Memories of the Mega Force toy series by Kenner recently popped back into my head. Premiering in 1989, the line had two different warring armies and didn’t specify which was “good” and which was “evil”. I’ve always been a fan of giant sci-fi vehicles (mechs and whatnot). I think that’s what the real draw for me was; I mean this thing had planes… that you could land planes on! The smallest units were diecast metal so they had a nice weight to them and didn’t feel cheap and plasticy like many toys from that era. Pictured above was my favorite vehicle of the four we owned. Its helipad is spring loaded and would pop up at the push of a button. The mechanism withstood a lot of abuse and all of the large vehicles featured some sort of action like this.
Of course, I couldn’t remember the name of this series the other day so I IM’d my parents to check the toy box. They actually found the checklist that used to be included with each toy and sent me a scan: front and back. You can find more pictures of the toy line on Toy Archive and here’s one of the commercials.
One of the birthday gifts I received was an unopened package of ALF trading cards a friend had picked up at a thrift store. It was a funny gift, but after opening them—ingesting the gum, YEARGH—I wondered what to do with them. I searched around for some magnetic sheets and found this package of 12 8.5×11″ sheets to be the best deal. They’re $10 (unfortunately $17 after shipping). I stuck the cards to the adhesive backing and trimmed them out with a hobby knife. It was really easy to work with and I think they’ll hold up great. I’m now looking around the apartment for other things to make fridge magnets out of; I found my Nevada license, old business cards, and maybe I’ll pick out some Magic cards.
The video above shows a clever use of the Nintendo DSi’s front-facing camera. It tracks the user’s eyes and redraws the scene accordingly. This is the same trick used in Johnny Chung Lee’s Wii display hack. He was using IR instead of facial recognition though. Read the rest of this entry »
With the arrival of StarCraft 2, one of the major staples of professional gaming is in for a shake up. It won’t just be the way the game is played though. The way tournaments are handled and broadcast is going to change.
Last night we celebrated my birthday at Hacker Drinkup. It was a massive turnout with a lot of fun surprises. I quipped on Twitter, “Things that should be denim: jeans. Things that shouldn’t: everything else. #denimbustiersrsly?!” Pictured above is the denim hat Pinguino made me in response (my mannequin is wearing it now). You may remember that this isn’t the first time a tweet has generated an unexpected gift. Erin and Pinguino decorated cupcakes with fondant so they looked like our crew (they’ve made hacker cookies before). The final treat was a pair of functional frosted laser boobs inspired by my flyer. In addition, I got a new tshirt, some ALF trading cards, and some sweet socks.
This weekend @SanMo (original post) started freaking out and reposting the same tweets over and over again. Code superstar Chris Finke wasn’t available to help me track down the issue so I reanimated Chris Nelson for assistance. My initial thought was that Twitter had changed the way it served mentions. retweet.py stores the status_id of each status it retweets in a sqlite database so it doesn’t repeat itself. Browsing the database, I noticed that the two tweets it was repeating were the first with ids above 10 billion (a recent milestone). Chris pointed out that running sqlite> SELECT MAX(status_id) FROM retweets; Returned the id ’9663742534′ and not the true maximum. The table that retweet.py creates has two text columns, one for status_id and one for the timestamp. Changing the status_id column to integer causes MAX() to work properly (I’m not sure what the technical reason behind this failure is). To get retweet.py running again, I did the following (via Chris) from the command line:
# sqlite3 sanmo.sqlite
sqlite> CREATE TABLE retweets2 (status_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, timestamp TEXT);
sqlite> INSERT INTO retweets2 SELECT * FROM retweets;
sqlite> DROP TABLE retweets;
sqlite> ALTER TABLE retweets2 RENAME TO retweets;
sqlite> .quit
That will shift all the old data into a new table. The initial database creation routine needs to be fixed in retweet.py and will probably be in version 1.3. The fix above works for me but your mileage may vary.
Last week Blizzard launched one of the most anticipated beta tests ever. StarCraft 2 has been in various playable forms since its announcement in 2007, but this is the first time players have had access to the game outside of special events. The original StarCraft was released in 1998 and has spent the last 12 years as one of the most popular multiplayer online games. The game is played professionally in South Korea where games are broadcast on three different channels dedicated to professional gaming.
This is a fun little trick I learned while traveling this weekend. When I’m not on my home network, I often use ssh -D to dynamically forward all of my traffic via SOCKS proxy to a remote server. This weekend though, I found myself trapped in a network with only an HTTP proxy to access the internet, so I couldn’t even check my email via HTTPS. The solution was to use connect.c to relay SSH through the HTTP proxy. I temporarily added two lines to my SSH config that proxied all host connections through the HTTP proxy.
Google rolled out Buzz recently and it’s started messing with my inbox (my Google profile). The first issue is that by default it puts an item in your Inbox every time someone comments on something you’ve posted or on something you’ve commented on. This item looks like a new email and I get an alert on my phone for new email. My group of friends is already used to commenting on Shared Items in Google Reader so I’ve been getting these emails all the time. I created the filter above in Gmail to take all of these items, which start with Buzz:, and tuck them away in the label ‘bz’ (‘Buzz’, like ‘Inbox’, is a reserved system label).
If you absolutely hate unread counts, you can go a little further. You have the option of hiding the Buzz label in Gmail’s Label settings. This will tuck it away next to Spam in the more labels drop down. That way you can check it at your leisure instead of being compelled by the unread count.
UPDATE:
If you just want to turn Buzz off, you can find it at the bottom of Gmail.
Last week Blizzard launched one of the most anticipated beta tests ever. 
