T-P-L.com

So I haven't posted in a while .. so this is a quick update ..

I finished that FM4 Zenith model, I kinda hate how it stands, it doesn't hold balance very well, especially with the 'backpack' add-on attached.

I also finished the Portal Turret model. This one was a bit of a pain in the ass to put together, the side covers are made out of like 10 stips, and the legs just refuse to stay on properly. Overall I'm not really all that happy with it.

As a quick "for the hell of it" project I also put together the Zelda Pot. I'm actually quite happy with it, its small, fairly robust and it can hold pens.

Currently, I'm in the middle of building a MacCat Model. I mainly have a leg left to do, and then sticking the bottom half of it together.

I recently became interested in papercrafting once again. I used to love the stuff a few years back, but never did anything exciting with it. This time around I discovered the wonderful world of online papercraft templates.

I initially started off working on a Mad Cat model, it was printer with a random printer that was obviously running out of ink, so the model came out all weirdly colored. I worked on that miscolored model for a little while until I got a proper printer to print stuff out on.

After purchasing a pile of supplies and a cheap (but decent) printer I tossed out the work in progress on the old model, and began work on a new model, this time it was the Front Mission 4 Zenith (can't find a link to the source).

Anyways, I'm about half way into it now .. here is the progress so far:

From Papercraft

Just a quick note to anyone possibly looking for an updated version of my compilation, it's been moved to WoWInterface.com. Their interface makes it easier for me to publish it for more people and keep track of versions/bugs/feature requests.

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=7048

Version 2.2

• af_UnitFrames + addons
• FuBar_TrainerFu
• FuBar_HeyFu

• StellarUF

download TPC-2.2 here

A while back I created an Apple Dashboard widget for tracking time on SlimTimer. I never bothered to release it .. but then I saw a post on the SlimTimer Google Group so I decided to post it and have people give it a spin. This is an initial public release, please post bug reports as comments to this blog post for now.

download here

• update *

I got a request for a screenshot .. so here it is

The goal of this version was to shed any “visible” non-Ace2 mods. The reason? because they don’t save settings properly between characters .. I love how Ace2 mods all retain state between characters by default.

Download The Phantom Compliation 2.1 here

This version had a few big changes .. but at least I feel that its worth it for the convenience of standardizing on Ace2 mods brings.

Changes:

• GFW_ReagentCost – show prices of crafting materials
• Auctioneer – auction scanner and more
• ClosetGnome – equipment switching
  • Banker
  • Gatherer
  • OhNoes
  • Zone
  • Fishing
  • Mount
  • Switcher
• nQuestLog – quest minion
• Prat – chat frame enhancement
• simpleMiniMap – mini map enhancement
• StellarUF – unit frame replacement

• ColaLight
• AdvancedTradeSkillWindow
• CT_Core
• CT_MailMod
• CT_BuffMod
• ItemRack
• XPerl
• MonkeyQuest
• coolDown

I’ve gotten back to WoW .. and it didn’t take me long to need good mods again ..

a lot has changed with the Burning Crusade .. so a whole new set of mods was needed. I started at a familiar place .. so I took apart the Insomniax Recompilation (now known as the Mirage UI), but I was happy with even less of the mods .. so I also found the All Deuce UI. Combining those two, plus a bit more .. yielded something I could be happy with.

So .. here it is .. initial release of The Phantom Recompilation 2.0.

download here

• !OmniCC – cooldown count
• !Swatter – fancy display of errors
• AdvancedTradeSkillWindow – better trade skill frame with queueing
• AuctionFilterPlus – filter auctions
• AutoBar – automatically find food/potions/etc
• Bartender3 – total action bar replacement
• Cartographer – map replacement
  • Cartographer_Fishing – track fishing spots on the map
  • Cartographer_Herbalism – track herbs on the map
  • Cartographer_Mining – track mining on the map
  • Cartographer_Noteshare – share map points with people
  • Cartographer_Opening – track opening of items
  • Cartographer_Quests – track quest givers
  • Cartographer_Trainers – track trainer
  • Cartographer_Treasure – track treasure
  • Cartographer_Vendors – track vendors
  • Chronometer – track duration of spells
• ColaLight – saves item sale values
• coolDown – fancy spell cooldown display
• CT_BuffMod – better moveable buff list
• CT_Core – needed by all CT mods
• CT_MailMod – mass mailing mod
• DeuceCommander – a FuBar addon to manage just about every Ace2 mod
• EQCompare – compare items with current equipped stuff
• FishingAce – easy double-right-click fishing
• Fizzle – visual durabilty display on the character pane
• FreeRefills – allows to configure items to be auto-bought and kept at a certain amount in stores
• FuBar – a bar that can hold lots of usefull mini-mods
  • FuBar_AmmoFu – track ammo
  • Fubar_Auto_LootFu – toggle auto-loot
  • FuBar_ClockFu – show time
  • FuBar_DurabilityFu – show durability
  • FuBar_ExperienceFu – show experience
  • FuBar_FarmerFu – track item counts
  • FuBar_HonorFu – show honor
  • FuBar_ItemBonusesFu – show item bonuses
  • FuBar_MarkOfHonorFu – show mark of honor counts
  • FuBar_MoneyFu – show money
  • FuBar_NameToggleFu – toggle name plates
  • FuBar_NauticusFu – integrates Nauticus
  • FuBar_PerformanceFu – show performance stats
  • FuBar_PetFu – show pet info
  • FuBar_PoisonFu – show poison info
  • FuBar_ReagentFu – show reagents
  • FuBar_RestFu – show rested xp across all alts
  • FuBar_SpeedFu – show current running speed
  • FuBar_TinyTipFu – config for TinyTip
  • FuBar_TopScoreFu – show highest hit achievements
• GFW_AdSpace – shows info about recepies and where they can be bought
• GFW_DisenchantPredictor – predicts what an item will disenchant to
• GFW_Gemologist – on gems shows what veins they drop from
• GFW_HuntersHelper – on animals shows what skill they come with
• IDCard – shows items icon next to its tooltip
• ItemRack – allows to keep item sets, and switch/use equipment easily
• MobInfo2 – keeps track of mob/player health, and mob stats
• MonkeyBuddy – config panel for Monkey Mods
• MonkeyQuest – quest tracker
• Nauticus – zepelin / boat tracker
• oCB – casting bar replacement, movable/skinnable
• OneSuite – combines bags/bank/keyring into a simpler single window interface
• oTweaks – allows to tweak some settings (accessible via DeuceCommander)
• sct – scrolling combat text
• sctd – scrolling combat text (damage)
• sct_pethealth – sct pet health plugin
• sct_purge – sct purge spell plugin
• TinyTip – enhaced tooltip
• WitchHunt – spell alerting mod
• XPerl – replacement for all unit frames (player/party/target/raid etc)

Been a while since I did anything with my site .. since then .. I had SliceHost contact me about spam originating from my slice .. so I decided to finally ditch all the remaining php dependancies (since I figured it had to have originated from some hole in WordPress .. since I was running a bit of an aged version)

Anyways .. I'm now on Mephisto .. still working on converting things over .. I'd appreciate if anyone notices anything weird (broken links/images) mainly .. to let me know .. just a blog comment will do fine.

I still need to migrate my photo gallery over, I may just upload it all to flickr or something and be done with it .. not sure yet

(if you end up signing up for SliceHost because of me, please use my referrer link)

so I was gonna check my mail just now and came across this mildly humorous gmail error message

So I got annoyed having to use a cable to plug in my camera to my mac in order to get photos off the the Memory Stick PRO media that it uses, and decided to do something about it.

I already had a Memory Stick Duo (the tiny version of Sony's Memory Stick media) USB adapter, and I was pretty happy with it .. it was very compact and worked pretty good (even amazon.com sells it .. there's a link below to it in case someone decides to pick one up)

I noticed that the MS PRO and the MS Duo media have identical sizes of the connectors, just a bigger casing, so I went ahead and started taking the MS Duo reader apart.

In the final version, I ended up breaking off most of the top inner cover so the MS PRO media can fit, I kept the casing around the LED in the front, and the device still looks pretty reasonable when its closed.

One of the sneaky touches inside is a small cabinet door bumper sticker (I had a spare from one of my IKEA cabinets, but just about anything should do that has approx 1.5mm in height). This piece of rubber helps to press down on the media so it connects onto the contacts correctly, and adds a bit of friction so that the media doesn't fall out.

Anyways .. photos of the modified device are available in my gallery here.

Amazon.com Link:

.. So I’m moved at last .. took a little while to get the DNS to point through properly .. but all my services are now switched over to my SliceHost account. Now I just gotta stabilize everything and actually deploy something new.

(please use my referrer link if you choose to sign up for SliceHost

I’m tired of not being able to properly run rails apps on Dreamhost (not really so annoyed with their recent downtimes as just not being able to run rails properly .. don’t believe them when you see “fully supported rails” on their website)

Long story short, they have aggressive scripts killing persistent processes (such as fastcgi’s) .. so even fcgi rails apps end up slow .. since they need to boot up rails fairly often on lower traffic sites ..

I came across a post on the onrails.org blog explaining their switch to a new VPS based host called SliceHost .. I took a look, liked the idea of a $20/month VPS .. and am in the middle of a switch .. I’m slowly switching services over and settings up things on the VPS .. I switched my name servers away from dreamhost’s back to Enom’s so I regain control of their locked records .. so thats switching around the world as I post this.

I started switching all the svn repositories over, and I’ll be switching dev.t-p-l.com over soon .. so in the unlikely case of someone using them .. thats why they’re down =)

I’m also going to take a plunge and switch my email to gmail hosted .. should make things easier .. just have to ease in my users to the switch before I flip the name servers (I’m going to have to end up needing to find some gmail hosted notifiers for windows .. oh well .. shouldn’t be that big of a deal)

p.s. if you end up choosing to get a slicehost account because of reading this blog, please put my email address as your referer when signing up its: piotr/dot/banasik/at/gmail/dot/com (of course turn this into a valid email address, use my my referer link)

I get increasingly annoyed with game copy protections, I find is completely stupid that you have to have the disk in the drive to play the game, there’s a reason 100% of the data is already installed. The saddest part of all, is that this doesn’t really help, it won’t stop people who are really pirating the games, since its trivial to find a patch for the game that will remove this protection, all these protections really do, is that they hobble the legitimate user.

One system I like, is Valve’s Steam, you download all your games, no disk needed (but you can buy Steam games on disk so speed up install), once activated, the game gets added to your account, and you can re-download it anytime, all the games you own through Steam are there on your account, and you can uninstall/install them at will. Some people attack Steam because you need to be connected to the internet to play the games, I say so what, at least you don’t need to have the disk, or worry about the disk scratching, losing the disk, etc.

Recently more and more publishers have been signing on with Steam, I applaud that, an online distribution platform like Steam makes it so much easier to purchase the games, that I think in its own way prevents some piracy, since (it is my belief) that a lot of casual software pirates do it because of laziness, its just so much easier to download the game than to go to a store (and if its a new release, hope its in the store).

So at the end of the day, I don’t care how complicated you make the protection scheme as long as it doesn’t hobble the end user, the person who PAID YOU MONEY to use your product, I do not want to keep the damned Disk in my drive just to appease the copy protection, I don’t mind having some kind of an account and requiring a log-in to play the game each time. But overall, the major game publishers should come together and make an online game delivery system, similar to Steam perhaps (or use Steam, extend it, because I’m not sure how well what Valve’s got would survive when all the sudden all games are sold over it =)

Oh and another thing, something that may well even further deter piracy, DEMOS. Seriously, do you really expect people to buy your games because the box looks pretty? An investment of $70 requires a bit of good will from the seller, no a days its basically impossible to return games to stores for a full refund. If its easy to try the product, via a demo of say the first 2 stages of the game (this of course varies from game to game), then thus enticed a player will want to buy the game (or not, I guess, but that’s just an incentive not to make crap games). Furthermore, once the player has the demo, realistically they game maybe 25-50% of the game, it should be made easy to upgrade this demo to a full game, ideally even keeping progress in the demo towards the full game (assuming the demo was using the first 2 levels).

Now most of this applies to PC games only, console games, for those I have my own rant. Since most consoles right now have some kind of internet connectivity, and some have high capacity storage (Xbox, Xbox360, PS2 with the hard drive add-on), very much like Nintendo DS’s “download and play” feature used in stores to demo games, one should be able to download demos of games via the internet to the console, either that or simply subscribe to some kind of a demo disk mail-out from the publishers, because realistically that’s well earned marketing dollars, since they’re sending out demos to games, people who may well buy their games. So to all you game publishers, make it easy for people to TRY and BUY your product, through demos, trials and making your games download-able.

... so this website came down unexpectedly sometime recently .. it was just showing a white screen .. so I lost my patience trying to deal with it. Instead I have bought a DreamHost account, and migrated the website over. I’m still waiting for the dns changed to take effect, Shaw’s dns server’s have been slow as usual dealing with any changes, but the main site is now moved. While I was at it, I also converted my image gallery over to Gallery2, its just an overall richer gallery tool, and should work well to be able to quickly drop in images.

I still need to move a few services over before this is truely done, one of them would be subversion, the other will be mail. I’ve had my mail account forwarded to my gmail account for a while now, but my parents and my brother still have @t-p-l.com accounts.

A lot of things happened since I last posted, for one I upgraded my Wordpress install to the new release 2.0. With that I actually put in some more effort into the site too. The old image gallery is back, it can be accessed here, it has been redone with a Wordpess plugin called Lazyest Gallery, it sort of takes a simmilar approach as Mig, leaving it to you to arrange your photos in a folder hierarchy, and it’ll display galleries based on it. Another mod, Filosofo Home-Page Control allows me to not show the Blog page as the home page, making this into something more like a website. I use Fold Page Menus in order not to show all the page clutter. And to remove the classic Register/Login links on the sidebar, I use Admin Menu to instead display a bar actross the top of the site. And lastly, a small touch, links get prettyfied (by having icons added to external links among others) via Link Indication.