM MicroATX 270W Power Supply (newegg.com)
• memory: CORSAIR Speed 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) x2 (newegg.com)
• DVD: TOSHIBA SDM1912-TA Beige IDE DVD-ROM Drive (newegg.com)
• hard drive: who knows? it was in the closet and not plugged into anything

Here’s a good compare/contrast of the old mac mb and the new gigabyte one. Interestingly, they
are almost the exact same size! there is a BIG problem coming up, but you can’t tell from this
pic. if you knew the mac internals, you might be able to spot it right now, though.
Hint: which ways are the 2 facing?

This is one of the details that you just might never notice, but i thought it was a pretty slick
touch. The signatures of a whole host of people are molded on the inside of the case! In this pic,
steve jobs’ signature is plainly visible right in the center. oddly, its all lower case. never
knew that before, but then again, i’ve never gotten a check from jobs, so i wouldn’t know.

The original mac motherboard was actually mounted to the metal frame in that first pic, and that
metal frame was anchored to the front portion of the case. I can’t use that frame, because it
takes up too much space, so i needed to find a motherboard tray i could mount the new board to.
My first idea was to reuse a slide out tray from one of my other cases. The problem with that is that
the tray was way bigger than the motherboard and case, and because i don’t have any tools suitable for
that hardcore of work. So i decided to just use plexi. i drilled some holes and mounted some
metal motherboard standoffs in the plexi.

I then mounted some on the inside of the case that i could screw this down to. I left the original
blue shielding (or whatever that is!) in the case, and just screwed through it.

I then mounted the motherboard to the tray inside the case. In the second pic, you can see what
i was talking about in the pic comparing the sizes of the 2 motherboards. The original mac mb
was about the same size and shape, but rotated about 90 degrees, taller than it was wide. in all
of my original measurements, i’d kinda run into this, but i neglected the space that the monitor
would take up inside the front of the case, and some other math.

I fabricated up a little box out of plexi to attach to the back of the case. The io cutout fits
right in there, so that works out pretty slick. After some sanding to round off the edges and
smoothing out the epoxy, i painted it up. it looks pretty decent, but since its the back, nobody
will ever see it anyway!

After all that, i put in the chip, heat sink, and fan, so i could see where i could mount the
powersupply. its a microatx job thats pretty small. It turned out that mounting it to the top
would be the best place, i could cut out the back to allow air flow and power cable mount, and
a spot at the top near the carrying handle that is the perfect place to mount the fan and a grill.
I also marked out a spot on the bottom to cut out and mount an 80mm fan for intake. the bottom
of the case has little feet, so there’s some room for airflow underneath. I also fabbed up a little
bracket to mount to the dvd and hard drive, which also turned out to be a good place to mount
the pc speaker.

Everything mounted up inside. You can see that the only way to get access to the DVD is to pop off
the front. I wanted to make the bottom of the front flip down, but there was no room to mount
the dvd horizontally there with the cpu fan in there. Since i plan on running linux on this thing,
i don’t need to use the CD for much, except in some rare cases, so taking the front off isn’t too
big of a deal.

You can kind of see it here in this picture, but i also fabricated up another thing, a place to mount
the power and disk LED’s, and a place for the power and reset switches. I stole all of those from
the case i planned on gutting the tray from. The old disk slot turned out to be a greate place
to hide those. The switches are tiny little black push buttons that were pressed originally by
bigger buttons on the original faceplate. the faceplate also had a plastic mount for the led’s,
which i cut down to be flat. I then glued all that into another piece of plexi which was i then
painted black. when mounted inside the drive slot, it just looks like its all in shadow, and
you can’t see the switches unless you’re up close. You can’t see the LED’s unless they are on.
Plug everything in, turn everything on, and it all fires up! I then installed the free version
of Mandrake’s amd64 version of 10.1. I think. maybe it was just 10?

After the system ran for a while, i realized how loud it was. I have a shuttle box running
a db and web stuff right next to it, and its pretty quiet. this new mac box was supa loud!
so i went trolling the Ars case and cooling forum to find some quiet fans. What i found
was a slick looking zalman copper deal that looked like it should fit. so back to newegg for that,
and some slim 80mm fans that appear to be used mostly for cooling off video cards:

• heatsink+fan: ZALMAN CNPS7000B-CU
• case fan: ZALMAN ZM-OP1 80mm

You can see that the zalman fan has a long thing attached to it. its a controller to allow
adjustment of the fan speed from 100% down to however quiet you want it. Know what? there
is actually a PERFECT place for that in this case! the original mac had a contrast knob at
the bottom, which i had just hot glued into its original location.

The contrast knob only needed a little work, involving just a little cutdown of the knob on
the zalman device and some hot glue. I then glued that into the inside of the front part
of the frame in the knobs original mac location. put everything back together, and fire
everything back up. Thew new fans are so much quieter. It is even quieter than the
shuttle pc next to it! and turning down the knob makes an obvious difference in sound,
but since its so quiet anyway, i have that all maxed out.

Mac Plus database server! was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Updates to BargainHunter was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Mac Plus case mod was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Strategist was originally posted at John's Random Review.