Wood PC -- Part 2: Beginning Construction

Now the fun stuff. Actually used my real camera for these photos, too.

This is all the stuff I bought:

• 12 feet of 1“x8” pine planks
• Black and Decker jigsaw, and some metal cutting blades for it
• Oak dowel
• Polyurethane/stain combo stuff, color of “American Chesnut”, with a brush and a spongy thing to apply it (wasn’t sure which would be better)
• Small squaring triangle thing (orange thing in the photo)
• 400 grain sandpaper
• A file, for metal and wood
• And some mothafuckin’ Gorilla Glue, who’s great powers I was oblivious to before I started this project

This is the pine stock I chose. Not the highest quality stuff, but hey, I’m on a budget here. Plus, I found some good pieces and only needed a very presentable 13” section for the front.

More or less, this is how it was going to be laid out.

So you know that drive bay I hacked out of the case in the earlier post (and is shown in the above photo)? Yeah, I trashed that bullshit. It was wobbly and terrible, so I decided to use this steel drive bay from my other old case instead.

I started the first cut, which was making the bottom of the case. I used two lengths of the plank, both at about 15”, and cut one to only be 4.25” wide, with the intention of combining them with glue and dowels. God bless Beth for putting up with messes like this around the house, which I have plagued it with for about 2 weeks (so far).

Here I’m drilling the holes for the dowels that go in between the planks to bind them together. I figured it’d be lots stronger than just wood glue by itself.

After liberally applying glue inside the boards and around the dowels in the intersection, I set it to dry.

Gluing on the sides. I also put two screws in the corners. The inside has a small test area of the stain, which I have to admit, I’m not totally satisfied with right now.

Hacked the mobo tray out of my old HTPC case, placing it inside the case for a size test.

With the other two main pieces inside. Pretty cramped in there, but not too bad. The angle is bad, but there’s at least an inch of space between the motherboard and the hard drives or PSU.

Gluing and screwing on the motherboard tray and drive cage. Space on the right still for the PSU. Actually, I’m not totally sure how I’m going to mount my PSU yet.

That’s it for now. Still need to do the following:

• Attach the front and back
• Make and attach a power button for the front
• Decide how to mount/secure the PSU, and where to put a fan out the backside
• Sand, file and stain the box

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Posted by Thane on 08/03/12 10:05 PM
in projects, personal

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Wood PC -- Part 1: Research, Planning, Gathering

I’ve been looking for a hardware-related project to work on at home and decided we could use a home torrent seedbox and media server. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and decided it needs to fill the following requirements:

• Low enough power consumption to be on 24/7
• Stable enough hardware to only be restarted once every few days (or weeks, even)
• Fit in my TV stand
• Look classier than my current HTPC
• Be much quieter than my current HTPC (which is loud as FUCK), as quiet as possible
• Hold at least three hard drives (forget an optical drive, never use them)
• And be… wait for it… MADE OF WOOD.

Well not all of it, obviously, but the the case. I’m not gonna hack some box already made or put a wood face on a metal case… I’m constructing this bitch out of wood planks like a man. On a related note, I can do, like, 20 push ups.

Thanks to a very generous donation of some new desktop hardware by my dad, I could replace my average-of-4-year-old hardware. Core 2 Duo and 4 gigs of RAM era shit. More than enough processing power for this project.

The motherboard I had was a micro ATX size, so it was only 9.6” x 7.64”, which is pretty small already. I also saw this board (fig. 1) on Newegg, the only Mini ITX board they still have that was Socket 775. I was VERY close to ordering this board, but thought about it, and essentially would only gain 3 less inches of length over my current board, it doesn’t have a PCI-e 16x slot, and I already had a fanless video card with HDMI out. Plus, I know my CPU works with it like a charm, so why take a chance? Basically, I realized that ordering that tiny board would be retarded.

I made a table of relevant data; measurements of the components and power consumption needs.

Made some really detailed drawings of how I was going to position the components inside the case. It seems the design on the left was probably the only real solution all along, but sometimes it takes drawing it out to really see for yourself.

I got another donated piece to complete this project: a case to hack for the drive bays. I drilled the rivets out to free the drive bay.

I also determined that having the drives be on their side is probably the best bet, since I can have the possibility of a 4th drive eventually instead of only being strictly limited to 3, which I chose over the possibility of the case being around 1 inch shorter. This is a file server, after all.

Next stuff to do is:

• Buy wood, stain, wood glue
• Hack the motherboard tray out of the case
• Make more detailed plans for the actual wood box of the case

Wish me luck!

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Posted by Thane on 25/02/12 05:51 PM
in projects, personal

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Game review: Batman: Arkham City -- 8.5 out of 10

Just like it’s predecessor, Arkham City knocked it out of the park. If Arkham Asylum is a very good game, then Arkham City is a great one. It takes everything about Asylum and builds on it to make it even better.

The writing for the game was top notch; both in plot and in dialogue. The voice acting, particularly by Mark Hamill and Nolan North, complemented it perfectly. On more than one occasion, a funny remark delivered masterfully by Hamill as the Joker would make me chuckle or smirk — nobody can (or will) voice the Joker like Hamill. Nolan North’s voice (the voice actor of Nathan Drake, the personality spheres in Portal 2, and lots of voices in Arkham City) is everywhere, and he did a great job in every character. The plot has lots of twists in it but isn’t hard to follow. The large twist at the end is particularly well done — I did not see it coming at all.

The story did seem to try and squeeze as many villains in as possible, a point that will satisfy Batman fans, but maybe crowded the story just a little. The part they wrote for Catwoman seemed too easy of an angle on the character: lots of cat puns, acting slutty, etc. I mean, come on, look at that. Other than in one section of the game where she has ambiguous romantic feelings toward Batman, she’s very one dimensional. To me, is a real bummer because I think Catwoman can be a very interesting character. Your move, Anne Hathaway.

Gameplay is very similar to Asylum, but with various additions and changes. Flying around the city is very fun. When you learn the dive-bomb/glide technique, it makes traveling in the game faster, more fun and feel more like you’re actually Batman. Hard to explain exactly, but it’s awesome. Just being able to roam around the city and come across groups of dudes to beat up is really cool. They’ll taunt you from the streets saying shit like “COME GET US, BATFREAK”, and I admit a few times I was convinced to oblige them and lay the smack down.

The typical enemies you encounter along the city are underlings of a certain villain’s gang: Penguin, Joker, Two-Face and the like. One main difference of these enemies though is that they the groups of them are peppered with ‘special’ enemies that have a specific attribute — one or two thugs in the group will have a knife that has to be dodged or a riot shield they’ll try to bash Batman with, for example. Accounting for these attributes adds a little more variety to the general combat than Asylum had. Another addition that mixed up the gameplay was the Riddler’s spies in the groups of thugs; if you knocked out every other thug in the group but this spy, you could choose to ‘interrogate’ him about the Riddler and get extra XP and unlock some concept art or other bonuses. Having to fight the enemies in a specific order was something small that added another dimension to the fights. I doubt many people will think this is as cool as I do, but whatever.

Maybe I’m inept, but I found some of the moves in the game hard to execute. The blade dodge takedown in particular I found completely impossible and terribly frustrating to do consistently. The Drive Bomb/Shockwave thing only worked if you started from a really high point and, because of that fact, I probably used it twice in the whole game. No big deal, but I wouldn’t have spent the XP bonus on it if I knew it was only going to work from super-high falls. The Batclaw Disarm upgrade, however, is very handy and I used it a lot.

Rocksteady Studios only really has these Batman games to mention for themselves, but I’m excited to see what they’ll do in the future. They should probably move onto another franchise after this game, though — I doubt they could go that much further with it. It seems that they have a caring philosophy in their game making, and it shows in these Batman games. Two thumbs up. I really enjoyed playing it.

P.S. — Total playtime was probably around 9-12 hours.

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Posted by Thane on 04/11/11 08:35 AM
in gaming, game reviews

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Hide default input type 'number' up/down arrows in Chrome

Not a lot of easily found resources out there that explain how to fix this problem:

Chrome adds these arrow-like controls to <input type="number"/>. This would be helpful if all browsers did the same thing or if you could style the buttons easily via CSS… but this isn’t the case. To hide them, just add this to your CSS:

form input[type='number']::-webkit-outer-spin-button,
form input[type='number']::-webkit-inner-spin-button {
    -webkit-appearance: none;
    margin: 0;
}

Safari does not show these arrows by default, though I’m pretty sure iOS devices show some kind of default controls for the number input type, so this should work for that, too.

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Posted by Thane on 17/10/11 11:01 AM
in web stuff, howto

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Game review: Duke Nukem Forever -- 3 out of 10

I will preface this review by admitting I did not finish it.

I pity anyone who did.

This game sucks. There’s no two ways about it. It should never have been released and should have been left to die.

The age of gaming where a Duke Nukem game is relevant is over. Back when gaming was in it’s Golden Age, you could pile on some dick jokes and some flimsy story about aliens invading Earth and it people would love it. More is now expected from games and their developers. This game requires you to suspend your disbelief at it’s crudeness and awful horribleness — and I doubt most gamers can do this for long.

Lets talk specifics.

Cons:

• A lot of the weapons are useless. For example, the weapon they start you with, the “AT Laser”, sucks. It fires at a weird rate and is weaker than a wet noodle.
  
  

  Pictured: realism

• The hair on each character looks like it was modeled with 5, maybe 6, polygons. Tops.
• The load times in this game are atrocious. So atrocious in fact, that I felt the need to (and did indeed) time them. After death, you have to wait at least 55 seconds to play again. One time I had to wait 1:20. When you are progressing to another part of a level (a-la Half Life series) and there is a loading screen, the average time is 2 whole minutes, with one instance being almost 2:30. In and of themselves, these times could be worse, but they’re made unbearable by one factor: THERE IS NO PROGRESS BAR. I’m sorry, but this is inexcusable. Every game in the past 10 years has had short enough load times (rendering progress bars unnecessary) or some kind of or some kind of load progress indication.
• Animations for Duke and other characters are not good. Duke’s jumping animation is laughable and the facial animations convey no emotion of characters whatsoever. See what I mean in this video.
  
  I read in the comments for this video (and similar videos) that this jump animation is an “homage” to the previous games. Probably not a great call since most players of a Duke Nukem game nowadays either a. aren’t going to remember a jump animation from 15 years ago or b. probably hadn’t been born yet.
• This game has some of the most macho pseudo-homoerotic dialogue I’ve ever heard in a game. This isn’t ass slaps at a baseball game, it’s lines like “Strap on the dildos, it’s time to tear up alien ass”. Said by a male. Lines Duke says often include a lot of literal talk about his own penis, or going up somebody or another’s ass. Now I’m not a homophobe, but Duke’s raging womanizing and heterosexual persona and his constant homoerotic one liners were kind of unsettling to hear together.
• The depth of field when doing the ‘rail sight’ style aiming is horrible. The amount of blurring on things that aren’t exactly where the gun is aiming is way exaggerated and you can’t see anything. For fighting groups of enemies, this is not helpful.
• The tips at the loading screens weren’t all terrible (some were actually kinda funny), but the one that says “Use melee attacks to conserve ammo” is just complete bullshit. Melee in this game is terrible and useless. Your enemies almost always melee you first and theirs is almost always stronger than yours — meaning if you try and ‘conserve ammo’ as the tip suggests, you’re going to die a lot. Plus, there’s not really a shortage of ammo.
• The crane part is directly ripped off of Half Life 2. The part where you get into the crane is almost a direct copy. No shame.

Pros:

• A lot of the props in the game are destructible. Barriers for cover, some buildings and the like can all be chipped away at with explosions.
• The game doesn’t hold your hand with waypoints or direction on where to go. Granted, the game is linear and it’s pretty easy to figure out where to go most of the time, but sometimes it isn’t and the game does a good job of making you figure that out sometimes.
• Puzzles in the game actually require something more than a pulse to solve. In particular, the puzzle inside the trailer with the power lines was actually pretty rewarding to solve.

If you were on the fence about whether or not to play this… I would probably suggest that you save your torrent ratio or (god forbid) your money for something worthwhile.

Let’s put it this way: if this game was reduced to $5 in a Steam sale, I would most definitely not buy it.

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Posted by Thane on 23/07/11 04:18 PM
in game reviews, rants

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