Showing posts with label About. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About. Show all posts

Sunday, October 28, 2012

ComputerCraft 1.46 Minecraft 1.4.2 Update



There's not much to go with this update, all this update really changes is that it is now compatible with the latest version of Vanilla Minecraft, 1.4.2. The only other change listed in the changelog is the addition of a separate tab for computercraft items in the new creative inventory mode that was first introduced in 1.3.2.

Download (this is Dan's adfly link not mine)

Blog post

Sunday, October 14, 2012

[How-to] Get Bukkit release and news feed


The website over at bukkit.org is very nice, the landing page is a news section with all of the news about the latest release of the server. But if you are like me, and many other people you don't want to have to visit the website just to check if there is a new bukkit release. Now the way that most websites fix this is with RSS feeds. And on first look it looks like the page does have a RSS feed, as indicated by the logo at the bottom of the page. But on closer inspection of the feed that it brings you to, it appears to be a feed of the "latest happenings" at the forums. This is alot more than what most people want, most people only want the RSS feed of the main page and the releases. The way that I found it was to inspect the source code, using firebug (firefox extension) and search through the document looking for "RSS". I found it in a javascript function, it was the second one listed.

http://dl.bukkit.org/downloads/craftbukkit/feeds/latest-rb.rss
 

ANVILS! (Minecraft 12w41a/b)


This weeks weekly chunk brings EXCITING new features to the minecraft 1.4 Pretty Scary Update! New in this feature is the Anvil, the anvil like its name would suggest is used for the repair of items like armour and pickaxes in minecraft. In addition to the repair features of the anvil, you are also about to "name" your items, if you wanted to you could rename your sword "Hrunting" (Beowulf  reference!) and it also allows for the combination of the different enchantments that are on two items. Of course to make anvil you'll need alot of iron, 55 ingots. And the anvil has a damage value, it appears to be a random feature at  the moment and has three different stages of decay. In order to use the anvil you need ALOT of experience. The anvil also has some more classic effects, it drops much like other blocks in the game, sand and gravel, but if it hits a player or mob it causes damage! This gives for a kind of ACME effect :D. Besides the anvil there aren't that many new features in this snapshot, nearing the release date (October 24th) much of the time is spent of bug fixing and getting ready for the final release.

Crafting Recipe (thanks to minecraftwiki.net)









Direct Link
Weekly Chunk

Changelog:
  • Added a new Anvil block for repairing, merging & naming items
  • Added an option for cape-owners to hide their capes ingame
  • Effects given by the Beacon will be less intrusive on the screen
  • Level-up sound now only plays every 5 levels
  • More bugfixes & tweaks!



0x10c Website update!


The newest game from Notch (Markus Persson, original creator of minecraft) 0x10c's website has received a nice new website! The website went from being general about the game to a word press blog format. On the new site, updated October 13, there are two new and exciting posts that will stir up alot of excitement among many of the 0x10c enthusists and shows that Notch has actually been doing lots of hard work.
The first post is a video of some gameplay of the current version of the game. The majority of it is just the player running around the ship shooting the laser. The video really shows off more of the lighting features of the engine that Notch is using than anything else. It does also show some of the features that the ship will have, asuming that the ship will be the same for ever. The video also shows some of features, like the 3d model of a person standing off to the side at the beginning of the video, it is unclear if this person will be in game on the ship or if it is supposed to be the player character model, considering the relatively high res and complicated 3d model (compared to minecraft) one can assume that this might be the player model. One other thing that I noticed about the model is that it looks like something out of TF2.

Some of the ship features shown off during the video include what is supposed to be the main component of the game, the DCPU-16 computers. The first one seen has lots of text of the screen, there is a year on the screen, it reads 1984. This could be seen as a reference to any number of things. The screen also reads as having a total of 64 kilobytes of ram with only 40 kilobytes being free. (right at the beginning of the video 0:01) He leaves the room and goes to what appears to be the stern of the ship (related to what appears to be the bridge, shown later) and shoots at what I assume to be either the power generator on the ship or the engine, there is no interaction with the object tho, shots fired go right through it.  Next the video goes to a window and shows what appears to be a planet with rings and at least one moon (both purple). The next part is the exciting part, he head to the bridge and begins to show off some of the more complicated features that are planned for the game. Throughout the video he looks up at what appear to be hatches in the roof, perhaps hinting at a ventelation or jefferies (Star Trek!) system through out the ship. The hatch in the bridge has a light hanging in it that shows off some of the very cool shader and lighting features that are currently in the game. He goes to the right most computer on the "bridge" and types in the command "crash" which does just what you would expect, it crashes all the computers, not just the one that it was typed into. The crash visual is just lots of random colors with different characters. The light given off by the monitors as the computers crash is, in my opinion, a very realistic effect. At the very end of the video the player gets caught in a pit at the bridge and shows off the jumping of the current engine, but is unable to escape the pit.

The next post, on the same day as the video is about the way that notch has decided to design the game, unlike minecraft he has decided to include the server portion of the engine with the single player from the beginning of the game. He goes on to talk about some of the latency and the problems and other things that he has encountered working on the multiplayer component of the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYojT0Xgt9Y&feature=player_embedded

Website

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Banshee 2.6.0



Today brings another release in what is one of my favorite and most over populated areas on Linux, the music player. Banshee has been around for longer than most, with it's initial release being all the way back in 2005. This new release brings many new features and bug fixes to the popular cross-platform music player.

An important part of this release are the features that have been added for Banshee's newest platform, Mac OS, in 2.6.0 they have added:
  •  Hardware support for USB mass storage devices
  • Handle opening files directly in Finder.
  • Use native file chooser dialogs for importing files.
  • Improve keyboard shortcuts.
  • Fix various volume issues and inconsistencies.
  • Switch to gtk-mac-integration and move to cocoa API.
  • Add debug and logging facility to OS X launcher. 
Some other notable features include the addition of Last.fm scrobbling support for recently played songs on iDevices (or compatible).

To install you can either compile from the source provided (ftp), or you can add the Banshee team ppa for Ubuntu compatible systems.

To install via ppa:
  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:banshee-team/ppa 
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install banshee



Friday, September 28, 2012

ALEKS Competitor

ALEKS Competitor

Today I started work on making a ALEKS competitor. Why? Because it needed to be done, they have ignored my complaints (and those of others) for too long, they need to know that we don't need them. This project that I have started on does not yet have a name, over on github I just used one of the randomly suggested names, that might end up being the name just for fun.

Features

So far I have made many features, the main site will be written in PHP and the questions and answers will be stored in XML format. The XML will be stored server side, and protected from the general public so that they can't just download the file and get all the anwsers. As of right now there are only 2 types of questions supported, multiple choice and fill in the blank, these can either be delivered all at once, 5 at a time or one by one, depending on how you write the delivery. There will eventually be a API, there sorta is one already taking shape for displaying the questions.


Planned Features

I plan to add everything that ALEKS has, all in good time right now I'm concentrating on the way that the questions will be written and delivered, the XML already has a format that for now serves it's purposes quite well.

There is no download but just cloning the repository into a php server directory with the php simplexml module installed and going to the "index.php" page should work about the same for you as it does for me.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Computer Craft 1.42

Changelog:
  • Ported to Minecraft 1.3.2 and the Forge mod system
  • Added Printers
  • Floppy Disks can now be dyed different colours
  • Wireless Crafty Turtles can now be crafted
  • All new textures
  • New Forge config file
  • Various tweaks and bug fixes
Download (mediafire)

Monday, September 10, 2012

1.3.2 Minecraft Archive

This post is obviously a bit out dated, this is just to start a series of what I'm going to call my Minecraft Archives, for every major release (maybe snapshots too) I'll post one of these with a link to both Mojang's official download link and one hosted on mediafire or the like.

Official Mojang Download Link

Rehosted minecraft.jar file (mediafire)

Sunday, August 26, 2012

About

About this Blog

I have previously tried to start writing a blog but have eventually let it decline and stopped writing, I hope that this time will be different. In this blog I will write about whatever it is I want, be that about Linux, current events or anything else that I have an opinion about. I hopefully plan to write about one post a day (ha that won't last long) or at the very least have one idea for a post a day.

About Me

I am a Senior in high school (as of August 2012) and am planning to go into either computer engineering or Computer Science as a major in college. I am currently taking a AP Computer Science class in my high school and have already taken a Honors Computer Science class last year. I have been personally using Linux as a desktop OS for about 2.5 years as of the post date. I am by no means an expert in Linux but know my way around the wheel. I have never spent much time on any social networking sites like twitter or facebook, they all seem to be much ado about nothing in my opinion. I have run Cross Country on my school's team for all of my time at high school, I have never ever been any good at it but it's still something to do.

 My time on the Interwebs

There are basically 5-6 websites that I go to on a semi-regular basis.
  1. Facebook - I only go into the "Secret" and "Closed" groups to post, I don't make anything public. I also don't post any pictures of myself, I usually just use a picture of RMS :D
  2. Imgur - Been using it longer than most, and introduced it at my High School where it has become quite a "thing"
  3. 4chan - Mostly a lurker, I find that I laugh at some of the things on that website much more than I should. I frequent the /b/ /g/ and /wg/ sections.
  4. OMG!UBUNTU! - Great website to get news on Ubuntu and Linux in general. I honestly check this website about 2-3 times a day. There usually aren't that many posts (especially on weekends).
  5. Youtube - I have tried to start a video channel here many time but never ended up sticking with it. I watch RoosterTeeth and alot of the KassemG stuff and related channels, one of my favorites is elithecomputerguy, I used to always watch his "daily blobs" but then school started...